Roy takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots (detail) with Roy Kennedy and Kelton Pell sitting at APN billboard site, Waterfall, NSW; Appropriated Circumstances, 2012
photo, Derek Kreckler 2012
Roy takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots (detail) with Roy Kennedy and Kelton Pell sitting at APN billboard site, Waterfall, NSW; Appropriated Circumstances, 2012
MORE THAN ANY OTHER TYPE OF IMAGE, THE ROADSIDE BILLBOARD OPERATES IN THE REALM OF OUR PERIPHERAL VISION AS THE SIGN GLIMPSED OVER AND OVER THROUGH THE CORNER OF AN EYE.
For this reason, artists who venture toward the billboard as a vehicle for art typically take a forthright approach, figures such as Barbara Kruger and her contemporary successors—culture jammers who employ the graphically bold and arresting strategies of advertising, turning it against itself. In these instances, ultimately the subversion resides more in the message than in the mode of visual communication.
An oblique approach is rarer. Yet this is precisely what was encountered in artist Derek Kreckler’s two roadside billboard installations from his Appropriated Circumstances series that intrigued drivers along the Princes Highway at Heathcote on the Sydney outbound route and at another inbound site just out of Waterfall from late February until April. Devoid of any text, slogan or signifier of a commercial entity or brand, Kreckler’s billboards were essentially large photographs in the landscape that, as drivers approached, registered like a glitch upon the sight line. Gentler than most advertising images with their naturalistic tones and clean, uncluttered white background, the billboards almost blended into the surrounding landscape and vegetation. “Because they’re highly detailed as photographs, it’s a different type of push on the viewer,” suggests Kreckler. “People look twice at them.”
Anti-advertising is one description that’s been suggested for the signs but it’s a term that perhaps doesn’t quite register the rich complexity of their visual rhetoric. The pair of billboards present two photographs taken by Kreckler that record a meeting between well-known Wollongong Dharawal activist and storyteller Roy ‘Dootch’ Kennedy and actor Kelton Pell, a Noongah man from South Western Australia, captured in front of a 19th century landscape painting in the City of Wollongong Gallery. The seemingly anachronistic gilt framed scene which is the object of their attention is colonial artist Eugene von Guérard’s View of Lake Illawarra with distant mountains of Kiama (1860). Its sweepingly picturesque and pristine view of the local topography pre-industrialisation presents a striking contrast to today’s developed coastline.
Titled “Dootch takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots” and “Strewth” (a clue to one of the billboards’ precursors?) Kreckler’s self-funded installations have more in common with visual strategies such as new objectivist image-making than the methods of public art as they’re typically understood. Commenting on the impetus of the work, Kreckler identifies a number of antecedent threads including a long held fascination with the museum photographs of Thomas Struth (b1954) which capture crowds of spectators looking at iconic paintings in the Louvre, the Prado in Madrid and other famous museums. When Kreckler encountered von Guérard’s near photographic oil study in the Wollongong City Gallery, he began to consider the work in this context (incidentally, Kreckler points out that both Struth and von Guérard trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in Germany). It was a meeting with Dootch Kennedy, though, that eventually shifted Kreckler’s thinking into a more temporal terrain.
“To me, the von Guérard painting appears quite old, but to Dootch it’s just another moment in time,” says Kreckler. The artist suggested to Dootch the idea of photographing him in front of the work and once he’d agreed, Kreckler introduced him to Pell. When the two men met in the gallery the painting immediately became a catalyst for cultural exchange as Dootch spiritedly imparted his considerable knowledge of the plentiful food source sites around the lake (Lake Illawarra is also regarded as having been an important location for Indigenous ceremonial and traditional activities). Kreckler took a large number of photographs without a particular construction in mind, simply observing the moment and shooting until the camera became invisible. Afterwards, he gave some thought as to how to exhibit the images. “I was feeling that I didn’t just want to put a photograph in a gallery and photography is so ubiquitous these days. I wanted to honour the work in a different way.” It was only later, driving past a billboard at Waterfall which at the time was displaying the now infamous “Want Longer Lasting Sex” advertisements, that Kreckler was struck by the possibility of appropriating the boards.
Derek Kreckler, ‘Strewth’, from the series Appropriated Circumstance, 2012, Princes Highway, Heathcote NSW
courtesy the artist
Derek Kreckler, ‘Strewth’, from the series Appropriated Circumstance, 2012, Princes Highway, Heathcote NSW
A multidisciplinary artist embedded in conceptual modes of thinking and making, Kreckler’s photographic practice interrogates the conventions of seeing. With images that are coolly precise and quietly performative, the apparent everyday quality of the scenes typically belies the web of temporal and perceptual concerns that cook and simmer with prolonged looking. Driving around the gentle bend and over the crest of the road on the approach to the “Strewth” billboard at Heathcote, the immediate impression of encountering two large-scale figures looming over the traffic with their backs turned away from the stream of passing cars was almost disconcerting in its denial of the viewer’s gaze. But following the direction of their line of vision into the painting, guided by Pell’s gesturing toward the von Guérard with an outstretched hand, absorbs the viewer into the men’s shared act of observation. Momentarily, looking takes on a surprisingly participatory dimension. For the drivers who passed the billboards on their daily route along the Princes Highway the back story of the images’ construction would have been irrelevant—what the observant driver encountered was a puzzle, a cryptic story with a network of referents that yielded more clues with each repeat viewing, while refusing any revelation.
Paintings like von Guérard’s View of Lake Illawarra increasingly hold interest for their ‘time capsule’ effect and there’s an aptness in Kreckler’s appropriation of this work given the recent reappraisal of the artist’s oeuvre. Long dismissed as too European in his perceptions of the Australian landscape but now gaining a new appreciation for the sublime qualities and scientific motivations of his paintings, von Guérard’s unspoiled landscapes carry greater resonance in an age of environmental crisis. The fact that an artist can undergo such extremes of reception is a reminder that all perception is cultural and susceptible to destabilising twists and turns. Kreckler’s creative appropriation of the billboard likewise reveals the shifts that can occur when a conditioned habit of seeing, or not seeing, is disrupted and fixed relations are unmoored, imaginatively set adrift into unexpected reconfigurations.
Derek Kreckler, Appropriated Circumstances, billboard installations at Heathcote, Feb 27–March 25 and Waterfall, NSW, Feb 27 – Apr 22
courtesy the artist and William Wright Artists Projects Sydney
Eugenia Raskopoulos, Vestiges #3 (2010),
ART PRIZES THE SCALE OF THE JOSEPHINE ULRICK AND WIN SCHUBERT PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD CAN TEND TOWARD THE SMASH AND GRAB VARIETY, HOWEVER THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH THIS AWARD. NOW IN ITS 11TH YEAR, IT IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA SPECIFIC AWARDS IN THE COUNTRY WITH A GENEROUS PRIZE PURSE, BUT ALSO STANDS ALONE AS AN EXHIBITION OF HIGH QUALITY CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY.
Selected and judged in 2012 by Kon Gouriotis, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography (a different judge is chosen every year), the prize is thus a curated selection, which lends it a critical strength and relevance as an exhibition of contemporary photography. This year’s prize presented a veritable smorgasbord of Australia’s leading photographic artists and as with all smorgasbords, the temptation is to indulge—indeed, it’s almost impossible not to when faced with 75 works, selected from over 360 entries.
The result was a salon hang of names, from well established and mid-career artists such as Petrina Hicks, Anne McDonald, Tamara Dean, Merilyn Fairskye and Darren Sylvester (who also gave a talk as part of the opening events), through to more emerging artists. Works ranged too in physical scale from huge to small lending the exhibition some more intimate moments. The thoughtfully chosen final field offered a snapshot, albeit subjective, of contemporary practice, a litmus test of the sector as it were.
The most important aspect to note is that the prize belongs to Gold Coast City Art Gallery (GCCAG), one of the biggest regional art galleries in Australia with an impressive collection begun in the 1970s. GCCAG is in the process of campaigning for bigger digs, motivated by the collection’s growing size and calibre; the continued success of this prize should add more weight to the argument. A word too about the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation: it’s nothing short of a national treasure, given the dearth of private philanthropy in this country. Its reach extends across literature, poetry, photography and ceramics and a variety of universities, museums and galleries. The photographic award’s first prize of $20,000 is supplemented by an additional $10,000 to the Gold Coast City Collection for acquisitions, which in 2012 included, at the judge’s discretion, works by Chris Budgeon, Ella Dreyfus, Merilyn Fairskye, Sam Scoufos and Chris Herzfeld in collaboration with Thom Buchanan: all handsome and welcome collection additions.
Chris Herzfeld in collaboration with Thom Buchanan, Superhero 3
courtesy the artists
Chris Herzfeld in collaboration with Thom Buchanan, Superhero 3
Thus The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award truly is nothing short of a gift to the gallery, and to the nation too. Fitting then that the winning work was Eugenia Raskopoulos’ Vestiges #3. On the surface an abstract study, the work is also a study in simplicity. A photograph of the remnants of a birthday gift—the discarded wrapping paper—it constitutes a happy accident of sorts, in the spirit of Irwin Wurm’s three-minute sculptures. Raskopolous’ larger project concerns itself with language, the complexity of making oneself understood as an immigrant in a strange land. In his award notes Gouriotis explained, “What started off as birthday wrapping paper, ended up as another shape which is then photographed offering a new interpretation to the object. The new meaning this shift creates, recognises the incomplete over the complete. It supports the possibility of other changes rather than no transformations.” It is an eloquent work that speaks with gravity to the immutable power of visual language in the absence of a voice. As the winning work too, its humility takes on greater significance: it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Other notable inclusions were Petrina Hick’s work Untitled #1 (The Perfomance, 2011) best described as a witty conflation of religious painting and Benetton advertising. In this ‘performance’ however, young women play the roles of Jesus and doubting Thomas investigating Christ’s wound. Hicks’ bright-eyed teenagers might be metaphors for a contemporary culture that is spiritually bankrupt, or emblematic of youth itself: beautiful and bereft. Superhero 3, 2012 created collaboratively by Chris Herzfeld and performative visual artist Thom Buchanan (and acquired as part of the fund) follows in the Marvel Comic tradition. Here a group of caped crusaders unite to smack down a dishdash-wearing Muslim foe. It’s a fun but ultimately serious work. Linsey Gosper’s Alone in my room (little death), 2011 with its pathetic, exposed protagonist is wonderfully dark. Murray Frederick’s magnificently malevolent clouds in Hector #12, 2011 evoke the cloud paintings of Matthys Gerber. It’s a particularly painterly work, eerily similar to Simone Douglas’s two cloud studies Ever III and Ever VII, 2011. Then there was Cherine Fahd’s whimsical and humorous 365 attempts to meditate, 2011, composed of 50 small images of a person blowing up a balloon. All in all the 2012 was a rich selection with something for everyone, like the perfect ‘all you can eat.’
The award coincided too with the biannual Queensland Festival of Photography, a series of events and exhibitions held across the state, and was complemented at Gold Coast City Art Gallery by Lorikeet Island, an exhibition of collaborative work by Alana Hampton and Marian Drew. An ambitious installation, Lorikeet Island consisted of photographs and immersive new media works produced over an extended period of time onsite at a mangrove cay in one of the labyrinthine Gold Coast waterways. The artists aimed to highlight the incredible natural beauty that lies just at the edge of Surfers Paradise’ ‘glitter strip,’ the aquatic playground that brings in the tourists. Lorikeet Island captured the largely unseen beauty of one small island that disappears with the vagaries of the tidal changes, exposing the mangroves and complex ecosystem. Hampton and Drew have worked together before but this exhibition crystallised their individual practices with its clarity of vision and execution. After the very fulfilling experience of the award, walking into the exhibition was not unlike diving beneath the water: cool and sating.
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, Gallery 1, The Arts Centre, Gold Coast, March 31-May 13
THERE’S A LABORATORY IN THE US THAT APPARENTLY HOLDS THE RECORD FOR THE WORLD’S QUIETEST PLACE—SO ACOUSTICALLY INSULATED THAT ANYONE INSIDE THE ROOM WILL HEAR NOTHING BUT THE SOUNDS OF THEIR OWN BODY.
To hear your very blood circulating, your organs heaving, is supposed to be an alarming experience and few can last long in the anechoic chamber without risking their sanity. I don’t know if that’s true, but the story has some psychic pull to it, given the way it dramatises something nigh impossible in our lives today: the idea of being completely alone.
Theatre, for the most part, doesn’t play with aloneness all that much. It’s a social art, and if a work addresses solitude at the level of narrative, you’re usually witnessing it in a roomful of fellows. Even if you’re the only person who’s fronted up on the night, or it’s a play-for-one, you’re likely in a space with another human being performing in some manner. Theatre is shared.
alma mater
That’s why UK duo Fish & Game’s Alma Mater proves such a striking encounter—striking in the sense of a blow, a box about the ears. It’s deceptively simple to describe. The lone audience member is given an iPad and headphones and sent into a small, artificially constructed room where they close the door behind them. The interior and its minimal furnishings—a bed, chair, dresser–is entirely white, a blank. The short film that plays out on the tablet’s screen, it becomes apparent, takes the same point of view as the person watching it, scanning the room as you pan in each direction. And then the ghosts appear. The device becomes a puncture in space, two pale children suddenly emerging and acknowledging the presence of the viewer.
While it doesn’t sound like much, the construction of the environment is integral to the phantasmic experience. It’s as if the mind struggles with the idea of being so completely alone, and gives the images on the screen more weight in reality as a result. Of course the kids aren’t in the room with you, but there’s an uncanny sense that they might be, in some way, or have left some real traces that hover behind you.
The drama that unfolds expands upon this prickling haunting: the room onscreen gradually becomes more embellished, the children discovering a bird in a cage, colour on walls, a family. A mystery begins to develop, involving a possible death, a transformation, a sinister sister with a murderous baking habit. We’re now in a space where something terrible may have occurred, and the children still regularly turn to look at us, their inscrutable expressions raising too many questions: are they asking us to help? Or to merely bear witness? Or is there something accusatory in there? Who, in the end, are we?
The whole encounter lasts barely 20 minutes but it’s riddled with enigmatic meanings that linger well after you exit the room. I left wanting to call someone, to talk to some real person if only to rid myself of the eerie sense that being so very alone opens up the possibility of visitations from places I’m pretty sure don’t exist. Which, some might argue, is one effective definition of art.
the seizure
Naomi Rukavina, The Seizure
photo Lachlan Woods
Naomi Rukavina, The Seizure
The Hayloft Project’s latest work explores the hellishness of solitude in another form. The Seizure takes up the story of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a soldier abandoned on a miserable island after an injury to his ankle. Here he has spent a decade in isolation, eating birds, picking at the festering wound that never heals. His only interlocutor is a crow, and in keeping with writer Benedict Hardie’s modern and secular interpretation, this chorus may well be a projection of Philoctetes’ own mental state. The divine is a pointed absence in this adaptation—there will be no salvation from Beyond.
When other humans do arrive—Neoptolemus and Odysseus, hoping to convince their fallen comrade to return to the war effort—we see how Philoctetes’ plight has become his being. He refuses to rejoin society, having seen how the fight itself is an undying machine that feeds on the bodies of men. If his wound is the thing that removed him from the cycle of death, then perhaps that is why he cannot allow it to be mended—this is the puncture that allows him a glimpse of the reality of war.
It’s a sparse and solemn production. In the past Hardie has proven a wonderful ability to show how words may both convey and obscure meaning (the outstanding Yuri Wells, for instance; RT94, p8) but here he holds back the linguistic fireworks in favour of a subtle, reverential poetry that serves its source well. The design is also unobtrusive: an almost featureless white space, with only a slash of black ink cutting a scar across the otherwise blank vista. Despite all of this, there’s much contemporary resonance to the piece, suggesting as it does that freedom is a sentence, not a gift.
the histrionic
Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic presents another vision of a self-imposed solipsist. The titular pomp, Bruscon, is a theatre-maker who has fashioned the entirety of human existence as his own reflection. He tours the country with his epic The Wheel of History, in which he dramatises the lives of great men by playing them himself. We find him in a pitiful backwater where he is attempting to stage a production of the play, facing down local safety regulations, substandard staging conditions and the resentful members of his family he requires to play supporting roles. He brings to all of this the kind of outrageous arrogance that at first seems to situate Bernhard’s work in farcical territory, but quickly expands to become something much more.
Bruscon is a fascinating tyrant who rails against the residual fascism he sees infecting post-war Europe while acting as its most potent expression. His art transforms human experience into a grotesque parody of itself, serving only to bulwark his ego at the expense of those around him. It results in literal violence against his family, just as it enacts its own form of symbolic violence. On a surface level this maker of a world is Hitler, but he is also the essence of the artist for whom the work stands above its subjects.
Bernhard’s brilliant creation here is also a condemnation of himself, the writer, and there are pointed connections between his monster and his own professional history. This is absolutely necessary, for to remove himself from the frame would be to commit the very same crimes of which he accuses Bruscon. To write himself in, of course, is to admit that those crimes are ones he’s guilty of already. It’s a slippery move but it adds immeasurably to the compelling complexity undergirding the entire work.
Where Philoctetes’ plight makes loneliness a tragic demand of freedom, and Alma Mater suggests that isolation breeds demons, Bruscon is the artist who seeks to remove himself from the degradation of civilisation by reducing the world to something he may command. While there’s plenty of laughter involved, especially given Bille Brown’s masterful performance, this theatre-maker may offer up the most chilling implication of creative solitude: to truly stand alone, free of influence and interpretation, is liberation as an act of annihilation.
Alma Mater, created by Fish & Game, directors Robert Walton, Eilidh MacAskill, cinematography Anna Chaney, music John De Simone, performers Lucy Gaizely, Albie Gaizely-Gardiner, Lyla Gaizely-Gardiner, Raedie Gaizely Gardiner, Gary Gardiner, Becki Gerrard, Thom Scullion, Mr Feathers, Ensemble Thing, design Phil Bowen, Hugh Speirs, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Apr 18-May 13; The Hayloft Project, The Seizure after Sophocles’ Philoctetes, writer, director Benedict Hardie, performers Christopher Brown, Haiha Le, Brian Lipson, Naomi Rukavina, dramaturgy Anne-Louise Sarks, design, costumes Zoe Rouse, lighting Lucy Birkinshaw, sound design Alister Mew, Studio 246A Brunswick, May 3-19; Malthouse Theatre & Sydney Theatre Company, The Histrionic, writer Thomas Bernhard, translator Tom Wright, director Daniel Schlusser, performers Bille Brown, Kelly Butler, Barry Otto, Josh Price, Katherine Tonkin, Jennifer Vuletic, Edwina Wren, set, costumes Marg Horwell, lighting Paul Jackson, sound design, composition Darrin Verhagen, CUB Malthouse, Apr 2-May 5; STC, Jun 20-Jul 28
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 pg. 24
He Xiangyu alongside his work, Skeleton at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
photo Zan Wimberley
He Xiangyu alongside his work, Skeleton at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
AN EXHIBITION CALLED COLA PROJECT DOESN’T AT FIRST SOUND ENTIRELY NEW: COCA COLA, CONSUMER CULTURE, THE POWER OF ADVERTISING—THESE HAVE ALL BEEN CONSIDERED BEFORE, NOT LEAST OF ALL BY CHINESE ARTISTS ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM ON TRADITIONAL AESTHETICS AND VALUES.
This recent show at Gallery 4A in Sydney’s Chinatown, however, takes a different perspective, and considers cola the sticky liquid rather than the clout of its global logo. After analysing the effects of consumerism on images, it appears that what you are left with is the object, and the ‘stuff’ of material culture.
Cola Project is currently the signature work of young, Beijing-based artist, He Xiangyu, and one that has been doing the international rounds since first showing in Beijing in 2010. 4A brought it to Sydney as part of their ongoing program to situate Australian art within the context of the Asia Pacific, bringing Asian exhibitions to Australia and recognising the Asian in Australian work. This, He Xiangyu’s third major art project, helps underscore this geographical and cultural proximity, if only for its acknowledgement of the finite—and increasingly crowded—nature of our physical world.
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Resin (2009-2010), installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy of the artist and White Space, Beijing
photo Zan Wimberley
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Resin (2009-2010), installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy of the artist and White Space, Beijing
In 2008, He Xiangyu worked with factory workers to boil up thousands of litres of Coca Cola, tracing its transformation into syrup, then sludge and eventually into coal-like crystals. These were then ground down to produce a black ink, with which the artist painted a series of Song Dynasty-style landscapes. Meanwhile, some of the goo was put aside for experiments on skeletons made by the artist from jade. The works on display at 4A represent about one third of the original show, and include a miscellany of products and documentation resulting from the large-scale work. The artist was also in town to assist with the installation, and I had the chance to speak with him then.
“I’m interested in the relationship between objects and people,” he told me. “In Beijing now, there are so many buildings in the centre of the city, so they build the rubbish tips further out. But then the city grows, until it and the rubbish are all on top of one another. Then the groundwater becomes polluted by the run-off and, bit by bit, this rubbish starts to permeate you.” He Xiangyu speaks with an awareness of his physical surroundings, but more with a tone of curiosity than indignation. The cycles of transformation seem to interest him rather than any narrative of environmental decay. As we sat in the downstairs gallery space, our conversation was itself infused with the smell of the exhibition—the tang of cola residue sits in your nostrils.
Entering the gallery at street level, visitors are confronted with a large pile of the black molasses-like substance produced by the refinement process. At turns both filthy and magical, it suggests a heap of coal one moment and an ink-washed Chinese landscape the next.
Upstairs hang the paintings rendered in this sticky material, the waste product of an industrial experiment put to the production of new cultural forms. Familiar limestone mountains disappear into clouds, river systems wend around their bases. There are boats and little bridges (arched like eyebrows) and the odd lonely pavilion tucked high into the crux of a mountain top. Distinctly ‘works of art,’ these paintings are as exquisite as the idea of the Coke sludge is coarse.
He Xiangyu, Skeleton (2010), jade, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy of Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai
photo Zan Wimberley
He Xiangyu, Skeleton (2010), jade, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy of Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai
On a podium, laid out as if for medical inspection, is one of the original exhibition’s three skeletons made of jade. Cola scum, applied to selected bones, has discoloured and worn holes into this highly prized, ancient material. In a nearby cabinet, bone specimens and a beaker of leftover black liquid are arranged as if they’ve come straight from the laboratory. If there is a traditional Chinese aesthetic to the show, it also has a creepy Victorian feel—a Jekyll and Hyde sense of experimentation with the materials that shape body and society.
Around the gallery lie further traces of the distillation process: artefacts covered in gloop; a pile of buckets stacked messily on top of one another; a detritus of spades, gloves and goggles. Finally, a wall of photographs records the smelting process: men in protective clothing pushing poles into ponds of blackness, lost behind clouds of steam. A pile of empty Coca Cola bottles is, intriguingly, the only image here printed in black and white, the choice of monochrome print disavowing the power of the red and white labels. This show is about cola the substance—a material that moves through and is processed by our bodies—not a brand with its lofty mythologies.
Ultimately the exhibition has a kind of circular logic, with each work stitched invisibly to the next. The filthy is within the exquisite, the base within the refined. There is a constant reminder of the ongoing cycle of refuse and sophistication. In this sense the exhibition is about the inextricability of humans and what they create: culture and waste. However, it also highlights the question of art itself as a process or, more specifically, art as a physical production. If the world is now engaged in a trashing and rehashing of resources, what role does art production—and art consumption—play within that?
At one point my conversation with He Xiangyu turned to Wim Delvoye’s infamous artwork, Cloaca Professional, which mimics the human digestive system. Currently on display in Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the machine is fed by curators and produces excrement on the hour. I suggested that the work was quite a confronting piece for a gallery environment. “Really?” said He Xiangyu with a smile. He was well aware of the piece. “I think [Cloaca Professional] is cool. It’s very symbolic of our times.”
He Xiangyu, Cola Project, Gallery 4A, Sydney, March 15–May 5
This article originally appeared in RealTime’s online e-dition May 22
MARCH WAS UNSEASONABLY COOL IN HONG KONG THIS YEAR, BUT THE ACTION AT FILMART MORE THAN MADE UP FOR THIS. THE MODEL FOR A MORE MATURE CHINESE FILM INDUSTRY IS FALLING INTO PLACE, AND THE MARKET WAS ALIVE WITH SMOOTH OPERATORS TALKING UP THE PROSPECTS OF “MONETISING CONTENT” (IE MAKING A BUCK).
China has now emerged as the world’s third biggest box office surpassing $US2 billion, only marginally behind Japan. Online revenue streams are also taking off as the industry stabilises around a new release chain. The freshly technologised China may abandon DVD altogether, given that it is so hard to protect the format from piracy. Instead, online platforms like Youku have emerged as second markets after theatrical exhibition. People are increasingly prepared to pay for content delivered to mobile devices.
There are also signs that the Chinese government is more interested in reaching an accommodation with the international film industry, allowing more “enhanced” foreign films (3D Hollywood blockbusters) to be distributed under better revenue sharing conditions. A joint venture announced with Dreamworks Animation suggests that, after years of frustration, Hollywood now thinks it can participate in the Chinese expansion. Expect to see more Chinese names in the credits of Kung Fu Panda 3.
Strangely though, once the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) started a few days later, there was a distinct dearth of Chinese films. As the HK industry declined over recent years, HKIFF became the place to see alternative Chinese films. This year, however, it was clear that the alternative Chinese scene is in sorry decline. Maybe everybody wants to come up from underground and get a piece of the commercial action, or perhaps the festival stopped programming the films because local interest was lacking.
love is in the air
Love
Instead, love is in the air for Chinese filmmakers. With the success of Taiwan’s You Are the Apple of My Eye and the mainland’s Love Is Not Blind, romantic comedy is the favoured genre of the region’s nascent commercial cinema. Doze Niu Chen-zer’s Love is a good example. Doze’s last film was the tough gangster film Monga, but Love is a network narrative of trendy young things who travel across the Taiwanese straits with more ease than they cross lines of class and gender.
Tsao Jui Yuan’s Joyful Reunion was another example, where food—the new bourgeois religion—is the currency of romantic complication, and where the divisions between Taiwan and China are effortlessly effaced by young and old lovers. These romances might prove harder for Western audiences to embrace, as they are directed at women rather than the male cult audiences that have traditionally sustained Asian film in the West. There’s also a kind of lush coyness with which the subject is approached. Given that the characters rarely enact their passions, gimmicky gesture and fairly obtrusive music become inordinately important as a way of signalling emotion. The result can be rather cloying, as Love Is Not Blind demonstrates. A young marriage planner breaks up with her unfaithful boyfriend and ends up with her prissy co-worker in a triumph for mannered cuteness.
bye bye miserabilism
After years of watching miserabilist films full of seedy pimps and chain-smoking grunge, it takes a little readjustment to see that Chinese audiences might enjoy seeing beautiful stars and conspicuous consumption of name brands (a lot of Häagen-Dazs is eaten in Love). Since the time of the Fifth Generation, the Chinese government has charged that underground filmmakers “pulled down their mother’s pants so foreigners could see her arse,” but the new rom-commies present us with the challenge of expanding our preconceptions about 21st century China. Previously, the Australian media only wanted to know that China was not a nice place. As the consumerist economy flourishes and an entertainment cinema emerges, we may have to look at frivolous genre films with a fresh measure of respect.
On the other hand, gloom is in the air for Hong Kong filmmakers. The money and the audiences are all on the mainland, and the glory days look to be in the past. This is the best framework for watching the two films by Pang Ho-cheung in the festival. There are two options for HK filmmakers: go to the mainland or stay in HK and make cheap movies. Pang’s Love in the Buff and Vulgaria are responses to these two options.
love in the buff
Love in the Buff
Love in the Buff is a sequel to Love in a Puff (2010), a romantic comedy with Shawn Yue and Miriam Yeung as two HK office workers who meet while smoking outside their offices. The new film relocates the characters to Beijing, where they have to fall in love all over again. Pang’s films are based around the idea that men and women are essentially opposed to each other. It might be the case here that men are from Mars and women are from Hong Kong, but the logic of the film is that geography tops gender, as our ill-suited couple form a tacit alliance against the northerners. The couple conspire in Cantonese against the more earnest, and nicer, Mandarin speakers. Hong Kongers are pictured as cool smart-arses whose sense of their own imperfect identities triumphs over the attractions of the north.
vulgaria
Vulgaria
Pang’s quicker and nastier comedy, Vulgaria, is as cheap as it is full of cheerfully scatological humour. A HK producer must go to any lengths to raise finance. This involves dealing with mainland gangsters whose idea of a big night out includes meals built around animal sex organs, topped off by a spot of bestiality. This is what it means to stay in HK and survive in the film business. No gag is too cheap and no in-joke too local. Stripped of this context, I’m not sure anyone would want to watch this film for more than 10 minutes. However, context is king here. Despite the tackiness of its mise-en-scène and the smuttiness of its humour, there is a strange grandeur to those who swim against the tide of history and persevere with lost causes.
Australians were thin on the ground at FilMart, which added a further layer of irony to the title of Wish You Were Here, one of the few Aussie films at HKIFF (see review). Asia features here as a place where Australians go to give in to their vices. It’s an inward-looking film about glimpsing the dangers of the world and retreating back to the family. Seen in Asia, this seemed a cogent statement on the limitations in the imaginative vision of Australians.
Hong Kong International Film Festival, March 21-April 5, www.hkiff.org.hk
This article originally appeared as part of RealTime's online e-dition May 22
I was born in Adelaide in 1957. Grew up there. I love that my children won't have to do that, be in that Australia. Back then. At my high school boys weren't allowed to do Art—they were taken outside to shift desks or pick up papers. Art was for girls.
I think 1976 was the first time I saw live music that wasn't a rock band. John Cage. Loved it. ABC-FM came out around then and gave me the first chance to actually hear interesting music on a regular basis. Andrew McLennan. Huge impact.
But I still did not meet someone my age who thought of themselves as an artist until maybe a year later. They were a neighbour. Showed them some of the audio and visual art I had been making. They took me to the South Australian School of Art where Bert Flugleman suggested I bypass art school and join South Australian Workshops, an artist collective in the city. I was thrilled and a little overawed to meet so many interesting people. My partner Lani Weedon and I met there. We've been together now almost 30 years. Two children. And a dog.
Ending up in Brisbane with a baby daughter, lack of income had me off to the University of Queensland. Student support payments were very welcome. I studied cognitive science. Came out with a university medal and a PhD in neuroscience. Hoping for a steady job. Let me know if something turns up.
Exposé
When I heard music I loved music, when I saw film I loved film, when I saw painting I loved painting.
Writing for RealTime gives me the opportunity to be connected with art from now, and write about it in ways I enjoy. I have not looked for other writing work, I wouldn't really know how to, but I can't see me being that interested in writing that didn't allow the creative freedom I get with RealTime. It takes me a long time to write a review.
Recent articles in RealTime
undercurrents
greg hooper: abhinaya theatre co & topology, the lady from the sea
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 pg. 38
The Seymour Centre Sydney will be home to this year’s National Reconciliation Week with a range of performances, talks and concerts aiming “to raise awareness of the historical and contemporary stories and experiences of the first Australians” (website).
The centerpiece of the week is Bindjareb Pinjarra (presented by Pinjarra Project, Deckchair Theatre and Seymour Centre). In 1994, performers Kelton Pell, Geoff Kelso, Phil Thomson and Pinjarra man Trevor Shorty Parfitt created a performance highlighting the horrific events of the Pinjarra massacre in 1834. It is estimated that up to 150 Bindjareb Nyoongar people were slaughtered (only 21 of whom have been publicly named) during a survey of the Pinjarra area aimed at protecting the rights and property of the white setters. To this day the site is only listed as that of a battle (one white man died falling from his horse) rather than a massacre, nor is it officially named as a significant Aboriginal site. The only memorial so far is a virtual one—www.pinjarramassacresite.com/.
In 2010, Pell, Kelso and Thomson (Parfitt has passed away) regrouped to share the work in oral tradition with three new performers, senior Pinjarra man Frank Nannup, Nyoongar actor Isaac Drandic and Wadjella (white fella) Sam Longley. While the subject matter is dark, the resulting performance is far from grim. In a review of the 2010 show Suzanne Spunner wrote, “The ensemble of six male actors are all agile performers and accomplished improvisers and very funny too, because this play about a massacre is presented as a comedy with a black undercurrent. The humour is always deadly serious. The actors play across age, class and race and play they do so that all the stereotypes are well worked over for comic effect. Its great strength is the depth of story it tells and the quality of the tale tellers.” (RT online exclusive May 24, 2010)
Bronwyn Bancroft, Falling Through Time (2012)
courtesy the artist
Bronwyn Bancroft, Falling Through Time (2012)
Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative are overseeing the exhibition component of Reconciliation week, titled Winds of Change. It will feature works by a range of prominent Indigenous artists such as Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Jenny Fraser, Graham Toomey and Wayne Quillia. The organisation will also hold a charity auction on May 26 at the Boomalli gallery to help raise funds to continue operations. Indigenous and non-indigenous artists are invited to donate artworks, $300 in value, for sale at the event. See http://www.boomalli.com.au/.
NSW Reconciliation Council and All Together Now are opening up a discussion on discrimination with their panel titled “I’m not racist but…” which will see Race Discrimination Commissioner ?Dr. Helen Szoke, Fear of a Brown Planet’s Nazeem Hussain, UN Youth Ambassador Benson Saulo and comedian Jennifer Wong in hot debate hosted by ABC Radio National journalist Steve Cannane. Australian Theatre for Young People will also create a space for discussion around the playmaking process with their a work-in-progress reading of Katherine, a new play by Rachael Coopes and Wayne Blair looking at the life of a teenager in the Top End.
Add to these performances by Casey Donovan in the Sound Lounge and free live music by Marcus Corowa and Jess Beck at the Reconciliation Party and there are plenty opportunities to reflect on Australia’s troubled history as well as celebrate the potential for more positive relations between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in the future.
National Reconciliation Week 2012: Pinjarra Project,, May 26-June 2, 10.30am & 7.30pm (Sat May 26 National Sorry Day & Sat June 2 special Community offer – quote the promotional code “COMMUNITY” to receive $8 off ticket price); Casey Donovan, May 30, 8pm; I’m not racist but…, May 31, 7:30pm; ATYP, Katherine, June 1, 1pm & 6.30pm; Reconciliation Party, June 1, 7.30pm; Seymour Centre, Sydney, May 26-June 2; http://sydney.edu.au/seymour/reconciliation/index.shtml
Jim and Linda Batten, Sweet Child of Mine, Bron Batten
courtesy the artists
Jim and Linda Batten, Sweet Child of Mine, Bron Batten
The Tiny Stadiums festival, produced by PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, began its life in 2009 under the guidance of the artist collective Quarterbred. The festival aims to infiltrate the streets of the most village-like of all Sydney suburbs, Erskineville, with gentle live art provocations and curious performance experiences. Now in its fourth year the reins of the festival have been handed over to a new artist curatorium—Amelia Walin, Christopher Hodge and Maria White, operating under the name Groundwork—who are focussing this year’s event around the idea of Centre/Margins and the traversal of such territories.
If you prefer your performances in a theatre there is a double bill at the PACT venue, but the works are far from traditional. Those of us who work at the pointier end of the arts are often faced with the dilemma of explaining what it is we actually do to non-arts types, not least of all our parents. In Sweet Child of Mine, Bron Batten exploits this awkward conversation by inviting her 60-year old parents on stage to discuss with her what might be the point of Bron’s own work, but also art as a whole. The show won Best Experimental Performance Award at the 2011 Melbourne Fringe Festival, and in the YouTube clip looks to be both heartwarming and a little bit heartbreaking.
Well matched with Sweet Child of Mine is Alice William’s Impossible Plays, coming to PACT straight from its Melbourne premier at Next Wave. Williams has interviewed four people about their imaginary lives: “Megan is a quietly spoken vet in Alice Springs. Andy is a poet whose writing treads an uncanny line between fantasy and reality. Douggie is an Arente watercolour artist. Mushi is a tarot card reader who navigates the realms of possibility in search of a sanctuary” (website). These interviews form verbatim texts for performers Amity Yore, Katherine Beckett, Megan Garrett-Jones and Jane Grimley to embody, creating a work that apparently walks a fine line between documentary and dream-like fantasy.
Ngoc Nguyen, Cultural Triangle
courtesy the artists
Ngoc Nguyen, Cultural Triangle
Over the weekend of June 2-3, the action will take to the streets (well mainly Erskineville Road) with a series of interactions, incursions and installations. Occupying one of the mini-parks on the strip will be Tom Hogan’s Monolith, a large metallic object which responds to the viewer, making sweet and, apparently, strangely familiar sounds. Meanwhile, Ngoc Nguyen whose installation [Xuan] Spring was a quiet highlight of Underbelly 2012 (see RT105), will be placing small Vietnamese style street coffee/food stalls around the neighbourhood, exploring ideas of cultural displacement.
If you’re genuinely hungry you can head down to PACT where Penelope Benton and Alexandra Clapham will construct the Tiny Diner, a three-sided stage set of a kitchen, with all elements made of cardboard, except the $2 toastie which is the real deal. And while at PACT you’ll also be able to experience Shamanic Organic, the video work of Robin Hungerford that melds food, plastic and technology into works that “kaleidoscopically implode” (website).
David Capra, New Intercessions
If the psychedelia is making you feel slightly freaky, then maybe it’s best to avoid Fitts & Holderness’ The Speaker, which will be peddling conspiracy theories, attempting to convince passers-by of the evil Project SKIN-EV that is taking place behind closed doors in Erskineville. And while David Capra’s New Intercessions—a dance around streets featuring the laying on of hands and speaking-in-tongues—is aimed at healing the spirit, it sounds potentially more terrifying than whatever The Speaker is promising.
Also aiming for the spiritual dimension is Gibberish and Let Go by Jodie Whalen, extending the one-hour meditation of spiritual Guru Osho to a five-hour durational performance in which the audience is invited to participate or simply watch. But if really all you want to do is have a quiet beverage, over at the Rose Hotel you will be able to experience some of the festival through YOU.DANCE. a video work by Rafaela Pandolfini who will be photographing locals and turning the small grooves of everyday actions into a celebration of our need to boogie.
Now in its fourth year James Cook University’s Screengrab New Media Art Award is open for entries that address the theme of control. All screen-based media are eligible including multi-channel video, digital illustration, audio sculpture, photography, generative media, 2D & 3D animation. This year’s award aims to explore the way in which technology is facilitating change as evidenced by recent political uprisings while at the same time allowing for even more surreptitious levels of control through “surveillance networks, social media, data mining algorithms, privacy interventions, sophisticated image gathering techniques and drone technologies” (website). A selection of works will be exhibited at James Cook University in August with the winning work awarded $5,000. For previous Screengrab exhibitions and awards see RT93 and RT101. James Cook University, Screengrab New Media Art Award, deadline for applications July 2; exhibition opens Aug 2; http://www.jcu.edu.au/soca/JCU_099817.html
arina.org, nava & crawl inc
Arina.org
NAVA and Crawl Inc have just launched a new online hub for information about all things ARI. While Crawl is a comprehensive list of ARIs and their activities, ARIna.org is a space for sharing ideas about the actual running of these artist run intiatives. Anyone can contribute and posts can be bumped up and down the list by other users according to interest and perceived importance (like Digg). You’ll find posts ranging from calls for proposals and studios for rent to guides to the intricacies of public liability, working with local councils and governance issues. http://arina.org.au/
dance film masterclass, aftrs open & form dance projects
Western Sydney Dance organisation FORM has teamed up with the AFTRS Open program to present a dance film masterclass. The weekend will be run by Dr Richard James Allen, co-director (with Karen Pearlman) of the Physical TV Company, responsible for works such as the feature Thursday’s Fiction (see RT80) and Entanglement Theory (see RT99). The masterclass, which is open to choreographers, dancers and filmmakers, will explore the history of dance films along with particular sub-genres and will also allow for practical exercises in the AFTRS studio with dancers. Form is also AFTRS Open & FORM Dance Projects, Dance Film Masterclass with Dr Richard James Allen, AFTRS, Sydney, July 28-29, 9-5pm, $495, $445.50 early bird booking by June 30; http://form.org.au/2012/03/dance-film-project/. FORM Dance Projects is offering one scholarship to a masterclass participant who is an emerging independent choreographer or performer. For more information email director@form.org.au
speaking in tongues, yppa national symposium
Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA) will be presenting their national symposium at the Casula Powerhouse in July. Speaking in Tongues seeks to establish a common language around the multi-faceted manifestations of youth arts and the arts in general. The symposium will bring together a range of keynote speakers such as Sue Giles, artistic director of Polyglot Theatre; Baba Israel (in telepresent form) from Contact Manchester, a leading UK youth arts organisation; Colin Pidd from btli international, a global consultancy firm teaching strategy implementation and leadership development; and Suzanne Lebeau, playwright and theatre maker from Quebec’s Le Carrousel who will also be running a masterclass.
Other hightlights will include the unveiling of the findings from TheatreSpace, a four-year research project looking at young people’s responses to professionally-funded theatre in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Also on exhibition will be Ruth Sancho’s ambitious TRIP – T(L)ICS, Digital Interactive Poetry Installation exploring how language shapes our world and identity by focusing on poetry in Spanish, English, Catalan, Kari’ña (Venezuela), Mapudungun (Chile), Nahuatl (Mexico), Guaraní (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay), Maltés (Malta) and Yanyuwa (Northern Territory). YPAA National Symposium, Speaking in Tongues – How do we translate the collective language of the Arts?; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, July 11-13; http://ypaa.net/program-2012/national-symposium/, earlybird bookings by May 23
because we care, colin, simon and i
In the time that New Zealand dancer Simon Ellis spent in Australia he made a quiet but distinctive impact on the dance scene. His 2006 performance Inert was for an audience of two strapped into reclining beds to experience the intimate dance and video work with a lessened sense of gravity (see RT73). About Ellis’ 2003 performance Indelible Jonathan Marshall wrote: “Ellis produces something closer to a mnemonic auto-da-fé…With only the barest temporal and emotional rises, Ellis creates a sense of an increasing trajectory of shattering and division.” (RT54).
Now based in the UK Ellis has been collaborating with Colin Poole as the duo Colin, Simon and I. They’ve recently been commissioned by The Place, London to create the work Because We Care, which explores the ways men relate, in particular exploring their own collaborative relationship. For a preview see their video promo. Colin, Simon and I, Because We Care, The Place London, June 8 & 9; http://www.colinsimonandi.com/
congratulations
The first batch of Creative Australia Fellows has been announced which sees Gaelle Mellis, Mic Gruchy, Guy Ben-Ary, Antony Hamilton and Cat Jones awarded the Established Artist Fellowships receiving $100,000 over one year and Matthew Prest, Lauren Brincat, Gian Slater, Lee Serle, Annabel Smith and Michaela Gleave awarded Emerging Artist Fellowships of $60,000 over two years. http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/creative_australia_artists_grants
Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor, The Body is a Big Place, (2011), installation view, 5-channel video projection, heart perfusion device
photo courtesy the artists
Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor, The Body is a Big Place, (2011), installation view, 5-channel video projection, heart perfusion device
The prestigious Prix Ars awards, part of the Austrian-based media arts festival Ars Electronica, have also been announced with three Australian groups receiving attention. Van Sowerwine and Isabelle Knowles (working with Matt Gingold) were given an Award of Distinction in the Interactive Art category for It’s a jungle in here (reviewed in RT108); while Peta Clancy & Helen Pynor’s The Body is a Big Place (reviewed in RT107) and Prue Lang’s sustainable dance performance Un réseau translucide both received Honorary Mentions in the Hybrid Art Category.http://www.aec.at/prix/en/gewinner/
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE’S INTERNATIONAL SPACE TIME CONCERTO COMPETITION IS UPDATING ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST PERSISTENTLY EXCITING MUSICAL GENRES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY.
“The concerto has always been the testing-ground of virtuosity,” explains Richard Vella, mastermind of the competition and Head of Drama, Fine Art and Music at the University of Newcastle. “But there is this idea that standards go down the moment you move away from classical music, which is simply not true. We want to revive the form by bringing back the improvisational aspect of the concerto and asking what a contemporary concerto would look like.”
The application process is simple: university students of all levels can upload an audition video or showreel on YouTube by July 1 and fill out the online entry form. The competition’s rules are slightly less so. Solo or collaborating performers, composers, producers, and A/V artists may enter one of six “historical” or “innovative” categories to share in a prize pool of $50,000 and perform at the finalist concerts in Newcastle with telematic collaboration from Ars Electronica in Austria, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore, the Central Conservatory of Music in China and Waikato University in New Zealand.
Vella sees the relationship between the concerto and the spaces in which it has resonated as central to the competition’s historical categories “Baroque (1600–1750),” “Classical/Romantic (1750–1900)” and “Modern/Postmodern (1900–1990s).” As well as representing a musical repertoire and a relationship to space, the categories also reflect different modes of interaction between performers and audience members.
Born from the opera overture, the baroque concerto roused audiences by “concerting” solo and small groups of instruments against the opera orchestra. The soloist would virtuosically bait and antagonise the orchestra with a spirit of improvisation that fed on the audience’s reaction. Musicologist Richard Taruskin suggests, “One doesn’t have to work hard to imagine such a thing; any rock video will provide a living example.” Audience interaction was no doubt encouraged by the fact that musicians and audiences were usually on the same level of ground as each other, either in front of theatre stages, in churches (where one wonders whether they stamped and clapped so enthusiastically) or the concert rooms of palaces.
If the baroque period was the concerto’s wild youth, then the classical era saw the form ossified into a set of widely understood performance conventions. Having composed over 300 of the things for Frederick the Great, Johann Joachim Quantz enumerated the essential elements of the late baroque concerto grosso as “numerous accompanying players, a large place, a serious performance and a moderate tempo.” That Quantz listed the physical surroundings and performance style of the concerto alongside its formal properties shows the importance of cultural and physical space to music in 1752 Sans Souci (that’s “No Worries,” the palace after which the Southern suburb of Sydney was named).
The classical and romantic eras saw the birth of paid public music performances and the image we now come to associate with the genre: a soloist on a stage in front of an orchestra. Beyond the partition of the proscenium arch it is said that a wall of respect for the works they played—and no longer improvised—separated performers and listeners, that people partitioned their outer and inner worlds while listening.
In the 20th century audiences and performers were further partitioned within modifiable concert halls with different distributions of players. For generations weaned on broadcast media it is said that performing and listening became further alienated and individualistic. While a solo performer may choose to perform a work from one of these periods (in the competition's “Historical” section), they may alternatively bring the work’s fascinating history into the present, combine it with contemporary musical forces or completely reinvent the spirit of the concerto within one of the competitions three “Innovation” categories.
Inspired by a trip to Austria’s peak arts and technology R&D centre Ars Electronica last year, Vella challenges young composers to develop new horizons for this ever-relevant art form. “The rise of the personal computer in music-making over the past 20 years has provided different creative opportunities. What is needed is a perspective that is historical, but also looks forward to creating the future.” Groups of performers, composers, producers and A/V artists can get together and enter either the “Remix/Recontextualisation,” “New Modes of Presentation,” or “Networked Music Performance” categories.
The Remix/Recontexualisation category invites groups to engage with historical works through sampling or quotation. The orchestral part can be remixed (though it will eventually be played by a live orchestra) and you can even compose a completely different solo part!
In the New Modes of Presentation section you can think about the long history of the concerto and find new ways of presenting it. Extend the orchestra with popular, world and jazz instrumentation; use synthesisers and live signal processing; or use real-time kinetic or visual interfaces.
With tertiary educational institutions all over the world building video conferencing suites it is easy to connect several orchestras with high fidelity A/V in real time. While not providing great new sonic possibilities, telematic streaming provides a logical progression in the relationship of the concerto to space and the gaze of the audience. So, while you’re practicing your Handel, why not consider entering the Networked Music Performance category to be accompanied by the International Telematic Ensemble drawn from the competition’s five partner institutions?
The International Space Time Concerto Competition invites us to decentre our idea of the concerto from a repertory of works tied to a set of performance conventions encompassing history, space, performers and audiences. When viewed in this way “the concerto” becomes an immensely enticing sandbox of contemporary possibilities.
The International Space Time Concerto Competition, University of Newcastle, Australia; entry deadline July 1; http://spacetimeconcerto.com/; finals will be held Nov 30 and Dec 2
Australian composer and sound artist Ros Bandt and German electro-acoustic composer Johannes S Sistermanns’ CD Tracings is aptly named. It offers the sonic results of three key collaborations undertaken over the last 15 years, exploring the concept of tracing, both as noun—the evidence of an action or event— and also verb, the very act of mark-making itself.
Tracings opens with BYOS, a project devised by Sistermanns for ABC Radio in 2006 in which each artist brought their owns sounds to the studio to create a collaborative composition. The CD presents five short pieces segueing seamlessly, yet each with their own character. “BYOs Preludes: Take off” launches us into a cavernous space where industrial, grating noises play a supporting roll to the reverberance of the site itself (a signature technique of Bandt’s—see her 1981 release Improvisations in Acoustic Chamber). “BYOS Vivace: Gannetts” is energetic and vibrant as bird flaps, squawks and water sloshes are overlayed and effected to create escalating sheets of sound. “BYOS Adagio: Bells” uses slowed and muted bell tolls punctuated by pitch-shifted plosives and staccato vowels.
“BYOS Industrial Blues” in particular exemplifies the aspirations of musique concrète—each sound a discrete unit, reminiscent of actualities, yet the true source is unidentifiable—as mechanised shards of sound mingle with distant voices over an insistent hum. In contrast, “BYOS Epilogue: Catwalk” is peppered with tiny mewings, moans, creaks and footfalls and scrunches with more of a cinema foley feel. As a collection, the “BYOS” offers a fast moving, rich but never cluttered collection of sonic collages, presenting glimpses of territories that make you eager for more.
“Sonic Blue Red Tracings—Kami” gives the CD its name and the artwork imagery. In 2008 Bandt and Sistermanns were in residence in Wakayama in Japan, where they began to explore the sonic properties of paper. They also applied dye to their hair (Bandt auburn red, Sistermanns blue) and created paintings using their hair as brushes, exploring gestures such as swishing and whipping. These paintings form the basis of a graphic score, but also act as instruments in themselves as the paper is miked up, amplifying the performative actions. The recorded composition is underscored by distant tones (accordion perhaps) giving it an ethereal atmosphere, while the rustle of paper scrolls and the friction of hair rubbing and whipping create a textural landscape with small rhythmic eruptions. The result is a delicately industrial soundscape with some haunting sonorities that offer more elegance perhaps than the action painting of the live performance manifestation (accessible via available video documentation that can be found here and here).
The final two tracks on Tracings are from one of Bandt and Sistermanns’ earliest collaborations, “A Global Garden for Percy.” (“Whispering Between Stars” offered as a separate track is based on an excerpt from the larger work). As part of the 1997 Melbourne Festival program Ros Bandt was commissioned to create an installation, A Garden for Percy’s Delight, in the grounds of the Grainger Museum. For this she utilised recordings of some of the curious instruments Percy Grainger had created in pursuit of his idea of Free Music—music released from regular metric rhythm, exploring smooth pitch undulations, like ocean waves, that could in fact be performed by machines free of human intervention. Some of the instruments in the museum include the Kangaroo Pouch Machine which uses three oscillators to create sliding tones, the Knoxville Butterfly Piano and a Metallophone (Steel Marimba).
Bandt and Sistermanns also performed a live composition, “A Global Garden for Percy,” via an ISDN line linking Melbourne and Frankfurt, with the piece broadcast and recorded by the ABC’s The Listening Room. The result is a substantial 41-minute work with each composer’s contribution well melded. Given the paltry capacity for streaming even today, this live global linkup was and still is an impressive feat. (Bring on the NBN!)
“A Global Garden for Percy” is structured around recurring themes: watery field recordings made at Brighton Beach where Grainger grew up; samples of ascending and descending glissandi on his inventions; voices whispering his treatise; and deep plucked piano strings. At one point Grainger’s Viola d'Amore (adapted into an Alto Viol) is used to play a wistful version of John Dowland's 17th century song “Come Again,” alluding to Grainger’s love of folk music, only to be subsumed back into the composition's layering. At another point a helicopter, a sound of modern rupture, alerts us to the mechanical glissandi that surround us everyday. It’s a drifting dreamscape, using fascinating source material and taking dark and difficult turns—a fitting tribute to one of Australia’s most fascinating and complex composers.
Tracings as a whole is an engaging work with many textural and atmospheric pleasures. It rigorously explores not just the sonority of objects themselves, but the very nature of composition and collaboration.
Currently living in Wrocław developing a research project with local theatre company Teatr Piesn Kozła.
the meeting place for living theatre histories
Wrocław is a beautiful small city, full of culture and life. Its city slogan is “the meeting place” and in my time here I have come across many artists from Europe and beyond who are attracted to the rich strand of theatre found here. As I write the city is blossoming into Spring and the Euro Cup 2012 approaches, this year hosted by Poland. On any given day most people you pass on the street will be eating ice cream and when it reaches 30 degrees you will see many red faces soaking up the much-waited-for sun.
for culture…
Wrocław
I first came to Wrocław to train with local theatre company Teatr Piesn Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre) in their MA Acting program facilitated by Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Piesn Kozła is a highly acclaimed avant-garde theatre company working in the tradition of ensemble laboratory theatre. In the artistic lineage of Polish theatre directors Jerzy Grotowski and Włodzimierz Staniewski (Centre for Theatre Practices “Gardzienice”) the company develops performances over a long period of time, researching, training and presenting new theatrical works with a consistent ensemble of actors. This company attracts artists from around the world to experience their unique approach to actor training through their workshop and MA programs.
Every July, Piesn Kozła hosts the Brave Festival, an international festival of disappearing cultures. This event brings together performances from around the world that are living examples of ancient cultural traditions. With an emphasis on music and song the festival aims to celebrate precious cultural practices that may be under threat due to the pressures of modern society. The theme of the 2012 festival is Women’s Voices and will take place July 2-7.
Wrocław
Wrocław is also home to The Grotowski Institute, an organisation dedicated to the work of Jerzy Grotowski, whose laboratory theatre was based in Wroclaw 1965-1984. Located in the Rynek (town square) this centre holds archival material of Grotoswki’s work as well as collections from associated artists such as Peter Brook and Eugenio Barba and his Norwegian/Danish company Odin Teatret.
The institute is also very active in hosting theatrical research projects, workshops, lectures, film screenings, festivals and performances. Last year I was lucky enough to see Eugenio Barba, dressed in sandals in the cool Polish autumn, introducing one of Odin Teatret performances being hosted there. Currently the institute is running a research project with acclaimed Russian director Anatoly Vasiliev; such projects are attracting artists from all over Europe to audition and participate in laboratory theatre programs.
Biennially the Teatr Wspolczesny in Wrocław hosts the Dialog Festival, showcasing high profile artists from around the world. Dialog is usually held in October with the 2011 event featuring work by Polish director Krystian Lupa, Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Sociétas Rafaello Sanzio (Italy) and Teatro Milagros (Chile) to name a few. Definitely worth a look if you are visiting the country in 2013!
for refreshment…
Cafe Monsieur, Wrocław
There are many little cafes and bars growing like mushrooms all over Wrocław, but I would recommend the lovely Monsieur Café. Located just off the Rynek, this romantically French style café serves delicious home made cakes and croissants and is a very nice place for writing postcards or using the free Wifi.
Another favourite haunt is the beautiful Mleczrnia Café located on ul. Pawła Włodkowica. With its chic antique décor and candle-lit tables it is a must stop for a delicious Polish hot chocolate, giant cappuccino or a sumptuous breakfast. Mleczrnia also doubles as a hostel and offers lovely accommodation at relatively affordable prices.
If you want to boogie until the Polish sun rises, I would recommend the gorgeous art deco bar Kalumbur located on ul. Kuznicza—a great place to sample some Polish vodka and if you are lucky you can be out-danced by a particularly crazy DJ.
other recommendations…
If you’re staying in town for a few days I would definitely recommend hiring one of the city bikes or taking a stroll. The Odra River weaves through the city and not too far from the town centre you can find the islands of churches, old style buildings and the botanic gardens.
As a student town, Wrocław is home to a lot of young people, many of whom speak English. So it is quite possible to get by as an English-speaking tourist, but it is always appreciated if you make the effort to speak some Polish too!
Janie Gibson is an actor and theatre maker. She has trained at UNSW, PACT Theatre, Teatr Piesn Kozla (PL) and most recently Shakespeare & Company (USA). Her work focuses on the ensemble as the heart of the theatrical process and an understanding of theatre as an ongoing practice of research. She is currently exploring the art of oral tradition in the performance of drama, storytelling and song. Recent productions include Stories of Love and Hate with Urban Theatre Projects and Sydney Theatre Company and Rhapsody by her own company Whale Chorus, part of Underbelly Arts Festival 2011.
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Thea Baumann in Shanghai
photo Shian Law
Thea Baumann in Shanghai
reason for travelling
Following an on-again off-again long distance love affair with The Middle Kingdom, I’ve returned to the glittering embrace of cybercity Shanghai to present augmented reality apps and live performance Metaverse Makeovers as part of Jue: Music+Art, an annual open-source festival.
Another aspect of my visit to China, supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, is to instigate ‘Border-Crossing’ collaborations and partnerships with international live art practitioners and presenters.
whore or pearl of the orient?
Shanghai’s scent is like a certain Chinese brand of cosmopolitan spirit. Soaring above, gleaming neon and LED emblazoned skyscrapers punctuate an ever-evolving futuristic city skyline. On the lower levels crumbling alleyways, the Old Town and French Concession, sophisticated Art Deco buildings, dizzying marketplaces and shopping—oh so much shopping—over stimulate the senses (and my new ‘authentic non-faux’ Chanel purse).
Shanghai is the city for being seduced by historical charm and the aspirations of what-is-yet-to-be—witnessing the excess and paradoxical peaks of communism and capitalism colliding; having dalliances with the luxury and the gutter classes; and immersing yourself in the closest visual and sensorial experience you’ll find to Blade Runner.
Shanghai
photo Thea Baumann
Shanghai
for culture…
Beijing is known as the city for edgy contemporary art and as the base for China’s heavyweights, however myriad cultural hotspots are fermenting in Shanghai.
Located in a stately Art Deco building, The Rockbund Art Museum shows local and international contemporary artists. Night@RAM is worth dipping into—a series of free educational events held on weekends. Walk up to the top level of the Rockbund for a free cup of coffee and head out to the balcony for a fabulous view of Pudong, The Bund, Huangpu River, laundry laden shikumen [19th century style townhouses] and apartment rooftops.
Reminiscent of the 798 district in Beijing, M50 is located in an industrial park next to Suzou Creek. Here converted and revamped warehouses, a warren of studios, cafes, and the LED new media art collective Island 6 are located. ShanghArt is one of the more reliable galleries for cutting-edge contemporary mixed media practice, as is Eastlink supporting emergent practice in China. Walk down the street from the entrance to M50 and you’ll catch a glimpse of what is most likely the only trace of an underground street-art scene in China—a wall dedicated to graffiti art.
The Shanghai Biennale opens October this year and has moved to a renovated power plant—now the New Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, formerly the Pavilion of the Future at World Expo.
Yuyuan Gardens, Shanghai
photo Thea Baumann
Yuyuan Gardens, Shanghai
diy & propoganda…
For meeting Shanghai’s new media community, tinkerers, inventors, local and visiting artists, head to XinCheJian hackerspace. They stage hacker gatherings, presentations, workshops, robo-racing and show and tells.
Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre is a treasure trove basement museum of socialist realist graphic art, communist utopias, Mao portraits, little red book waving masses and, surprisingly, a fabulous archive of Shanghai Calendar Girl posters.
ni che le ma? (are you hungry?)
Che. Definitely. Shanghai is a city for eating, drinking, dining, clubbing, indulgence and debauchery.
For revelling with Shanghai’s glitterati, The Glamour Bar on The Bund is perfect for sexy cocktails with pink-hued lighting and vintage lounges graced with stunning views of Pudong: giant flashing billboards, the retro-futuristic Pearl Tower and sharp shiny modernist architecture.
On the Pudong side, head to the Jinmao Tower and take the ear-popping ride in the elevator up to the Skywalk—the tallest observation deck in mainland China. Then calm the vertigo and head down a level to Cloud 9 for cocktails and blindingly twinkly views of Shanghai.
If desperate for a good cup of coffee in Shanghai (after disgracing yourself with a Starbucks sprint), head to Old China Hand Reading Room located in the French Concession. This library cum cafe cum bookstore is owned by local architecture buffs who have published gorgeous books on Shanghai’s Art Deco heritage.
Time in China cannot be spent without sampling the myriad street food options. Chuanr— little chunks of seasoned meat on skewers cooked over coals on portable BBQs (sometimes an electric grill, mostly just an old iron gutter grate)—is unbelievably addictive. Ask for ‘la’—hot! Head to Yuyuan Gardens for bazaars and night time street snacks.
for sleeping…
If you’re starting to feel guilty about your love of Shanghai’s blinking neon display and need to alleviate your carbon emissions, sleep at Urbn, Shanghai’s first carbon neutral hotel with rooms fitted out in recycled wood from old concession era houses.
Foyer of the Paramount Ballroom, Shangai
photo Thea Baumann
Foyer of the Paramount Ballroom, Shangai
bargain, haggle, sing, dance
Shanghai is dotted with experiential jewels and a multitude of opportunities to shop.
Cut label (seconds) designer boutiques line the streets of the French Concession. Pick up a stack of DVDs from the stores and carts that pepper the streets. Need some Shanzhai (Chinese imitation and pirated brands and goods)? An ‘iPhone,’ ‘iPad,’ or a Steve Jobs memorial iPhone case? Head to Pacific Digital Plaza. Or hire an OTT VIP Karaoke Lounge Room at MJ.98. And for an enchanted vision of a bygone era, stop at the Paramount Ballroom for ballroom dancing and champagne.
Shanghai: it’s a city that still provides an intoxicating and heady array of options to indulge your every vice.
Thea Baumann is Executive Producer of Aphids where she co-directs Atelier Edens, a series of field laboratories sustainably creating cross-artform, digital and transmedia projects in remote and natural environments: OCEAN, WILDERNESS, SPACE. She conceived Metaverse Makeovers, augmented reality enhanced performances and AR apps for iOS, and is currently undertaking R&D in networked, collaborative live arts practice in China, Europe, and the US.
Soundcapsule is a bi-monthly online feature offering free downloads of music by artists we’ve recently covered in RealTime.
All tracks are copyright the artists.
jon rose, tromba mariner
Jon Rose playing the Tromba Mariner, 1979
Jon Rose is a UK-born composer who has lived in Austraila since 1976. He is a consummate violinist and versatile improviser, has made a multitude of instruments and has also created many radio works. Most recently he has been exploring interactive music making experiences in works such as Pursuit, using musical bicycles (see RT90; RT96), an interactive netball game, Team Music! (RT96); and the multi-user festival hit The Ball project (RT102).
In March he received The Australia Council’s Don Banks Award which honours an artist of high distinction over 50 years of age who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to Australia music.
The following track is a recording of an instrument that Rose constructed in the 70s called a Tromba Mariner. It was based on a medieval triangular bowed string instrument which Rose says “was attached to my boat which I had at the time, [and] used water to change the focal length of the resonating chamber'” (invterview in RT108).
the sound of bicycles singing
shannon o’neill: jon rose & robin fox, pursuit
RealTime issue #90 April-May 2009 pg. 48
listening to history
jon rose’s 2007 peggy glanville-hicks address
RealTime issue #83 Feb-March 2008 pg. 46
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thomas william vs scissor lock, dreams of dreams (excerpt)
Thomas William vs Scissor Lock
photo Lucien Alperstein
Thomas William vs Scissor Lock
Thomas William, previously known as Cleptoclectics (real name Tom Smith) is a Sydney-based musician and producer working primarily with sample-based music. Scissor Lock (real name Marcus Whale), also Sydney-based, creates gritty swathes of sound using voice, feedback, no input mixing and laptop processing. They first teamed up for a New Weird Australia benefit gig and have continued to collaborate, producing their debut CD Jewelz for the NWA Editions series (reviewed in earbash.)
The following track is an excerpt from a piece created for the experimental radio show Ears have Ears presented by Brooke Olsen, on FBi Radio 94.5fm.
part 1: sydney scenes & sounds
gail priest: silent hour, ladyz in noyz, high reflections
RealTime issue #103 June-July 2011 pg. 40
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shoeb ahmad, kitten’s eyes
Shoeb Ahmad, Watch/Illuminate, Mystery Plays Records
Shoeb Ahmad is a Canberra-based musician working with guitar, voice, field recordings, keyboard and laptop to explore drone, ambient, improv and pop. He is one half (with Evan Dorrian) of the duo Spartak whose recent New Weird Australia Edition, Nippon, was reviewed in earbash. He is also the founder of the DIY label hellosQuare, which has released 49 CDs and CD-Rs since its inception in 2004. See in the loop to read about the label’s upcoming residency at Canberra Contemporary Artspace.
The following track, Kitten’s Eyes, offers a special preview of Ahmad’s upcoming solo album Watch/Illuminate, to be released June 2012.
Beirut is a city in a period of rapid transformation. One sees evidence of the devastation of its troubled past, but all around there is renovation and reconstruction, not just physically— the city is gripped by a desire for cultural change. It’s an exciting and contradictory place. Whether or not, in the face of transformation, it can maintain some of its old charms is a debate current amongst its citizens. The reconstructed downtown looks like a film set—almost too perfect; a few metres away are the empty shells of bombed buildings. A promenade by the Mediterranean brings you in contact with a diverse group of people. Beirut is a complex place.
Old Beirut
photo Jim Denley
Old Beirut
Getting around the city is a challenge, there is little public transport and walking can seem unpleasant and dangerous due to noisy, chaotic traffic—drivers park their cars almost anywhere, often blocking pavements. But once you get the feel for it, crossing streets and negotiating the traffic becomes easier and off the main roads it’s surprisingly quiet. Everything in this place is negotiable. Regulations have little power—red lights are often run—but strangely, it works. Cabs are cheap, every trip seems to be 10,000 Lebanese pounds, around AU$6-7.
for culture…
Around Easter in Beirut is the Irjtjal Festival devoted to improvised music (irjtjal means improvisation in Arabic). The event forms around a core group of musicians: Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet), Raed Yassin (double bass) and Sharif Sehnaoui (guitar), three brilliant players working at the very edge of experimentalism on their instruments. They have links with an array of European and American musicians and, excitingly, performers from Egypt and Tunisia. The festival takes place in a variety of venues throughout central Beirut.
Straight after this festival is BIPOD—Beirut International Platform of Dance. Launched in 2004 as the Beirut International Dance Festival it offers dance performances by artists of different origins, workshops, conferences and debates in order to develop new concepts in contemporary dance. The Beirut Art Centre is also worth checking out, offering programs of exhibitions and performances.
Bustros Palace, Beirut
photo Jim Denley
Bustros Palace, Beirut
There are good bookshops throughout the city. I guess given Lebanon’s history it’s not surprising that the politics section is often large and quite radical. There are bookshops in the main street of Hamra and even Virgin Megastore in the Downtown area carries a large number of books on Lebanese history and politics. There are also little shops in Mar Mikhael, like Papercup on Rue Pharaon, specialising in art books.
Metropolis Empire Sofil in Ashrafieh, at the heart of Beirut, is a two-screen theatre, also a café and a film library. The program is mainly art cinema.
La Plage, Beirut
photo Jim Denley
La Plage, Beirut
for refreshment…
Eating in Beirut is a great experience, I didn’t have a bad meal in my time there. For Armenian food, Mayrig (282 Rue Pasteur) provided me with one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life. Armenian food is similar to Lebanese but with subtly different spices. I think the meatballs in cherries might have been sheep testicles—it was delicious.
A good place for lunch is Basma (Sasadi Bldg, Charles Malek Ave) in Achrafieh. The menu seems to be modern meets traditional.
One of Beirut’s most famous landmarks—a massive seaside palace with swimming pool beach club and swanky eatery—is known by long-time locals as Café d’Orient or simply as La Plage by everyone else (Ain el-Mreisseh). It’s expensive, but a great place to sit and have a drink in the evening and watch the Mediterranean.
Cheaper options are Barbar on Rue Spears in Hamra where you can pick up fresh falafel and kebabs till late. This popular chain sells manaeesh, shwarma, pastries, mezze, kebabs, ice cream and fresh juice.
Shoemaker in Beirut
photo Jim Denley
Shoemaker in Beirut
other recommendations…
A walk around Bourj Hamoud just to the north of Beirut takes you into another world where Armenian culture dominates. There are lots of delicious and cheap places to eat. Bourj Hammoud was founded by survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and expanded mostly during the 1930s. They were given the right to construct shacks on the eastern banks of the Beirut River that, at the time, was swamp and marshland. Subsequently permission was granted to erect houses and buildings which stand to this day.
If you have time, take the bus north 85km to Tripoli. The souk (covered market) and the old city there are extraordinary, and people are friendly and inquisitive—I guess they don’t see too many tourists. Eat at Abdul Rahman Hallab & Sons (just ask, everyone seems to know this place) where the sweets are amazing and different from any Lebanese sweets I’ve had in Australia.
Jim Denley is Sydney-based musician. Wind instruments and electronics are core elements of his musical output. An emphasis on spontaneity, site-specific work and collaboration has been central to his work. He sees no clear distinctions between his roles as instrumentalist, improviser and composer. Denley performs regularly at local, national and international events and festivals and also runs the record label splitrec.
sounds found & introduced
bruce mowson: bogong air festival
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 40
sonic interiors
simon charles: liquid architecture 9, melbourne
RealTime issue #87 Oct-Nov 2008 pg. 47
the many ways to play
chris reid samples sonic innovation at mibem
RealTime issue #85 June-July 2008 pg. 45
the improvising organism
gail priest, machine for making sense
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 38
Interview with artist Lara Thoms about her participatory performance work The Experts Project, part of Local Position Systems, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, curated by Performance Space.
Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo by Untrained Artist
Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc
lucy guerin inc’s untrained
Lucy Guerin Inc’s successful show Untrained has already charmed audiences around Australia and in Hong Kong. The show is scheduled to tour the US in November and the company is looking for two new untrained men to become part of the show. Males over 18 with no dance experience (and no criminal record, for visa purposes) are eligible to apply. Applications close 5pm, May 14; auditions May 26, 10–1pm; http://www.lucyguerininc.com
international space time concerto competition
Australia’s University of Newcastle has announced the inaugural The International Space Time Concerto Competition encouraging artists to explore the concerto both from an historical but also contemporary perspective looking for innovation within the form. Also involved are the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore, Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, Waikato University in New Zealand and Ars Electronica in Austria and entries are encouraged from virtuoso classical instrumentalists, orchestral players, jazz, contemporary bands, electronic and new media artists. The pool of prize money is $50,000 (sponsored by benefactor Jennie Thomas and the Friends of the University). Six finalists will be chosen to perform with orchestra at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music Concert Hall in late 2012 with another two finalists performing with an ensemble linked across five countries via the internet. Entries close July 1, www.spacetimeconcerto.com
access space uk residencies
Access Space is an open digital arts lab in Sheffield, UK. With an emphasis on sustainability the lab runs on recycled computers and open source software and systems. Access Space is calling for applications for Artist Residencies which will utilise its Refab Space, a DIY fabrication studio including tools such as 3D printer, laser cutter, CNC router, Arduino and an embroidery machine. Applications are sought for one residency in July and three residencies from September 4 to December 15. Residencies are for 15 working days and successful applicants receive a fee of £1500 (approx AUS$2,300), self-catering accommodation, a small budget for materials and a small contribution towards travel. Applications close for July residency May 16 and Autumn residencies June 18; http://www.access-space.org/arts/Refab_Residency_Call.htm
realise your dream
If you need help getting to UK there’s The British Council’s Realise your Dream program, funding artists in their first 10 years of practice to travel to the UK and undertake a tailored professional development program devised in consultation with the Council. Applications are open to people working in any industry “where creativity plays an important role” (website). The award offers $10,000 plus airfare. Applications close June 3, 2012; http://artsfrontier.britishcouncil.org.au/?cat=4
vagrant, new weird australia
New Weird Australia is currently offering small grants (up to $750) for artists to curate and produce an event for New Weird’s open source gig series. The events will take place under the moniker of Vagrant, with NWA providing promotion. Applicants must share the organisation’s eclectic and experimental sensibility, but the style and responsibility for production of gigs is entirely up to recipients. Funding is for artist fees, travel, marketing and production costs with a stipulation that “artists are not out of pocket” (website). Events can take place anywhere in Australia before July 30. Applications close May 14; http://newweirdaustralia.com
kit denton disfellowship
The 2012 Kit Denton Disfellowship, named after Andrew Denton’s father, a respected writer, is now in its sixth year, however it’s been re-titled a “disfellowship” to encourage “subversive ideas” which the press release suggests might mean that “your nan disowns you, your neighbours shun you and the shock jocks call for you to be locked up.” The aim is to “find ideas of substance, intelligence and purpose that will take viewers outside their comfort zone and challenge the status quo” (press release). This year it is run by the Australian Writers’ Foundation and Cordell Jigsaw Zapruders, the privately owned television company that is responsible for shows such as Go Back to Where You Came From, The Gruen Transfer and Enough Rope, as well as the upcoming Dumb, Drunk and Racist. The fellowship offers a grant of $30,000 to script the idea for screen production. Applications close May 25, http://awg.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=383&Itemid=509
HAVING LIVED IN THE MELBOURNE SUBURB OF COLLINGWOOD FOR ALMOST A LIFETIME, I AM SUBCONSCIOUSLY AWARE THAT FUGUESTATE WILL BE PERFORMED ON GIPPS STREET AT THE UNITED MASONIC TEMPLE.
A woman wearing a ritualistic tailcoat greets me at the entrance. Together, we step through a hall and enter an antechamber. Black and white photographs from the early 20th century occupy measured space on tar-stained walls. But the equilibrium of ancient imagery is sabotaged by the inclusion of several closed circuit screens. A Dali-esque clock appears on one screen, and intermittent shadows across its face betray the presence of others passing through some hidden mausoleum.
A man approaches me as if he has known me all my life. He invites me to sit at a table that might have been constructed purely for letter writing. He disappears, then returns with a glass of port and a sheet of paper that details the widely reported 2005 discovery of ‘The Piano Man.’ I read on, hoping the liquor provided will fortify me against this tale of a fellow found wandering along a road on the English Isle of Sheppey.
Fuguestate, Jason Maling & Joseph Giovinazzo
photo tmphoto.co
Fuguestate, Jason Maling & Joseph Giovinazzo
The port achieves its stated aim and lodges an ember in my belly. But this report of a speechless man who, when provided with a piano played melancholy versions of Swan Lake, disturbs my thinking. Is it a media myth or an actual case of a gifted person requiring treatment for a personality disorder? It is impossible to tell, but the cynic within conspires toward the circus surrounding Australian pianist David Helfgott. Some employed in the media will do anything to make a buck. Then again, adopting the role of urban mythographer is preferable to hacking the phone of a murdered English teenager.
Then I too am fitted out in tailcoat, white gloves and a set of headphones jacked into a book with an esoteric sign embossed on its cover. The aforementioned man opens a door and invites me to explore a hidden recess. Inside, empty chairs placed in methodical rows remain attentive before a decrepit portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. There are others inside this ballroom, also wearing tailcoats, gloves and headphones. We wander together, as if condemned to immolate within a purgatory bereft of defining terms.
I exit this room and enter another. It’s a kitchen and I do declare that the multitude of cucumber sandwiches once prepared across its steel benches are present in spirit, if not vanquished by time and hungry Freemasonry. Emanating from my earphones is what I believe to be an atonal composition that competes with itself in the attainment of some transcendental plane. It’s a fugue, of course; and the title of this performance thumps between my ears as I now believe myself to be in composition with a world that previously had been limited to subtle winks and shifty handshakes.
Fuguestate, Jason Maling & Joseph Giovinazzo
photo tmphoto.co
Fuguestate, Jason Maling & Joseph Giovinazzo
I venture further, into a dusty hollow. There, again, is another man who has known me all my life. This time, he takes the shape of a decaying skeleton resting inside a miniature coffin. The detail is remarkable, but so is the magic of human deception. In fugue with life as in death, we compete with ourselves in defiance of some final retribution. Our time will come, my friends, and in the end there will be nothing but the sad monument of death illuminating a lifetime of wasted dreams.
Fuguestate, conceptual realisation Jason Mailing, Joseph Giovinazzo,
drawing, photography, production design Jason Mailing,
musical composition, audio technology Cake Industries (Jesse Stevens & Dean Petersen), production Joseph Giovinazzo, producer Ann Schoo, book construction Gene Hedley, Cake Industries, United Masonic Temple, Melbourne, April 16-29; http://www.fuguestate.info/
This article originally appeared as part of RealTime’s online e-dition May 8
CHOREOGRAPHER AND DIRECTOR KATRINA LAZAROFF’S FIRST WORK WITH THE INDEPENDENT DANCE COMPANY ONE POINT 618, POMONA ROAD, PREMIERED AT THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRE IN 2010 AND WAS NOMINATED FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN CONTEMPORARY DANCE AT THE 2011 AUSTRALIAN DANCE AWARDS (SEE RT97)
One Point 618’s latest work, Involuntary, began development almost as soon as Pomona Road had closed, and will again be premiering with the support of the Adelaide Festival Centre. With Involuntary, Lazaroff wants to take a humorous look at the unconscious motions we go through in our lives, and in particular, how technology influences them.
“The idea for Involuntary came from [observing] my mother-in-law watching football. She was jolting around…unconscious of her own movement, because she was so involved,” says Lazaroff. “That sort of involuntary action and [its] sporadic nature really interested me. I thought there is something comic in this: it’s unconscious but [has] a driven focus.”
Involuntary, One Point 618
photo Chris Herzfeld
Involuntary, One Point 618
Also observing spontaneous movement in her then 14-week-old daughter, Lazaroff began to draw parallels between this unconscious physical movement and other “unconscious behaviour in society.” Lazaroff says: “We often go along with things without much thought, because it’s required of us…I think with the evolution of technology and [its] systemisations…we don’t really have time to question very much…We make choices as we go, unsure of the implications.” Lazaroff says Involuntary “has become a satire…a humorous look at how at times we follow blindly.”
A concern throughout the development process was making a dance theatre work about technology in a world where it is rapidly evolving. “Because technology keeps advancing so fast, people keep bringing new ideas to me and I keep getting new ideas, [but] I’ve tried to steer away from [actually using] technology.” Lazaroff says that during development “we focused a lot on technological sound and vision, but to me that was already out of date: it had been seen 10 or 15 years ago in works by Chunky Move and other companies.”
The result has been a toning down of the work’s ‘cyber’ elements by video designer Nic Mollison and sound designer Sascha Budimski. “It’s more about the influence of systems and procedures, programs and information technology rather than trying to represent technology on stage. I’ve tried to strip it back and get a bit more human with it.”
Involuntary, One Point 618
photo Chris Herzfeld
Involuntary, One Point 618
Originally from Adelaide, most of Lazaroff has spent most of her dance career in Perth, working with Buzz Dance Theatre and small independent companies. She is excited by the opportunity of having a second work presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre on this scale as she sees it as contributing to potential national understanding and recognition of her work. “Sometimes making work in Adelaide and Perth is quite isolating. The eastern states are a bit disconnected from the artists who work in these places.” After Adelaide, Involuntary will be presented at the National Regional Arts Conference in Goolwa (SA) in October, and after that Lazaroff hopes to take it interstate.
While the Involuntary incorporates ideas about technology, systemisation and unconscious actions, for Katrina Lazaroff the work is primarily “a culmination of all of my passions and thoughts and feelings. Not just the technical side of being a dancer, creator or choreographer, but bringing together the whole picture of how I think, how I feel as an artist…It brings together all the hard work I do everywhere else in order to survive…the joy but also the hardship of making a work.”
One Point 618 & Adelaide Festival Centre, Involuntary, director choreographer Katrina Lazaroff, performers Ninian Donald, Timothy Rodgers, Veronica Shum, Jessica Statton, video, lighting Nic Mollison, sound design Sascha Budimski, set design Nic Mollison, Richard Seidel, Katrina Lazaroff, consultants Catherine Fitzgerald, Richard Seidel, Roz Hervey, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, May 1-5; http://www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
photo Tony Lewis
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
FOUR ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CONCERTS SPANNED AN EXTRAORDINARY RANGE OF APPROACHES TO MUSIC AND, ESPECIALLY, THE USE OF SPACE. WHILE LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S MASS USES THE AUDITORIUM IN THE TRADITIONAL MANNER, THE ZEPHYR QUARTET PERFORMANCE INTRUDES INTO THE AUDIENCE, RICHARD CHEW INCARCERATES HIS AUDIENCE AND PAUL GRABOWSKY, ANTONY PATERAS AND THE AUSTRALIAN ART ORCHESTRA IMMERSE THEIRS.
leonard bernstein’s mass
In 1971, legendary US conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein responded to Jackie Kennedy’s commission to write a work celebrating the opening of the Kennedy Centre and marking a decade since the President’s assassination, with Mass. It’s a unique composition that acknowledges the Kennedys’ Catholicism, reveals Bernstein’s interest in both theological and political issues and addresses the ultimate question of faith in an absurd world.
Leonard Bernsteins’ Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
photo Tony Lewis
Leonard Bernsteins’ Mass, 2012 International Arts Adelaide Festival
Mass combines music theatre and dance with a traditional Catholic mass and the social and philosophical issues Bernstein raised remain relevant 40 years after the controversial work’s premiere. Set in the street and presenting the Catholic mass as concept, rite and musical form for consideration rather than for participation, Mass critiques organised religion and the Vietnam War and includes readings from letters by imprisoned draft evaders. Blending orchestra, rock band, singers, dancers, actors and multiple choirs, including children, into a cross-media mix, it implicitly proposes a cross-community bridge and captures the 1960s Zeitgeist. Its experimental nature—at the time, rock and classical music were engaged in a cold war that epitomised the conflict between establishment and counterculture—defies musical categorisation, as it links particular musical styles to specific characters or elements of the plot.
Mass is an interesting choice as an Adelaide Festival flagship, combining large-scale performance, experimentation (not uniformly well received at the time) and a recapitulation of issues relating to faith, the Catholic Church and political protest. The performance by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, soloists and choirs under Kristian Järvi was excellent and Jubilant Sykes was outstanding in the pivotal role of the Celebrant who experiences his own crisis of faith precipitated by his parishioners’ alienation, before a child’s strength of belief finally triggers a Kierkegaardian leap of faith amongst the crowd.
richard chew’s instructions for an imaginary man
Instructions for an Imaginary Man
courtesy the artists
Instructions for an Imaginary Man
In 1943, Polish writer and resistance member Jerzy Ficowski wrote, “It was exactly eleven/ steps from wall to wall/ in the Pawiak prison/ from to from to/ wall wall wall wall/ and eleven and back again.” Adelaide composer Richard Chew’s Instructions for an Imaginary Man muses on the experience of prison, and questions the nature and impact of imprisonment and its relationship to structures of power and control.
Instructions for an Imaginary Man takes place in the long-disused Old Adelaide Gaol, in a corridor accessing rows of cells, with a scrim separating the audience from the performance area that represents a cell, and with the musicians positioned behind a second scrim at the far end of the corridor. Videos of cell interiors and an actor-prisoner are projected onto the scrims as the performance progresses. The same actor mimes imprisonment, depicting the loneliness and mental breakdown associated with confinement, forcing the audience to remember the gaol’s former uses. Chew set the poetry of Verlaine, Behan, Rilke and others, including political prisoners and former hostages, to his own music, which is for soprano and baritone accompanied by piano, strings and clarinet. Fine performances and clever design make this a strong work. Staging theatrical and musical events in disused prisons is not new, but in this case is highly evocative
australian art orchestra’s miles davis, prince of darkness
Australian Art Orchestra
courtesy the artists
Australian Art Orchestra
Musically, the Australian Art Orchestra’s concert Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness, was the festival standout. A tribute to jazz trumpeter Davis (1926-1991), the AAO concert runs chronologically: the first half commences with selections from Birth of the Cool (1948-9) progressing to Gil Evans’ arrangement for Davis of the second movement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1961) in which Davis’ trumpet took the guitar role; followed by festival director and AAO leader Paul Grabowsky’s arrangement of Davis’ Black Comedy (1968). Trumpeter Phillip Slater is wonderful in the Concierto. Superbly arranged, these performances render the quintessential Davis style through the AAO’s distinctive sound and approach.
But it was the second half of this concert that really got things moving with Anthony Pateras’ high energy Ontetradecagon. Knowing that Davis’ late work, particularly his On the Corner album (1972) was influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pateras pays homage to the experimentalism of both Davis and Stockhausen by exploring the conjunction of jazz improvisation and experimental music. AAO members were located in six groups around the auditorium—on stage, on either side, at the back and on the balcony—with Pateras strategically positioning himself in the centre aisle facing the stage. Pateras uses a Revox B77 to replay fragments of On the Corner and process elements of the live performance, while the AAO play from Pateras’ score which is orchestrated from On the Corner pitch elements and structured to allow improvisation. The spatialisation immerses the listener—I felt as if I were inside Davis’ and Stockhausen’s minds simultaneously. Paradoxically, the absence of a driving jazz rhythm brings out the ethereal feel of Davis’, as well as Stockhausen’s music. Ontetradecagon extends the language of both composers into multiple, layered ensemble playing, and in the program notes, Pateras acknowledges Varèse, Xenakis and Luigi Nono in the concept.
Australian Art Orchestra
photo Tobias Titz
Australian Art Orchestra
As David Toop notes in Ocean of Sound (Serpent’s Tail, London, 1995), record producer Teo Macero mixed Miles Davis’ late albums from long recordings of live takes, and a different mix would have produced a different result, the composition in effect emerging from the mixing. Remixing Davis is thus not only appropriate but anticipated, with Pateras now the producer. At various moments, both trumpeter Scott Tinkler and Pateras appear to be conducting, and the scattered AAO ensembles cohere into a tightly unified whole. Pateras adroitly adds sound samples from the onstage trio of Erkki Veltheim (electric violin), Vanessa Tomlinson (percussion) and Tinkler. Tinkler’s dazzling trumpet solo quotes characteristic Davis motifs, though Ontetradecagon is more about Davis’ musical exploration and development than his own trumpet playing. It’s especially about saturating the audience in challenging sound.
The final piece in the AAO concert was a fabulous reworking of Davis’ Black Satin by AAO bassist Philip Rex, who for this piece performed at a laptop. Black Satin is also from the 1972 On the Corner sessions, and this rendition updates Black Satin’s eclectic, danceable drum ’n’ bass flavour to incorporate today’s electronics and club style. A mirror ball above our heads completes the ambience! This AAO concert was a knockout, and Grabowsky’s program essay is insightful, reinterpreting Miles Davis’ work to confirm and extend its innovations.
zephyr string quartet’s MICROMacro
Jo Kerlogue, MICROMacro, Zephyr Quartet
photo Belinda Humphris
Jo Kerlogue, MICROMacro, Zephyr Quartet
In the Adelaide Fringe, at a pub noted as a folk and blues venue, Adelaide’s Zephyr string quartet gave us MICROMacro, in which they performed their own compositions while artist Jo Kerlogue painted on the freshly paper-covered walls and floor and even a table in the auditorium. Zephyr and Kerlogue look for synthesis between notated music and spontaneous art—an emerging trend combining music with visual art as performance, a form of visual improv where the artists’ creative flow is nakedly exposed. Periodically, the musicians would change position in front of audience tables, though the sound source, the PA, remained fixed, creating a feeling of disembodiment and teasing the listener’s sense of how vision and sound combine.
shifting musical spaces
There are four different concepts of theatre at work in these festival works. Chew’s choice of location especially charges his work and provides its foundation. Musical languages are combined and redeveloped and there are contrasting approaches to improvisation. Of the same era as Bernstein’s Mass, Miles Davis’ On the Corner is taken in new directions by Grabowsky, Pateras and Rex. Chew and Bernstein critically address social issues, particularly political imprisonment, and the power of their works derives partly from the essential nature of human speech. While Zephyr shows how visual art might respond to music, Pateras addresses the raw power of sound through its sonic references, timbres, textures and performance, and the music of Bernstein and Chew seeks out the soul. These performances collectively show how music engages the mind, heart and body simultaneously.
2012 Adelaide International Arts Festival: MASS, Leonard Bernstein, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conductor Kristjan Järvi, director Andy Packer, chorus director Carl Crossin, scenic designer Geoff Cobham, lighting designer Mark Pennington, featuring Jubilant Sykes, Absolute Trio, Adelaide Festival Chorus and Children’s Choir, State Opera of South Australia in association with Adelaide Festival Centre, March 10; Instructions for an Imaginary Man, composer, Richard Chew, mezzo soprano Cheryl Pickering, baritone Nigel Cliffe, actor Graeme Rose, pianist Richard Chew, violins Jacqui Carias and Laura Evans, viola Teagan Short, cello Jillian Visser, clarinets Alexander Loakin, producer Cheryl Pickering for Various People, designer Bec Francis, lighting, projection Nic Mollison, Old Adelaide Gaol, March 9; Australian Art Orchestra, Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness, led by Paul Grabowsky, composer Anthony Pateras, arrangements Eugene Ball, Paul Grabowsky, Philip Rex, Adelaide Town Hall, March 15 http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/
LIFE IN MOVEMENT IS A DOCUMENTARY DIRECTED BY BRYAN MASON AND SOPHIE HYDE ABOUT THE SHORT LIFE AND TRAGIC DEATH IN A ROAD ACCIDENT OF CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER TANJA LIEDTKE, ON THE EVE OF TAKING UP THE DIRECTORSHIP OF SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY (OBITUARY, RT81).
Let’s get the accident out of the way, as the film does. In one of the filmmakers’ clever moves they place news coverage of Liedtke’s death up front, within the first few minutes, telling us that yes, it is a film about this event, but also signalling that it is not their story’s eventual revelation or end.
The tragedy of an exceptional and promising life cut short is clear, and this aspect of the documentary has been widely reviewed in the mainstream media in response to the film’s award-winning run through last year’s film festivals and subsequent cinema release. (Eleven official selections and awards are listed on the film’s website, including Sydney Film Festival’s Australian Documentary Prize and both jury and audience awards at Cinedans.) But beyond this narrative journey about the life and creative impulse of Liedtke herself, Life in Movement paints a portrait as much about a close group of friends and collaborators coming to terms with their loss.
Tanja Liedtke, Silhouette Falling (archival), Life in Movement Life
photo Solon Ulbrich
Tanja Liedtke, Silhouette Falling (archival), Life in Movement Life
Filmically, editor Bryan Mason deftly stitches together footage from a range of different sources, skipping back and forth in time and across formats and aspect ratios. There is material shot by him in rehearsal and performance of Liedtke’s two full-length dance works, Twelfth Floor and Construct, in anticipation of their individual premieres (Mason had been contracted by Liedtke to film both productions) and in remounted international tours after Liedtke’s death. There is an abundance of interviews with partner Solon Ulbrich, dancers Kristina Chan, Paul White, Anton, Amelia McQueen, Julian Crotti and Joshua Tyler; choreographers Garry Stewart and Lloyd Newson; and with close friends and family. And amazingly, there is a treasure trove of video material from Liedtke herself—old grainy snippets of her childhood antics at boarding school and, later, recordings of experimentation in hotel rooms or alone in the studio in early development of ideas that would find their way into Twelfth Floor and Construct.
These small sketches, gems of ideas torn from an artist’s undifferentiated ream of creative research collected along the way towards realising a final work, are a boon for the film. They allow for Liedtke to be strongly inserted into the film in a very intimate way, as she talks to camera and reaches for the record button. Mason and Hyde have, in the end, invited us to witness a vivisection of the creative process.
Tanja Liedtke, self portrait, Life in Movement
The film’s most interesting achievement is the way in which it understands the dramaturgy of Liedtke’s works, tracing particular scenes and choreographic moments back through the archive of video documentation. It is remarkable that Liedtke was such an avid user of video and thereby provided such an archive; but equally remarkable is the way in which the filmmakers select and use that material, re-deploying the dramaturgy to tell their own story. The final scene from Construct, in which Kristina Chan is enclosed and stilled within a tower of timber two-by-fours (used playfully throughout the work in varying configurations), is cut into a long sequence in which collaborators and family members talk about Liedtke’s high standards, her unreachable expectations for herself and her fears of failure. We accumulate an understanding of real life events through artistic ones and vice versa: the objects, the materials and tools for play and creativity can also be the structures that contain and confine us.
One of my favourite memories of watching Liedtke perform remains a tiny fragment of an idea she created with Chan at one of Australian Dance Theatre’s informal Ignition series for emerging choreographers back in 2002. In a program of short works purportedly re-imagining something in relation to the Nutcracker tradition, their collaboration stood out for its conceptual clarity: in an exploration of passage through space, Liedtke described tight corridors and diminishing gateways through exacting articulations of her long form. She did so little, and yet the air around her vibrated with excitement. I tried to Google the work in order to name it here, but surprisingly turned up nothing (returning to the old-fashioned archive of a review I wrote at the time to check the date). This is partly what Life in Movement or any biography attempts to ameliorate I suppose: despite the seemingly inerasable and inescapable technologies of the internet, of video documentation or even the print archive capturing whatever we do, such archives are in fact highly unstable. Our activities and our lives may yet dissolve into vague memory and forgetting.
This is of course what academic Peggy Phelan and others have notably claimed for performance as well, its ontology of disappearance and ephemerality. But Life in Movement demonstrates that ephemera and material remnants of an artwork and a life do remain—in the bodies of the dancers who worked with Liedtke (what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire”), in the memories of those who witnessed the life and the art, and in this case, in an extensive image archive too.
Seeing the film I am reminded of Tanja Liedtke’s ability as a dancer and choreographer to put us in touch with both the cruelty and brilliance of humanity through the extremity of human form and human emotion in her performances. This is an intelligently crafted film that re-activates such memories, both collecting and also adding to the archive of Liedtke’s life and work in the public domain.
Life in Movement, director, cinematographer, editor, co-producer Bryan Mason, producer, co-director Sophie Hyde; Closer Productions; http://lifeinmovementfilm.com; in cinema release from April 12
reviews of tanja liedtke’s work
words for escape
francesca rendle-short: tanja liedtke, tweflth floor
RealTime issue #60 April-May 2004 pg. 44
It’s a common error to assume that innovative arts action only happens in big cities. Particularly in the area of experimental music and sound art there’s a vibrant history of festivals and activities based in regional Australia. In NSW there’s been the Unsound Festival in Wagga Wagga (RT76), Rolling Stock Festival (RT101) and Wired Lab in Cootamundra (e-dition Nov 22, 2011); and more recently activities at Cad Factory Narrandera. In QLD there’s been See Hear Now in Townsville (RT81; RT97) and in regional Victoria the undue noise collective.
Gently steered by Jacques Soddell (who also runs the Cajid CD label), the undue noise collective has been in operation since 2002, primarily in Bendigo but also working with Punctum to produce events in Castlemaine, including a touring leg of Liquid Architecture. Over this time the collective has presented more than 70 concerts successfully creating a community of artists and audiences in the region of Central Victoria.
To celebrate their 10 years of existence the collective is presenting Sonic Decadence, four concerts over two days at their regular venue, The Old Fire Station, featuring 24 local and intrastate artists covering a range of exploratory styles. Potential highlights could be Dr Aardvarks Table O Gadgets, a rare appearance by Warren Burt playing musical toys such as iPhones, Android Tablets and KAOS Pad, and The Runny Tadpole, a new group based in Bendigo playing Theremin, Kaossilator, home made instruments, drums and effects. Also from Bendigo is Justin Bull, improvising guitarist playing solo and reuniting with Soft Black Stars, a free improv group who performed at the very first undue noise. Taking the trip from Melbourne will be guitarist Tim Catlin, sax player Rosalind Hall and guitarist David Brown. And of course the festival wouldn’t be complete without an appearance by the microbiologist turned field recording sound adventurer, Jacques Soddell himself. Certainly worth a roadtrip!
Undue Noise presents Sonic Decadence, Old Fire Station, Bendigo, April 28, 2 & 8pm; April 29 2 & 8 pm; http://undue.cajid.com/blog/?p=331
Victoria Hunt, Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka (2012)
photo Heidrun Löhr
Victoria Hunt, Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka (2012)
Overlapping with Local Positioning Systems, the Performance Space program presented with the Museum of Contemporary Art, comes their first season for 2012 at Carriageworks, Dimension Crossing.
Inhabiting the foyer is Robyn Backen’s Whisper Pitch. It’s a curved brick structure, a building within a building, that draws on the artist’s investigations into architectural acoustics and parabolic forms to explore the idea of a whispering wall—a place for secret communications amidst the reverberant hubbub. (Until May 19)
Audiences access Michaela Gleave’s Our Frozen Moment through a makeshift cloakroom at the back of Bay 19 where they are invited to don raincoats and gumboots. (In Sydney’s current weather they probably arrived wearing them!) In the centre of the gallery space is a kind of stage, on which the visitor may frolic in the light misty rain. Flashes of light illuminate the droplets like tiny stars, dancing ever so briefly before your eyes—a new micro-universe. (Until May 19)
The performance program opened with Yumi Umiumare’s EnTranced (April 19-21). Well titled, the work was totally entrancing, as Umiumare, a mistress of transformation, danced through a series of surreal in-between worlds (see review in RT109).
Following this is the long awaited Copper Promises: Hinemihi by Victoria Hunt. Over the last few years Hunt has been on a very personal odyssey to explore her Maori heritage. In many ways her journey parallels that of the Hinemihi, an ancestral ceremonial space that was bought from its traditional people and transferred to England—but for her people the Hinemihi is more than a structure, it is the female ancestor herself. Hunt, a mesmerising performer trained in BodyWeather, has been assisted by her extended family and guest artists (James Brown, Densil Cabrere, Annemaree Dalziel, Hedge, Horomona Horo, Clytie Smith, Chris Wilson and Fiona Winning) to create this performance (also to be reviewed in RT109). May 4 8pm, May 5 6pm, May 8-12 8pm, post show artist talk May 11
The final show of the season comes from Blood Policy in collaboration with Aphids. Computer Boy is an exploration of the effect that the virtual world is having on younger generations and is created within a 3D virtual environment (based on gaming technologies such as Grand Theft Auto) and also involves puppetry (a kind of Pinocchio with a 12-inch LCD head) and machinima animation. Made by Bryony Anderson, Martyn Coutts, Sam Routledge and Willoh S Weiland with music by DJ TR!P, it looks intriguing. Game on! May 23-26, 8pm, May 26 2pm
Performance Space fans might want to become members. For $100 you get access to nine shows for free as well as discounted tickets for a friend and off-site shows. http://www.performancespace.com.au/2010/membership/
In RT94 the late Douglas Leonard praised Sunny Drake’s Otherwise, stating “this was not navel-gazing but a richly creative engagement with a world where power and sexual or cultural identity are linked.” Drake’s new one-person show, X, currently showing in Brisbane’s Metro Arts as part of their Independents season, looks likely to be a similarly challenging performance.
X enters the world of best friends Caitlin and Jamie and two hand puppets, Naked and Fancy, who together explore addiction from a “lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/intersexed/questioning” (LGBTIQ) perspective. Following the Brisbane season, Drake will be taking the show to the USA National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco. Sunny Drake, X, Independents 2012, Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, Brisbane, co-presented w Sunny Drake & Contact Inc; until April 28; www.metroarts.com.au/
buru, us tour, marrugeku
Buru, Marrugeku, Broome 2010
photo Rod Hartvigsen
Buru, Marrugeku, Broome 2010
Also currently touring North America is Marrugeku’s latest dance theatre work, Buru, which premiered in Broome in 2010 and toured the Kimberley in 2011. Buru explores the six seasons as described by the traditional landowners of the area, the Yawuru people, using the stories of Janyju (Red Lizard story as told by Karajarri elder and Yawuru language specialist Doris Edgar) and Walmanyjun (Greedy Turtle Story as told by Yawuru/Jabirr Jabirr elder Cissy Djiagween). The piece is conceived and choreographed by Dalisa Pigram and co-directed with Rachael Swain and includes younger and more mature Indigenous performers utilising hip-hop, stilt dance and storytelling accompanied by the music of Marrugeku Mongrel Band with guest songwriter Stephen Pigram. Buru has already been performed at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Phoenix, Arizona (April 14) and will be playing as part of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Winnipeg, Canada (April 24-27). The nine young Indigenous performers will also take part in cultural exchange workshops and activities with local indigenous theatre makers. Marrugeku, Buru tour; www.marrugeku.com.au/
tyger tyger: west space
West Space’s curatorial initiatives continue to impress. As well as the 2011/2012 project Today Your Love which sees artists inhabit the gallery with an emphasis on process and experimentation over product, there is also the Tyger Tyger project curated by Phip Murray. Tyger Tyger aims to broaden the focus of Westspace beyond emerging artists and thus Murray has invited a number of established guests to team up with an emerging artist of their choice. Coming up next is a collaboration between Lyndal Walker and Danielle Hakim titled Re-make/Re-model looking at the role of the model, both animate and inanimate, in life and art. Also part of the Tyger Tyger project is the collaboration between composer and sound artist David Chesworth and sculptor/installation artist Katie Lee. Together they will present All Who Occupy This Great Space, a sound installation and sculptural environment which will also be the site of two performances by experimental vocalists Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Carolyn Connors. Lyndal Walker and Danielle Hakim, Re-make/Re-model; David Chesworth and Katie Lee, All Who Occupy This Space, West Space, April 20-May12; performances April 28, 3pm, May 10, 6.30pm. http://westspace.org.au
making the green one red (virtual macbeth), andrew burrell, kerreen ely-harper
Making the Green One Red (Virtual Macbeth), Andrew Burrell, Kerreen Ely-Harper
Director Kerreen Ely-Harper started the Virtual Macbeth project in 2007 (with Dr Angela Thomas and multimedia artist and producer Kate Richards) as an online world in Second Life. The project has now been further developed, with Sydney-based hybrid media artist Andrew Burrell, to become Making the Green one Red (Virtual Macbeth), focusing on the live and virtual performance possibilities of the concept. The work will be exhibited as a performative installation at QUT’s The Block where visitors can interact with the world, becoming “audience, actor and narrator, allowing them to self-determine their own path within the physical and virtual world the witches have created.” Audiences can also experience part of the work in the virtual environment at http://miscellanea.com/virtual_macbeth. Making the green one red (Virtual Macbeth), The Block, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, April 24-May 5; http://www.ciprecinct.qut.edu.au; http://miscellanea.com/virtual_macbeth/
moduluxxx—modular synthesis mini-festival serial space
And one for the knob twiddlers. Pia Van Gelder, überlord of Dorkbot and musician/curator Alex White are presenting a two-day mini festival celebrating the joy of the modular synthesiser. They tell us it’s a “style of synthesiser design where the architecture is left open. Each element, whether it be a sound generator, filter, controller, modulator or effect can be reconfigured in an infinite variety of arrangements…You might never finish a song or track again” (press release). There’ll be performances by geek favourites Robin Fox, David Burraston, Hair Hochman, Nadir (Ben Byrne and Alex White) and Pia van Gelder, a special Dorkbot share-meeting where you learn to “Synthesise a Synthesiser” and, perhaps most curious of all, a Synthesiser Petting Zoo where you can touch these little magic boxes yourself. Moduluxxx, April 27-28, Serial Space, http://serialspace.org/; https://sites.google.com/site/moduluxxx/
opportunities
For Brisbane-based emerging artist Metro Arts and Chan Hampe Galleries (Singapore) have joined up to offer a Brisbane-Singapore exchange program. Four artists and two curators or writers will spend three weeks in both Singapore and Brisbane resulting in a major exhibition which will take place as part of the 2012 Asia Pacific Triennial. Applications close April 30; http://www.metroarts.com.au/
Artspace, Sydney is calling for proposals for its 2013 Studio Residency program. Both residential and workspace-only studios are available, generally for periods between two and six months at subsidised rates. Applications close June 15; http://www.artspace.org.au/residency_guidelines.php
Screen Space in Melbourne is a purpose-built gallery focusing on works which take an innovative approach to screen-based media. They are currently seeking proposals from artists and curators for both the Main Gallery and Small Screen exhibition spaces for 2013. Applications close May 25; http://www.screenspace.com/proposals.html
PACT Centre for Emerging Artists will be holding auditions for their PACT Ensemble 2012 Program which provides training and creative development for artists aged 18-30. The 2012 program will include training with movement tutor Sam Chester, voice tutor Drew Fairly and culminates in the development of a final work under the direction of Cat Jones and Julie Vulcan. Registrations close April 30 and auditions will be held May 14; http://www.pact.net.au/
Kathleen Mitchell Award for Young Writers is a biennial award for authors under the age of 29 years who have published their first novel. Kathleen Mitchell’s aim was “the advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature, to improve the educational style of the authors, and to provide them with additional amounts and thus enable them to improve their literary efforts” (website). The value of the award is $15,000. Applications close April 27; http://www.trust.com.au/philanthropy/awards/kathleen_mitchell.asp
Wade Marynowsky has amused and bemused gallery viewers over the last few years with his distinctive take on interactivity and robotics. Dan MacKinlay wrote of his 2009 work, The Hosts–A Masquerade of Improvising Automatons: “There is a kind of inversion of the panopticon here. I know I am watched, but I do not know truly by what. Is it another of Wade Marynowsky’s telepresence hoaxes, or some automated trickery, or perhaps something more unnaturally intelligent? Is the moment at hand when we reprise our ancient animism, catching ourselves being polite to our appliances just in case there is an intelligent mind of any sort peering back at us that we might offend?” (online exlcusive RT93)
Marynowsky has a new solo show, Universal Remote, opening at UTS Gallery comprising media art pieces along with some more ‘traditional’ sculptural and photographic works. The universal remote of the title is in fact a series of oversized replicas (almost two metres tall) of remote control devices carved out of Canadian rock maple and Australian camphor laurel. Marynowsky was inspired by the totem poles he saw when undertaking an artist-residency in Canada. He rather cheekily states, “Remote controls are the talking sticks of my generation; at my parents home the person ‘in control’ of the remote holds the power to speak…or choose what we all watch” (press release).
Wade Marynowsky, The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face 2012, installation view.
courtesy the artist
Wade Marynowsky, The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face 2012, installation view.
Similarly playful is another sculptural piece, The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face. Here the outline of an ATM is etched into a large mirror in which you become the ghost in the machine.
Entry to the exhibition is via a sound installation titled One room, one button: composition for padded room. Marynowsky says, “It consists of eight white padded panels and an oversized chaise lounge [sic], embedded with 704 arcade buttons. The installation explores the insanity of the ever growing ‘smart revolution,’ in particular the smart home” (email correspondence). Perhaps Wade Marynowsky shares Dan Mackinlay’s anxiety about machine intelligence.
Wade Marynowsky, Universal Remote, UTS Gallery, April 24-June 1, artist talk with MCA curator Anna Davis, May 22, 5.30pm; www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au/gallery
Three months. Seven million people. 7,417 legit skyscrapers. All on an island half the size of Canberra.
It’s the ‘Asian Century’ and I was on a mission to see, hear, taste and wrestle with all that lies on the doorstep to the great People’s Republic. Wintertime is festival season in Hong Kong. The weather is bearable and the constant smog finally clears to reveal the chaotic, frustrating, completely intoxicating mix of east meets west. For the culture vulture there is Detour, an annual design festival, Hong Kong Arts Festival (www.hk.artsfestival.org/) and nearby Macau Fringe. For more traditional festivities it’s Chinese New Year—fireworks, banquets, lucky money. 2012 is the Year of the Dragon.
At first Hong Kong can be a lonely place: 20-somethings taking a gamble on the stock market, heaving ex-pat bars and distant locals. But with a smattering of Cantonese and a good (very good) map, this city can feel like home, just better.
The West Kowloon Cultural District offers Cantonese Opera in a proscenium arch theatre entirely constructed from bamboo. The first program of The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority will be become an Asian cultural juggernaut under the direction of Aussie Michael Lynch.
At the Hong Kong Fringe Club you can see everything from Cantonese stand-up to contemporary dance via slow food workshops in this collection of spaces in an old cold storage building in Central District. Tip: the rooftop bar/cafe serves a vegetarian buffet lunch daily. One of the only cafés with a genuine view of the sky!
Asia Art Archive offers a treasure-trove of publications documenting the vast landscape of contemporary art in Asia. You can easily spend a few hours trawling the shelves here. They host monthly artist talks where I managed to hear Yang Fudong talking about his epic No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006. (See RT103). They also produce the Backroom Conversations Program at the annual ART HK Art Fair (May 17-20, 2012).
Street art, Hong Kong
photo Bec Allen
Street art, Hong Kong
Clockenflap Music and Arts Festival is HK’s first big outdoor music festival. See international acts alongside indie Asian songsters and K-Pop (Korean pop). Includes a film program presented by the British Council and will take place December 2012, Kowloon Waterfront Promenade.
Artist Studio Visits are abundant. Check out the Fo Tan Estate (http://www.fotanian.com/), a collection of studios hidden amongst a maze of industrial buildings. The collective hosts regular open access weekends when over 200 studios are on view. Closer to town is Cattle Depot: home to Frog King and Queen, HK Pavilion Venice Biennale 2011) and Videotage among others.
Sound Pocket is a small organisation specialising in sonic practices and study. Housed in a loft space inside a nondescript factory building on the edge of Victoria Harbour, it’s a gem of serenity and aural contemplation. With regular artist talks and listening parties it’s like sitting in someone’s loungeroom.
Bowrington Rd Market, Hong Kong
photo Bec Allen
Bowrington Rd Market, Hong Kong
for refreshment…
Cooked Food Centre, top floor of the Bowrington Road Market, Wan Chai, open 6am to 2am. This is a temple to fast food Cantonese style; the duck curry stall offering is delicious.
Fancy a queue? Then line up at the world’s cheapest Michelin starred restaurant for delectable parcels of goodness in the form of steamed dumplings (Tim Ho Wan, 8 Kwong Wa St, Mongkok). Look for the green sign next to the firearms shop.
Other end of the scale is the 30th floor Aqua Spirit Bar. Sit back and watch the nightly laser show across the harbour whilst sipping their signature cocktails (1 Peking Rd, Tsim Sha Tsui).
for sleeping…
Short term studio rental is the best value for money in a town that measures in square feet not metres…be prepared for ‘compact.’
other highlights…
Surprisingly Hong Kong Island has some amazing hiking tracks. The best by far is the Dragon’s Back across the top of the ridge, leading you to Shek O Beach for the best Thai feast in town.
There are also hundreds of islands off the coast of Hong Kong. My pick is Po Toi, a 30 minute boat ride from Stanley Market. With stunning views and cliffs it’s barely inhabited save for a restaurant serving the absolute best seafood.
For a truly surreal experience get your James Bond on by taking a turbo ferry to Macau. High rollers, poker, dancing girls and a faux Venice. Playing indefinitely is Franco Dragone’s House of Dancing Water—must be seen to be believed.
Finally, grab a bowl of noodles, sit back and watch the hustle of Hong Kong Island pass you by from the top deck of an old wooden tram. They trundle from one end of the island to another, at one point going right through a street market!
For more on Hong Kong in RealTime see Melinda Rackham’s survey of HK media arts in RT107
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Bec Allen is the Producer with Kate Champion’s company Force Majeure, Sydney.She is a graduate of NIDA and has been working in producing, stage and company management for the past 10 years for companies including Belvoir, Sydney Theatre Company, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Bell Shakespeare, Performing Lines, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most recently as Creative Producer for Darwin Festival (2009/10).
I am in Berlin on a six-month study visit, as a part of my master’s degree in urban design. My first time in Berlin was in January 2010, the coldest winter ever recorded in Europe. The temperature was -15°C, every walking surface was iced over (and people fell all the time!), the sun set shortly after lunch, and one drank alcohol purely for warmth. Despite this comprehensive state of emergency, I thought it was the greatest city I had ever visited.
poor but sexy
Berlin is the newest, the youngest, the leftest and the most welfare-dependent of all of Europe’s grand old capital cities. Here the 20th century was one of disruptions. A whole third of the city was razed to the ground in WWII; then the Wall formed a wide, empty death strip through the historical centre, and many gaps are only now getting filled in.
West Berlin, an enclave of capitalism in the middle of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), saw an exodus of businesses and the middle class. In their stead, students and radicals moved in, not least because citizens of West Berlin were exempt from military service. It is often said that West Berlin was as socialist as the East: its failing industry was hugely subsidised, its mindset radically left, and a large percentage of its population living on social welfare.
Berlin: 1) city centre, 2) apartment building, 3) underground on a Wednesday at 1:10am; 4) Berlin from above
photos Jana Perkovic
Berlin: 1) city centre, 2) apartment building, 3) underground on a Wednesday at 1:10am; 4) Berlin from above
What young expats moving to Berlin for low rents and the hip factor don’t understand is the radical left legacy this has left on the city. Every big-ticket redevelopment plan has been attacked as a flagship of gentrification, an attempt to capitalise on Berlin’s “poor but sexy” chic. The creative class is decidedly unwelcome here. Still, Berlin is changing, its enormous cachet now drawing in Canadian hipsters, American DJs, Australian graphic designers, just as it once brought in anarchists and squatters.
All this makes Berlin a strange city. Not only is it indisputably uncool to have money here, the whole city has been structured for the needs of the unemployed. Op shop chic is the norm. Flea markets abound. Everyone has enormous amounts of time. Nobody looks at the brand of your bike. Anything before 3am does not count as ‘going out’ proper. While there is now glamour in Berlin, from the chichi shops clustered throughout Mitte, to the renovated Potsdamer Platz, there is none of that old, settled money one finds inhabiting the centres of Paris, Vienna or London. Berlin still feels like a new city, a young city, a place that might have turned its population twice over in an average lifetime.
Hebbel am Ufer (Hau), Berlin
photo Jana Perkovic
Hebbel am Ufer (Hau), Berlin
for culture…
Berlin is home to over 50 theatres, 700 galleries, seven symphony orchestras, three opera houses and hundreds of small artistic initiatives. Attendance is heavily subsidised: opera tickets start at 10 euros, and state theatres charge five to seven euros for student tickets. German theatres have repertory seasons: instead of a series of continuous four-week seasons, each month’s program consists of a large number of in-house and visiting productions, with a few performances each, scattered throughout the month. This makes it possible to see a different performance every night.
Whether you concentrate on the text-focused ‘English’ Schaubühne (home to Thomas Ostermeier and Benedict Andrews) or the shrine to radical Regietheater, the Volksbühne (home to Frank Castorf, Rene Pollesche and the late Christoph Schlingensief), is to some extent a question of group belonging. A few of Barrie Kosky’s productions are still in repertory at Die Komische Oper, although he will stop directing when he becomes its Intendant (Artistic Director) in 2013.
Once a year, Theatertreffen brings to Berlin the ‘best’ 10 German-language mainstage productions, selected by a jury of critics, while Tanz im August is the city’s biggest dance event. The large and uncurated Month of Performance Art takes place in May.
The most interesting performance spaces are recently established, without a fixed ensemble, functioning as production houses not unlike their Australian counterparts. Hebbel am Ufer (HAU), an amalgamation of three Kreuzberg theatres, programs everything from Rimini Protokoll to Peaches. Sophiensäle is an important space for independent performance. It sometimes seems that every house (apartment block) in Berlin is running an art event in its hinterhof (backyard). It is worth your while to go with ad hoc recommendations. Performer Stammtisch is a relatively good source of information about tiny events flying under the radar.
for refreshment…
Food in Germany will inevitably disappoint the discerning Australian palate, and let’s not even talk about the coffee. Going out here is a ‘beer&döner’ experience. Approach mid-market restaurants with caution. However, street food in Berlin is of a much higher standard than in Australia, and you are much less likely to be disappointed with a three euro meal, than with a 30 euro one.
Kreuzberg and the nearby, trending Neukölln are brimming with unpretentious little bars, with secret dancing rooms, mismatched furniture and cheap beer. Try to get to a ping pong evening at Dr Pong (Eberswalder Straße 21, Prenzlauer Berg) or Balkan Tripps (Glogauer Straße 21 Kreuzberg) where you rent a racquet and the whole bar plays together. Clash (Gneisenaustraße 2A, inside the hof), the centre of Berlin’s alternative scene since the 1980s, is still going surprisingly strong.
Just outside, at Mehringdamm U-Bahn, are two of Berlin’s iconic fast food joints, both worth a 2am visit: Curry 36 for its renowned currywurst (Berlin’s autocthonous street food), and Mustafa’s for the best döner in town. Note: most of these places allow smoking inside, so leave your underage friends and good clothes at home.
Clubbing in Berlin is an intense activity, wrapping up only around breakfast time. After 3am, try to get into Berghain, repeatedly voted the best club in the world, with velvety acoustics, strict no-photography rule, mythos of unprecedented debauchery inside and a cruel and arbitrary door policy.
Teufelsberg, Berlin
photo Jana Perkovic
Teufelsberg, Berlin
other recommendations…
There are many one-of-a-kind places in Berlin. One of my favourites is Teufelsberg (the rubble mountain), on the far west of the city. Buried underneath is Albert Speer’s Nazi military-technical college (it was too big to demolish), but perched atop is the US listening station, monitoring USSR radio traffic. The tower is now abandoned, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and hosts picnics, parties and kite flying.
If it is dreadfully cold, I cannot recommend saunas enough. More Australians need to be familiarised with the civilised custom of relaxing nude in large groups. For the hip experience, visit Badeschiff, a floating bar/café/pool/sauna on the Spree.
Mauerpark Flohmarkt, a Sunday flea market in the park where the Wall used to separate Prenzlauer Berg from Wedding, is now a tourist affair par excellence—a place where poor Berlin fashion designers peddle tote bags to visiting Italians. But the communal, open-air karaoke that takes place here in the warm months is truly a thing of joy. Worth visiting, if only to ponder why it is that, in Australia, such an event would be shut down in five minutes, on health & safety grounds.
Jana Perkovic is a Melbourne-based writer and urbanist. She works at Melbourne School of Design as researcher and tutor, and in various capacities as theatre critic. She is currently completing a Master of Urban Design degree at the University of Melbourne. She is a regular writer for RealTime.
love in a cold climate
jana perkovic: 2011 melbourne international arts festival
RealTime issue #106 Dec-Jan 2011 pg. 4
the mysteries of curation
jana perkovic: arts house, works from season 2
RealTime issue #105 Oct-Nov 2011 pg. 36
revelling in the now
jana perkovic: the little con, dancehouse
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. web
Nikki Jones and audience
member, Ush and Them, Proximity
Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
Nikki Jones and audience
member, Ush and Them, Proximity
Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
There’s a lot of walking in RealTime 108. Good exercise for mind and body. Matthew Lorenzon goes on an art walk in Battambang, Cambodia, exploring the city’s artistic re-emergence. Next Wave director Emily Sexton talks about the communality of sharing with fellow walkers one’s responses to a range of selected festival works on day-long guided walks. At the end of an intense NOW Now concert, Romy Caen goes on a programmed hour-long night walk in silence, alerted to the sound world of Sydney’s Marrickville. Ian Millis writes about a Green Bans walk through Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, meeting people who were there in the 70s and recalling the fusion of art and activism that saved significant parts of the city from development. Millis argues for the walk as art: ephemeral, collaborative, memorial, political. From there, it’s a mere step into a virtual world of public transport, and public violence, realised in Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles’ latest interactive creation, It’s a jungle in here, where fellow travellers might irritate or turn nasty and you choose how to respond. Elsewhere, a sometimes amused, sometimes perturbed Laetitia Wilson reports you can find yourself seriously on your own, up close and very personal with an artist in a one-on-one live art work. One of which was Ush and Them with Nikki Jones (pictured above) corralling a bemused viewer in her work about ushers and guides. As this edition of RealTime extensively reports, together, alone, engaged with the actual or the virtual, the art experience is exponentially expanding.
PULSE-QUICKENING NOT ONLY COURSED THROUGH SPECTATORS AT THIS YEAR’S PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL BUT WAS EMBEDDED, WITH VARYING DEGREES OF FIRMNESS, INTO A RANGE OF ITS ARTISTIC INTERROGATIONS. BODIES TECHNICALLY FORMED BY DANCE AND CIRCUS TACKLED THE COMPLEXITIES OF POLYPHONIC EXPRESSION WITH AN UNUSUAL SENSE OF INTENT, WHETHER DIRECTLY AS IN LUCINDA CHILDS’ DANCE AND GRUPO CORPO’S PARABELO AND ONQOTO, OR WITH DISCRETE INDIRECTNESS IN THE WORKS OF THE WA BALLET’S QUARRY SEASON, THE VOCAL CUSHIONING OF HOW LIKE AN ANGEL’S EARTHBOUND TRAJECTORIES AND IN THE PLAYFUL ZENITH OF CROSS-CUTTING DIALOGUES, JAMES THIÉRÉE’S RAOUL. RHYTHM AS A SINGULAR IDEA IS BLOWN ASUNDER BY PRODUCTIONS THAT DISSECT TIME IN THE BEDROCK OF THEIR MAKING/CREATION.
lucinda childs
Childs’ Dance exemplifies the perspective. Indeed, this reconstruction of a 30-year-old minimalist work folds the past into the present with intriguing resonances. Essentially Dance is about mathematical computations concentrated within the restricted phrasal vocabulary of Philip Glass’ score and Childs’ choreography. Though irrevocably wedded, dancers and musicians follow the democratic dictates of the 70s and maintain their autonomy, promoting their own identity through calculated skipping, over and in each other’s patterns. Today however, designer Sol LeWitt’s contribution dominates. In the artist talk with Michael Whaites, Childs explained that LeWitt consolidated Dance’s concept because he considered the dance and music intrinsically so strong that design would prove to be unnecessary except if provided by the dancers themselves. Therein materialised the filmic design projected on a downstage scrim where the dancers partner themselves. LeWitt’s solution has survived, now transformed into a dialogue of the vital being-ness of current performers with their forbears, a powerful encounter of dancers across time.
Silent manoeuvres of the filmic eye tip horizontal perspectives into overhead sight or split screen-dancers onto opposite sides of the stage to transpose the minute shifts of sound and movement into a complex mapping exercise. Sepia-tinged screen-dancers criss-cross space like phantoms, the loose swing of their limbs relieved of the weight of flesh. Against their live counterparts with musculatures which scavenge space in directed pathways, these apparitions float free of bodily endurance. That is except for Childs whose image from across time stands huge in its determination, a will which is, ironically, not to be manipulated.
west australian ballet
Jayne Smeulder, David Mack, Serenade, Ballet at the Quarry, WA Ballet
photo Jon Green
Jayne Smeulder, David Mack, Serenade, Ballet at the Quarry, WA Ballet
Down in the Quarry, WA Ballet artistic director Ivan Cavallari’s Strings 32 aligned violin bowing with vibrating energies of dancers and their elastic appendages to provide a feasible premise to celebrate the compulsion of refined action. Muscularity infiltrated the atmospheric expanse of the Quarry but did little to interconnect the violinist with the starry environment. On the other hand, Balanchine’s early tribute to American classicism, Serenade, flowed blue into the night entirely in sync with Tchaikovsky’s haunting tones. Under repetiteur Eve Lawson’s astute direction, the dancers embodied the legendary choreographer’s musical sensitivity and movement abstraction with a credible confidence. While veiled beneath the airy costuming and feminine foregrounding, Serenade bears a structural affinity with the Childs/Glass lineage. Balanchine may not have imbibed the democratic mania of his adopted homeland but, choreographically speaking, he led the introspection of form that was to follow.
The remaining two works, Reed Luplau’s The Sixth Borough and Terence Kohler’s Rhetoric, though replete with the tempi of city life and online role-playing games of their respective themes, blanched into predictability and obscurity. All the verve and seduction of sexy bodies in impressive whips and curves simply could not retrieve the works’ formless descent. Only the lone night star of Serenade endured, shimmering past into present, double-ghosting Sol LeWitt’s sepia memories.
grupo corpo
Rhythm pulsed through swaying and twitching joints over a throw away classical technique to make Grupo Corpo’s Parabelo & Onqotô an experience of the now. Patterns skittered back and forth through that pervasive ethnic mix that is the Brazilian actuality. Batuadas, the percussive signatures of identity for the myriad mixtures of peoples, ricocheted through the sound and movement of Rodrigo Pederneiras’ Parabelo, not to illuminate fragmentation but to reiterate unity. Bodies caught and threw notes, weight and attitudes of difference and commonality about in conjunctions which finally conveyed order rather than chaos. Touches of formality (Childs) and virtuosity (WAB) appear but the sassy sexuality of these dancers slipped over the sophistication and viral disintegration of the worldly wise. Even the sparse interjection of duets and solo movements never eroded the group’s momentum. Grupo Corpo’s world is warm and conservative, playing with the heart beat’s literal need; at variance perhaps with aesthetic fulfilment?
In the Brazilians’ reception a line was drawn between the general public’s appetite for the exotic and dance aficionados’ reservations. Sensual syncopation is undoubtedly a structural element which Pederneiras plumbs for all manner of thematic concerns but its literal application, plus unitards, diminutive masculine movement and commercial aura failed to please dancers. Being biased towards all things South American, I found such concerns puzzling. In Onqotô, a female body was slapped around by a male who for the most part lay supine on the floor. In the image, I saw an extraordinary reverence for the masterful skills of a soccer icon like Pele in conflict with the literal reading which pointed to a harsh sexual relationship. A further overlay, or so the program notes suggested, yoked this clash metaphorically with the creation of the universe. This sequence, both uncomfortable and thrilling, was pitched against a female homosexual duo which could, with cultural encoding, be a statement about the complex workings of machismo, both within and beyond the soccer environment. Such a reading may be impossible without some familiarity with the culture in question.
circa & i faglioni
The ‘angels’ of How Like an Angel hit the earth repeatedly with the bruising flesh-thud of indisputable human propensity. Was the intention to reframe Milton’s tale of the fall from paradise, to accentuate the negative transformations of fantastical flight and tussle of divine wills? Intoxicating sacral tones reverberated within the acoustic bounce of Winthrop Hall, circulating an impressive arena-like configuration of audience and rectangular strip of performance space. The sound coiled around a sculptural figure partnering a long pole as if in a philosophical or sublime debate. This promising start plummeted when his fellow athletes appeared.
How Like an Angel, a commissioned work of circus, choir and cathedral for Britain’s Olympic Festival glanced awkwardly over the idea’s potential. Setting and aural evocativeness tumbled due to what seemed an under-rehearsed and unformed realisation of what might have been. The promised play in paradise lost crept in once or twice, as when a scantily clad female climbed up black silks. It was a simple and unexpected image, posed as if the performer was on a trajectory to heaven. The drama of this image evaporated as quickly as it surfaced. Performance rhythm did briefly return after the painful thud to earth of a suicidal man who, unlike St Michael’s defeat in his challenge to a jealous God, fell inexplicably from the high-rise apparatus onto a pile of thick mats. The culminating pole act signalled how it is that human skill may accomplish angelic mystery or, in philosophical terms, the god-breath. Here, circus skills prevailed: timing and sheer audacity on that vertical pole exemplified what a physical idea might achieve.
james thiérée
James Thiérée, Raoul
photo courtesy PIAF
James Thiérée, Raoul
Final festival reflection must come from he who utters little but speaks volumes in sound, design and movement. Performance is a strange territory, given to multifarious prejudices, trends and desires. Structures can be brilliant by way of purity of intent, bodies can be devilishly attractive in their astounding defiance of the norm and, then, there is this other place and possibility, wherein exposure transports ordinary people into something which is ungraspable. James Thiérée’s Raoul, ostensibly a solo performance, achieves exactly this objective. Thiérée employs skills across disciplines to convey an insignificant human in an inexplicable world, sharing ideas about the who-what-how of what human being-ness might mean. Thiérée’s arrogant and absurd little man talks with fixtures of external decadence and imagination. In his presence, polyphony transcends genre and clamour turns symphonic. Fluttering hands, leftover movements from an argument with sound walls, dance into the astounding complexity of simplicity.
Perth International Arts Festival: Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Dance, choreography Lucinda Childs, music Philip Glass, film Sol LeWitt, Heath Ledger Theatre, Feb 22-25; West Australian Ballet: At the Quarry, Feb 10-March 3; Grupo Corpo, Parabela and Onqotô His Majesty’s Theatre, March 1-4; Circa and I Fagiolini, How Like an Angel, director Yaron Lifschitz, musical direction Robert Hollingworth, Winthrop Hall, UWA, Feb 29-March 3; La Compagnie du Hanneton, Raoul, designer, director, performer James Thiérée, Regal Theatre, Feb 18-26
U-Ram Choe, Urbanus Female, 2006, installation view, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
GAMBLING ON A SMALLER VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM BUT WITH HIGHLY COMMENDED NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS IN THE PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL HAS CERTAINLY PAID OFF THIS YEAR WITH RECORD BREAKING ATTENDANCES AT SOUTH KOREAN ARTIST U-RAM CHOE’S SOLO EXHIBITION. CHOE’S DELICATE AND HIGHLY TECHNICAL KINETIC SCULPTURES WERE ELEGANTLY INSTALLED AMIDST DARKNESS, HOVERING UNDER ILLUMINATED LIGHT WITHIN THE CORNERS AND CORRIDORS OF THE JOHN CURTIN ART GALLERY.
Featuring nine machinic organisms accompanied by plaques that describe their behaviours, habitats and adaptive responses, the exhibition forms Choe’s premonition of how machine life will evolve in a future technocratic society. It is a world populated by these life forms (or anima-machines) that have adapted faster than humans and thrive in urban environments. They have been ornately designed to resemble natural flora and fauna but have adapted by acquiring light steel skins for protection and factory motors instead of organs. They graze on residual urban energy, airborne viruses and unclaimed data and live in harmony with their environment. Choe invites his audience to study this realm, the behaviours of these specimens, to become accustomed to their nature and understand that these creatures are an harmonic synthesis of technological systems and the natural order.
Each of the eight machine organisms is a delicate hybrid of mechanical engineering and nature. Each form, movement and behaviour has been designed specifically for these organisms to not only exist but also thrive in their machinic environments. Instead of proposing a threat to humanity they harmoniously perpetuate the life and energy cycles of machinery.
U-Ram Choe, Nox Pennatus, 2005, installation view, John Curtin Gallery
Some works are in constant repetitive motion, while others wait to sense human presence before performing their gestures. Each work has been intricately designed and fastidiously engineered to not only mimic the complexity of the natural order but to demonstrate a capacity for the visceral elegance in machinic movement. The skeletal creations are fitted with perforated steel skins to expose the entire operation of hundreds of custom-made steel ligaments, joints, frames, CPU and LED motors. The connection of each component meeting and moving with the next forms an orchestration that reveals mechanical bodies to be as detailed as our own in motion.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Urbanus Female (scientific name: Anmopista Volaticus floris Uram) (2006) is a flower-like anima-machine that Choe has created as a nocturnal feeder of urban energy. In the gallery it lies dormant, suspended from the ceiling until it senses human presence, which cues the work to perform its anthesis [the period during which a flower becomes fully open and functional. Ed]. With each turn, the flower—its stamen a twisting and beaming metal halide lamp—opens and closes slightly before unfolding entirely, expanding three metres in diameter and reaching forward to the viewer.
U-Ram Choe, Una Lumina, 2005, installation view, John Curtin Gallery
Choe has designed the interaction between his Urbanus Female and those in its company as an elusive form of communication. Its gestures require our patience, its grand unfolding taking place at its own rate. Choe’s great trick reminds us that we are in the gallery to study, rather than command the behaviour of these rare specimens for our entertainment. We are in their space, in their world as their audience.
Around a corner stands Ultima Mudfox (2002), hovering with its fins waving in perpetual motion but otherwise still for us to examine its delicate skeletal structure. After reading their accompanying narrative we find that these creatures “free themselves, one after another, from the factory that created them, clone themselves in a base camp beneath the city, where electromagnetic waves are abundant” (Choe, U-Ram, Exhibition Catalogue, 2012). The artist clearly pursues the issue of sustainability between humans and machines. When set into motion and given life, anima-machines live, breed, consume and expire alongside humanity, feeding off computer viruses and unclaimed data and converting them into resources. Choe envisions a world where these creatures subsist within the cycles of human life and production as independent and complementary beings.
U-Ram Choe, Jet Hiatus, 2005, installation view, John Curtin Gallery
It is common for kinetic artists to explore technology’s capacity to either assail or assist humanity. At times these tropes can perpetuate a reductive dichotomy between nature and technology. Choe successfully avoids this binary association by presenting his works as fantastical beings that thrive in the technocratic society from which they are born. U-Ram Choe firmly believes that the evolutionary capacity of machines is far more advanced than our own and that we can therefore learn from our technological creations. His art is an invitation to study their advanced behaviour and adaptive responses, approaching these anima-machines as our future companions and providers.
2012 Perth Festival, U-Ram Choe, John Curtin Art Gallery, Perth, Feb 3-March 4
A DIVERSE AUDIENCE FILLED THE BURSWOOD THEATRE FOR ENNIO MORRICONE’S PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL APPEARANCE. OLD AND YOUNG, CLASSICAL ENTHUSIASTS, FILM BUFFS AND HIPSTERS WERE ALL DRAWN TO SEE THE 84-YEAR-OLD FILM MUSIC LEGEND. MORRICONE’S MUSIC SEEMS TO FIND SOME POINT OF REFERENCE WITH A GREAT NUMBER OF PEOPLE. HIS WORK WITH SERGIO LEONE ON FILMS SUCH AS THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966) SPAWNED NEW TROPES FOR FILM COMPOSITION AND HIS SCORES HAVE CYCLED ENDLESSLY THROUGH POP CULTURAL HOMAGE AND PARODY.
Morricone’s sound world is truly huge. Appearing for the first time in Australia, he conducted a 100-piece youth orchestra and a 100-strong choir, as well as a few rock instruments and a (less than perfect) guest appearance by soprano Susanna Rigacci.
The entire performance was amplified, sparking much post-concert debate. In a purely classical context, amplification can ruin the intimacy of a performance by rendering it hyperreal, but Morricone’s music isn’t essentially classical, it is film music. Its currency is evocation and broad gesture. In my view, the amplification aided both these elements, adding a sheen of fantasy to the performance. The sound was detached from its context within the hall, allowing it to evoke the kind of imaginary landscapes in which Clint Eastwood triumphs as the archetype of butch Americana.
This raises the question of how one evaluates a performance of Morricone’s music. It makes no sense to talk about it in the same way one would a performance of a work by Beethoven. It is film music, and perhaps should be assessed as such, but is presented here without the dressings of image or narrative. There are rock elements too, not only in the electric guitar and drum set but in the exaggerated movement, memorable themes and mass appeal (three encores, no less). Again, however, there is no rock theatricality.
Rather, Morricone’s music seems to both include and transcend these streams. It has become part of the collective unconscious. Even for people who have never seen any of his films, the music is instantly familiar and evocative. Some of its tropes are, or have become, clichéd. It brings to mind John Adams’ summation of culture: “when we communicate, we point to symbols we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference.” This is the good and the bad of Morricone’s music—where there were no reference points, he created them, but now, with his music so established, it is difficult to hear it afresh. Despite all this—the cheesiness, the clichés, the endless pop-cultural echoes—something about Ennio Morricone’s music is magic. Widescreen nostalgia for a place that never really existed.
Perth International Arts Festival: An Evening With the Maestro, Ennio Morricone, Susanna Rigacci, West Australian Youth Orchestra, The Perth Festival Morricone Chorus, Nanni Civitenga, Massimo D’Angostino, Ludovico Fulci, Leandro Piccioni, Rocco Zifarelli; Burswood Theatre; Febuary 26, 2012
CONSIDER THE AMERICAN DREAM. FREEDOM. OPPORTUNITY. EXCESS. NOW, CONSIDER AMERICAN MUSIC, SPECIFICALLY CLASSICAL. MUSIC IS OFTEN INDICATIVE OF THE PLACE WHERE IT WAS WRITTEN AND ACCORDINGLY, THE CLASSICAL CANON OF THE AMERICAS HAS A FAR DIFFERENT CHARACTER FROM THAT OF EUROPE. IN THE AMERICAS, CLASSICAL MUSIC IS AN IMPORT. WITHOUT THE SAME WEIGHT OF TRADITION, AMERICAN COMPOSERS ARE FREER TO PULL IN A VARIETY OF INFLUENCES FROM JAZZ, ROCK AND OTHER NATIVE MUSICS.
As part of the Perth International Arts Festival, Soft Soft Loud presented contemporary chamber music by composers from USA, Mexico and Argentina. In every piece, there was a sense of music’s role as a cultural signifier.
Take, for example, Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov’s voice and ensemble piece Ayre, which uses religious melodies to explore music’s ability to simultaneously evoke and transcend culture. “With a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian,” says Golijov. The piece had some beautiful softer melodies but its inclusion of (admittedly, tongue in cheek) rock sections and drum machines came off as heavy-handed. Rapid stylistic shifts also featured in American Andy Akiho’s Hamba iro (for steel pan, drum kit, string quintet and harp) but the changes were far smoother. The piece pulled itself, serpent-like, through waves of cool jazz, brooding classicism and energetic Caribbean.
Woven through the program were movements from George Crumb’s beautiful Eine Kleine Mitternacht Musik (Ruminations on ‘Round Midnight’ by Thelonious Monk) for solo piano. The American Crumb’s music is the most European sounding of the program, transporting the original Thelonious Monk tune from New World cool to Old World sadness. As a pianist, Monk revelled in music’s stray threads, those moments when the tune falls away into some angular, atonal gesture. In Crumb’s variations, the situation is reversed so that atonality is the norm and the original theme is the interruption—a fond memory or a hopeful rumour of a tune.
The night’s highlight was Steve Reich’s response to the Twin Tower attacks, WTC 9/11, for tape and string quartet. The story goes that on the day of the attacks, a panicked Reich rang his son in New York. After a few minutes, all New York’s phones cut out suddenly, leaving a blaring alarm on the phone line. The piece opens with this alarm, its unrelenting F’s picked up and augmented by the violins to gradually create a chilling cluster chord. Like Reich’s 1988 Different Trains (which dealt with the Holocaust), WTC 9/11 uses fragments of cut-up speech which are mimicked and accompanied by live strings. It’s a detached, almost documentarian approach to dealing with horror which manages to be affecting without feeling manipulative.
Reich’s influence was clear in Mexican Javier Alvarez’s string quartet Metro Nativitas (from 1999, the oldest piece on an impressively contemporary program). The piece uses Reichian minimalist forms but with dense, atonal harmonies and rhythms taken from South American folk dance. The result was an absorbingly static dissonance with a sudden, sheer finish. Another Reich piece, his Pulitzer winning Double Sextet closed the concert. Reich is perhaps the most purely American of any composer. His sound is a grab-bag of tropes from classical, jazz and rock all pulled together by the music’s relentless forward motion, its dogged insistence on growth. It is music that doesn’t sound like anywhere else. Freedom, opportunity and occasional excess.
Perth International Arts Festival: Soft Soft Loud—The Americas; Artistic director Matthew Hoy, Fremantle Arts Centre, Feb 12, 2012
How To Have A 3 Minute Shower (2012) Jen Jamieson, Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
How To Have A 3 Minute Shower (2012) Jen Jamieson, Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
THE UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL FORMAT OF THE ONE-ON-ONE PERFORMANCE IS FAMILIAR FROM THE SEX SHOPS IN THE STREETS OF NORTHBRIDGE, BUT WHEN TAKEN INTO THE CONTEXT OF LIVE ART, BECOMES SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. IT COMES WITH ITS OWN DEGREES OF INTIMACY, AWKWARDNESS, PLAYFULNESS AND, INDEED, PRIVATE DANCERS AND STRIP SHOWS.
Proximity, staged as part of Fringe World at the Blue Room theatre in Perth, is Australia’s first live art micro-festival comprising12 one-on-one performances, each lasting about 12 minutes, featuring twelve artists with a unique take on the concept of proximity. Artists drawn from dance, theatre, live and visual arts presented works curated by James Berlyn, produced by Sarah Rowbottam and provoked by Kelli McCluskey (PVI Collective).
The idea of proximity can be interpreted and communicated in numerous ways. The pieces ranged from offering convivial, occasionally banal, encounters to abrupt challenges to personal inhibitions. The entirety of the sensorium became involved. Like a puzzle, the program began with a map, detailing the location and order of the pieces and, like clockwork, announcements were made to indicate their beginning or end. In the face of potential confusion the event was managed and timed to precision. If it were a game it would be full of mysterious choices, challenges hiding behind closed doors, hairy monsters, quirky stories and shadowy portals into alternate worlds. Once in the swing of it, I eagerly followed the path from one encounter to the next, as a solo adventurer facing the unexpected with a wee bit of trepidation—did I really want my own private hoofer? Did I really want to fondle a beard?
My personalised map began with Ush and Them by Nikki Jones, a conversational, wandering piece acknowledging the oft-neglected role of the usher. It was undeniably tongue-in-cheek with Jones taking a toilet break and leading me straight to the lighting room in lieu of any show. The majority of the performances were anchored to a similar kind of conversational interactivity resulting in social, relational, inter-subjective and often instructive experiences. Participants were simultaneously drawn into the world of the performers and invited to reflect on their own circumstances. The success of each performance was largely reliant on the individual personalities, communicative and performative abilities of the artists, which made for a spectrum of experiences, from raw to refined.
Sarah Nelson, Mobile Moments, Series 2 (2012), Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
Sarah Nelson, Mobile Moments, Series 2 (2012), Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
An existential element came to the fore in two of the strongest pieces, Sarah Nelson’s Mobile Moments and James Berlyn’s Sweetlife. Although very different, these two pieces invited consideration of personal views and morality respectively. Berlyn’s beautifully crafted game placed the audience member in a staged context: delightfully pink, strategically lit, with the sound of ticking timers and the temptation of lolly bags in the background. At one point the participant’s body became a game piece, pulse and iris movements were measured to determine whether or not a sweet life/just desserts were deserved. Moral qualms gave way to thoughtful musings in Mobile Moments, a gentle roving journey through the cultural centre. As passengers on a trike, participants were filmed responding to specific questions around personal likes, dislikes and life decisions. This piece was both subtle in its articulation and incredibly resolved in extending to an aesthetically engaging after-life in a series of video portraits screened in the cultural centre in the weeks to follow.
More practical concerns were addressed by Renae Coles in The Union. Situated in the Blue Room offices, Coles put on a bureaucratic face and saturated the participant with officious banter, providing a unionist official type service for those with a miniscule axe to grind. In a characteristic twist toward the ridiculous, Coles morphed these mini-complaints into a punk song, made all the more ludicrous by the thrashing head movements and belted lyrics emanating from the neatly dressed performer. Practicality was also at the heart of Jennifer Jamison’s How to Have a Three Minute Shower, an instructive realisation of the local water corporation’s billboard advertising. Jamison talked participants through her shower routine while taking one herself and then inviting us to freshen up too, all the while discussing the intricacies of showering and emphasising environmental conscientiousness by accumulating water in buckets.
This kind of close interaction and focused conversation did not dominate every encounter; some performers invited no response, as in the whimsical bedtime story told by Russya Conner. Others embraced silence, with intent or incidentally. Janette McGinty used it to effect in Hydrosis, a theatrical narrative in a tight filing cabinet where silence was harnessed to heighten tension at the moment of confrontation with the physical proximity of McGinty’s armpits. Silence was less an intentional tool in Helen Russo’s Fragmentation 1.2. Participants were guided to shine a torch on Russo’s semi-naked body as she writhed from entrapment within an old school desk. The only sound was the shuffling of her body; the only light was from the torch.
The relation between dancer and solo viewer can so easily become voyeuristic and silence can generate a heightened sense of awkwardness, correlating with the experience of finding yourself alone with a stranger. This was thankfully bypassed in Claudia Alessi’s Your Private Hoofer which allowed the participant to select music and costume: a minor gesture toward interactive exchange which relieved the prospective unease of a personalised dance.
Similarly, in Flush, a game of strip poker with Janet Carter, it was easy to become absorbed by game-play, not to mention diversionary tactics—it was remarkable how little time it took to find oneself facing the removal of underwear. Fortunately Carter was self-admittedly an unskilled player. Even the dirty talk in Glory Hole Beard, by Jackson Eaton, launched into the realm of the absurd rather than the awkward. In this well-rehearsed piece, a very large beard, too much beard in fact, proudly thrust itself forth toward the participant through a hole in a toilet door. Did I want to touch it? No! But I did, compelled less by choice than obligation.
Sarah Rowbottom & participant, Slow Food Sunday (2012), Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
photo Ashley de Prazer
Sarah Rowbottom & participant, Slow Food Sunday (2012), Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art
Finally, with a nod in the direction of relational art of the 1990s, Sarah Rowbottam’s Slowfood Sunday provided the chance to get back to the basics of the everyday in its mindfulness about consuming local produce. Thankfully there were more than two people to enjoy the meal. When sitting at the dinner table sharing wholesome food and talk of the day, one key point became apparent; there is something very special about being an audience of one, but there is also something poignantly lonely about it. In all the investigations of proximity, however physically close and conversationally intimate, the audience/performer divide remained. Against this background the dinner was a salvaging moment and potent reminder that gratifying proximity comes in such simple moments of everyday communal ritual.
2012 Fringe World: Proximity Micro Festival of One-on-One Art, curators James Berlyn, Sarah Rowbottam, provocateur Kelli McCluskey, presented by Blue Room & Proximity Festival; Blue Room Theatre, Perth, Jan 29, Feb 5, Feb 12, Feb 19
TWO INDEPENDENT PERFORMANCE WORKS GROUNDED IN DANCE FORMED A COMPELLING CHAMBER OF ECHOES IN FRINGE WORLD FESTIVAL’S DEBUT PROGRAM. ALTHOUGH COINCIDENTAL, STANDING BIRD AND TILTED FAWN’S DOUBLING IN PICA’S EARLY-AND-LATE-NIGHT SERIES INVITED REWARDING COMPARISONS ON THE NATURE OF THEATRE.
Both works centred on lone dancers and their interactions with diverse technologies that operated simultaneously as companion performers and scenographic environments. Standing Bird announced itself as a performance while Tilted Fawn chose installation as its frame but both pervaded spatial axes travelling memory, geographically determined by an Australian landscape in Standing Bird and played out in sonic terrains in Tilted Fawn.
Director Sally Richardson has long pursued sagas of women and wilderness in dance theatre modes, so Standing Bird is like a riven nugget isolated from that endeavour. In this manifestation, Jacqui Claus takes on the quasi-archetypal woman, her sinuous extent pushing against the calculated restriction of a central platform set. Alcoholic self-violation initiates the woman’s lost balance which is caught under a controlling light. The voyeuristic twist of this technical decision punctured the narrative skin, especially since the woman wielding the light was none other than the director herself. Perhaps the intention was to lay bare the workings of the production but its execution exposed power relations which left a bitter edge to the performance.
Imprisonment pervaded the radiant bride’s endless tulle and worked against typical Australian impulses of escape through the Australian coordinates of flight, sea and sand. Filmic projections of drowning on the bridal tulle—now transformed into a shroud—threw an unintentional shadow, its darkness redolent of the performer resisting victimisation. Otherwise, sand, like liberty, fell through fingers and toes, leaving Claus in a mirrored throwback of displacement, set up again by Richardson moving around the set—shackling this life of nudity and collapse.
From this baited position, the bird shudders and stands defiant, the dorsal extensions of her movement resonating with the rippling arms of Pavlova’s Dying Swan. But the angular struggle of emergence is given over once more to the creator who controls the light. Standing, this bird cannot fly.
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
photo Maik Reichert
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
Melanie Lane and Chris Clark’s Tilted Fawn from Berlin carries its light and shade with sophistication. The dancer slowly shifts a few dozen cardboard bricks around the space, its concentrated execution enabling spectators to become attuned to the moving sound. Each brick bears a sonic voice within its taupe volume forming, under Lane’s meticulous listening and arranging, mesmerising miniature cityscapes that contribute thickness in the orchestrated space. There is a withheld dramaturgy in the pace which scatters in plaintive cries from the tiny structures when Lane leaves the stage. It is a potent moment when structures mutate into lost memories craving the substance of their being, like children grieving departing mothers.
Lane’s danced return—in fawn unitard stretched over platform footwear—introduces another sort of memory connection via Marie Chouinard and then back to Nijinsky’s Faun. Dance
lineage seems to situate this intervention, illustrating layers of recall which involve intertextuality as well as intimacy. The interlude is brief and soon the mother returns to her sonic strays. She tends her sonic memories with ever-increasing care until, no longer contained within the bricolage of individualised points of reference, they become an immovable force of sound. Her exhaustion in the final moments brings installation firmly into performance. The bricks have left home, have tilted strains of memory over into another space, the curious space of imagining.
For another response to Tilted Fawn see page 25.
2012 Fringe World: Standing Bird, director, concept Sally Richardson, performer Jacqui Claus, sound Kinsley Reeves, dramaturgy Humphrey Bower, lighting: Mike Nanning, costume Fiona Bruce; Tilted Fawn, choreographer, concept, performer Melanie Lane, sound composition, installation Chris Clark, artistic collaborator Morgan Belenguer, dramaturg Bart van der Eynde, costumes, props Melanie Lane, lighting Max Steizl; PICA Performance Space, Perth Feb 7-12
WESTERN AUSTRALIA IS INCREDIBLY LARGE AND QUITE EXTRAORDINARILY FLAT. OCCUPYING ALMOST HALF THE AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT, IT IS PRIMARILY DESERT AND MOSTLY UNINHABITED, WITH A POPULATION OF AROUND 2.3 MILLION. 73% OF WHOM LIVE IN PERTH, LEAVING A MERE 621,000 PEOPLE DISPERSED ACROSS 2,532,400 SQUARE KILOMETRES.
The ecology is fragile and geological features are often dwarfed by the immensity of space and sky. It is spectacular, rather than picturesque, excepting the scenic and temperate southwest corner. It’s not surprising that questions of space, place and identity are often at the forefront of artistic concern here. The downside of this preoccupation is the potential for a dreary form of parochialism. The upside is clearly visible in a project like IASKA’s inaugural Spaced exhibition, which draws on 21 Artist in Residence programs undertaken over a two-year period by artists and collectives, both Australian and from overseas.
the quality of engagement
Embedded in the curatorial ambition of the overall project is the desire to move beyond the privileging of artists parachuted into communities who make art out of the experience of ‘being there.’ Instead each project emerges from a negotiated and carefully managed partnership with groups and individuals from towns and communities spaced out (sic) across the state: from the Dampier Peninsula to Esperance, from the Abrolhos Islands to Leonora, from the mining town of Roebourne in the Pilbara to the coastal towns of Albany, Mandurah and Denmark and the very different wheat belt towns of Northam/Bakers Hill, Moora, Mukinbudin, Kellerberrin, Narrogin and Lake Grace.
Consequently Spaced is not only concerned with exhibiting art and its documentation, it also seeks to represent something of the quality of the engagements undertaken and the relationships developed in remote locations and small country towns over at least 10 weeks, and developed through what IASKA director Marco Marcon describes as a “decentred organisational structure.” The exhibition represents these relationships through an extended series of filmed interviews, encompassing the views of both artists and community members shown on wall-mounted LED screens in the hallway of the Fremantle Art Centre.
Inevitably, the exhibition represented only the tip of the residential iceberg. Of course this is true of most exhibitions. Whether socially engaged or not, few artworks speak to the experience of their coming into being. In this project the desire to foreground the experiences of not only the artists but also community members, led to a rich and complex, often paradoxical and occasionally confronting, series of artworks, conversations and engagements that will surely resonate long after the individual projects have ended.
Spaced also encompassed a weekend symposium, which sought to tease out some of the ideas, paradoxes and conundrums around ‘socially engaged practice,’ and to reflect on the processes of interaction between artists and communities. Whilst participating artists and community members spoke on panels about the experience of their respective residencies, five keynote speakers, including David Cross (NZ), Margo Handwerker (US), Ian Hunter (UK), Zara Stanhope and Ian Tully (VIC), punctuated the proceedings with reflections and provocations on thematically connected practices from other parts of the country and the world. It is ironic to consider that despite the plethora of residencies, exhibitions and artists’ projects taking place in remote and rural communities, and small towns globally, the idea that contemporary art practices are solely the provenance of first world, metropolitan centres such as New York, London and Tokyo, remains remarkably tenacious.
On the ground in WA, however, artists and collectives took up residence in small communities in strange locations. Even for local artists who might be expected to have an understanding of country and the complexity of issues confronting, for instance, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, such projects can be as challenging as they are extraordinary. Sohan Ariel Hayes spent two months in Roebourne in the Pilbara, infamous for the tragic bashing death in custody of 16-year-old John Pat in 1983. It was clear from the outset that if a residency was to go ahead in this place, then much more would be expected than just another white fellah dropping by and building his career on the suffering of Aboriginal people.
birndi wirndi—worlds apart
Hayes worked closely with Michael Woodley, a filmmaker and CEO of the Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation, not only to create a meaningful art work but also running skills development workshops in editing and filmmaking. Ultimately they created a powerful and evocative projection project called Birndi Wirndi—Worlds Apart which projected images of Yindjibarndi people from Juluwarlu’s extensive digital archive, as well as footage from the two-part documentary, Exile and The Kingdom, which tells the story of the last 150 years from an Aboriginal perspective. In Roebourne, the work was projected onto the façade of the old Victoria Hotel which closed in 2003 at the request of the local Aboriginal community, given the catastrophic impact of the 1960s mining boom and alcohol. Hayes describes this project as an act of cleansing, an invocation, a summoning, and whilst the gallery-based work probably doesn’t carry the punch of the site specific original, for those of us who couldn’t be there, it remains a beautiful, powerful and poignant work.
locus deperditus
For another West Australian artist, Kate McMillan, the town of Leonora about 830 miles east of Perth, described in tourism-speak as the “historical heartland of the Goldfields,” was a transformative experience, allowing her to finally experience herself as Australian. For McMillan, this residency initially represented an opportunity to work with asylum seekers in the detention centre, however that impulse was transformed by the experience of witnessing first hand the impact of youth suicide, following the death of a teenage boy. The disparity between resources available to detained children and those for ‘free’ Aboriginal children saw McMillan adding the roles of advocate and networker to that of artist. She undertook developmental community arts projects, including drawing workshops at the Refugee Centre and cultural projects at the local Indigenous Youth Centre, persuading BHP to provide $20K per annum towards an ongoing program of artists’ workshops. McMillan also established a deep relationship with local historian, Jill Heather, whose work in recent decades has been to record the history and whereabouts of lonely 19th century graves across three surrounding shires, and it is the photographic documentation of those graves that represent McMillan’s residency in the exhibition.
ornitarium
M12, Ornitarium
photo courtesy the artists
M12, Ornitarium
Not every project was so inherently confronting. Colorado-based collective M12 created the Ornitarium, an architectural sculpture situated at the Wetlands Education Centre—operated by Green Skills—in the softer climes of Denmark in the state’s southwest. The artists describe the project as being “inspired by ‘local knowledge’…specifically knowledge related to birds that populate the region’s wetlands areas, regional timber types and building methods. The work is designed and built as a bird hide and as a social space [for humans]…” The guest watcher can be in their own custom built nest inside the hide but camouflaged from the bird life on the other side. In the gallery they created an installation curated in partnership with master taxidermist Michael Buzza that included objects collected by Denmark locals, Basil Schur and Tina Smith.
headspace, levelled ground, in transit
Julia Davis created the haunting, site-specific work Headspace, casting her own head from salt harvested from Lake Brown. Over time, the head dissolved back into the lake. She developed another project called Levelled Ground, shown at the Mukinbudin Railway Station that visually represented digital information in a gold-leaf wall schematic, from recorded interviews with local people no longer able to live on their farms. At the Fremantle Art Centre she showed an interactive video work, In Transit, which documented the friendly but characteristically laconic gestures of acknowledgement made by local people as they pass by each other in cars and trucks.
the way you move me
David Chesworth and Sonia Leber’s beautiful and joyous video installation, The Way You Move Me, filmed in Moora, a wheatbelt town about 177 kms north of Perth, took its inspiration in part from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. The experience is mesmerising, sometimes funny—there are sheep after all—and occasionally poignant. Handsome cattle lumber down the green hill chasing a small tractor, jostling for precedence, or cluster closely, gazing deeply into the camera lens. Sheep move constantly in and around each other, whether up close in pens or trotting down a country road, juxtaposed against paddocks of unbelievable greenness or the eye-bending golden fields of canola. Moments of intensity, changing rhythms and gaits, are interspersed with personal, almost transcendent moments of interspecies connection.
to the other end
In the gallery, the photographic documentation and blood-stained prayer rug that comprises To the Other End by Dutch artists Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis forms a savagely ironic juxtaposition to Chesworth and Leber’s bucolic video work. To the Other End follows the journey of live sheep exported from the small wheatbelt town of Lake Grace, 345 kilometres southeast of Perth, to the small island country of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. It examines the use of sheep for both wool and for meat. Helped by local farmers and craftspeople, the artists learned how to shear a sheep and card and spin the wool, from which they wove a black and white copy of a Baluchi funeral carpet. After a year of knotting they completed the carpet and took it with them to Bahrain during the feast of sacrifice.
In Bahrain, they found an Australian sheep from Lake Grace and a local family to organise the ritual killing of the sheep on the prayer carpet during the feast. The meat was distributed to the poor. Photographic documentation included a portrait of the slaughtered sheep hanging on the wall of a small cell-like room, with the prayer rug saturated and stiff with black blood.
crayvox
Nigel Helyer spent an enviable two months travelling around the turquoise waters of the Abrolhos Islands, home of the rock lobster or crayfish, and described as the world’s first sustainable fishery site. Helyer’s interest in the future viability and sustainability of our marine economies is represented through sound and object with a beautifully constructed wooden boat, CrayVox, that resonates with the sounds and stories of fishing communities in both the Abrolhos Islands and in the restaurants and seafood importers of South-East Asia.
narrogin banksia tower
Polish artist, Jakub Szczesny and curator Kaja Pawelek, developed the concept of an 18-metre tower inspired by Australia’s banksia flower. Proposed as an interactive and functional artwork with a hairy surface responsive to passing cars and visitors, a model of the tower, animations and a prototype forms the basis of a proposal to the Shire of Narrogin to undertake its realisation. The project forms the basis of a forthcoming documentary by Polish artist and filmmaker, Matylda Salajewska for Europe’s Canal+ television.
Sadly, space precludes me from writing about every project in this inaugural biennale, but I wish to acknowledge the calibre of art works and projects developed by Australian artists Bennet Miller, Mimi Tong, Makeshift’s Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe, Michelle Slarke and Roderick Sprigg, as well as Indonesian artist Ritchie Ned Hansel’s Abandoned Trolley Project, Japanese artist Takahiko Suzuki’s Global Store Project and French artists Marion Laval Jeantet and Benoit Mangin’s collaboration with SymbioticA.
emerging spaces for action
Spaced: art out of place, raises many vital questions about the role of art and artists, living sustainably, and the relationship of city to country. Most of us inhabit the cities and suburban margins and never really have to negotiate the complex relations that exist between species—whether domesticated or wild, indigenous or introduced, or to think about lack of meaningful infrastructure or cultural opportunities. It’s a cliché to say that we rely on country for life—for our food and water, for both physical and spiritual sustenance—and yet the divide between town and country remains a deeply felt schism in our everyday. Ian Hunter, in his provocative but stimulating paper, “Art and Agriculture–cultivating new metaphors for sustainability,” persuasively argued rural and non-metropolitan areas as new critical sites from which to think through relational, durational and ecological art and aesthetics—an emerging space of radical action. Less polemically, but equally passionate, Ian Tully talked of his more embryonic project, ACRE—Australia’s Creative Rural Economy, a project bringing together artists, arts workers and farmers in regional Victoria since 2009.
Spaced raises more questions than it could possibly hope to answer, but its ambition, generosity of spirit and willingness to experiment, and to generate what Marvin Carlson has described as “productive disagreement with itself” (1996), offered a radically different kind of biennial experience, one that actively solicited meaningful forms of ‘social engagement,’ while also allowing us to reflect on the wonder, the beauty and the terror of life on this planet we all share.
IASKA, Spaced: art out of place, inaugural biennial event of socially engaged art, exhibition Fremantle Art Centre, Perth International Arts Festival, Feb 4-March 11; spaced symposium, Feb 4, 5; www.iaska.com.au
Artists and residencies: Nigel Helyer, Abrolhos Islands; Mimi Tong, Albany; Philip Samartzis, Dampier Peninsula; M12 Collective (Richard Saxton, Kirsten Stolz and David Wyrick), Denmark; Makeshift (Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe), Esperance; Ritchie Ned Hansel, Fremantle; Roderick Sprigg, Jakarta, Indonesia; Takahiko Suzuki, Kellerberrin; Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis, Lake Grace, and Michelle Slarke; Kate McMillan, Leonora; Art Oriente objet (Marion Laval Jeantet and Benoit Mangin), Mandurah; David Chesworth and Sonya Leber, Moora; Julia Davis, Mukinbudin; Jakub Szeczesny and Kajar Pawetek, Narrogin; Bennett Miller Northam/Bakers Hill ; Sohan Ariel Hayes and Michael Woodley, Roebourne
HAVING LIVED IN TASMANIA FOR 10 VERY FORMATIVE YEARS, IT WAS A JOY TO RETURN TO THE ISLAND TO EXPERIENCE THE TRANSFORMATION THAT MONA (MUSEUM OF OLD AND NEW ART) AND ITS FOMA MUSIC FESTIVAL ARE WREAKING ON HOBART. MONA HAS SURPASSED THE HARROWING PORT ARTHUR AS THE PRIMARY TOURIST DRAWCARD IN THE STATE. THIS IS A SEISMIC SHIFT IN TASMANIAN CULTURE AND MARKS A PSYCHIC BORDER.
With the economy perpetually moribund, the state government has had no choice but to respond, spending $30 million on a long overdue upgrade of the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery, for which the first exhibition will be a combined effort with MONA. Tasmanians have certainly responded. It is deeply satisfying to see people from all walks of life happily queuing up, eager for the next MONA experience, the likes of which would only recently have been condemned in many quarters.
Everyone’s favourite Brechtian Goth-Punk, Amanda Fucking Palmer, truly made this edition of the festival her own. The Dresden Dolls’ reunion performance on the second Friday night won many converts with its vitality, the virtuosity of drummer Brian Viglione a revelation (think Terry Bozzio during his Frank Zappa years), but that was just the start. With The Death Grips sadly cancelled, Palmer and Viglione backed up the next night with a MOFO superband, joining Bad Seed Mick Harvey, PJ Harvey producer John Parrish and MONA FOMA producer and former Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie to play the songs of the much-loved Violent Femmes debut album to a rapturous reception. The climax was a two-hour flat out Dresden Dolls set in the wee small hours of the final Sunday morning in the laneway of the Faux MO festival club, patrons hanging off fences and fire escapes and totally dizzy with disbelief that it was actually happening.
Wim Delvoye’s major exhibition at MONA is, according to its website, “provoking heated debate about the ethical integrity of his work” among staff. It features skins of the artist’s tattooed pigs and of “living artwork” Tattooed Tim. This comment seems surprising given MONA owner David Walsh’s well-known devotion to transgressive art, until you become aware of his vegetarianism; then the gesture becomes an admirable statement of commitment to the personal quest underlying the whole venture. This exhibition is the largest of Delvoye’s work ever assembled, with multiple Cloaca machines in addition to the one permanently installed at MONA, and numerous other works such as a life-size truck and wooden cement mixer carved in his meticulous and delicate filigree, plus playful distortions of Disney imagery that surely have that notoriously litigious franchise plotting a slow and painful retribution. Like MONA overall, the show overwhelms (most of) the senses: so much so that it ultimately creates a deficit of touch. There is so much work here about the body, yet bringing bodies and objects into contact is almost always forbidden in art museums, even a place like this.
In delicate contrast to Delvoye’s appropriation of Disney was the complete rejection of that corporate colonisation of our subconscious by the group Armiina, from Iceland. Originally an offshoot of Sigur Rós, they produced charming, winsome soundtracks to 1920s shadow-play films of classic fairytales by Lotte Reiniger, themselves a revelation. This was one of many intimate gems that were dotted about MONA FOMA. Another was Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s sound installation Shape Shifter, which is simply one of the best explorations of interior resonances I have experienced.
I’m kicking myself at missing Michaela Davies’ While Rome Burns, featuring a string quartet powered by electro-muscular stimulation (there’s a great snippet on YouTube at http://youtu.be/6jTKfCCmT10) and not getting in early enough for a seat for Ed Kuepper. The only major disappointment, however, was oppressively stuffy (verging on unsafe) conditions for the PJ Harvey gig, which would have been far better suited to a seated auditorium.
The highlight of MONA FOMA in the week I attended was The Barbarians, a major new work by IHOS Opera commissioned for the festival. IHOS and its director Constantine Koukias are clearly revelling in their position as premier local artists for FOMA. Who wouldn’t? Brian Ritchie even supplied the poem that forms its libretto, “Welcome the Barbarians” (1904) by Constantine Cavafy. It explores the simultaneous fear of, and desire for, the other/unknown/invader, a fundamental strand in the vast expanse of Greek cultural history, overlaid with millennia of invasions, sometimes successfully resisted but many times resulting in cultural fusion.
The Barbarians is a landmark for the company, the third in the series of deeply personal major works that began with Days and Nights with Christ (Sydney Festival, 1992) and To Traverse Water (Melbourne International Arts Festival, 1995). That it has been so long in coming is a reflection of the personal journey of Koukias and his efforts to establish and maintain for 21 years a contemporary opera company. That he has managed to make work that is both cutting-edge and accessible in Hobart is all the more notable. Koukias achieves this balance through a musical language based in Byzantine Church chant, part of the root-stock of all Western music.
Scintillating visual and sound design are hallmarks, as are the sonorities of languages other than English, but what truly makes IHOS unique is the central role of movement in unfolding the text. This production saw the welcome return to IHOS of Melbourne-based Christos Linou as choreographer and dancer. His tour de force performance, naked for the entire show, was juxtaposed with the lush orchestration and polished singers and orchestra. The whole is bounded by sounds that genuinely create fear in the listener. Little wonder David Walsh attended twice and was reportedly raving in the festival club about this beautiful, transgressive masterpiece. This can only bode well for the future of IHOS and for contemporary music and performance in Tasmania.
SOMETHING REMARKABLE HAPPENED AT THIS YEAR’S PUSH FESTIVAL. FESTIVAL DIRECTOR NORMAN ARMOUR DIED AND CAME BACK TO LIFE. HE SUFFERED A CARDIAC ARREST PART WAY THROUGH A CONCERT BY MARY MARGARET O’HARA AND PEGGY LEE. THANKFULLY, SOMEONE WAS ON HAND TO ADMINISTER CPR AND RESTART THE HEART—TEMPORARILY. ARMOUR’S PULSE AGAIN DISAPPEARED, BUT PARAMEDICS ARRIVED, APPLIED THE DEFIBRILLATOR AND THE PULSE WAS BACK. EN ROUTE TO THE HOSPITAL THE HEART WENT SILENT AGAIN. ONE MORE CHARGE OF ELECTRIC CURRENT TO THE CHEST WALL DID THE TRICK, AND ARMOUR WAS TRULY BACK AMONG THE LIVING.
Meanwhile, at the theatre, O’Hara sang “Body’s in Trouble” from her album Miss America, providing the perfect theme for a shocked audience seeking communal solace. There were those in the crowd who were friends of the fallen director, those who were simply concerned about the welfare of a fellow human being, and I suppose there were those who were unmoved. Spectators make their own meaning, even of such life-and-death theatrics. Did I say “theatrics?”
Actually, Armour’s unintentional performance was anti-theatrical—absolutely authentic, more in line with the kind of authenticity 1960s performance artists risked when they did things like deliberately get shot and slice themselves open with razor blades. Those artists are now distant progenitors of the typical hybrid performances featured at festivals like PuSh. A half-century later, 1960s notions of body-based authenticity have become just another set of aesthetic conventions, a style of performance if you will, no more and no less valid than any other. On the other hand, having a heart attack fulfills the requirements of the ‘real’ while providing the kind of high drama anti-theatricalists of the 60s viewed with disdain. Armour’s ‘performance’ collapses the argument. He becomes an appropriate symbol for a festival that welcomes traditional aesthetic opponents under the same umbrella.
andrea božić
It’s a coincidence that Andrea Božić’s contemporary dance piece After Trio A (Amsterdam) was on the program this year. Božić takes Yvonne Rainer’s iconic 1960s anti-theatrical dance solo Trio A and turns it into spectacle. The original work exemplifies principles articulated in Rainer’s 1965 tract, No Manifesto, in which the choreographer proclaims, “No to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer.” The Trio A (1966) solo is non-seductive, non-narrative, and non-dramatic. There is no climax. Every part of the dance is given equal value. In theory it’s a performance stripped of pretence and artificiality. It must have felt urgent in its non-urgency back in the days when Rainer was part of a larger trend that included performance artists putting themselves through durational performances of great physical and mental rigour in order to stake a claim to authenticity while rejecting the illusionism of theatre. Chris Burden, famous for filming himself getting shot in the arm, once said, “Bad art is theatre.”
But it’s all theatre to the spectator. What constitutes too much or too little spectacle or virtuosity is always a matter of degree. In A Manifesto Reconsidered (2008) Rainer adjusts her original declaration: seduction, she writes, is “Unavoidable,” and virtuosity is “Acceptable in limited quantities.” Božić’s After Trio A, as well as her own playful tract, After No Manifesto, revises and partly refutes Rainer’s assertions. Two dancers (Claire French and Anne Cooper) learn Rainer’s original score while watching it on a monitor for the first time. They are able to approximate what they see due to their dance training. In 1966 Rainer was able to give every part of the original solo even weight due to virtuosic control of her own body. In 2012 Božić achieves in-the-moment authenticity by giving skilled performers a task they can’t rehearse.
In After No Manifesto Božić responds to Rainer’s caution against virtuosity with “Yes to imagination.” In an era in which we acknowledge that we are always performing versions of ourselves, there’s really no such thing as inauthentic performance, only authentic disguise. The ‘true’ you is a relative concept. The bare materiality of 1960s performance art—“I’m not pretending to be shot, I’ve really been shot”—has given over to “I’m really pretending to be shot.” Full circle.
chelfitsch
Hot Pepper, Chelfitsch
photo Toru Yokota
Hot Pepper, Chelfitsch
And yet the 1960s resistance to the cheaper sentiments of commercial theatre remains a guiding principle for much of the work at PuSh, as does the mistrust of dramatic peaks and valleys. The typical show tends to be kept within a narrow dynamic range (not too high, not too low), and performers tend to avoid over-expressing. This is certainly true of the mesmerising Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech by Chelfitsch (Tokyo), in which choreographed movement based on everyday gesture is stretched to the edges of plausibility, but vocal and facial expression is restricted by office etiquette.
rabih mroué
Rabih Mroué, Looking for a Missing Employee
photo Houssam Mchaiemch
Rabih Mroué, Looking for a Missing Employee
Rabih Mroué (Beirut), writer and director of Looking for a Missing Employee, adopts a Colombo-like faux naiveté while sifting through news documents that point to government collusion in the murder of a Finance Ministry worker. “Never trust a photocopy,” he says coyly while rifling through his own copies of articles from Lebanese dailies. Mroué renders even himself a copy by performing from behind the audience where a video camera projects his live image to a screen onstage. With such displacements, and with sly wit, Mroué gestures toward the guilty but never commits the aesthetic crime of shouting “Murderers!”
peter reder
Seduction of the spectator through understated personal charm is also a feature of Guided Tour by Peter Reder (London, England). This mock tour of the Vancouver Art Gallery has a thematic thread related to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the angel of history”—a figure unable to repair the disasters of the past because it is being pushed relentlessly into the future by the fierce winds of paradise. Reder connects this concept to nostalgic constructions of our individual pasts. He provides a slideshow of family picnics at the beach, which might be from his childhood but—due to the generic quality of the images—could just as easily be from someone else’s. Like the angel of history, you can only reconstruct the past in your mind. In the meantime disasters will pile up. The success of this show ultimately depends on the rapport Reder establishes, through deft irony, with the small group of patrons he guides through the building. There are no startling revelations. Discoveries are kept in proportion. High drama is rejected in favour of intimate personal contact.
teatro linea de sombra
Amarillo, Teatro Linea de Sombra
photo Roberto Blenda
Amarillo, Teatro Linea de Sombra
Amarillo by Teatro Linea de Sombra (Mexico City) constructs the “probable” journey of a Mexican migrant worker who attempts a crossing into the USA. It begins with the packing of a desert survival kit that includes lemons for dehydration and painkillers for dealing with an 80-kilometre trek in 50 degree heat. It ends with death by drowning in a sea of sand. An upstage wall stands for the barrier between South and North. It is leaped at, climbed and pounded in vain by a man who will ultimately disappear. It also serves as a projection screen for the many surveillance quality cameras that shoot the action from above. Objects accumulate on the floor of the stage, and by the end we are looking through columns of sand, pouring down from above, at a projection of jugs full of blue water lit up by flashlights, as if a well-ordered and sentient constellation is trying to make sense of the dead man lying half-buried on the desert floor.
mario pensotti
El Pasado, Mario Pensotti
photo Matias Sendon
El Pasado, Mario Pensotti
The action in El pasado es un animal grotesco by Mario Pensotti (Buenos Aires) keeps pace with the revolving stage on which interweaving stories of a number of 20-something urban Argentinians take place. The revolve itself is a beautiful plywood-clad thing, with rollers visible, and with scenic furniture stripped down to the bare living essentials. The characters that inhabit it are young and can’t afford to complete the furnishings—they are unfinished projects. Each is, in her or his own way, struggling to find a place in a globalised society in which individuals tend to be atomised worker/consumer units and personal connections are hard to sustain. Most of what happens to the characters seems accidental. As an actor exits a scene passing to the back of the revolve, she enters into and narrates another coming into view. The true narrative engine of the evening is the revolve, which is divided into quarters and is in almost continual motion throughout the performance. As a result the stories have a sense of forward momentum even though they unfold rather slowly. Like Benjamin’s angel, the characters can never go back, but neither are they propelled by a storm. Rather, they are continually nudged forward. Gentle as the push may be, the imperative of linear time is no less inexorable.
neworld/vancouver moving theatre
You might expect Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (Neworld/Vancouver Moving Theatre, Vancouver) to provide an old-school dramatic spike to those hungry for emotional punch. Seven years ago director James Fagan Tait (who also writes the adaptation) gave us the apotheosis of Crime and Punishment. The Idiot is a different kind of novel, slightly Chekhovian in the way character pretensions are consistently deflated. Tait’s Idiot is alternately ironic, sincere and down-to-earth, if a little liberal with the ‘F’ bombs. As with Crime we have the large, ethnically diverse cast made up of trained and un-trained actors, the spare staging, the beautiful group tableaux in which performers deliberately look like here-and-now Vancouverites in there-and-then attire, and the same quiet, unforced delivery that makes the spectator lean forward to catch every word. In keeping with much of the festival, performer expressivity is constrained. Even when Rogozhin (Andrew McNee) suffers a remorseful vocal utterance after murdering his lover Nastassia (Cherise Clarke), the momentary rupture is limited to a single, measured cry.
yes to seduction
There were a few shows at the festival that embraced melodrama, mid-20th century realism, or plain old kitsch. For me, these productions simply affirmed the value of the dominant aesthetic of the festival: don’t spoon-feed the audience. Of course, one can get over-cautious. In her 1965 manifesto Yvonne Rainer stridently demands, “No to moving and being moved.” Seriously? I want my money back. In 2008 she grudgingly acknowledges that “moving and being moved” is “unavoidable.” How terribly pinched. Andrea Božić counters, “Yes to transparency,” “Yes to enthusiasm,” “Yes to staying here.” I confess I go to performances hoping to be seduced. If you’ll indulge the allusion, seduction is acceptable as long as it occurs between mature, consenting spectators. The structure of the theatrical event provides the necessary “safe word.”
art, actually
And then there’s the fact of Norman Armour’s cardiac arrest. John Cage would have appreciated the circumstances: a chance “operation” occurring within the aesthetic frame of the festival. Parameters are established, and then what happens within them is “art.” Or is the heart attack too great a disturbance? Is it too real for art? Is it the aesthetic ‘body’ of the festival that is “in trouble,” as Mary Margaret O’Hara sings in her song? Probably not. Michael Boucher, the man who saved Armour, described the festival director’s collapse as “almost” comical. Ah, so it wasn’t tragedy, it was slapstick. Like the characters in The Idiot, we are rather impotent creatures. Our sufferings are real, but what does it all add up to? With Božić we must say, “Yes to confusion of the spectator”—ourselves. How can we authentically say otherwise? At the same time, in our relief at the survival of a fellow spectator, we can also say with Božić—and with Norman Armour—“Yes to staying here.” For as long as we can bear it.
2012 PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Vancouver, Jan 17-Feb 4; http://pushfestival.ca
SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 2006 UNDER THE DIRECTION OF ITS FOUNDER, COMPOSER MATTHEW HINDSON, THE AURORA FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART MUSIC HAS BECOME A KEY PART OF THE BURGEONING ARTS WORLD OF WESTERN SYDNEY, WHERE IT HAS BEEN PRINCIPALLY PRESENTED IN THE REGION’S FLOURISHING ARTS CENTRES.
Hindson directed three festivals 2006-10, the third playing host to the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) World Music Day yielding an enormous program rich in diversity and invention.
In 2010, composer, arts manager, teacher and co-founder and co-director of Chronology Arts (RT97, p40), Andrew Batt-Rawden, was appointed director of the 2012 Aurora Festival. I spoke with him about his program and its evolution, asking how it felt to be an artistic director. “You get an opportunity to release your creative vision into the world, which is a lot of fun,” he declares with a laugh. “It’s very exciting, also very daunting and there’s a lot of work involved.”
As for the creation of the program, a committee was involved. The 27-year old admits “As a first time festival director, I was keen to surround myself with people I like and whose opinions and musical tastes I trust. We all researched projects and put them on the table. Only a couple of times did I think, no, not that event. It was a collaborative effort.”
I asked how conscious Batt-Rawden was in his programming of keeping in step with the diversity of forms of contemporary art music that take it beyond the traditional concert medium. He replies, “The last thing I wanted to do was to create a festival that didn’t reflect the culture of contemporary art music.” Consequently there are events like Super Critical Mass, a performative installation featuring 60 local musicians and an audience on the move; Pocket Gamelan, an opportunity for the public to play mobile phones that have become musical instruments; and AMPED, a performance for and with young people at the arts centre where they hang out on Thursday nights.
george lentz, zane banks
Zane Banks
Of course, there are concerts in Aurora but some of the contents might surprise: “I wanted to have a diverse range of events including some emphasis on electronics and noise,” says Batt-Rawden. He also notes the prominence of the electric guitar in the program was quite unintended. “It was organic. Originally we wanted to get Oren Ambarchi involved.” Then Zane Banks was added to the program, to play the Australian premiere of Sydney composer Georges Lentz’s Ingwe (from Mysterium, part of a large-scale cycle of works, Caeli errant…). Banks, who plays both contemporary classical and avant-garde rock and is the artistic director of Ensemble Ampere (an electric guitar outfit), premiered the 60-minute solo work in Luxembourg in 2007 and then recorded it for the Naxos label. As an admirer of what I’ve heard of Lentz’s Caeli errant… and an aficionado of the diverse capacities of the electric guitar, I’m very much looking forward to Ingwe (May 12, Campbelltown Arts Centre).
It’s fascinating to read on his website how Lentz came to write Ingwe: “One evening at the Royal Hotel, a pub in Brewarrina, northern NSW, a man sat alone tuning his electric guitar for that night’s rock gig. I was working on a piece for solo cello at the time but knew immediately that I should write something for the guitar instead—the loneliness and desolation of the place (and indeed my own loneliness) seemed to be encapsulated in that man’s sound…(www.georgeslentz.com/ingwe.html).
oren ambarchi & merzbow
Oren Ambarchi, Judith Wright Centre, 2010
photo Brian Spencer
Oren Ambarchi, Judith Wright Centre, 2010
Oren Ambarchi’s superb electric guitar skills are widely admired—he has performed with a formidable list of adventurous fellow artists including Fennesz, Otomo Yoshihide, Keiji Haino, John Zorn, Jim O’Rourke, Keith Rowe, Dave Grohl and Phil Niblock. On March 1 this year he premiered John Cage Portrait, a work for electric guitar and orchestra, with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at the Tectonics Music Festival. For his solo performance on May 8 at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre Ambarchi says he will be playing guitar and “some pretty antiquated effect pedals… it’s usually something quite simple that’s explored over 30-40 minutes—a motif or idea slowly unfolds over time. Hopefully it’s something where both myself and the listener lose ourselves.”
The inclusion of Ambarchi in Aurora is indicative of the increasing overlap between contemporary classical and experimental musics, an inclusiveness in this festival which extends to Tokyo guest, noisician Merzbow (Masami Akita) on his second visit to Australia to present an improvised performance of extreme noise using a combination of laptop and analog equipment at Riverside Theatre, May 11. In a second appearance at Campbelltown Arts Centre on May 13, he’ll duet with Oren Ambarchi for the closing night of the festival. Ambarchi, as part of Sunn 0))), has played with Merzbow previously in Tokyo, an experience he describes as “really special…I’ve always considered Masami’s music to be psychedelic, in the true sense of the word. Psychedelic, in the sense of losing yourself in the sound. I get a feeling of momentum, when his stuff is really working. So I’m hoping the collaboration will go down that road.”
Batt-Rawden feels that “noise is a pretty important part of contemporary music. It’s a good investment to bring Merzbow from Japan.” As well as his prodigious musical output, sound installations and collaborations with Sonic Youth, Mike Patton and others, Merzbow’s work includes musical protests against whaling.
synergy, clocks and clouds
Terumi Narushima, Kraig Grady, Clocks and Clouds
On Aurora’s percussion front, at Casula Powerhouse on May 5, Synergy will interpret works by Amanda Cole, Marcus Whale, Alex Pozniak and James Rushford, the outcome of the group’s first Emerging Composer Initiative, a much-needed opportunity for composers to meet the very particular challenges of writing for percussion. Also at Casula Powerhouse on the same night, the performer-composers of Clocks and Clouds, Kraig Grady and Terumi Narushima, will doubtless feature the transcendent sounds of their distinctive, retuned vibraphone and pump organ and other instruments constructed by Grady.
marshall mcguire
Another instrument rarely privileged with solo outings is the harp. Anyone who loves virtuoso Marshall McGuire’s Rough Magic (1999) and The Twentieth Century Harp (2002) CDs—paired as a double CD, charM, by ABC Classics in 2007—will not want to miss his concert of 21st century compositions on May 6 at St Finbar’s in the Blue Mountains, an invaluable and rare opportunity to hear what’s happening with that magical instrument in our own time.
chamber made opera
At the Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, May 9-11, Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera (see p36) will present Minotaur The Island which premiered on Bruny Island in Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island festival last year. The work is an imagining of the lost 1608 Monteverdi opera L’Arianna: “We see the conception of Pasiphae, King Minos’ mail order bride, who has become obsessed with the bull of heaven. She gives birth to the monstrous Minotaur, part bull, part human. The Minotaur grows and becomes ferocious, needing to devour men for sustenance, and as a consequence is locked away, in a gigantic labyrinth (press release).
chronology arts & dirty feet; daniel blinkhorn
Chronology Arts and Dirty Feet dance company unite to present Vitality, a series designed to bring together composers and choreographers. The first in the series is Quest, in which choreographer Martin del Amo and composer Alex Pozniak “explore a young girl’s ‘blind’ discovery of sound and movement.” It will be presented May 12 at Campbelltown Arts Centre on the same bill as sound artist and composer Daniel Blinkhorn’s performance drawing on his field trip to Antarctica.
greg schiemer
The ever-inventive composer and electronic instrument builder, Greg Schiemer has created Pocket Gamelan for Mobile Phones (Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 13). Batt-Rawden says it was “an opportunity that came up and was not to be missed! [Schiemer] has networked a set of mobiles, programming them with music software and showing non-musicians how to use them—like swinging them around your head! It’s quite spectacular and the implications for using everyday technology instrumentally and collaboratively are amazing. It creates musical ensembles and is available to everyone.” The work, which premiered at London’s Tate Gallery in April 2011 combines electronics and voices, using Schiemer’s Mandala App (see image page 14).
luke jaaniste & julian day
Further audience engagement outside the concert sphere will be found at Blacktown Arts Centre where Luke Jaaniste and Julian Day invite their audience to amble room to room to encounter 60 musicians performing Super Critical Mass for the festival’s opening on May 4. This performative installation should offer a truly distinctive aural and spatial experience—”like wandering through a soundscape,” says Batt-Rawden. “I’m not allowed to tell you the instrumentation because it’s going to be a surprise.”
chronology arts
Chronology Arts has conducted a couple of workshops with “the young people who hang outside the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith on Thursday nights,” says Batt-Rawden, “any number from 50 to 200 playing games, basketball, dancing sporadically in a non-threatening, almost festive atmosphere and very receptive to what will engage them. For AMPED we’ll be there May 10 with interactive electronics, microphones, keyboard, guitars [Zane Banks’ guitar quartet] and a Max/MSP program to create a duet between electronics and human input—and let the kids have a go. Chronology will do a concert and hope to coax some of the kids to perform.”
alicia crossley
Also at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, recorder player Alicia Crossley will be conducting a program aimed to get school children involved in music, a project, says Batt-Rawden, that centre hopes will have a longer life.
open access
I ask Batt-Rawden if it’s important that works like AMPED, Super Critical Mass and Pocket Gamelan provide a very accessible experience of contemporary art music. “Yes, we wanted to break down a number of barriers to contemporary music. Another of these is distance, which is why we’re doing the festival in Western Sydney. Pricing is addressed, including some free performances, like Super Critical Mass. And then there’s understanding, hoping people will be open to something possibly quite alien. You need an open mind to enjoy it—there is no fixed way to experience music. Open yourself to it and you will get something from it.”
Aurora Music Festival, Western Sydney, May 4-13
Industry forum, “Sustainable Music Business Models,” chair John Davis, CEO Australian Music Centre, Campbelltown Arts Centre, May 12 www.aurorafestival.com.au
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
photo Tada Hengsapkul assisted by Lee Anantwat
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
THE GREATER ASIA CO-PROSPERITY SPHERE IS A TRIO OF ARTISTS AIMING TO REPRESENT ALL ASIAN NATIONS. THEY DRESS IN GOLD SILK SUITS, GO ON ELEPHANT-RIDING HOLIDAYS IN THAILAND AND ARE AMBITIOUSLY TAKING ON A DISCUSSION ABOUT THE JOYS AND ODDITIES OF MARRYING ASIAN AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURE.
Family history is something many of us only discover at funerals. Unbeknownst to us, Great Aunt Mabel was a glamorous socialite who seduced prominent thespians, or Poppa John had crossed the border into Austria as a fugitive. For Australians, discovering notoriety or exoticism in the bloodline seems a kind of jackpot. We speak with bright-eyed pride of convict ancestry or our genealogical fractions of Romany gypsy or European royalty, despite the manifestation of this rare link in our lives being minor.
Perth artists Casey Ayres, Nathan Beard and Abdul Abdullah have begun the excavation of their familial heritage early, making sure to fully absorb every ounce of romance, humour and melodrama into their ostentatiously titled collaboration, The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The three early career Perth artists were drawn together by their shared backgrounds: each has an Asian mother and a white Australian father, and was brought up in a Western Australian household that maintained traditions from both cultures. This meant the co-existence of primetime sitcoms with Buddhist ritual, pork buns beside fairy bread at birthday parties, and at all times a heightened awareness of the way Asian culture had been translated by their parents into everyday Australian life.
Nathan Beard’s father met his mother on holiday in Thailand in the late 1970s, during a break in his job as a federal policeman. After their move to Australia and the birth of their son, Beard’s mother ensured her traditional Thai cooking and a strong dedication to Buddhism “tethered” the boy to Thai culture. “I’d always sympathised more with my mother’s side of the family. I think as I got older and started to realise the cultural alienation that she took upon herself, divorcing herself from her heritage, I started to feel sorry about it. So I wanted to investigate that further.” Beard has been working on ‘quasi-collaborative’ pieces with his non-artist mother for years, contracting her to paint family portraits or asking her to model for his photographic recreations of classical paintings.
Casey Ayres’ mother is Malay-Chinese and his late father the son of English immigrants. He guesses this makes him a second generation Australian, though his laid-back attitude, penchant for backyard barbecuing and laddish accent suggest he’s got more than his share of the Antipodean in him. Ayres’ examination of his roots began only recently: “When the project came up, I really knew nothing about my cultural heritage whatsoever, so I thought this was a good way of exploring it. Also the food! Any place that makes so much good food, I want to know more about.” A skilled machinist with both camera and car, Ayres’ practice usually involves the photographic glorification of his beloved Ford Escort.
Clearly fascinated by the complexity of his background, Abdul Abdullah details his family biography as though he’s memorised it: “My mother is Malay, my father is Australian, I am seventh generation Australian, descendant from convicts despatched here in 1815 for stealing two stamps and a watch chain.” Abdul’s father converted to Islam and his parents moved to Australia to make their home in the early 1970s. As an Archibald finalist and 2011 winner of the Blake Prize for Human Justice, Abdul’s thriving painting practice has opened up discussion about what it means to be a Muslim Australian.
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
photo Tada Hengsapkul assisted by Lee Anantwat
Nathan Beard, Casey Ayres, Abdul Abdullah, Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Thrown together by otherness, Beard, Ayres and Abdullah have formed a kind of artistic solidarity. Not only do they have Asian mothers in common, but each has experienced parental suspicion or confusion about their art practices, particularly when it came to researching family history. Collaboration seemed natural.
The trio consider themselves emblematic of an Asian-Australian nexus. At first this led to casual experiments into culture jamming, in particular forming a hypothetical boy-band called Beige. The name had an unexpectedly decisive effect on the way the artists worked together. Beige, being the colour of non-specificity, allowed them to consider their very varied heritage under a single category—as Asian-Australian heritage in general. It gave them permission to hybridise their autobiographies, research themselves, each other, the West, the East and all Asian nations with equal attention, attachment and entitlement.
It was at this point that Abdullah, Ayres and Beard became The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Named after an anachronistic proposal penned by Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in the 1940s, the artists used their collaboration to pool their experiences with Asian culture. What formed was a kind of ambassadorial unit, documenting an often humorous “glance at all of Asia,” as Abdullah puts it. The Sphere made research trips to Singapore, a once imperialised multicultural hub, and Thailand, a country with unusually strong mercantile ties with the West.
The GACPS project, which will be exhibited at the 2012 Next Wave festival, and is supported by Next Wave’s Kick Start program, will take the form of a comprehensive, experiential and highly multi-media installation: a pan-Asian embassy. Built in Melbourne, the embassy will be filled with an array of Asian decorative objects manufactured by the artists, representing the whole spectrum from traditional to kitsch. Think brush-painted banners, red lanterns, Maneki Neko waving cats and gold thrones as well as a full program of dance, music, craft and cooking activities.
The artists have merged themselves into the project as gaudily dressed yet sombre dignitaries, for an embassy certainly requires the presence of ambassadors. They will don a uniform they call the “Plada suit,” a bright gold silken two-piece topped with a gilded Thai headdress, perhaps as incongruous to Australian life as Imperial safari outfits were to jungle outposts in the 30s, or an Indonesian batik shirt on John Howard. In costume, the trio must perform their ambassadorial duties, explains Beard: “Importantly, what we’re going to be doing is facilitating an engagement with the space for audiences, trying to get people to think beyond the immediate experience and open up a dialogue. How were they raised with ideas of multiculturalism in an Australian context?”
A kind of pastiche of a World’s Fair pavilion, the embassy will provide gallery patrons with an experience that is equal parts sincerity and humour. The GACPS ambassadors have practised developing humorous access points between themselves and an audience. Recently, they’ve appeared in full costume at karaoke bars, for studio talks at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and attempted to correspond with some of Australia’s most prominent Asian-Australians such as Penny Wong, Lee Lin Chin and Shaun Tan. This willingness to point out and then embody the absurd dissimilarities that exist between all cultures has quickly endeared the artists to their audiences. Ayres attributes this to their willingness to demonstrate “a sense of communal humiliation.”
While the object of the embassy never approaches social activism, it certainly exists within a climate of what Abdullah calls “increased multiculturalism” and cultural sensitivity. Perhaps it is fair to say that Australia’s complex historical relationship with Asia, the strength and diversity of Asian culture here and also the laconic Aussie sense of humour have created the perfect environment for The GACPS collaboration to thrive.
If everything about this project is loud—gold veneer, manifestos, cultural clashes and comical performance—it is still autobiography that has allowed the artists to foreground the issues of nationality, family and borrowed culture. This is a personal project for each artist. They have reclaimed a place for themselves between two cultures that would once have been described as marginal, other or “neither here nor there.” In this territory they have made themselves educators, cultural liaison officers, translators and ambassadors to both Australia and Asia, helping us to comprehend and relish a world in which language, art, music, food and tradition may all be so easily borrowed and just as easily misunderstood. The collaboration “reflects upon that innate sense of confusion that arises when you’re stepping in between two cultures. We want to open up an earnest exploration to allow people to figure out, bearing in mind all these differences, how they negotiate their own sense of identity, their own sense of cultural confusion.”
The embassy of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will be installed in the Ian Potter Centre by Federation Square in May 2012 during the Next Wave Festival: The Space Between Us Wants To Sing.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EMILY SEXTON SEES NEXT WAVE 2012 AS “A SOCIALLY AND POLITICALLY ENGAGED FESTIVAL. WE WANTED TO CREATE AN EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMIC IN THE WAY YOU SEE ART.”
To this end, the festival invites you to start each day with a couple of hours at the Breakfast Club at the Wheeler Centre for Writing, Books and Ideas over coffee and the provocations of visiting international curators. Then you can spend the rest of the day exploring a variety of shows, installations and events across the city. Create your own trajectory or take up the festival’s offer of a choice of nine different day passes, each with a guide and each from breakfast to late night. That means sharing the experience with a group of fellow audience members for a day: “That’s where the cut and thrust is to be had,” says Sexton, “in the dialogue you have before and after experiencing an artwork and we wanted to make that as easy as possible.” She makes the point that the festival presents multidisciplinary works but wants to create a multidisciplinary context—hence this sharing: “It’s about our own practice as a festival.”
Consequently, Next Wave 2012 has an emphasis on “people coming together around everyday experiences expanded into intense versions: breakfasts, a wedding, markets, walks—all exploded into a contemporary art context. Next Wave is not like mainstream arts festivals that make certain promises. It’s about people exploring things and taking risks, so you have to create an environment that is about risk as well. I thought a lot about great music festivals: you go for the headliner but it’s the unknowns that everyone talks about afterwards. So we wanted to give people the opportunity to be surprised.”
Sexton emphasises the role of collaboration underpinning Next Wave: “Artists have made their work in collaboration with an amazing diversity of people in and around the arts. Elizabeth Dunn, for example, has created a beautiful project called Flyway in collaboration with birders for the last two years. Driving the great Australasian migration flyway up the east coast of Australia from Melbourne to her home in Queensland, she stayed along the way at migratory hotspots where birders live who generously opened up to her. Dunn made the journey into a metaphor, layering it over Melbourne to create a migratory walking tour from Carlton to Dockland mirroring her own journey.” Video monitors showing birds and locations will be encountered on the walk, the sightings aided by small binoculars for each walker. The sonic element will be provided by Brisbane sound artist Lawrence English.
In No Show’s Shotgun Wedding, gay artists Mark Pritchard and Bridget Balodis, who have been attending weddings and talking with priests for their research, will create an apparently very realistic wedding experience. The audience are the guests, eating, dancing and engaging with all the activities that come with, says Sexton, “one of the strongest of social rituals, one where many people fall back on tradition.” She describes this theatre work as insightful and very funny.
Next Wave 2012 features artists from across the country: “We really see it as a national festival—how many strange hotels have I been sleeping in over the last 18 months while searching for the artists who are the bravest and most curious in their practice.” As for artists beyond Australia, Sexton in her first year as director is focusing on making connections. Consequently, “Next Wave has created a residency program for emerging international festival directors and curators—people who are starting up things in different ways in the UK, Beijing, Korea, Indonesia and New York. Some we know well, some of it’s a bit of blind date, but we’re looking forward to a deep conversation with long term results.”
As for Next Wave 2012’s political dimension, Sexton describes the last two years as “a very strange time, with more and more people taking to the streets, but not always being able to articulate why they want change. I think that’s where art comes in so strongly because it uses the unconscious to help articulate our feelings. And not didactically. It’s all about discussion.” She cites Dan Koops’ The Stream/The Boat/The Shore/The Bridge, in which you’ll find yourself on a boat negotiating the Yarra, games and adventures while “thinking about our use of resources from a problem solving perspective.” Sarah-Jane Norman’s work, Bone Library (at the Melbourne City Library), about the loss of hundreds of Aboriginal languages, in which she carves their names on animal bones, is described by Sexton as “very mournful about what is dying around us that we can and can’t see.”
Skye Gellmann, Blindscape
photo Dom Bonnice
Skye Gellmann, Blindscape
Sexton says that she and her team started thinking about Next Wave 2012 in terms of generosity and urgency. “Urgency prompts us to make political work, while generosity is more complex—artists giving away parts of themselves and their ideas, often without reward.” Next Wave, with its mix of free and modestly priced ticketed events and the space it offers young artists to meet and challenge an audience bespeaks the political power of generosity. Sexton pays tribute to another kind of largesse, the advice received “from Next Wave alumni like Martyn Coutts, Willow S Wieland and Lara Thoms,” who in their own work in previous Next Waves, says Sexton, so effectively articulated cross-art practice which is, she emphasises, now no longer seen in terms of a clash of forms but as innate to contemporary practice.
Reading the Next Wave media kit I was struck by the sheer inventiveness, on paper, of many of the works soon to be realised. They include, from over 40 works, Team Mess’ Bingo Unit, participatory filmmaking and a backlot tour; Robin Hungerford’s Shamanic Organic Contemporary Cuisine cooking show; Talon Salon, an intimate audio theatre show and nail treatment in one, presented in an actual nail salon; The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a mock embassy (see p15); Fresh Produce, works presented in the Queen Victoria Market; Skye Gellman’s Blindscape, physical theatre experienced through iPhone and other intimacies; Creo Nova’s “proximity controlled xylophones, megaphone whirlwinds, singing plants and deep-sea gurglers”; and Tiffany Singh’s Drums between the Bells, one thousand strands of bells hanging from an elm tree in Melbourne’s City Square.
Zoe Meagher’s Goodbye, CSIRAC, in the Melbourne Museum, is a sound and performance work about Australia’s first computer “and its forgotten female operators”; Kel Mocilnik and Alison Currie go In the Pursuit of Repetition (fame and squalour) in a dance, visual and performance work for the duration of the festival beneath Federation Square; in Physical Fractals dancer Natalie Abbott and collaborator Rebecca Jensen “will produce intense sound effects by hurling microphones into the space and generating feedback from squeaky amplifiers”; in Exchange, Justin Shoulder will perform with Dewey Dell (Italy), an offshoot of Societàs Raffaello Sanzio; in The Warmth of the Curve, Michelle Sakaris explores cross-cultural walking practices; in Wheyface by Daniel ‘Room 328’ Santangeli, three post-apocalyptic curators “erroneously piece together the history of humankind”; and in Wintering, dancer Aimee Smith draws on her experience of the Arctic Circle to ask what it means “to live in a changing and disintegrating world?” And that’s a mere handful of works from a packed program that promises intense engagement, risk and dialogue.
book cover The Shadowcatchers, A History of Cinematography in Australia
THE BOOK WILL BE BEAUTIFUL. IT’S COFFEE TABLE BOOK SIZE, AND IT’S FILLED WITH OVER 380 PHOTOGRAPHS OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMATOGRAPHERS WORKING ON FILM SETS FROM ALMOST THE BIRTH OF CINEMA TO THE PRESENT.
There’s a rich and detailed text, covering the history of film production in Australia but told very much from the cinematographers’ perspective, and there are fascinating and often very funny biographical sketches of many of those who have worked behind the camera throughout that history.
It’s The Shadowcatchers: a Photographic History of Australian Cinematography, and when it is finally published next month it will be the culmination of an eight-year labour of love by the Australian Cinematographers’ Society and, in particular, ACS members Calvin Gardiner and Martha Ansara.
In the very comfortable ACS clubrooms in North Sydney I talked to Gardiner and Ansara about how the book came about. (These are clubrooms which are well used by the very involved ACS members; there’s a terrific library, excellent screening facilities where they view one another’s work and an extensive and fascinating collection of donated cameras and other film equipment.)
It’s well known that Australian film crews are hugely respected in the industry, both locally and overseas, cinematographers particularly so. (There are five Australian Academy Award-winning cinematographers: Dean Semler, Andrew Lesnie, Russell Boyd, John Seale and Dion Beebe.) In fact, as I say to them, the one person who has been absolutely essential to the making of a film since filmmaking began has been the one behind the camera.
Calvin Gardiner (“a superb cinematographer,” says Ansara) who was inducted into the ACS Hall of Fame in 2009, is a committee member of both the NSW and Federal Executive and was elected as NSW President in 2008. His father, Jack Gardiner, was also ACS Federal and State President.
lunatics, obsessives & individualists
Terry Gibson (driver), David Eggby (DOP), Mad Max (1979)
courtesy David Eggby
Terry Gibson (driver), David Eggby (DOP), Mad Max (1979)
Gardiner says, “that’s what the book is really about; the cinematographers—their lunacy, their obsessiveness, their individuality. It’s about the people; what they do, how they feel, what they do to get the job done. It tries to find out, but doesn’t quite answer the question, why do they have such high standards? It used to be a fairly carefree, larrikin, fuck you mate, I’ll do it my way attitude that prevailed,” he explained, “and it’s still there, but underneath, more concealed.” “Perhaps it is, as John Seale says, ‘something they put in the beer’,” adds Ansara.
While she says that Gardiner really instigated the book, they both put the idea to the ACS Committee, back in 2004. “The original idea was to have it ready for the 50th anniversary of the ACS, which was founded in 1958; but it was much harder, and took much longer, than we expected,” she explained.
from oral origins
Ansara had interviewed many cinematographers while recording their oral histories and this was a great starting point for the project. One of the first women in Australia to work as a cinematographer, she later became a director and producer of prize-winning social documentaries, also teaching film production and writing historical and critical articles on film for a range of publications. She was the founding convener of the Film & Broadcast Industries Oral History Group, and has contributed nearly 100 oral histories to the National Film & Sound Archive.
How did that start? I asked. “In 1977, when I was a cinematography student at AFTRS, we were required to write a paper, and I wanted to write one that would teach me something about the close-knit group of cinematographers who seemed to dominate everything in those days and who, it seemed then, would never accept a woman into their ranks,” she explained. “At that time, there was so little written information (still largely the case) that I had no other choice but to ask the older cinematographers to tell me their histories. Among them was Bill Trerise, who started in film as a spool boy at the Lyceum before the First World War. It was he who said, ‘They used to call us the Shadowcatchers,’ and so that’s what I called my very naive paper—and now this book.
Damian Parer, cinematographer
“It turns out, however, that any woman who demonstrates real ability and love of cinematography is accepted despite the prejudice. And today, the men who run the ACS, brought up as they have been in the fiercely masculinist culture of Australian cinematography, make that extra effort to respect and promote the work of women cinematographers. And I respect them all the more for doing so because they act out of a consciousness which doesn’t come naturally and in some ways goes against their upbringing. In the book, there is quite a lot about this upbringing—the apprenticeship in attitudes as well as skills—which, until relatively recently, was how young teenage boys became cameramen,” she says.
integral to the industry
Although she’d done the oral histories and talked to people who told her about how things really were, Ansara said that once she began the research she discovered just how integral to the industry the cinematographers were. “They shot the film, they directed, they had very little film so they’d shoot so that everything they brought back to the editor was useful. Up to the 60s,” she said, “the industry was actually driven by cameraman-directors, who not only made the films but formed companies. Most of the filmmaking was in reality workplace, corporate or industrial documentaries, commercials, filmmaking that lent itself to such small-scale operations.”
“In fact,” added Gardiner, “the production of commercials actually underpinned and supported local production until it was lost through the free trade changes, when people who didn’t understand its importance didn’t fight for its retention—although it was probably doomed, anyway. In the book we highlight the role of commercials and their importance in the wider industry—you really get to hone your storytelling skills when you have to tell a story in 15, 30, or 60 seconds!”
the making of shadowcatchers
“Producing the book,” Ansara said, “was like making a film. First we gathered our material—the interviews, my background research and over 4,000 pictures. Then we did an edit, choosing the photos we would use and organising them, and then we ‘added sound’—the text. It’s just like a film, except that it doesn’t move.”
And how did they get the photos? “We put out appeal after appeal to the members; we asked for great photos that were good in themselves and said something about the art of cinematography—and we got thousands,” said Gardiner. “Martha also researched the picture archives of the NFSA and Film Australia and found some great images, and we got some from the War Memorial. And still pictures kept coming in. We literally looked at over 4,000 photos to find the 380 that are in the book, what we hope are really good pictures that satisfy the criteria we’d established.”
“And getting the captions right! You’d sometimes have to practically dig someone out of their grave to get the correct details,” said Ansara, who only recently discovered a vital piece of information for a caption when chatting to someone at the Railway Film Festival at Eveleigh. “Luckily,’ she added, “some ACS members are amateur historians with stupendous memories.”
Much time was spent in checking captions, facts, redoing scans because they weren’t good enough. There was the drama of changing printers and the search for a better black. As Ansara explained, “cinematographers love their black! But really we knew we had to take a great deal of care, as this is a once in a lifetime production for the ACS, and it has to be as close to perfection as possible.”
the risk-takers
“While we all love looking at the pictures,” Ansara thinks that “really the book is about the human side of cinematography, about the relationships, about how people get to see all those amazing places in Australia. Because that’s what they get from shooting films—they go down coal mines and inside really strange houses and into the lonely outback. And tales of danger, and even death, just don’t deter them a bit. We have some pictures showing the incredibly dangerous situations they’ll get into, just to take a shot. They laugh at danger, do things you’d never do in normal life to get a picture. The obsession is to get the best picture possible, however possible.”
As Gardiner observed, “cinematographers are like a bikie gang in their relationships—the tight knit male group, the nicknames. But gradually women and people of non-English speaking background appear in the mix. There’s a background of collectivity, of independence, and of real pride in the work.”
Martha Ansara, The Shadowcatchers, A History of Cinematography in Australia, Australian Cinematographers Society, 2012, 288p, soft cover $66, hardbound limited edition signed by Academy Award-winning Australian cinematographers, $250; May launch date to be announced.
“IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR AN INITIATIVE LIKE THIS TO HAVE A CLEAR IDEOLOGY,” REFLECTS STEPHEN CLEARY, KEY CONSULTANT FOR THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN FILM CORPORATION’S AMBITIOUS FILMLAB PROGRAM. FILMLAB WAS LAUNCHED IN 2009 WITH THE AIM OF FUNDING EIGHT FEATURE FILMS BY NEW DIRECTING TALENT AT BUDGET LEVELS OF $350,000 EACH, A FIGURE AROUND FOUR PERCENT OF THE 2010 AVERAGE FOR FILMS MADE WITHIN THE COUNTRY, ACCORDING TO SCREEN AUSTRALIA.
The quest to find a distinct identity for each film, and to encourage each director to find their unique authorial voice, has been at the heart of an endeavour that has actively tried to invert the usual approach of public financiers. Cleary, former head of development at British Screen and devotee of Aristotle, starts with the broad principle: “FilmLab asks, ‘What type of filmmaker do you want to be?’”
The projects selected in the two rounds of FilmLab are starting to mature, mainly sitting at the latter stages of development or on the cusp of production. One has already seen the light of day and had very notable success: Matt Bate’s pop-grunge documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (RT107, p23) which premiered at Sundance in 2011 and has had multiple territory sales and national award recognition. As the seven slower-brewing fictional pieces will start to roll out in 2012 now seems a useful juncture to have a look at what the alternative approaches championed by FilmLab are, how they are playing out and how the scheme can contribute to a wider debate about how feature films are developed and financed in Australia.
taking the pressure off
The first philosophical underpinning Cleary outlines is to create an environment of non-competitiveness and to relieve pressure on the selected filmmakers as much as possible. Instead of an intensive, bureaucracy-heavy selection process requiring final script and full production package, FilmLab asks for one-page ideas and little else. Filmmakers are not pinned down to one particular project but are encouraged to explore a range of ideas during a four-week intensive “creative laboratory” and then receive a small allocation of development funding to grow their eventual film.
This creates the unusual situation where filmmakers find themselves guaranteed production funds before they have a script or even a firm idea of what they will make. Similarly, teams are not required to have or seek extra market finance attachments. “I’m always interested in questioning the assumptions of public funding development, to turn things over, to find better ways of doing things,” explains Cleary. “The assumption in the public system is that it should mimic the private market.” To his mind public funding systems in places such as Australia and the United Kingdom act as proxy private financiers, looking for film “packages,” or triggering their funds with the attachment of market investors, and as a result harvesting a competitive, first-past-the-post culture. “For low budget films, there’s no reason why this should be so. Let’s not make filmmakers think they have to go through some gateway.”
FilmLab flips this with its financial certainty at the earliest possible stage. “This leaves what happens with the money up to the filmmaker rather than the financier, and puts the power back in the hands of filmmakers.” With the usual financing pressures alleviated, creative freedom should flourish.
low budget strength
The second ideological form of FilmLab deals with the place of low budget films in the current cultural landscape, and primarily seeks to answer the question: how can a film be a stronger work because of, rather than despite, its low budget? For fake found-footage films such as Paranormal Activity (2007), the low budget is key to the authenticity of the film’s concept, but there must be other ways to answer this question for sophisticated and rapacious audiences. “We didn’t want to dictate an answer but to create a debate for the filmmakers to engage in,” says Cleary. “One of the most interesting things about FilmLab is that there are a lot of different filmmakers wrestling with that question and coming up with different solutions…some have gone radical and innovative in their approach and others are trying to make a film that looks like it has higher production value and is made in a more conventional way.”
identity, not branding
Cleary cites FilmLab 2009 project 52 Tuesdays (director Sophie Hyde) as an example of a radical methodological approach, with the filmmakers shooting for one day a week for a year the framework of one character undergoing a change in gender identity. The frame of the story is fictionalised but the character’s transformation is real. In this way the process of the dramatised work with ambient documentary elements becomes a marketing tool for festivals that often have selectors interested in how different craft practices impact on the artistic outcomes of cinema. Other projects such as the horror film Inner Demon (Ursula Dabrowsky) and the thriller Touch (Christopher Houghton) are looking to operate within the framework of a genre: “In low budget genre, the question becomes, is the filmmaker good enough in a generic sense to thrill or excite to the extent that budget becomes a non-issue?” Cleary believes that the lower the budget, the more important clear hooks and selling points become for a film. This doesn’t necessarily mean gimmickry, but creating a distinct identity for a film that is easily processed and understood. “I’m not talking about brand, as that’s something you put on top; identity is getting to the heart of who you are, what you want to do and therefore what kind of films you want to make…I also think there is a correlation with the bravery you show as a filmmaker and the distinction of identity that your film will have.”
theory into practice
FilmLab’s theories were put into practice in the intensive four-week laboratory. Teams were tasked with a mixture of practical filmmaking exercises as well as activities in other artistic disciplines. “The idea was to get people into unfamiliar territory, to have fun doing things you hadn’t thought of, to experiment and explore things from new angles.” So alongside shooting and cutting film sequences or truncated versions of their story ideas, teams also painted, sculpted and even sang in a choir. This happened alongside more traditional script development and project initiation to get both sides of the brain spinning into action.
The practical filmmaking elements of the development lab to test ideas and hone aesthetics and tone are rare in Australia. “Public funding development is usually a literary process,” says Cleary, “an understandable necessity of the assessment process as funders need to get through a pile of ideas.” As a result the visual storytelling of the artform itself, and directors, or at least the directorial process, can get backgrounded during the development stages. “The director goes from having a minor role in development to the primary role in production,” which can end in a disjointed, unbalanced process. The FilmLab process is one attempt to redress this balance.
Cleary stresses that FilmLab is not the answer to all the problems of development in the public funding sector, but is merely part of a dialogue as the industry undergoes significant change. “Low budget filmmaking is not going to go away…and I think possibly in the end [filmmaking practice] is not going to be in the hands of public funders at all, as the methodologies and processes of filmmaking become much more democratic. I think [FilmLab] is contributing to the debate, rather than leading it.” In the end he sees FilmLab as part of a longer game and snap judgments on its impact can’t be made on the films it generates. “Ultimately, the marker of success of FilmLab will be where all the directors will be in four years’ time.”
A WOMAN IN A BLONDE WIG WALKS INTO A CIRCLE OF LIGHTS AND CAMERAS. SHE STANDS, A RABBIT IN THE HEADLIGHTS, ISOLATED AND AT SOME DISTANCE FROM THE SHADOWY DOCUMENTARY FILM CREW WHO FOCUS ON HER. A DIRECTOR/INTERVIEWER SITS AT THE EDGE OF THE CIRCLE, HIS IDENTITY OBSCURED FROM THE VIEWER. IT’S A THEATRICAL BEGINNING TO BLACK & WHITE & SEX, THE DIRECTORIAL DEBUT OF PRODUCER JOHN WINTER (RABBIT-PROOF FENCE, DOING TIME FOR PATSY CLINE), AN AMBITIOUS EXPLORATION OF THE NATURE OF SEX WORK, SEX, WOMEN AND MEN.
Winter examines these themes through a dialogue between two characters: Angie, a sex worker (a role shared by Katherine Hicks, Anya Beyersdorf, Valerie Bader, Roxane Wilson, Michelle Vergara Moore, Dina Panozzo, Saskia Burmeister and Maia Thomas) and her nameless, faceless interviewer (Matthew Holmes). Initially, the mood between these two is tense, as Angie bats back the director’s simplistic questions in a way that confronts him and sets in motion the film’s aim of demonstrating that there’s nothing black and white about sex work (and, by extension, sex itself).
The director is clearly meant to represent us, specifically a middle class liberal audience with certain well-meaning preconceptions about prostitution. Angie’s job, of course, is to confound this audience’s expectations, playing provocateur to the interviewer’s devil’s advocate. It makes for an attention grabbing, if rather hectoring first act. It’s when the discussion progresses to more general matters sexual, with some grandiose statements about the nature of men and women, that things become problematic.
The director now seems to stand for a certain kind of emasculated manhood, while Angie becomes a spokeswoman for earthy female sexuality: “Women are pleasure and pain,” she declares, effectively pulling women into a world of sensation that cannot be understood by their drily cerebral male counterparts. It’s a hazy viewpoint that sits awkwardly with an earlier statement that she has a science degree (a revelation greeted by the interviewer with sniggering surprise).
Angie is mercurial, prone to evading the truth with elliptical statements. As a character she rather brings to mind the lyrics of that Billy Joel standard, “…she only reveals what she wants you to see/ She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.” The interviewer compares her with a butterfly: “You’re here, you’re there, you’re everywhere,” and later on a chameleon—“I never know who I’m going to get.”
There’s an element of fantasy to Angie perhaps in keeping with her line of work, which is, after all, about fulfilling fantasy, if only one as basic as the client believing she’s “getting off on it.” Winter creates a mystique around his many-faced “unattainable” call girl, even while seeming to want to demystify her chosen career. He fights stereotypes (the “hooker with a heart of gold”; the victimised prostitute) with other stereotypes (the majority of Angie’s personae).
On the whole, Black & White & Sex is best viewed as a symbolic exercise, with the various Angies representing different sexual archetypes—mature woman, dominatrix, ingenue, earth goddess—though these tend to blend into one another. In this way, we can accept the incident where Angie-as-dominatrix forces the interviewer to strip naked and masturbate as the ice breaker it’s meant to be, as opposed to a rather nasty piece of sexual humiliation. Like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), to which it bears a formal resemblance, the film is less an attempt at realism than a free-form exploration of its director’s attitudes and thoughts; a weighing-up of experience and opinions couched within the film-within-a-film format. It’s not a mockumentary, though it might appear to be at first glance.
At times, the film’s lack of realism deprives it of a rawness that would seem more in keeping with the subject matter: there’s a theatrical wordiness to these characters and their exchanges that makes them less believable as people than as mouthpieces for various arguments. This is ultimately a film about talking about sex. The character of the interviewer suffers particularly as a result of this treatment, making it difficult to share his revelatory journey. Nonetheless, Winter and his actresses are successful in their creation of a feisty, multi-faceted uber-whore. It’s in the larger questions about women, men and sex that the film’s purpose becomes lost.
Black & White & Sex premiered at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival, appeared in the Brisbane and Rotterdam International Film Festivals. Australian theatrical release March 22.
Black & White & Sex, director John Winter, cinematographer Nicola Daley, editor Adrian Rostirolla, music Caitlin Yeo, sound: Tony Vaccher, John Dennison, Craig Butters, costume designer, Yvonne Moxham, producers Melissa Beauford, John Winter, 2011
THE LATEST IN CURRENCY PRESS AND THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE’S AUSTRALIAN SCREEN CLASSICS, A SERIES OF COMPACT VOLUMES AIMING TO “MATCH SOME OF OUR BEST-LOVED FILMS WITH SOME OF OUR MOST DISTINGUISHED WRITERS AND THINKERS,” SEES WRITER FOR YOUNG ADULTS SONYA HARTNETT DELVE INTO DIRECTOR GREG MCLEAN’S BRUTAL WOLF CREEK (2005).
Her opening chapter, which details a pivotal childhood moment, is a powerful evocation of squalor and highlights an ugly aspect of the Australian psyche that, though usually hidden, is always ready to bare its teeth. Thus Hartnett demonstrates her own affinity with Wolf Creek’s darkness, as well as positioning the film as quintessentially Australian: “two-bit antipodean horror,” as she puts it.
This deeply felt beginning raises expectations for her analysis of the film, and in many respects we’re not disappointed. Hartnett’s elegantly measured prose matches Wolf Creek’s own controlled pacing and considered atmosphere, and she brings a poetic sensibility to material that some might think of as anything but. The vast meteorite crater at Wolf Creek is “a great wound from which a scab has been gouged.” As the film’s young travellers ride closer to their fate, “the road sign they pass is blacked-out, for they have ceased to exist in the known world.”
Throughout her narration of the film’s plot (more on this narration later), Hartnett sets the scene culturally and geographically. Italicised factual inserts about the Falconio disappearance and the Backpacker murders place the film’s events alongside their real-life counterparts in a way that creates a feeling of dread in the pit of the reader’s stomach. We are never in any doubt that Australia is a dangerous land, both in fact and in fiction. Paralleling the film’s deliberate weaving of imagined and actual events, Hartnett draws upon both cultural and historic examples in discussing the traditional white Australian fear of the bush that coalesces in the enduring theme of the lost child. These observations, though not original, are pertinent to the material.
“Home isn’t homely when it can’t be trusted,” Hartnett writes, effectively making Australia the embodiment of Freud’s unheimlich—the uncanny—and, as such, a natural backdrop for horror. This idea of a menacing, predatory land is extended to encompass its human monsters, men such as Bradley Murdoch and Ivan Milat, on whom Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor is modelled—men described here as “dust devils.”
In some of her most insightful passages, Hartnett alerts the viewer/reader to the disruption of typical horror narrative that makes Wolf Creek such a singular and unsettling experience. In the beginning, “the world being depicted is a replica of the real world, peopled with unremarkable characters, messy in its casualness, riddled with holes.” As in Hartnett’s novels, the writer is awake to Wolf Creek’s depiction of the indiscriminate nature of death.
If there’s a flaw in her approach, it comes perhaps in her decision to retell the film’s entire narrative chronologically and (if you’ll forgive the phrase) blow by blow. It’s understandable that a storyteller seeks to examine a film by telling its story, but frustrating for those readers already familiar with the film who are in search of something more theoretically meaty. The final chapter provides more in the way of straightforward criticism, with Hartnett dwelling lyrically on Wolf Creek’s subtlety and complex handling of character while simultaneously addressing its lapses in judgement. The moral ambiguities inherent in a film which takes real-life tragedy as its starting point are tackled here, as they must be, and through reference to her own work, Hartnett mounts a convincing, if qualified defence.
It is rare to come across a considered, empathetic account of a horror film, horror being a genre that usually provokes responses ranging from the flippant or asinine to the dismissive. Hartnett refers to Wolf Creek as “less a horror film than a film in which horrifying things happen.” While appreciating the distinction, for some of us this just makes Wolf Creek a particularly fine horror film. Interestingly, there is no mention of a couple of Wolf Creek’s cinematic forbears: Wake in Fright (the subject of Tina Kaufman’s book in the same series), an example of “two-bit antipodean horror” if ever there was one, and Picnic At Hanging Rock, which Wolf Creek deliberately references (though you could say Hartnett indirectly refers to the latter in her discussion of the lost child).
This is a personal reading, a storyteller’s account. The historical facts referred to will be familiar to an Australian audience, fascinating to those not from this country. What both will gain is an appreciation of the sophistication of a film that is more frequently spoken of in terms of its crude brutality.
Sonya Hartnett, Wolf Creek, Australian Screen Classics, Currency Press and the National Film and Sound Archive, Sydney, 2011
SHIFTING BETWEEN THE MEAN STREETS OF CAMBODIAN BEACH SHANTY TOWN SIHANOUKVILLE AND THE LEAFY EASTERN SUBURBS OF SYDNEY, WISH YOU WERE HERE IS A STYLISH THRILLER PRODUCED BY THE BLUE TONGUE FILMS TEAM (WHICH INCLUDES NASH AND JOEL EDGERTON) AND WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY KEIRAN DARCY-SMITH, WHOSE 1998 SHORT FILM BLOODLOCK WAS NOMINATED FOR AN AFI AWARD.
Dave (Joel Edgerton) and his wife Alice (Felicity Price in an elegantly measured performance) visit Cambodia with her sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr). After a wild night dancing under the moon and taking e’s, Jeremy disappears from the beach. As the days unfold, he fails to return. He’s listed as a missing person; it turns out none of the others really knew him. When the three return to Sydney, the film’s delicate structure gradually reveals the secrets they have been hiding from one another since that night.
Darcy-Smith and Felicity Price are a husband and wife team—and also the film’s screenwriters—and the writing and performances are particularly strong in the scenes where the couple’s family life (they have two small children) gradually unravels. The conversations around the dinner table capture the random, humorous, often surprising nature of dialogue with toddlers. And the conflict that erupts is convincing: a pregnant Alice drinks a bottle of wine as Dave loses his temper, accusing her of trying to kill their baby. The children watch as the couple’s relationship slowly disintegrates under the strain of Jeremy’s disappearance and Dave’s increasing paranoia.
What’s curious about the film is that there’s no great sense of loss at Jeremy’s disappearance—or even a real feeling that he’s missing; the tension doesn’t quite build from the beginning. Perhaps this is because the film so quickly shifts location from Cambodia to Sydney. We’re not there for those long days when minutes becomes hours; when time slows the way it does when you’re waiting for someone who doesn’t arrive, who never returns. Even the scenes with Jeremy’s parents, struggling to accommodate the news that he’s gone, are stilted—perhaps reflecting that all the characters in the end remain strangers to one another, while Jeremy can only be a mysterious figure, unknowable, untraceable.
Watching Edgerton in the central role I’m reminded of his similarly edgy performance in The Waiting City (director Claire McCarthy, 2009), an Australian film where the sense of waiting (in a foreign place, India) is palpable. In both films, there also seems to be another story waiting in the wings (from an Indian or Cambodian perspective) that’s just out of reach, tantalising: here, it’s the tale of the Vietnamese mafia, the brothel owner who parades a small girl for the Australian men who drink at his bar.
I’ve walked along the Sihanoukville beach at night, skinnydipping in the shadows. The shanty bars right on the ocean’s fringe give a wild-west frontier feel to the place. I caught a tuk-tuk ride at 3am back to my hotel, a friendly local only too happy to drop me off for a few American dollars. Even then I got the feeling that if you wanted to disappear, this would be the place to do it.
Wish You Were Here, director Kieran Darcy-Smith, writers Kieran Darcy-Smith, Felicity Price, producer Angie Felder, cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin, editor Jason Ballantine, production design Alex Holmes, costumes Joanna Park, music Tim Rogers; distribution Hopscotch Films, release April 25
“WHERE ARE THE BOB CONNOLLYS, THE TOM ZUBRYCKIS, THE DENIS O’ROURKES OF THIS GENERATION?” THIS WAS A QUESTION THAT EMERGING DIRECTOR/PRODUCER JENNIFER PEEDOM DEEMED “ALARMING,” WHEN SPEAKING ON THE “DEFINING DOCUMENTARY” PANEL AT THE 2012 AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY CONFERENCE.
Minutes earlier, despairing veteran director Bob Connolly had taken aim at what he considered the elephant in the room: “that increasing non-person (at the conference), the auteur.” Asked to comment on a legal stoush between production company Essential Media and Screen Australia, one driven by questions concerning eligibility for producer offset funds for documentary, Connolly expressed his dismay that such discussions concerning documentary form were driven by financial rather than artistic imperatives. Peedom went on to describe her forced existence as ‘gun for hire,’ rather than independent filmmaker, evidence of what Connolly described as a shift away from independent voices in favour of agencies and broadcasters contracting with corporate entities.
“Defining Documentary” was one of several panel discussions running alongside keynote addresses in which a variety of national and international speakers discussed the current climate of documentary production and distribution. Connolly was not alone in foregrounding the challenges for independent and emerging filmmakers. Julia Overton (Jotz Productions), recipient of this year’s Stanley Hawes Award for outstanding contribution to the documentary sector in Australia, acknowledged a lack of mentoring and support for young locals, a situation she sees linked to the 2008 merging of the nation’s former ‘big three’ agencies into Screen Australia. Acknowledging the current difficulties associated with producing one-off documentaries, Overton stressed the need for producers to widen their search for funding, commenting that at the end of the day, “it’s all about storytelling.”
f4: first factual film festival
Now in its second year, the First Factual Film Festival (F4), a documentary screening program running in conjunction with AIDC, has expanded to include public screenings as part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Billed as an “unrivalled professional development opportunity for Australia’s emerging documentary filmmaking talent,” the festival showcases first films from talented Australians alongside the work of more experienced international conference guests.
From four finalists (chosen from 70 entries), the F4 Award for Outstanding New Documentary Talent was this year awarded to 26-year-old South Australian filmmaker Paul Gallasch for Killing Anna. In this 29-minute film, Gallasch as protagonist tracks his heartbreak and despair following the break-up with his first long term girlfriend, Anna. Constructing a bizarre fantasy as a way to understand his loss, Gallasch decides to stage a funeral service for Anna, pretending that she has died in a tragic accident. The film covers the lead up to this event through interviews with friends, family and strangers, and then the aftermath. Ultimately disappointed with his funeral service undertakings, Gallasch questions the social acceptance of grief associated with relationship breakdowns, remarking that ultimately, the only people who care are the two parties involved in the split.
Seemingly living in a rundown Brooklyn NY neighbourhood at the time, Gallasch’s method involved carrying the camera with him for four months, during which time he was a student at the New York Film Academy. Drawing on the work of Werner Herzog, Killing Anna combines a range of storytelling devices including narration, direct address to camera, interviews and recreations, perhaps reflecting Gallasch’s progression as a filmmaker. The incorporation of footage of his editing processes means that as well as being about loss, the piece questions the process of film construction itself. In a search for authenticity Gallasch wrote more than 8,000 words of narration on the subject of grief: “I wrote the film trying to rationalise the loss and then realised I couldn’t.” What he has managed to do is articulate a grieving process that defies logical explanation in an exceptional and surprising manner. On behalf of the F4 jury, Claire Jager praised the film’s “original and bold premise” and “the playfulness of the filmmaker’s shifting relationship to the camera and the audience.”
David Tucker’s My Thai Bride, a 52-minute documentary that received a special commendation from the F4 jury, also tracks a relationship breakdown. The story centres on Ted, a 46-year old salesman from Wales, who when visiting Thailand on business, meets and falls in love with Tip, a bargirl. The two decide to marry and despite a happy beginning, things soon turn sour. As both Ted’s money and Tip’s affections dwindle, he realises that the marriage was a mistake, and eventually returns to the UK destitute. Tip remains in the village house they built together, having gained some financial security as a result of the experience. Although giving more screen time to Ted, Tucker presents both protagonists without taking sides, creating a sense that a cultural misunderstanding is at the heart of the problem. Although Ted has lost his fortune at the end of the story, one is left to ponder who is worse off in the long term considering the poverty in Tip’s village.
It is impossible to consider Tucker’s engaging work without making comparisons with Denis O’Rourke’s landmark 1991 film The Good Woman of Bangkok, which also interrogated the sex trade in Thailand. My Thai Bride differs, however, in its focus on the emotional journey of the male at the heart of the story, revealing that, in Tucker’s words, “sex tourists have feelings too.” In a Q&A session Tucker described Ted’s eagerness to set the record straight, commenting that there are a lot of western guys like Ted but there is no solidarity between them as their situation is humiliating. I was surprised to learn that much of the film was shot in retrospect, with Tucker, then living in Thailand, only meeting the couple as they were splitting up in 2006. The filmmaker recreates their initial meeting, drawing upon a collection of still photographs and narration. On the filmmaker’s return to Australia, Michael Cordell came on board as executive producer and a successful Screen Australia investment meant funds to undertake additional photography and finish the film. The result is a powerful work that sheds new light on a complex issue.
It is interesting to note that both Tucker’s and Gallasch’s outstanding films were conceived of, developed and largely undertaken without any government funding, a situation that is clearly not unusual for first time documentary makers; here it certainly does seem to be all about storytelling. Debates undertaken at AIDC 2012 raise some worrying questions as to just where these Australian filmmakers might go next.
AIDC, Australian International Documentary Conference, 2012, Stamford Grand Hotel, Glenelg, Feb 27-March 1; F4 2012, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, March 2-4
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
TRAVELLING BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT IS NOT AN EXPERIENCE WE TYPICALLY ASSOCIATE WITH COMFORT. AT ITS BEST CONVENIENT, AND AT ITS WORST FRIGHTENING, THIS DAILY RITUAL SEES HORDES OF URBAN COMMUTERS SILENTLY SLALOM THEIR WAY THROUGH MOMENTS OF PHYSICAL PROXIMITY AND PSYCHICAL DETACHMENT, HOPING FOR A CLEAR RUN.
It’s a jungle in here (2011), created by longtime collaborators Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, uses the familiar experience of a suburban train journey to explore ideas of empowerment, complicity and individual and collective responsibility in public space. Drawing on the artists’ own personal experiences on public transport, as well as those of their friends, It’s a jungle in here is an equally enchanting but more conceptually rigorous follow-up to the duo’s You Were in My Dream (2010), winner of the coveted Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award. Their latest interactive animation debuted at Screen Space for the 2011 Melbourne International Arts Festival.
A stop-motion animation made from paper puppets and a diorama, It’s a jungle in here harnesses similar technology to that employed in You Were in My Dream. Approaching the installation in pairs, participants unwittingly become involved in an ambiguous psychodrama, casting themselves in the role of either attacker or victim, depending on the seat they choose. The attacker is provided with a console button to advance the action, while the victim can yell into a microphone to derail the attack. A live video feed maps each of the users’ faces onto a different animated character, blatantly implicating them in the conflict.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here, installation view
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here, installation view
The animation is housed within a wooden peepshow cabinet: a handcrafted ‘wonder box’ with just enough old-world charm to lure participants in and encourage play. At the same time however, the structure also gestures towards less innocent, contemporary live-action exchanges. More than just encouraging an active subjectivity, the peepshow box establishes the voyeuristic mode of spectatorship necessary for the work’s unsettling narrative thrust. Both users are immediately forced into a very physical mode of looking, manoeuvering their faces into peepholes, craning necks to absorb the scene from different angles, and focusing and refocusing to register the animation’s intricate detail. It’s a jungle in here thus forces an awareness of the very act of spectatorship, and the power, complicity and responsibility it demands.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
In the first vignette, a male character fiddles loudly with his mobile phone, which raises the ire of a fellow passenger. Before long, a fistfight ensues. When the victim-player remains silent or quiet, the on-screen attacker suddenly morphs into a grizzly bear, bloodily mauling the man on the carriage floor. When the player uses the microphone to signal distress, their avatar suddenly transforms into a turtle, retracting into a hardened shell to protect itself against the predator.
Other confrontations enacted in the animation include a lecherous man forcing physical contact with a female passenger, and a gaggle of boisterous schoolgirls shooting spitballs and bubblegum. In the second scenario, the harasser’s hands become snakes that slither into the woman’s blouse. In the final scene, the schoolgirls metamorphose into carnivorous black crows, filling the cramped carriage with a murderous flapping. Significantly, throughout each altercation the surrounding travellers all cower silently, immobilised in their seats.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
courtesy the artists
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here
More than providing the focus for a meditation on the precarious relationship between humanity and animality, civilisation and chaos, the animal characters imbue the work with a seductive and fanciful beauty. It’s a jungle in here manipulates the participants’ allegiances and expectations at every turn, diluting the meaning and power of their violent actions through its sweet, picture-book aesthetic and whimsical calls to fantasy. By turns beautiful, dreamy, creepy and brutal, the work turns the ‘space of exception’ occupied by videogames and online social spaces in on itself, and in so doing, reveals how deeply those conventions are ingrained in the spectator psyche. In this way, It’s a jungle in here is startlingly effective in articulating an ethics of participation, both within the virtual world and outside it.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, It’s a jungle in here, coding, interface electronics Matthew Gingold, carpentry, engineering Don Russell, sound Finn Robertson, additional coding Oliver Marriot; Screen Space, Melbourne, Oct 13-29 2011
AFTER AN EXHAUSTIVE REVIEW PROCESS, WHICH INVOLVED SEVERAL ROUNDS OF CONSULTATIONS, AN ISSUES PAPER AND A DISCUSSION PAPER AND HUNDREDS OF SUBMISSIONS TO BOTH, THE AUSTRALIAN LAW REFORM COMMISSION HAS SEEN ITS FINAL REPORT ON THE ENQUIRY INTO AUSTRALIA’S CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM, THE FIRST FOR 20 YEARS, TABLED IN FEDERAL PARLIAMENT LAST MONTH.
While the ALRC’s recommendations do not automatically become law, and while the government will probably take several other reviews (including the important Convergence Review) into account when it decides whether and when to take action on classification, the ALRC has certainly made some brave and eminently sensible recommendations which would dramatically haul an outmoded and cumbersome system into the digital age.
“Australia needs a new classification scheme that applies consistent rules to media content on all platforms—in cinemas, on television, on DVDs and on the internet,” said Professor Terry Flew, Commissioner in charge of the ALRC review, “but the scheme also needs to be flexible, so it can adapt to new technologies and the challenges of media convergence.”
The report, Classification—Content Regulation and Convergent Media, contains 57 recommendations which would see the current complex array of classification guidelines for films, TV programs, computer games, publications and online content replaced by a streamlined, single classification system, run by the Commonwealth Government. There would be a common set of markings and criteria, using the same categories and guidelines, for all content, whether it is viewed on television, at the cinema, on DVD or online. A much greater role for industry in both the classification of content and in the development of co-regulatory codes is also proposed, informed by the fact that self-regulation has worked well for television for some years. Measures would also be introduced to remove the need to reclassify films and TV programs when they are re-released on DVD. While film festivals would remain exempt from classification, they would still be required to exclude people under 18 from unclassified films.
Recognising that media convergence, digital delivery and online distribution have irrevocably altered the landscape, as has the exponential increase in available content, the ALRC commenced the enquiry taking into account a number of issues. They range from the rapid pace of technological change in media available to, and consumed by, the Australian community, and the needs of the community in this evolving technological environment, to ways to improve available classification information and enhance public understanding of regulated content. This would be balanced by the need to minimise the regulatory burden and by the desirability of a strong content and distribution industry in Australia. Most important, of course, were the impact of media on children and their increased exposure to a wider variety of media, from television, music and advertising to films and computer games.
The ALRC also identified guiding principles in the provision of an effective framework for the classification and regulation of media content. They are: that Australians should be able to read, hear, see and participate in media of their choice; that communications and media services available to Australians should broadly reflect community standards, while recognising a diversity of views, cultures and ideas in the community; that children should be protected from material likely to harm or disturb them; that consumers should be provided with information about media content in a timely and clear manner, and with a responsive and effective means of addressing any concerns; that the classification regulatory framework should be responsive to technological change and adaptive to new technologies, platforms and services, should not impede competition and innovation, and not disadvantage Australian media content and service providers in international markets; that classification regulation should be kept to the minimum needed to achieve a clear public purpose; and that classification regulation should be focused upon content rather than platform or means of delivery.
Out of all this came the key features in the report: platform-neutral regulation with one set of laws across all media platforms; clear identification of what must be classified (feature films, television programs, and computer games likely to be MA 15+ or higher, made and distributed on a commercial basis, and likely to have a significant Australian audience); a shift in regulatory focus to restricting access to adult content, by imposing new obligations on content providers to take reasonable steps to restrict access to adult content and to promote cyber-safety; and co-regulation and industry classification, subject to regulatory oversight There is also Classification Board benchmarking, with a clear role for the Board in making independent classification decisions that reflect community standards, and the important proposal for a federal government scheme to replace the current co-operative scheme (between federal, state and territory governments) with enforcement coming under Commonwealth law, and a single regulator with primary responsibility for over-seeing the new scheme.
“Classification criteria should also be reviewed periodically, to ensure they reflect community standards,” said Professor Flew. “One category that may no longer align with community standards is “Refused Classification” or RC. The scope of this category should be narrowed, and the ALRC suggests changes for government to consider.”
ALRC President, Professor Rosalind Croucher has pointed out that Australians value classification information about films, computer games and television programs, and that “the new scheme will continue to deliver this important advice. The ALRC has recommended a balanced approach, recognising that it is not practically possible in a digital age to classify everything. An effective scheme of content regulation must address this context…(while expecting) content providers to take reasonable steps to restrict access to adult content, so that children are better protected from material that might harm or disturb them.”
While the submissions received during the enquiry offered a huge range of opinions, ranging from no need for classification at all, and the impossibility of classifying or containing internet content, to the need for more control and more stringent regulation, the ALRC has come up with substantial recommendations which, if adopted, will provide a sensible, flexible and more streamlined framework for the classification and regulation of media content. We now must wait and see what actually eventuates.
There’s definitely a prince involved, Gideon Obarzanek
photo Jeff Busby
There’s definitely a prince involved, Gideon Obarzanek
INFINITY KICKS OFF THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET’S GOLDEN JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS WITH A TRIPLE BILL ENCAPSULATING OUR COUNTRY’S CONTEMPORARY DANCE CULTURE. FROM ABSTRACT BALLET TO PULLING THE FEATHERS FROM SWAN LAKE TO A COLLABORATION WITH BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE, INFINITY EMBRACES POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION AND ENDS ON A SOULFUL HIGH NOTE. THE THREE PIECES ARE VASTLY DIFFERENT BOTH VISUALLY AND THEMATICALLY, YET STRIVE TO SHARE A UNIQUELY AUSTRALIAN POINT OF VIEW OF BALLET.
Graeme Murphy’s The Narrative of Nothing shuns conventional storylines and is inspired by the score, Brett Dean’s sometimes extraordinary and, some might say difficult or even discordant, Fire Music. Murphy handpicked his favourite dancers, some of whom caught his eye in his production of Romeo & Juliet. His choreography explores the human impulse to create stories from abstract work; in lieu of an actual narrative, we thread together our own. Boxes of stage lights, almost unisex costumes and Dean’s score give the performance a kind of dystopian feel. Dancer Adam Bull stands beneath a single globe that sways in an expanding circle; lit from above, he’s a perfect, anonymous figure: a living, breathing Oscar statue. Where the score clangs like construction workers on a skyscraper, the dancers are all speed and strength, either angular and hard or fluid, like molten steel. In this science-fiction world (my ballet date thought Space Odyssey, whereas I leant towards Metropolis) there are flashes of competitiveness or struggle, an unsupported head-hold of Lana Jones in a pas de deux and male-only groupings that occasionally threaten to spill into affray. Though it can be a daunting task to sustain audience interest in non-narrative performance, Murphy overcomes this with original, exciting choreography.
In There’s definitely a prince involved, Gideon Obarzanek deconstructs Swan Lake. Underscoring it with dialogue, initially as a dig at our lack of knowledge of the (seemingly ridiculous) plot of the world’s best known ballet, he too questions the role of narrative in ballet. The dialogue is less effective when it deals with the Swan’s theme of idealised romantic love via dancers’ confessions. In revisiting and pulling apart the choreography of Swan Lake (1877; but most versions derive from the1895 version), we see how potent the source is as cultural fodder (Black Swan, anyone?) and as arguably the pinnacle of narrative ballet. Obarzanek isn’t wringing the Swan’s neck but rather asking the audience to reconsider what ballet is. There were laughs at the image of a prince bringing a swan home as a date, and how irrelevant plot digressions allow the dancers to display their technical prowess in brilliant sautes. In a tribute to the dance of the cygnets, the splendour of the original is highlighted by stellar performances. Madeline Estoe is magnetic as a deconstructed Odette.
There are several complex ideas here. The fussy, satin court costumes are at odds with designer Alexi Freeman’s incredibly free-flowing, tasselled and almost naked costumes, which dancers use to full effect. This demonstrates a disjuncture between classic and contemporary ballet—the reliance on narrative, the heavy weight of the past, particularly on borrowed European notions. Freed of these, dance can be stripped bare to pure movement. Amid all these questions, Obarzanek shows us he can pull together a satisfying ballet.
The closing work, Waramuk—in the dark of night, marks the third collaboration between Bangarra Dance Theatre and The Australian Ballet, and is a fitting close to Infinity with its melancholy beauty and visual romance. Choreographer Stephen Page has been reinvigorating traditional storytelling for two decades with Bangarra, yet here ballet is the beneficiary of a new breath of life. The stories of the Yolngu of Arnhem Land speak of the link between spirituality and the land: in this ballet, the creation stories centre on the moon and constellations, myths which may be millennia old but are largely unknown to most audiences.
Rich in symbolism—a rope connects the sky and earth, or the spirit world and reality—and, informed by a dance language that borrows from Indigenous movement, Waramuk confidently avoids stereotypes. As the Evening Star, Vivenne Wong is heart-achingly graceful in bridging two genres of dance, while Elma Kris brings strength and emotion to her role as a Mother Earth figure. David Page’s haunting score of recorded voice and orchestral music, combined with the shimmering, shifting backdrops by Jacob Nash, transfix us. There were definitely goosebumps involved.
Infinity plays at the Sydney Opera House, April 5-25
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Australian Ballet, Infinity, The Narrative of Nothing, choreography Graeme Murphy, creative associate Janet Vernon, composer Brett Dean, stage and lighting design Damien Cooper, costumes Jennifer Irwin, sound Bob Scott; There’s definitely a prince involved, choreography Gideon Obarzanek after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, music Stefan Gregory after Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, costumes Alexi Freeman with Caroline Dickinson, stage concept Benjamin Cisterne, Gideon Obarzanek, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, original sets Hugh Colman; Waramuk—In the Dark Night, choreography Stephen Page, music David Page, costumes Jennifer Irwin, set design Jacob Nash, lighting Padraig O Suilleabhain, sound design Bob Scott; Orchestra Victoria; Arts Centre, State Theatre, Melbourne, Feb 26-March 6
Ros Warby (image 3 – with Ria Soemardjo), The Tower Suites
photo Calista Lyon
Ros Warby (image 3 – with Ria Soemardjo), The Tower Suites
THREE BODIES ENTER THE SPACE. MY EYE IS DRAWN TO THE CORPOREAL BEARING OF EACH PERFORMER, TO THE WAYS IN WHICH EACH BODY BECOMES PERFORMATIVE.
Ria Soemardjo sings. Her whole body becomes voice. There is a kind of simplicity to her physicality that makes space for the sound to emerge as pure affect. It is different with Helen Mountfort. There is something baroque about the whole thing, the curlicues of the cello, the space between the musician and her instrument, the compositional nature of the music. In Ros Warby’s case, the body is a staging ground for many different kinds of event. It begins discombobulated, a body in bits and pieces becoming organised. Ironically, it takes a great deal of skill to allow the body to unravel so as to stage its own organisation, rather like giving birth to oneself. But then, Warby is not shy of a challenge. Her focus, in its protean forms, keeps this intricate work together.
Tower Suites is collaborative. Its multiplicity of elements—cello, voice, film and dance—guide our perceptions. The elements each come to the fore and recede. The film lends weight to our seeing. That is after all its domain. At first, I was unsure whether to privilege Warby’s dancing, how to incorporate the other onstage bodies that don’t dance yet orient themselves to their own domain of art-making. But the processional nature of the first set of images, people in ritual dress moving along, allowed me to unite the group rather than consider each one severally. By the end, we all grasp the relationships that undergird Tower Suites.
Yet, this isn’t about relations between the women. Warby makes the work through a very specific choreography which draws upon a range of artistic qualities, sounds, images and affects. These are all different events, activities which draw in the soulful singing of Soemardjo, duet with Mountfort’s compositions and utilise a palimpsest of images (Margie Medlin), mixing history with colour shots of Warby’s own dancing.
Warby threads time by building fine movement that travels across space. The pull of a curtain entangling her legs evokes all the elegance of deco drapery in silhouette. She has a kind of commedia del arte character, a bittersweet condensation of human foibles. A repeated falling echoes the filmic citation of collapsing buildings, creating a certain kind of abstraction against the very historical imagery.
For Ros Warby, dancing is not enough. Her choreography seeks to incorporate more than itself. It swallows up Warby’s face, incorporating sound, voice and image. As a result, there is a richness to Tower Suites, which is emotional, sensory and personal.
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Tower Suites, created by Ros Warby in collaboration with Helen Mountfort, Margie Medlin, and Ria Soemardjo; choreography, performance Ros Warby, light, projection, set design Margie Medlin, composition, cello Helen Mountfort, voice Ria Soemardjo, cinematography Ben Speth; Arts House, North Melbourne, February 22-26
IS THERE ANY AUSTRALIAN CHOREOGRAPHER WITH A PHYSICAL GRAMMAR AS DISTINCTIVE AS ANTONY HAMILTON?
Not that he’s the most original shapemaker or that he hasn’t absorbed the influences of many of his peers and mentors. But there’s no-one quite like Hamilton, for both better and worse. He’s pursued a particular method of pop-and-lock staccato, freeze-and-reverse repetition and an organic/mechanic blurring so rigorously and for so long that not only has it become a signature, it’s become one that no-one else can forge. It always makes for compelling viewing when he’s demonstrating the results of his investigations, but when he choreographs on others they can never quite match the man himself.
Thankfully in Hamilton’s collaboration with Melanie Lane, the double bill Clouds Over Berlin, he seems to have melded minds with someone developing an art equally as striking. In Hamilton’s Black Project 1, Lane is still at times a nanosecond away from matching his stop-start brilliance, but in her own Tilted Fawn she delivers an experience quite unlike the various threads that have been woven through Australian choreography of the last decade.
There’s a mythic quality to the work which reveals itself coyly, and it’s as cool and inhuman as true myths always end up being. The audience sits in the round, bordering a space populated only by a few dozen cardboard bricks the size of shoeboxes. Lane methodically shifts and stacks and shuffles these, her movements concise and efficient enough to allow the inert objects as much presence as her own body. But gradually the onlookers become positioned as insubstantial gods watching the accelerated architectonics of human activity, each new structural formation engendering new associations. Stonehenge, a highrise ghetto, a walled estate, the Twin Towers? Sounds begin to emerge from the tiny edifices: music, whispers, conflict. The referents are never made explicit but it’s hard not to fashion your own interpretation of each configuration presented, and the cold, closed nature of these depictions subtly shifts its audience into a position of meditative spectatorship that allows us to forget our own corporeality.
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
photo Maik Reichert
Melanie Lane, Tilted Fawn
Then Lane returns as a violent, excessive vision of that vanquished bodily reality, clad in a pale and featureless skinsuit with elongated hooves that cause her to stagger across the space. The wildness of her motion extends so extremely in all dimensions that it’s almost overpowering, and the constant collapse of each ankle isn’t just resonant with the image of the tottering newborn fawn but conjures a whole species of flailing, howling, confused beings up till now sublimated by the fairy village of urban planning.
Life remains absent from Black Project 1, however. Hamilton and Lane appear as gleaming black wraiths making their way across a post-urban wasteland. It’s a vision that gestures to the choreographer’s earlier interests—aerosol art, digital tech, breakdance—while stripping away any literal referents. The dance itself may be Hamilton’s most developed and sustained exploration of his own practice; certainly, its realisation occurs in a set and lighting state that is as immediately impactful as any I can recall. It’s less curious, perhaps even less generous than Lane’s effort, but in tandem the pair make for a bewitching penumbral experience both stirring and unsettling.
Read another review of Tilted Fawn at Perth’s Fringe World on page 7.
Clouds over Berlin: Tilted Fawn, choreography, concept, performer Melanie Lane, sound composition, installation Chris Clark, artistic collaboration Morgan Belenguer, dramaturgy Bart van der Eynde, costume, props Melanie Lane, lighting design Max Stelzl; Black Project 1, choreography, concept, design Antony Hamilton, peformers Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, video projection Olaf Meyer, music Robert Henke, Vainio and Fennesz, costumes Antony Hamilton; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 7-11
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 pg. 25
Radio Muezzin, Rimini Protokoll
photo courtesy Rimini Protokoll
Radio Muezzin, Rimini Protokoll
SITTING IN THE DARK WE EXPERIENCE THE SOUNDS AND VIBRATIONS OF THE AZAN, OR CALL TO PRAYER, SUNG BY THREE MUEZZINS FROM SEPARATE CORNERS OF THE AUDITORIUM. EVENTUALLY EACH SINGER IS REVEALED BY A SPOTLIGHT. THROUGH A MÉLANGE OF INTERMINGLING MELODIES, RHYTHMS AND TEMPI, ABDELMOTY ABDELSAMIA, HUSSEIN GOUD AND MANSOUR ABDELSALAM EVOKE FOR US THE SOUNDSCAPE OF CAIRO.
This is the opening of Radio Muezzin (RT107, p3), a documentary performance directed by Stefan Kaegi of Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll. Since 2000, directors Kaegi, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel have worked in a wide range of collaborative partnerships, producing diverse and acclaimed forms of socially-engaged performance. Through Radio Muezzin, and the upcoming production in May of 100% Melbourne, Australian audiences are able to experience first hand Rimini’s unique version of Reality Theatre. This currently prominent mode of performance engages with the ‘facts’ of social reality, particularly through representing contemporary people. The representations may involve a scripted text based on interviews and documents and/or the literal appearance of the people themselves in real-life sites. What is distinctive about Rimini’s version of Reality Theatre is their replacement of professional actors with people who are specialists in other fields of life. Working with these “experts of the everyday,” Rimini open up live encounters between people unfamiliar with each other within a globalised world.
While the local adaptations of the 100% series offer insights into the seemingly familiar aspects of one’s own city, Radio Muezzin (2008–) allows a glimpse of an Egypt inaccessible to many, one inhabited by four muezzins and a radio engineer, Sayed Abdellatif. Through carefully orchestrated autobiographical stories, the presentation of religious rituals, still images, video footage and soundscape, we gain diverse insights, mainly into the lives of the less visible members of Egypt’s institutionalised Islamic faith. These ‘good souls’ of the mosque introduce us to their daily responsibilities, including housekeeping tasks, and their religious roles as teachers of the Qur’an and callers of the azan.
During the production the audience are made aware that the visibility of these muezzins is likely to be diminished even further, for, as Sayed informs us, the azan in Cairo “will no longer be called from thousands of voices but will be broadcast via radio.” As in other works by Rimini, the homogenising nature of such centralisation processes is a key concern. So too is the related issue of censorship—the withholding of information and the making absent and silencing of citizens that can accompany such centralisation. The theme of silencing is later sounded again when Mohamed Ali, a young socially empowered muezzin who only appears in a highly mediated way (via footage, sound recording and a performer who reads out his text), announces: “[t]o avoid the different voices and times the Ministry [for Religious Affairs] has decided that only one man is to call people to each prayer.” He also declares himself to be one of the 30 trained voices selected to perform this role. These brief and dispersed comments from the engineer and muezzin leave much to the imagination. For example, the reasons for the changes, date of their completion and the economic consequences are never fully fleshed out. Will the men stand to lose their jobs, or ‘only’ their public prayer voice?
As is typical of Rimini’s work, Radio Muezzin rarely presents its political and cultural concerns in a didactic manner. In part this approach stems from sensitivity to the political context and to the personal needs and safety of the experts. In the last section of the performance the production overtly acknowledges the impact of regulatory forces that limited what could be said and shown. During the blind muezzin Hussein Gouda’s rendition of a religious song, statements—presumably from the Ministry—roll silently in Arabic (accompanied by English surtitles) across the streetscape footage on the upstage screen, telling us some of what the authorities saw fit to ban: “On the screens there should be no donkeys or dogs. And also no garbage or actors. Muezzins cannot play dominoes on stage…What can’t be said in the presence of one’s mother, sister, daughter or wife one should not say in front of any woman.”
The muezzin’s function as a role model for the Egyptian citizenry and ambassador for Islamic faith is perhaps one reason why the protagonists’ political opinions and differences are only partially revealed. For example, we learn that Mohamed Ali left the show after coming into conflict with the other muezzins, but the details of the dispute are never divulged. The partial concealment here is one of the ways Rimini work to ensure that the act of making an unfamiliar person visible does not slip into the terrain of dangerous or exploitative spectacle.
Rimini’s interest in ensuring voice and visibility is memorably embodied in one of the final images of the show where the live experts (and the performer who sometimes reads the missing muezzin’s text) stand silently facing the audience alongside a large loudspeaker. Out of the ‘mouth’ of this technology we hear a recording of Mohamed Ali calling the azan, while in the background is footage of Muslim men praying with their backs to us in a street. On one level the episode can be received as a protest against forms of centralisation that make some humans (including women) partially redundant or invisible. Yet, the radio system also disseminates a powerful and beautiful voice, and, in combination with the recording and film technologies, provides broad access to a significant mode of singing and religious ritual.
In a manner typical of Rimini Protokoll’s theatre, this image from the concluding section never congeals into a simple assertion about human relations with technology. For us, both the image and the show presented the possibility of a careful intertwining of humans with machines, as modelled by Sayed the engineer, and by the elderly muezzin Abdelmoty, who while working as an electrician managed electricity’s positive and negative force. Such an interaction is also pursued by Rimini through a dialogue between the experts’ (live and mediated) bodies; the technologies of their environments featured in the show—such as the rotating fans, vacuum cleaners, clocks that tell the prayer times and the green fluorescent lighting of Cairo’s mosques; and the audio-visual technologies that help create Rimini’s stage worlds.
The non-didactic images and information gaps within Radio Muezzin also invite spectators to actively develop their own meanings. Rather than a dramaturgy based around conflict and its resolution, Rimini Protokoll frequently uses a segment-oriented structure where autobiographical commentaries offer only partial access to the performers’ actions, choices and statements and where on-stage dialogue is replaced by the juxtaposition of statements given in direct address to the audience. For example, the muezzins’ views of recent political change in Egypt are dispersed throughout the piece as snippets rather than being presented in a sustained exchange of differing opinions. While this dramaturgy of fragmentary information prompted us to engage in ongoing meaning-making, on occasion the holey fabric left us too uncertain about the nature of what was at stake for the muezzins, for Rimini Protokoll and for Egypt.
100% melbourne
100% Köln, Rimini Protokoll
photo courtesy Rimini Protokoll
100% Köln, Rimini Protokoll
The individual human being is also put in the spotlight in Rimini’s 100% city series. Like previous shows in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Vancouver (RT102), Vienna and Cologne, 100% Melbourne will seek to give the individual a voice and a face which otherwise tends to disappear behind the statistical pie charts and graphs that are used to depict the masses for, say, political cost-benefit analyses. Rimini only chooses the first person, who then initiates a personalised statistical chain reaction by selecting an acquaintance in accordance with criteria drawn from the local statistics office. The acquaintance in turn proposes one further person, and so on, until the cast of 100 creates a mosaic of a city according to gender, age, ethnicity and suburb.
Having representatives of individual suburbs on stage, each performance can address local interests and concerns that are also shared—often enthusiastically—by their audience. After an initial self-introduction, these issues are introduced via survey-type questions, to which the individuals on stage respond by arranging themselves in groups or holding up signs. While this presentation is a clear display of individual and collective opinions, potential reasons for or tensions between the individual responses shown on stage generally have remained unexplored. For example, in 100% Köln the experts’ majority vote in favour of the recently completed mosque in their city sits without explanation alongside their lack of a majority for a public call to prayer. In the case of 100% Melbourne it will be interesting to see what issues Rimini Protokoll will leave quietly resonating in the air.
100% Melbourne by Rimini Protokoll, with the support of the Goethe-Institut and Arts Victoria, will be presented at the Melbourne Town Hall, May 4-6, 2012. In conjunction with this event, on May 5 the Goethe-Institut Melbourne will host a panel discussion, “100% Rimini Protokoll: Cutting-edge Documentary Theatre that puts ‘Real Melbournians’ on the Stage.” For further information about the company’s work see: www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/
Rimini Protokoll, Radio Muezzin, Seymour Centre, Everest Theatre, Sydney Festival, January 16-21; 100% Melbourne, Melbourne Town Hall, May 4-6
MELBOURNE-BASED KATE DENBOROUGH AND GERARD VAN DYCK’S PHYSICAL THEATRE COMPANY, KAGE, CELEBRATES ITS 15TH BIRTHDAY THIS YEAR, AND THE COMPANY SEEMS TO EMANATE ALL OF THE POSITIVE QUALITIES OF ITS TEENAGED YEARS WITH NONE OF THE ACCOMPANYING NEGATIVES.
Other collaborations lurching towards such an age can be overtaken by insecurities and restlessness, a wondering if things might be better elsewhere. But Denborough and Van Dyck—despite international acclaim and a series of high profile commissions across Australia—seem as curious and eager to encounter the new as they were 15 years ago.
“We still feel our best work is ahead of us,” says Denborough. “That’s still our driving impetus. We’ve still got lots of ideas and things we want to do.”
“I feel like we’re just starting now,” says Van Dyck. It’s an odd statement from such a successful creative partnership spanning more than a decade, but perhaps it’s because KAGE isn’t a brand merely churning out variations on a theme or style. The company’s brief has never been easily categorised—’physical theatre’ or ‘visual theatre’ have been bandied about, but each new work appears as if cut from a fresh cloth. There are consistencies across productions, but the differences seem to make these fade into the background.
“Our resilience and perseverance and willingness to do what we want to do and not subscribe to other people’s expectations is the only reason we’ve survived, really,” says Denborough. “If we’d worried what other people think of us too much we would have crumbled. There are enormous expectations and demands to be black and white. It’s not so much an unwillingness to be put in a pigeonhole and more a willingness to be expansive. We’ve always tried to put a positive spin on it, for our own sanity I suppose.”
The pair met while studying dance at VCA and discovered a range of affinities from the outset. “We really loved each other’s sense of drama within the movement,” says Van Dyck. “Dance as a storytelling device rather than an abstract artform. And on top of that, a sense of humour. That’s where our working relationship began, with those elements. The first handful of works we made…I wouldn’t say they were comedy but there was silliness or absurdity. Then we moved into things that were perhaps more humane or more serious. But when it comes to me and Kate working in a room together or just hanging out, none of that’s changed. All of that is still really there. Which is probably testament to why we’re still here.”
“We looked around us and wanted to create something that we didn’t see happening,” says Denborough, an impetus that still seems to drive KAGE. “Both of us were drawn to collaboration. Even at lunchtime we’d hang out with the musos, some of the visual arts production students. We already had an eclectic eye because we didn’t just hang out in the dance studio and want to dance. Right from the start, I think that’s been a key aspect in our aesthetic.”
While collaboration is a crucial tenet in contemporary performance, the company pays more than lip service to the idea and the results are another reason each KAGE production carries with it a distinct sense of vitality and reinvention. Denborough and Van Dyck have drawn on the talents of circus performers, children, bodybuilders, opera singers, poets and cartoonists, among many others. And each has not been merely a resource to be mined, but a pivotal contributor to the breathing essence of a work.
Denborough is pragmatic about this method. “In terms of performers, it’s really interesting finding dancers who’ve come from different backgrounds. Or who are not necessarily trained dancers but are amazing physical movers. Because there can be quite a sense of sameness when you see a lot of dancers who have had very similar training from one institution. The style and the methodology of the teaching can mean things can tend to look very similar. But when you get bodies who have had really different physical experiences and you work with them over a period of time, the possibilities become much more exciting.”
sundowner
Sundowner, KAGE
photo Jeff Busby
Sundowner, KAGE
This interest in collaboration has also seen KAGE subtly move from an earlier character of abstract visual theatre towards a more grounded, socially engaged process. A case in point is Sundowner, which premiered at the Castlemaine State Festival last year and which will be staged in Geelong and Melbourne in 2012. The work explores experiences of dementia, particularly early onset dementia, and the process by which it was developed is illustrative of the company’s methodology.
Denborough conducted a series of interviews with carers, documenting their stories, and these oral encounters formed the launching point for a forum involving artists, the carers and a group of people with younger onset dementia. The discussions which resulted produced a field from which the work could draw, rather than a simple testimony which would be adapted to the stage verbatim.
“For instance there’s one woman who told us a beautiful story about her dad,” says Denborough. “He’d tell her that every morning he would meet this guy and have these fantastic chats. It turned out that it was actually him looking at himself in the mirror but he thought it was a stranger who happened to be meeting him in the bathroom every morning. Lots and lots of the stories we heard we started filtering into the show, but we really did it over a long period of time.”
team of life
Another work KAGE will be developing in 2012 is Team of Life, a piece that uses sporting metaphors to connect with young people who have experienced disadvantage. “[Working with] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids and their love of AFL, and young refugees and soccer,” says Denborough, “it’s based on a writing methodology called the Team of Life…So if your family has been massacred and you’ve got no-one, it’s about how you might begin to rebuild your ‘team’ through this metaphor from sport, which a lot of these young boys and girls have a fantastic passion for.”
flesh and bone
And then there’s Flesh and Bone, another work in progress that upends any sense of an obvious trajectory for the company. Eschewing the large sets and sprawling casts of recent works, it’s an intimate work which sees Denborough and Van Dyck sharing the stage—alone—for the first time in almost a decade. In 2001 the pair decided to demarcate their roles, Denborough as director and Van Dyck as performer. Flesh and Bone might be an appropriate 15th birthday present, then, both a return and a step in a new direction.
“That’s one of the reasons that we wanted to do it,” says Van Dyck. “We like to reinvent things, we don’t like to get too stuck in the ways things are done. Maybe here we’re going back to methods that we’ve worked with before, but we certainly haven’t for almost 10 years and it’s about time.”
MATTHEW WHITTET WON THE PHILIP PARSONS YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS AWARD IN 2010 WITH HIS PROPOSED PLAY, OLD MAN. NOW IT’S ABOUT TO PREMIERE IN BELVOIR’S DOWNSTAIRS THEATRE WITH A STELLAR CAST WORKING A VERY INTIMATE SPACE—AN APT ONE FOR A WORK WITH A DEEP SENSE OF INTERIORITY AND PASSAGES OF STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS DELIRIUM.
The Sydney-based actor has written five full-length plays: 12 (short-listed for the Patrick White Award in 2006 and workshopped at the Australian National Playwrights Conference), Warren, Silver (performed by Whittet as part of the 2009 B Sharp Season at Belvoir and at the National Theatre of Iceland in Reykjavik) and two commissioned works, Fugitive for Windmill Theatre and Harbinger for Brink Productions—both staged in Adelaide in 2010.
In Old Man, Daniel, a father of two young children, is subject to a profound experience of loss—his family appears to have deserted him. Or has he abandoned them? He cruelly rejects his mother’s help and, panicking, wanders the same streets as his anxious children. Underlying this deep-seated separation anxiety is his father’s desertion when he was a child. The first part of the play is addressed directly to the audience, amplifying a range of emotional crises.
I had the pleasure of reading the draft of Old Man that will go into rehearsal, where doubtless it will go through a number of changes, says Whittet, whom I met in the Belvoir offices to discuss the play.
One of the things that struck me straight off is that you’ve written a kind of dissociative play; a substantial part of it is not linear in any conventional sense. What was it that drew you to the form—the nature of the subject that you’re dealing with?
This is basically laying my cards on the table. LAUGHS. I performed in a show at Sydney Theatre Company a couple years ago, Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, which I found a really fascinating form to work with… [but] the second half tended to explain and close doors on the magical first half. In the end it was a slightly reductive experience. So, although I really loved the structure, I kept thinking surely there must be a way of playing with this kind of form but finding a way where you open more doors in the second half that have been hinted at in the first but lead you on a completely different path.
So when you see the second part, you think back over the first—forced to consider what might have happened? It’s disorienting and sometimes quite spooky, even on the page.
It works on echoes and on memories but with more of a theatrical language to do with what’s happening to these bodies in space and what’s happening inside these people, less than necessarily the story of what has happened.
What drew you to write a play about a son and his missing father?
I have a five-year old and I really wanted to explore the idea of fatherhood and what it is. I was really curious to visit the experience of what it means to people I know who don’t have fathers or haven’t grown up with their fathers. How then do you learn to be a father? Where does that come from? It’s something that’s passed down, I think, the same way that motherhood is, in the same way anything is. I had big chats with a few friends when I was considering what this piece was and how I’d attack it before I’d even started writing. A friend said, you’re a father; you’ve got to put yourself on the line; you have to explore something of your own experience.
Exploring your own anxieties?
Yes. What I wanted to explore in the first half was my notion of the what-if, my notion of what would happen if I woke up one day and my family—whom I love and have no problems with; none of that anxiety exists—has gone. It’s about digging into, I guess, the possibility of loss, which always exists, that could be there at any moment. It’s quite challenging as a young father to try to imagine what it would be like to be without your family. It’s horrible. Hopefully that sort of feeling has gone into the play.
It’s a feeling scattered through a prism, isn’t it—all the characters at some point feel abandoned, to the extent that you wonder, is this one man’s nightmare or something larger?
In my heart I think it’s not as small as one person’s experience. What I want to do in the first half is to very much enter into an inner state for a whole lot of people. The audience sit with intense levels of intimacy with performers who basically speak directly to them for the first half of the production. There’s nothing new about that performance style, but when you play with its simplicity it actually does become quite confronting.
It reduces the opportunities for conventional staging.
Absolutely, and I’m really interested in how that affects their relationship to the text and to the audience. In the end the binary I was really interested in started with the closeness of the first half, that absolute access so that it is about touch and smell and it is all actually very, very concrete. There’s very little abstracted notion of anything except for the fact that these people are trying to grapple with a story they can’t quite get their hands on, that they can’t touch and they can’t understand. All they know is that things are missing.
I’m really interested in how that access, that closeness in the first half then leads to the second half in which all access is completely closed, where a fourth wall goes up. But, hopefully, you still have a connection with Daniel and what he experienced in the first half as it goes into the second. It’s kind of like putting a magnifying glass on an anxiety and burning it for a moment. You’re faced with how do you deal with day-to-day with horrors and fears—these enormous things. Without giving anything away, the play opens out into ‘the narrative’ of the piece, which I think, despite the strangeness, the hard-to-pin-downness of the first half, actually lands cleanly on something.
Though not with that terrible word ‘closure’ in mind. It still leaves you with plenty to ponder.
I hope so.
Daniel’s not necessarily a strong character. He doesn’t come across as a strong father. As you say, how do you learn to be a father if you haven’t had one. It’s like he doesn’t quite know the rules.
It feels to me like an honest response to the way a lot of people deal with being parents. My own family has structure but, being in the arts, our routines are not set in stone. Hopefully Old Man paints a picture of a simple, honest, modern response to what it is to be a parent.
These are not really complex people. The state they’re in is complex but they’re not complex people.
It’s dealing with the day-to-day and I think it’s the complexity of their thought that brings out the complexity to the piece. Outside of that, hopefully what it does is to create a lot of situations and characters that then become incredibly recognisable.
There’s a line, in a very moving scene in the second half of the play, where Daniel says, referring to and politely underplaying the impact of the absence of his father, “No blame, I just had a gap.” But it’s a very big gap, an emotional chasm in fact, and it’s hard to imagine that Daniel will fully survive it. He’s also worried that if he doesn’t become a proper father, one who will be remembered, that nothing will change generation to generation. I wondered if there is an element of fatalism in Daniel or is that something he’ll overcome?
I took a very, very long time—relative to the time it took to write the play—to find the last line of the play. I think it lands on something, which for me becomes the heart of the question of what is going on for this man.
With these characters I wanted them to explore particular moments very cleanly. In the second half of the play, what I’m trying to do, in a very delicate way, is to speak of a moment in time. It becomes not about an answer to an issue, or a way in which someone makes things right, but just to explore that simple, simple moment of someone meeting someone for the first time in their life and just how you can’t make such a moment heroic. You can barely speak. It’s a complicated and incredibly delicate meeting of people and I think that’s what I was interested in exploring; whatever these characters go on and do after the end of this play is in another world.
How long has the writing of the play taken you?
I write rather quickly. I won the Philip Parsons Award in 2010 and started writing in February last year.
Was the director Anthea Williams involved in the play’s evolution?
Anthea was involved from very early on as dramaturg and she fought to direct it, which is fabulous—to have someone who’s so committed to the play. It’s the sort of piece that will be very much about sitting with great actors—Ben Winspear, Alison Bell, Gillian Jones, Peter Carroll—a metre or so from your face. We’ve been doing auditions for the two roles for kids, which is really exciting. There are some phenomenal kids out there. It’s intimidating! You’re 12 and you can do that? I couldn’t do that at 12!
Do you feel the Downstairs Theatre will work well for the play?
I think that was one of [artistic director] Ralph Myer’s first responses when he heard it read—and Anthea and [associate director] Eamon Flack as well. The first thing they thought: this is the sort of experience that would be really special downstairs because of its intimacy.
Belvoir, Matthew Whittet, Old Man, Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, June 7-July 1
JACK AND THE BEANSTALK: A MUSICAL FAIRYTALE IS THE SECOND STAGE OF CHIARA GUIDI’S DEVELOPMENT OF THEATRE FOR CHILDREN AT CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE. AS CO-FOUNDER, WITH ROMEO CASTELLUCCI, OF HIGH PROFILE ITALIAN THEATRE COMPANY SOCÌETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO, GUIDI SPOKE AT THE CENTRE IN 2010 OF HER AIMS TO CONSTRUCT A “CHILDHOOD OF THEATRE” WHICH INCORPORATED THE GENIUS OF YOUTH IN A “REVERSE PEDAGOGY.”
Children can see through the senses, she explained, and thereby have access to imagination before reality impinges (RT100, p32). Listening to Guidi speak in 2010, and watching her work in a process-driven masterclass of unfolding surprises, I was struck by her intense harnessing of the life of childhood to inform a theatre of self-conscious story-ing: objects uncannily entered the space only to depart moments later; characters were suddenly bigger or smaller or absent; there was darkness and fear, but jokes and laughter too. In this workshop, children were narrative subjects, participants and teachers, leading adult performance makers on a journey into the ‘forgottenness’ of creativity.
Jack and the Beanstalk shifts Guidi’s collaboration with Campbelltown Arts Centre to a more traditional phase. This time, adults make a work for children to watch. The darkness of her 2010 workshop has been maintained, as have its fear associations, but the open participatory space has been drawn into a more static, seated set-up. We enter to an empty stage flanked by musicians, the mood already tense. The performers begin percussive spatterings of cymbal, drum and high-pitched, atonal “Jacks.” The sound is anarchic and urgent, if in a slightly aged, experimental way. Jack (Sam Routledge) is the object of our concern with the frenzied noise around him making for an ominous start to a story that most in the audience know well. Jack trades a cow for magic beans; the beans grow a giant stalk which he climbs, enabling him to steal gold, a gold-laying goose and a harp from an ogre who guards them in the sky. Jack thrice faces his fears and is rewarded by claiming the wares as his own and shafting the ogre into to the heavens for good by cutting down the stalk.
As with many fairytales, the pathos of Jack and the Beanstalk is underwritten by a number of narrative discomforts which fail to historically translate: Jack is a protagonist whose stealing we applaud and he repeatedly steals without warrant (it seems). He is greedy and devious (it seems) and yet we are on his side. None of this particularly matters, except that it becomes a blind spot the work-in-progress does not seem interested in tackling. Beyond animating a context in which children can safely live out fear, the work doesn’t really explain why Jack does what he does. Why this story of greedy heroics? Why here? Why now?
What is clear is that the tale has been used to foreground a dramaturgy of imagination. In this, terror and dread are summoned by way of narrative suggestion; little happens visually in the space but the sonic environment is full. The performers’ actions are presentational; they work ball games, task-based actions and text across a stage which refuses to visualise the gruesome ogre or his heavens. Instead, we hear the doomful clanking of his tableware and imagine the children he’s yearning to munch. The narrator (Katia Molino) does a good job of enticing us into this world of fear. Volunteers are selected to accompany Jack to the ogre’s house behind the curtains and some are visibly scared, raising their hands only to turn back. I asked one young boy after the show what the ogre’s house was like: “Great,” he said, “I got to help them with their sound effects, banging plates and cups and things.”
Guidi and her Australian collaborators had a challenging, mere two weeks in which to get to know each other to develop this showing. As a work-in-progress, the theatrical tension sustained between visible and invisible, material and imagined is meaningfully crafted. There were moments when theatre got carried away with its own imagination, rupturing the diffusely non-representational space —including the entry of a glorious golden egg-laying goose, in life-sized puppet form, animated to flex and preen and nestle at the foot of the stage to be caressed at the close of the work.
Guidi’s enmeshment of the invisible world of the story with the aural world of the musicians marks the work’s clear departure from typical children’s theatre, replete as it usually is with playful colour and scenography. What remains to unfold, however, is to imagine into imagination which is what Chiara Guidi has so passionately called for. The final work will premiere at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2013. For this, I’m counting on seeing a theatre for children which is other to itself altogether. This is no small ask, but having observed this project from the outset, it lingers as a tantalising promise nonetheless.
Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Fairytale, director Chiara Guidi, facilitator Jeff Stein, performers Drew Fairly, Christa Hughes, Katia Molino, Sam Routledge, Annette Tesoriero, musicians Robbie Avenaim, Jim Denley, Veren Grigorov, Paul Prestipino, Laura Tanata, design and puppetry Scott Wright, lighting Clytie Smith, producer Annemarie Dalziel; Campelltown Arts Centre NSW, Feb 17-19
I ARRIVE ON TIME AT ARTS HOUSE ONLY TO DISCOVER THAT THIS PERFORMANCE IS AT THE WAREHOUSE. ONCE INSIDE, I FIND I’M LATE FOR AN AUDIENCE WITH THREE CLOWNS. THE CLOWNS ARE CRUDE, MUCH LIKE THE EQUIPMENT THAT AN USHER HAS ATTACHED TO MY HEAD. YES, THESE DEBAUCHED ESCAPEES FROM A MISFIT’S CIRCUS EXIST NOWHERE ELSE BUT AS PROJECTIONS ON-SCREEN INSIDE A LOW-TECH, VIRTUAL REALITY HEADPIECE.
We’re sitting inside a Jaguar, travelling at night along an obtuse road. A recorded voice demands that I accept an envelope containing a mysterious letter. Made complicit by this acceptance, the clowns and I engage in our road-trip while the recorded voice directs me toward performing certain tasks. Beyond the fabulated interior of the Jaguar, an actual person sits beside me. Disconcerted because my sight has been co-opted by a virtual scenario, I can nullify this performance by not participating. But who can resist the temptation to be jocular with three dickheads wearing face-paint and speaking Spanish while sharing vodka from a filthy bottle? When the recorded voice demands that I look at my virtual hands, I realise they are covered in blood. Of course, my actual hands are clean. But as a man traversing life’s treadmill I have become the fourth clown, and therefore, the biggest dickhead of all.
We’re joined by a fifth clown, but not before a lone jogger is exterminated in a random act of violence. The recorded voice demands I stare out the passenger window. I see in my reflection not a clown but a handsome, yet slightly haunted male face. He stares at me, as I do at my unidentifiable self. Prompted to forget my present location, I nevertheless remember that I have not left The Warehouse. But when illusion is applied metaphorically, as a performance strategy within a technological context, it is difficult not to make conclusions. Actual human presence, once made cyberspatial, is also a revision of human presence. This revision is an amplification, or an augmentation, of what human presence might become once flesh and blood are replaced by mathematical equation. But this low-tech show is economically diminished because its creators wish to make a point. Faustian pacts with utopian technologies are deceitful, if not dangerous. When my road-trip ends and is replaced by a vision of my unidentifiable self standing in an open field (complete with wind on face, a sprinkle of rain and the scent of lavender), the conceptual framework for this show leaps from the technological into the philosophical.
Science, the same discipline that promotes the illusion of cyberspace, never allows us to forget that human presence, as perceived, is itself an illusion. Standing before me, as a play of light upon my optic nerve, my unidentifiable self hands me the talon of a bird that, presumably, has fallen from the sky. Then, like me, he vaporises, and my screen is black. Who are we but atomisations of energy passing through the labyrinth of Quantum Theory? Once outside The Warehouse, a person resembling myself disappears toward the end of the street. Somewhere, a clown flutters an eyelid, and I am gone.
Il Pixel Rosso (UK): And the Birds Fell from the Sky, writer-directors Simon Wilkinson, Sylvia Mercuriali, performers Xelis Del Toro, Sylvia Mercuriali, Simon Wilkinson, Matt Rudkin, Avis Cockbill, Sharon Honour Mission, Lucy Joy, Joe Kenney, Ulysses Black, Lewis Reid, Crystal Dave Reid, cinematographers Joe Murray, Simon Wilkinson, art director, script development Matt Rudkin, audio-visual editors Sylvia Mercuriali, Simon Wilkinson, supported by Brisbane Powerhouse, presented by Arts House, Melbourne, Feb 29-March 18
IN THE LATE 1990S, PERFORMANCE STUDIES WAS DOMINATED BY DEBATES ABOUT ABSENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND DISPLACEMENT. PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS TEXT TO EMERGE FROM THIS PERIOD WAS PEGGY PHELAN’S UNMARKED: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE (1993), IN WHICH SHE PROPOSED THAT:
“[P]erformance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: Once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being…becomes itself through disappearance.”
Then suddenly, the conversation changed and we found ourselves talking not of absence, but of presence, repetition and remains. For a scholar who had only just oriented herself in the field, the switch seemed to come out of nowhere but on reflection it had been building for some time. Early indications were evident in Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), in which he argued against the ontological and instead insisted on the historical and ideological nature of the live. The shift could also be seen in Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), in which she argued that while performance may escape the archive (text, document, history), it nevertheless endures in the repertoire (speech, gesture, memory). Shortly after this, came an abundance of books on the actor’s presence, including Joseph Roach’s It (2007) and Jane Goodall’s Stage Presence (2008). Since then, the trend has accelerated, with the arrival of Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011) and now Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield’s edited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (2012).
theories and histories
This is a weighty book, in both senses of the word, and can be seen as a simultaneous compilation and consolidation of two decades worth of thinking and talking about Peggy Phelan’s formulations. Indeed, almost every essay in Perform, Repeat, Record refers to her. The book is divided into three sections, the first titled Theories and Histories. It consists of 13 essays which deal with three overlapping themes: disappearance and documentation; the economy of reproduction and reception; and the globalisation of performance as both form and field. In the opening essay, Auslander examines the photographs of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960) to argue that “the crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience.” If the document produces pleasure, pain and thought in its interlocutor, then it is not simply an index of a past event but can be seen as a performance in and of itself. To put it otherwise, as Christopher Bedford does in his analysis of Shoot and its aftermath, performance can no longer be defined by, or confined to, its originary event. Instead, it “splinters, mutates, and multiplies over time in the hands of various critical constituencies in a variety of media, to yield a body of critical work that extends the primary act of the performance into the indefinite future of reproduction.” For this reason, he describes performance as having a “viral ontology.”
The language of the viral is also implicit in Mechtild Widrich’s account of the “repeated outbreaks” of VALIE EXPORT’s Genital Panic (1969). Widrich argues that this performance comes into being not through its live enactment (which may or may not have occurred) but through the artist’s descriptions of it as well as later photographs, posters and reenactments. The epidemic also finds its way into Mónica Mayer’s essay, when she states that “performance art is such a lethal virus that it has even infected the ways in which we register it.” But the broader thrust of her essay concerns the hitherto obscured history of performance art in Mexico, from the 1920s to today. In a similar move, Eleonora Fabião examines the work of Afro-Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario, firstly to retrieve a history of South American performance but secondly to propose a theory of performance that focuses on its precarity rather than its ephemerality. She writes: “If ‘ephemerality’ denotes disappearance and absence (thus, predicating at a certain moment, something was fully given to view), ‘precariousness’ denotes the incompleteness of every apparition as its corporeal, moving, constitutive condition.” Likewise, Meiling Cheng considers Chinese performance in order to argue that “documentation reviews, repeats, records, relearns, and re-imagines a partially memorialized past to generate a present tense re-encounter with pieces from the past and to facilitate future generations’ reliving of these semi-processed pasts in their present moments. What we call ‘live,’ then, points to a perceiver’s present-tense intertwinement with the fleeting sense of being alive.”
In this way, Widrich, Fabião and Cheng reflect Schneider who, in an iteration of her 2001 article “Performance Remains,” argues against the archival logic that perceives performance as disappearance and proposes instead that performance persists “differently, via itself as repetition—like a copy or perhaps more like a ritual—like an echo in the ears of a confidence keeper, an audience member, a witness.” Jane Blocker treats the issue of repetition in more detail in her analysis of the work of Bruce Nauman and Steve McQueen, as does Andre Lepecki who discusses his reenactment of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (RT83, p17). Here, instead of positioning the document as score for, or record of a performance—as is so often the case—Lepecki sees Kaprow’s scribbled papers as “nothing other than a necessary and unavoidable rehearsal.” Hannah Higgins deals with another iconic figure, George Maciunas, not so much to recuperate his reputation or work but rather to displace it and to bring other Fluxus members to the fore. Her analysis of the politics of reception sits nicely alongside Sven Lütticken’s chapter, which argues that “performance art has never been a real threat to the spectacle” or indeed to capitalism. Instead, it has become complicit in the economy of experience and when documentation is banned, as in the case of German-British artist Tino Sehgal, it merely serves to add to the event’s aura and expense.
documents
In the second section we move from theories about documents to documents themselves. The section collates 20 documents by artists as diverse as Franko B, Nao Bustamante, Tim Etchells, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Orlan, Rabih Mroué, Santiago Sierra and Faith Wilding, among others. Some of these documents focus on a particular performance, as in the case of Sierra, who provides four pictures of Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of 10 Workers (2004), but leaves the brief commentary to Jones. Others consider a performance and its double, as in the case of Wilding who places the text of her iconic Waiting (1972) alongside photographs of its reenactment Waiting-With (2007). Still others take a chronological approach, as in the case of Gómez-Peña who rehearses a timeline of his life in art. Local readers will be interested in Lucas Ihlein’s account of his and Louise Curham’s recreation of Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light at Artspace and in gallery director Blair French’s account of Aftermath (2007), which investigated the intersection of performance and installation and included works by Arahmiani, Guy Benfield, Franz Ehmann, Anne Graham, Tony Schwensen and André Stitt (all discussed and documented here; also see RT79, p8).
dialogues
In the final section there are 11 interviews and performance lectures, with Jones and Heathfield participating in three apiece. The former interviews Carolee Schneeman, Marina Abramovic and Shezad Dawood about a range of issues, but in each instance the conversation comes back to the vexed issue of copyright. For Schneemann, the issue is that she cannot access some documentation of her work as it is being withheld by the documenter. For Abramovic, the issue is not simply about documentation but also the performance and, specifically, the performer. In performing other artists’ work, she seeks not simply to reactivate the past but to model an ethical relationship to it: “to show how we should really address these pieces…in re-enacting other artists’ works you have to ask permission, you have to do your own interpretations…there has to be a kind of seriousness to it.” For his part, Dawood attempts to sidestep the issue by incorporating photography into the performance itself, so that the two become indistinguishable.
Heathfield’s interview of Teching Hsieh (RT90, p52) focuses on his One Year Performance series. Of these, Hsieh says (echoing Auslander, Bedford and Widrich), “an audience’s presence is not vital. As long as audiences know my concept and the real action I did, they can use their own experiences and imagination to feel these artworks…[In fact, sometimes] being present physically may not be helpful.” Heathfield also interviews artist Janine Antoni, whose practice is at once “object-centred, site-specific, and process work.” While these two interviews are fairly formal, Heathfield’s encounter with Tim Etchells and photographer Hugo Glendinning [who has been investigating the nature of performance photography with Forced Entertainment. Eds] is more casual, but still contains some poignant thoughts on the “professionalization of presence” and the persistence of distance.
Other interesting interviews include Joanna Scanlan and Tilda Swinton’s conversation about agency and authorship in Swinton and Cordelia Parker’s performance-installation The Maybe (1995) and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s discussion of their restagings of iconic rock gigs and the possibility of “re-witnessing…something that’s already mythologized, unwitnessed except perhaps by a lucky few.” Perhaps they could restage the work of Goat Island, the now-retired company of Lin Hixon and Matthew Goulish, but if not, we will always have their lyrical lecture performed here on the page as poem, script and image. Philosopher Jean Luc-Nancy performs a similarly poetic pas de deux with Mathilde Monnier, in which they discuss the role of repetition and medium in dance and the (im)possiblility of (im)mediation.
The breadth and depth of Perform, Repeat, Record are astonishing and the range of artists, scholars and insights invigorating. The book has been years in the making, hardly surprising when you consider the work involved in producing, sourcing and selecting all of this material, not to mention some of the writing (Jones and Heathfield’s introductions are excellent). While I initially read the book as a riff on presence and persistence, when I reread it I found this phrase from Heathfield: “Perhaps we should no longer speak of presence and absence, since there is neither one nor the other, but the tireless movement between: the continuous flux of bodies with other bodies. No more talk then of a unitary or self-coincident body. No integrities, but instead intensities of exchange and flow.” The achievement of Perform, Repeat, Record, then, is not that it recuperates presence but rather that it starts to destabilise the presence-absence polarity that has structured performance studies for the past two decades. It does so, not in order to plot a third way, but rather to facilitate the intense exchange and flow of ideas. It leaves me overwhelmed.
Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History; Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency, 2012, 656 pages; www.intellectbooks.co.uk
SOMETIME IN THE 1950S PIANIST CECIL TAYLOR WROTE THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE PHRASE, “FORM IS POSSIBILITY,” WHICH ON REFLECTION MEANT THAT ARTISTS WITH ENQUIRING MINDS AND SENSIBILITIES SHOULD USE THEIR ARTISTRY TO DISCOVER NEW MUSICAL FORMS.
To break from convention and the comfortably familiar is never easy but the rewards often justify the effort. The quest to discover new forms was enthusiastically undertaken by the 16 local and international artists who performed at SoundOut 2012, a festival of improvised music that took place on the last weekend of January within the leafy, low-key environs of Theatre 3 nestled behind the School of Art on the Australian National University campus. Organiser Richard Johnson overcame what can only be described as baffling funding difficulties from those who should know better to program a world class line-up of performers from Canada, France and Japan, playing with like-minded home grown artists who mostly operate in the realm of electro-acoustic improvisation.
Featured instruments at the festival included saxophones, guitars, prepared piano, flute and percussion augmented by seemingly haphazard assemblages of electronics that littered a stage, at times looking like the aftermath of a computer technology fair. The electronics were mostly made up of exposed components used to explore tonality and pitch with barely a melody to be heard. The aim was to engender new ways of listening and engaging with music particularly when electronics and acoustic instruments melded and overlapped. On occasion the electronics became part of the physicality of the performance: Canadian guitarist Eric Normand coaxed feedback from an electric bass while hammering on an assortment of small electronic devices with an increasing intensity to match the fierce overtones in the music.
In contrast, a festival-goer wandering into Theatre 3 early on Saturday afternoon would have been greeted by trance-inducing ambient drones coming from Julian Day’s uncomplicated keyboard with which he created a dreamy minimalism that sent the listener on an introspective and altogether pleasant journey that might otherwise have been brought on by the likes of Steve Reich or Brian Eno (see RT106, p39). Then there was the Zen-like discipline with which Japanese artist Toshimaru Nakamura conjured micro-tonal sound shapes from a no-input mixing board that alternatively blended with Sabine Vogel’s (Germany) flute and Jim Denley’s hissing and chattering wind instruments to create a serene solemnity.
Richard Johnson, Andrew Fedorovitch, Rishin Singh, Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew
photo James Brown
Richard Johnson, Andrew Fedorovitch, Rishin Singh, Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew
Until Saturday evening all performances had taken place in the theatre but, in the democratic tradition that defines improvised music, a last minute collective decision was made that Richard Johnson and Andrew Fedorovitch on saxophone with Rishin Singh on trombone, Sam Pettigrew on bass and Laura Altman on clarinet would play in the theatre courtyard. As dusk came on, the audience, fellow performers and assembled instrumentalists eagerly gathered outside. The ensuing 50-minute performance, which involved gentle breathing in its creation of insect-like harmonies, transformed a pleasant natural environment into a harmonious space of free creativity where at one point trombonist Singh spontaneously rustled some leaves in response to the tactile call and response entreaties from Richard Johnson’s impressive looking and sounding baritone saxophone. In this way the music melded with the environment and the organic surround sound was a joy to behold.
This was a shining example of spontaneous field performance, but let’s contrast it with the superb Saturday afternoon theatre set from electric guitarist Ryan Kernoa (France) in combination with bassist Eric Normand (Canada) and Canberra musician Michael Norris on electronics. Normand does a lot more than merely strum his instrument in time, which one has often come to expect from a bass player. If I can be so bold as to make the comparison, Normand does for improvised music what Joy Division bassist Peter Hook did for post-punk—redefining the role of the bass so that it becomes a lead instrument allowing for harmonic interplay beyond simply laying foundations. Normand attached all sorts of devices to his instrument. He banged and stroked it in equal measure to set a scene that involved controlled feedback, theatre in the form of physical contortions in response to the sound, and a highly disciplined approach to noise-making. This was enhanced to the nth degree by the mouth-watering atonality of guitarist Ryan Kernoa who altogether dispensed with melody to explore bristling electrified string configurations which at times reminded me of Thurston Moore at his finest. When Michael Norris’ flailing tonal pitches on electronics were added to the mix the ensuing sound from the three performers was a welcome reminder that improvised music hasn’t forgotten noise.
Of the 18 performances in the festival the latter two stood out for me amidst so much activity involving all sorts of instrumental blends.
SoundOut 2012 was a special event. The mechanics of each performance, including the nightly collective improvisations, produced a beautiful harmony of artistic intent and sense-stimulating sound-making. This highlighted a dedication to the open and democratic craft of improvised music from the performers who invited audience members to experience the joys of supple creativity. Improvised music is about fulfilling the potential of uninhibited self-expression within a setting that encourages genuine engagement and there was plenty of this on offer at SoundOut 2012. It seemed that true freedom was within reach.
SoundOut 2012, artistic director Richard Johnson, Theatre 3, Australian National University, Canberra, Jan 27-28; http://soundout2012.blogspot.com.au/
Jon Rose & Hollis Taylor, play a fence in the Strzelecki
AT THE TURA 2012 PROGRAM LAUNCH IN PERTH ON MARCH 21, JON ROSE WAS ANNOUNCED AS THE WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL’S PRESTIGIOUS DON BANKS AWARD.
UK born, Rose arrived in Australia in 1976 at the age of 25 and, somehow finding this country’s idiosyncrasies to his liking, exploded into a plethora of activities, which continue to this day. As well as being a consummate violinist and versatile improviser, he has made a multitude of instruments and has also created many radio works. Most recently he has been exploring interactive music making experiences in works such as Pursuit, using musical bicycles (see RT90; RT96), an interactive netball game, Team Music! (RT96); and the multi-user festival hit The Ball project (RT102).
Rose has also embraced the Australian landscape, evidenced in his Great Fences of Australia project undertaken with his partner, violinist Hollis Taylor, which saw the couple travelling across the outback playing and recording the sounds of Australia’s many fences. This journey is beautifully documented in a book by Taylor called Post Impressions (see RT82). Another epic adventure was the Ad Lib Project, an extensive archive of weird and wonderful music-making activities from around the nation, housed on the ABC’s website. It perhaps best illustrates Rose’s conflicted love for this country and its curious history which he enticingly articulated in his 2008 Peggy Glanville-Hicks address (RT83) and which he discusses in the following conversation with equally respected musician and improviser Jim Denley.
instrument builder
Jim Denley In preparing to talk with you today, I actually went back and listened to some of your early 1980s work, like Devils and Angels [Fringe Benefit Records 1984], where you use multi-stringed instruments. If I compare it to say Derek Bailey’s solo guitar playing in the 70s it seems like what you were doing is a logical extension—this search for a kind of multiplicity through complexity and velocity.
Jon Rose A multiplicity of events—that’s a good way of describing it. First of all there was a 19-string violin which was stolen in London. Then there was the 19-string half cello to replace that, which has incidentally also been stolen…Those instruments were specifically about multiplicity, using also amplification to project certain things, so you had a stereo image and could place things within that image.
But there were other instruments…I had ideas about certain areas of experimentation and I built the instrument to try to figure out what to do with it. So there was one violin with a very long neck and 16 strings set up in a way that they were never intended to be played individually, but played as a mass. There was an instrument that was played by the wind—an Aeolian violin. There was a tromba marina [a medieval triangular bowed string instrument] that was attached to my boat which I had at the time, which used water to change the focal length of the resonating chamber. There was a megaphone violin that had an FM radio microphone in it. So it’s not true to say that it was always about finding multiplicity. Some things were about trying to get a sound happening which was not the normal sound made through applying a bow to a string—the usual hold, slip, hold, slip, sawtooth wave form.
Jon Rose playing the Tromba Mariner, 1979
…In the second half of the 70s I was in this strange country and I just got on with what I thought was appropriate. There were not that many people to play with and those that were available had a certain area they wanted to go in that wasn’t so interesting to me, I was basically left to my own devices…I enjoyed that space. I think if I’d stayed in Europe I wouldn’t have done that somehow. I would have been busy in bands or in groups. And I also had the advantage of very quickly being able to get commercial work to live off. Playing in a country and western band or in Club Marconi two or three nights a week…You could be a professional musician and the rest of the time free to do whatever you wanted to.
JD In thinking about those times, as a young musician from the ‘Gong’ [Wollongong], you were kind of a mentor to me and other musicians. You just sidestepped the local inanity and if you couldn’t get a gig in Sydney, you didn’t worry about it…You presented an international agenda and a multimedia agenda. If you couldn’t operate in one sphere, you’d operate in another.
JR Well in the 70s…you could go almost anywhere except the Opera House and play a concert, because people said, ‘Sure.’ The first improvised concerts took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art—a gallery run by a couple of architects which [sound artist] Rik Rue helped set up. And they were just delighted to have people come in and do stuff. The same as Stephen Mori Gallery later. It was open. The thing that I got from Sydney was that I finally formulated what I was going to do with my life…which was this artform around the violin or strings in general.
the dominant body
JD There’s something almost paradoxical in much 21st century and late 20th century music: it’s almost as if music has been running away from the human body. I was talking to Stephen Adams, the composer and ABC broadcaster, recently and for him you represent a kind of humanist approach to phraseology and gesture. It seems to me, when you work with technology, the body dominates the technology.
JR That’s very well put. Otherwise I’m not interested. I’m not interested in pressing return and playing a file. Although that’s not to say it can’t be useful. That technology doesn’t give me much as a musical instrument, whereas if I apply it—like in The Ball project for example—[I can] use technology to try and re-engage the populace at large in the business of making music. The last time I did The Ball Project, it was in front of 400 people [at MONA FOMA 2011]. I said they shouldn’t kick it because they might hurt their feet but really they could do what they wanted with it, and they just started to make music. You couldn’t sit those 400 people down and get them to listen to a playback file of electronic music, they wouldn’t have it. But they got it immediately—they could make this stuff.
Jon Rose playing Palimpolin, with the K-Bow at Galapagos Club, New York, 2010
photo Jill Steinberg
Jon Rose playing Palimpolin, with the K-Bow at Galapagos Club, New York, 2010
All my interest in that technology comes from the bow anyway. That’s the first thing I tried to do was to make the bow interactive so that it would do other things…Now I’m working with a small company in California who’ve got real resources and can make things much better than I could…But all that interest in the technology comes through the violin. If I hadn’t been born when I was I would have been doing “what can a violin do with a horse and cart?”…I’d be looking at the context for what to do with this instrument. Because the context in which it’s usually stuck is always out of date.
historical landscapes
JD It seemed to me that you embraced Australia. And reading through Hollis Taylor’s book, Post Impressions, she documents a love—especially of the outback. What is it about Australia that makes it such a fertile place to work?
JR Culturally this is a perverse place, and it’s a uniquely perverse place. Colonialism happened all over the world but Australia is extremely distant and it’s a big place with a small population which has made people confused, psychologically really unsure of themselves, desperate to grasp at things from other places, overseas and so on. And you have this culture that is permanently in denial, even to this day.
… If you look for the history of music, particularly in the 19th century, here it’s just got these extraordinary stories. You couldn’t make them up. The first Aboriginal string Orchestra in the 1860s, founded by [Benedictine Monk] Rosendo Salvador in New Norcia in Western Australia; you meet people like Rosina Boston who plays the gum leaf. Everywhere I look, there’s some extraordinary stuff…Jamaica has come up with three genres of music: Ska, Reggae and Calypso, it’s also a colonial place. But in Australia, nobody came up with a genre. And you start looking at why…If you’re going to be a musician and live in Australia, you have to deal with the place at some level.
JD Is that why, later this year you’re going to take a bunch of young musicians out to the far west of New South Wales?
JR This is the plan… I’ve been doing this stuff (with Hollis too) pretty solidly since I got back and started living in Sydney again in 2002. Any skill or knowledge we have should be handed on…we’re the only people who have worked extensively in that part of the world, as far as I know, in what you might call…what do you call it these days…I hate the word ‘sound art’—new music, experimental music, exploratory music?
exodus australis
JD As the Ad Lib website proposes, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s happened here and is happening…We’re saying this is an exciting place, Australia, it’s got a great history. And yet, you’ve gone off with a DAAD scholarship to Berlin and lived in Europe again and then returned. I see generation after generation of young musicians relocating, usually to Europe. Are we always going to be parochial? To make a mark do you have to relocate?
JR Up to 1981, which was the first time I played at Moers (New Jazz Festival), I assumed that no one ever got paid for this. I thought that’s extraordinary. So after that there came more opportunities and I thought, well I’ll divide my time. Pretty much every year I lived in Berlin I did come back, mainly because there was the option of the ABC [radio] which was amazing. I could make programs and do some concerts and whatever. But it became clear to survive doing this work you have to be international. But where my passion lies is here.
Also it depends what kind of a musician you are…I have a broad output and so that makes me different really from say a classic improviser. That’s a little part of what I want, but it’s not the whole picture.
changing contexts
JD But that collaborative improvising musician which you clearly are, a lot of people might not know about that Jon Rose. With the Don Banks Award you’re presented as a composer.
JR It’s a word I hate. But eventually you give up trying to correct people. What is it? I don’t know any more because now everyone uses the word ‘improvisation’ all over the place…
…Collaboration is one thing, and with different groups—working with communities on one thing and seeing what can come out of that; working with classical musicians is another. But basically it’s the context change that interests me in a primary sort of way. Anything can sound extraordinary if you change the context. So one of the pieces I did out at Wogarno station [for Tura New Music’s Outback series] was with a front-end hoe—a digging machine basically. Just an amazing collaboration which I thoroughly enjoyed. It wasn’t because it was warped or off-centre. I really enjoyed it. It made me want to play.
I think I need to be in situations where I really want to play like it’s my last concert, that’s really important to me. And I tend to avoid situations where that’s not the case, where it’s going to be a routine….That’s not possible for me. I guess it is for some musicians and I guess that’s really important for music that there are people who will do that—keep the Mozart churning out.
…I really want to use the Don Banks to point or put a very small spotlight on the other people and other organisations that do whatever we want to call this music, this ‘other music.’ People who have worked in What Is Music?, Robbie Avenaim, The Make It Up Club, the NOW now, people like yourself Jim, Tos Mahoney in WA, Lawrence English and lately MONA FOMA, there’s a list…The funding is a joke, but somehow the stuff keeps going. And the wonderful thing about it is that it points back to a time when to be living in Australia made you look to your own resources. It was the ultimate do-it-yourself boot camp in a way and has been for most of its history.
The Australia Council’s Don Banks Award is valued at $60,000 and is offered annually by the Council’s Music Board honouring an artist of high distinction and over 50 years of age who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to Australia music.
APPOINTED IN 2009 TO THE ARTISTIC DIRECTORSHIP OF MELBOURNE’S CHAMBER MADE OPERA, DAVID YOUNG (FORMERLY ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF APHIDS) HAD, HE SAYS, “A BRIEF TO RE-ENERGISE CMO AND TO TAKE IT IN A COMPLETELY NEW DIRECTION. SO WE’VE FOCUSED ON WHAT I THINK I CAN DO BEST WHICH IS TO MAKE NEW WORK THAT CROSSES THE BOUNDARIES OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, PERFORMANCE, THEATRE AND VISUAL ARTS, BRINGING ALL THESE TOGETHER, WHICH IS WHAT OPERA HAS ALWAYS DONE.”
Young also knew he had to do it “on a scale that was manageable for the company while retaining the level of quality—the pristine nature of the productions—that CMO had always been associated with. But I knew I wasn’t ever going to be able to do that on a huge mainstage and at a huge cost, not on the budget I had. Hence it wasn’t rocket science for me to look to where chamber music had started—in the home, in the living room. This gave us advantages: not just manageable scale, but it also allowed us to take risks we couldn’t with a big commission. And I’ve been able to give the artists completely free rein. It was incredible that Daniel Schlusser made a work [Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 2011] that he wouldn’t have made in a theatre—living room opera pushed him into a completely new space.”
CMO now has a considerable number of works in repertoire, “seven to eight within two years,” waiting to manifest in other living rooms or translate to theatres or galleries. “It depends on the particular work,” says Young, “Some are very site specific. The Box [2012, see RT109] was realised in a beautiful Robin Boyd-designed house, known as The Iris, on the Yarra Bend, a spectacular setting. It’s a very unassuming building actually, but you really feel like you’re in a tree house. The location is a big part of the experience, responding to the natural environment, the sounds, the house itself. But would The Box work without this house? Over 20 years I’ve translocated shows from one place or one city to another. Some work translates directly; you change nothing. Others have to be re-configured totally—that’s pretty much the case with the living room operas unless you can find a similar house or build one in a theatre. Malthouse is turning the Beckett Theatre into a living room for our co-production with Rawcus, Another Lament (RT101), featuring Ida Duelund Hansen, a wonderful Danish double bass player and singer. It premiered in 2011 in a home in suburban Armidale. We’re having a number of a very active conversations about placing our works.”
CMO is also involved in community engagement: “I have a very broad view of living rooms, as I have of opera,” Young quips. “The ‘Venny’ is an amazing adventure playground in Kensington located very close to a lot of public housing populated with people from very diverse backgrounds, culturally and economically. I thought it would be good for an extreme performance company to work with this community and give them access to contemporary performance. It’s very much a pilot. It will culminate in April with an opera performance involving the children and our musicians. We hope it will be of long term benefit for the community, for the playground and an opportunity for further work with us.”
Hellen Sky, Minotaur, Chamber Made Opera
photo Daisy Noyes
Hellen Sky, Minotaur, Chamber Made Opera
Young always sees his work in an international perspective: “It’s really essential that Australian art engages with the rest of the world. It’s so easy, particularly in Melbourne, to think that the whole world is here because we’re so far away and because we have at least one of everything, of each kind of venue and company. It’s so important to work with artists from other places—as a reality check, to get a sense of what else is happening and understand where we fit in.” Chamber Made is engaging in an exchange program with LOD Music Theatre in Ghent. “It’s a contemporary chamber opera and music theatre company. It’s one of the companies most aesthetically aligned with us and also in scale. So we’ve committed to a two-year partnership which will begin with an exchange residency. First, artists will come from LOD and then Australians will go to Ghent in June. Our hope is that this will lead to a co-production which will premiere in Belgium in December 2013 and then play in Australia and, possibly, tour in Europe.”
It’s already a busy year for CMO with Fritz Hauser (Switzerland) having performed his solo gong work, Schraffur, at the Melbourne Recital Centre in March; the premiere of The Box (with Aphids, Fritz Hauser, Boa Baumann, Speak Percussion and Deborah Kayser) also in March; Minotaur (2011) travelling to the Aurora music festival in Western Sydney in May (see p14); and Another Lament at Malthouse in June as part of the XS Opera Festival.
What about the rest of the year? “Even busier,” the indefatigable Young declares. “There are the Nova Workshops with Opera Victoria: four works in two showings in December, one by Mary Finsterer which she has been working on for 10 years. The relationship with Victorian Opera has been wonderfully collegial and mutually supportive. We’re also running our second librettist workshop. There’s a real gap; very few places professionally develop librettists. It’s a kind of boot camp and one of the most successful things that came out of last year’s workshop was a ‘speed dating’ session between librettists and composers, 20 of each. We’re doing that again.” It’s clear that Young sees CMO as playing a nurturing role, whether in the development of new opportunities for composers through the living room and in-repertoire model, in community engagement and in skill development and partnering. Later in 2012, the Minotaur Trilogy will premiere and CMO will develop a new multimedia work.
It’s with a sense of jubilation and relief that Young declares, “The Box has been a breakthrough. It sold out a week before opening and I feel we now really know what we’re doing.” David Young’s idiosyncratic approach to art-making—multidisciplinary collaborations, site specificity, inventive sponsorship and commissioning models, the nurturing of new work and an international perspective—has reinvigorated and reinvented Chamber Made Opera and is breathing much-needed new life into Australian music theatre.
LIKE MUCH OF THE EXPLORATORY MUSIC IT FACILITATES, THE NOW NOW FESTIVAL IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING. BASED IN SYDNEY’S INNER WEST FOR THE SECOND YEAR, AFTER TRAVERSING THE INNER CITY AND BLUE MOUNTAINS SINCE 2002, THE 2012 FESTIVAL TYPIFIED THIS MOMENTUM WITH ONE OF THE MOST DENSE AND DIVERSE PROGRAMS YET. FEATURING TWO PUBLICATIONS, TWO SOUND WALKS, OVER 100 ARTISTS, ONE GROUP EXHIBITION AND SEVEN NIGHTS OF MUSIC OVER FOUR VENUES THERE WAS AN ABUNDANCE OF SOUND-BASED ART AND MUSIC TO ABSORB. I’LL FOCUS ON THE JANUARY 19 AND 21 PERFORMANCES.
With a sizeable crowd already ensconced in velvet armchairs or on cushioned crates at the Red Rattler Theatre, Melbourne duo 12 Dog Cycle began the evening with a low volcanic hum emanating from Nigel Brown’s dissected accordion. Amplified with contact microphones, the subterranean drone was punctuated by the scratch of electric toothbrush bristles against the exposed bass reed blocks accompanied by the shrill shrieks, gurgles and sudden silences of vocalist Alice Hui-Sheng Chang. With the uncanny ability to make her voice sound like more than one, her piercing bursts of sound roamed the warehouse rafters like a swarm of insects.
The ominous tone took a turn towards farce when Wollongong’s Gooble Gobble launched beards-first into the third set of the evening, presaged by “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” from one of the circuit bent toys littering the stage. Guitarists Gary Butler and Jariss Shead played everything, including the kitchen sink, with chaotic energy, partially reined in by the poise of laptop musician Nathan Penzer. While the resultant noise-fest would have benefited from distillation, the performance was endearingly enthusiastic, culminating in Butler fiercely grating styrofoam on his guitar strings and showering the stage in ‘snow.’
As well as being a showcase, the NOW Now Festival functions as a conference, bringing musicians together from around the world to network through events and curated groupings of performers. One such duo was the creative and ambitious pairing of turntablist Jordan Dorjee and stand-up comedian Nick Sun. Such a potentially awkward union requires excellent skills in improvisation, and though the set did feature some nice moments of spontaneity—“You want a joke? This whole situation is a joke”—there was, if slight, an overall lack of synergy. Nevertheless, it was bravely attempted and essentially one of the most experimental pieces of the festival.
On January 21, with the Red Rattler bathed in a dim blue glow, French musicians Christine Abdelnour and Ryan Kernoa began with a slow build-up of cicada-like trills that morphed into a low flapping pulse. Abdelnour’s guttural squeaks and skids from the saxophone complemented Kernoa’s icy guitar tones and waves of feedback, smoothly balancing the challenging and the pleasurable. Together they explored many terrains of sound, flowing in and out of melody and dissonance, calm and crescendo, weaving a misty sonic journey that held the audience entranced with its ethereal allure.
Next up was a trio featuring acclaimed Japanese no input mixer player Toshimaru Nakamura. With a sound at once immense and subdued, Nakamura came forth with a series of powerful, evenly spaced thumps, heralding the onset of Sam Pettigrew’s long notes on double-bass and Dale Gorfinkel’s randomised clicks and rattles. Gorfinkel’s adapted vibraphone and trumpet contraption are intriguing tactile playgrounds, as illustrated when a small boy approached mid-set to peer into the bell. Both Gorfinkel and Nakamura harness the haphazard tendencies of their instruments with masterly finesse. Pettigrew, pockets overflowing with implements, never gives the impression of overuse, instead employing each tool to timely advantage. The set peaked in a cataclysmic upsurge highlighted by Nakamura’s static spits, Pettigrew’s textured drones and the harmonic ring of mallet on vibe keys.
At the end of six sets it was somewhat taxing to drag drooping eyelids to the assembly of people awaiting the departure of Anthony Magen’s hour-long sound walk, but I’m glad I did. With a mind brimming with music it was a welcome relief to walk in silence through Marrickville. The only injunction being not to communicate, thoughts were free to roam, alighting on various heightened sensations without stress or force. Instead of a solemn procession there was a sense of playful youngsters cheekily provoking the curiousity of passersby, with some participants darting off to contemplate a vent or jump through a hole in some brickwork. The route itself was thoughtful and extensive with three stages most clearly defined by their soundtracks. After the isolated growls of passing cars inherent to the industrial precinct, the second part of the walk flowed into Sydenham Railway Station where our silent collective went virtually unnoticed amid beeps, automated voices and the occasional disengaged passenger. On the other side, wind and breath intertwined while clover heads thwacked against feet as we crossed Tillman Park and made our final stop-off under a large moonlit tree. When Magen stood up to declare the sound walk over we began to make our way back, our elated chatter contrasting with the rich magic of silent listening.
One of the aspects I love about experimental music events is the sense of communion with a crowd of people without the need for physical or verbal communication, a sensation epitomised by the sound walk and present in everything the NOW Now does. Inclusiveness and warmth is felt in all facets of the organisation; through the idiosyncratic MCs, quirky flyer design and camaraderie between all involved. As co-founder Clayton Thomas puts it, the mission is to “break down cliques” and that shared experience is what makes the NOW Now such a beloved and quintessential initiative in the Australian music scene.
The 2012 NOW Now Festival, curators Laura Altman, Sam Pettigrew, Rishin Singh, venues Stone Gallery, Hardware Gallery, the Red Rattler, Jarvie Park, Sydney, Jan 12–22
THE PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE MOUNTED THE STAGE TO DEAFENING APPLAUSE. THEY HAD TRAVELLED THOUSANDS OF MILES ONLY A WEEK BEFORE TO FIERCELY REHEARSE THE MOST CHALLENGING CONTEMPORARY REPERTOIRE FROM AROUND AUSTRALIA AND THE WORLD. THEIR BACKS ACHED AND THEIR HANDS WERE RAW FROM THE ORGANISED MAYHEM THEY REFUSED TO BLUFF. THE HALL FELL INTO AWED SILENCE. THE ENSEMBLE PAUSED, BREATHING IN UNISON.
This was not exactly the concert I attended, but rather the impression I got watching the six interstate percussion students that comprise Nomad Percussion perform their debut concert at the ANU’s School of Music. The room was small, but the courageous atmosphere surrounding their performance of such large-scale works as Anthony Pateras’ Refractions and Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa on a week’s rehearsal was unforgettable.
When the members of Nomad Percussion met at National Music Camp it became evident that they should share their expertise and networks by forming an interstate percussion ensemble. In doing so they would build on the strengths of an already active Australian percussion scene, crossing the largely geographical but to some extent taste-driven divide between the repertoires of Synergy Percussion in Sydney and Speak Percussion in Melbourne. The welcome diversity of works on their debut program attested to the success of this formula. Last Waltz by Synergy artistic director Timothy Constable presented that group’s driving tom toms, snare drums and bongos. This tour de force contrasted well with Melbourne-based composer Mark Pollard’s minimalist reverie for vibraphone, The Heavenly Muzak Machine, the third movement of which features an undulating hymn played only with the fingertips.
In terms of scale, the highlights of the performance were the sextets Refractions and Persephassa, both pieces performed by Speak Percussion at the 2011 MONA FOMA (RT 102, p5). Steve Fitzgerald conducted Pateras’ Refractions, drawing from his experience performing the piece with Speak the previous year. The opening sextuplets where six timbres are rapidly passed between the performers were tightly executed with the relatively dead performance space lending a precision to quiet sounds and those with a fast attack. As such, the standout moments of the performance were not those of dynamic climax but the combination of wood rattles with crumpled paper and wood claps with kick drums and cymbal rolls. The intimate space also lent drama to the ear-tickling tones produced by Anna Ng’s expertly rubbed shot glasses.
While the grand spatialisation of Xenakis’ Persephassa suffered from the nigh on claustrophobic conditions, the physical energy and command of conductor William Jackson transported the audience to a hall eight times the size. Here the ensemble exhibited its greatest sense of musical intention, sustaining a uniformity of dynamics and timbres in the sounds passed around the room while deftly managing global dynamic and rhythmic changes. This strength of vision never waivered as the lengthy piece drew on the performers’ energy reserves, nor when they were called upon to blow whistles while playing.
It is thrilling to see Australia’s tradition of percussion moving from generation X to Y, especially with Nomad Percussion’s interstate vision and experience. I would like to see more concerts with this level of daring. Where is the Australian New Music String Quartet? The Oceanic Wind Ensemble for the Performance of Contemporary Music? The Intercontinental Students’ Electroacoustic Orchestra?
Nomad Percussion, A National Percussion Project, debut concert, ANU School of Music, Canberra, Feb 18
See RealTime 107 (p42) for Greg Hooper’s review of the debut of another percussion ensemble, Early Warning System. Eds.
The Lady from the Sea, Abhinaya Theatre Company & Topology
photo Kevin Stallan
The Lady from the Sea, Abhinaya Theatre Company & Topology
THE LADY FROM THE SEA PRESENTS IBSEN’S PLAY AS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN BRISBANE’S TOPOLOGY AND THE ABHINAYA THEATRE COMPANY FROM KERALA (INDIA, ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE NEAR THE BOTTOM) AND TOOK ABOUT NINE MONTHS TO PUT TOGETHER, AMIDST OTHER WORK AND THE WHOLE PROBLEM OF EAST/WEST TIMEZONE DIFFERENCES. THERE’S A LOT OF TALK ABOUT COLLAB POST NET, BUT TIMEZONE STILL GETS IN THE WAY—IT’S A VERTICAL SLICE OF THE WORLD THAT’S THE EASIEST TO LINK UP. NORTH-SOUTH DIALOGUE FOR THE WIN.
The stage is a two and a bit level stack: Topology high up on the top, then below them the stage proper and surtitles in between. It’s the beach/under the ocean, the water clear, the sound of waves. Sand on the stage. Behind the stage the projection screens. Women float along, remora attached, translucent pale blue.
Rich conch drone from the bass and composer Robert Davidson’s first piece begins, exquisitely lyrical, an exceptional work. On stage, a woman struggles in argument with a disembodied, low male voice(over), soft and convincing in a language I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, tone carries all, and I seldom use the translation.
There are also three blokes on stage wearing fully head-covering flesh-coloured helmets that have a single eye. Now, generally, “fleshy helmet with single eye” induces risible penis references but these guys act as a form of mute chorus that seems to work. I feel as though I should be finding it more kitsch than I do.
The pace is slow—I think how a pulp thriller writer like Matthew Riley writes life as a rapid-fire series of short sharp episodes, zero character, zero description, the story transmitted through causal linkage of concrete actions. The Lady from the Sea presents the other view of life story, sloughed of events, immaterial. Life as Idea in Duration, rather than events jammed next to each other, strung out in a line, the more the better.
Two characters and “the voice.” The woman is emotional, distraught, histrionic. She is tempted by the voice, which seems to represent a type of counterfactual life. If only I’d done that and not the other then I wouldn’t be stuck with this, the now, the actual. She is distressed by her marriage to the actual man, the man on stage, who is not emotional, or not that you’d notice. Their marriage is breaking down, the glory days gone. The woman feels trapped by her own decision to marry and he just can’t say anything right, nothing that can make up for lost time, the dream life, the ‘if only then were now, choices would be changed, now would be better.’ She blames him for her decision. He should have been above the social, seen that she was trapped inside it. She wants to be apart, individual. He doesn’t disagree so much as can’t see the point. Unable to engage.
And underneath and throughout, the music. Like slow waves. Direct. True.
Abhinaya Theatre Company and Topology, The Lady from The Sea, in Malayalam with English surtitles, after Henrik Ibsen, composer Robert Davidson, director Jyothish M G; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 24-26
THE COUNT TAKES AN AXE TO THE DOOR OF THE COUNTESS’ CLOSET, THINKING SHE HAS A LOVER HIDDEN THERE. LATER, AFTER A HUNT, HE DRAGS A DEAD STAG INTO HER ROOM. FIGARO, OVERCOME BY JEALOUSY, PLACES THE BARREL OF A SHOTGUN IN HIS MOUTH. THESE MOMENTS OF AGGRESSION, WHETHER TURNED OUTWARDS OR AGAINST THE SELF, ARE SHOCKING, HIGHLIGHTING THE MALE TYRANNY AND MISTRUST CENTRAL TO MOZART’S THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. THEY ARE INTEGRAL TO BENEDICT ANDREWS’ SUPERB PRODUCTION FOR OPERA AUSTRALIA.
Although we can laugh it off in due course, comedy is built on the fact of danger. The precariousness of virginity, marriage, property, status, indeed life in The Marriage of Figaro needs to be felt—it is in the music, and is on the stage. This opera is breathtakingly driven by threat and risk-taking, evasion and subterfuge, lies and delusions. Yes, entrapment and escape in Figaro are richly comic and inventively realised as such by Andrews and his adroit cast, but as with the opera’s rare moments of soulful interiority and loving embrace, the comedy needs to turn dark to reveal its deep seriousness. But Andrews, ever faithful to the work, does not dwell there. Although the impact of the shattering of the closet door reverberates for some time, the stag in the boudoir quickly becomes a comic prop in the ensuing farce to reveal who’s been duped. There is little time to linger or reflect.
Peter Conrad writes of Figaro, “If the work’s dramatic concern is living space, the musical counterpart to that is breathing space…Figaro is breathlessly overworked…[It] scrambles to keep up with the restless rearrangements of society and human relationships. The excitement of Figaro is the uniquely theatrical one of watching people thinking on their feet…” (A Song of Love and Death, The Meaning of Opera (Graywolf Press, 1996). Andrews sustains that breathlessness dramatically, even making it literal—and musical—in the character of Bartolo (Conal Coad), wheezing, grabbing for his oxygen mask, the gas cylinder attached to his walking frame.
Elvira Fatykhova, Michael Lewis, ‘The Marriage of Figaro
Elvira Fatykhova, Michael Lewis, ‘The Marriage of Figaro
As for living space, Andrews and his collaborators have located the opera in a large home in a gated community of our own time. Identically dressed servants and a pair of security guards, who frequently frame the action, serve the Count (Michael Lewis) and Countess (Elvira Fatykhova). During the overture, a sense of busyness and sociability is palpable as staff arrive for work and change into their uniforms. Before long, a frantic Upstairs Downstairs interplay between social castes is in motion.
For an opera that plays on a lack of privacy, on social congestion that yields invasion and farce, that interplay is, oddly enough, heightened by the spaciousness of Ralph Myers’ design. His stark white, modernist, open spaces convey the potential for vulnerability—where can one escape? Hide? From this Andrews extracts opportunities for comic invention and makes the most of the space for enlivened movement using, for example, a clothes rack on wheels, rows of overcoats, a cleaner’s trolley, plastic chairs. True to the opera’s inclination to farce, there are doors either side to small ante-rooms with which to engender constant suspense and surprise. With a bit of theatre magic at one point, the Count leaps out of a washing machine, one of the few objects in the room. With deliberately limited means Andrews, Myers and costume designer Alice Babidge dextrously make the most of what’s at hand or worn by the performers.
The Countess’ softly curtained room, with bed and vase of (tellingly deployed) flowers, looks like an immaculate Thomas Demand creation (RT107, p44), stripped of superfluous furnishing and decoration—until the Count shatters the closet door; and, later, he drags in the stag. Like the axe, the stag seems chillingly real in the rarefied world of an austere mansion removed from any reality beyond its immediate inhabitants. The contrast between the room’s potential for serenity and refuge, textured by the warm light through its wide window and the sudden invasions by violence and mortality yields indelible images as if from the Surrealist imagination.
Joshua Bloom & Taryn Fiebig, The Marriage of Figaro
Joshua Bloom & Taryn Fiebig, The Marriage of Figaro
The characterisations are vivid, broadly comic but textured with the minutiae of complex emotional states. Ensemble playing is constantly responsive and the large scenes finely orchestrated—not least the Lucy Guerin-choreographed wedding dance, communal, gestural and neatly articulated with its kicks and dips at the waist, strangely familiar and alien at once, part of the other-world, beyond most us, of the Count and his 21st century contemporaries.
In the end, the performers demount the wedding paraphernalia, opening out the space not into a garden but a relatively unbordered night sky, a space of possibilities, especially of forgiveness and renewal as signalled in the shower of confetti that falls through the blue and lighting designer Nick Schlieper’s contrasting of stark interiors with this cosmic outside. As David Cairns reminds us in Mozart and His Operas (Penguin, 2007), one of a number of radical elements of the opera in its own time was that the Count must beg for forgiveness in public, just like his servant Figaro. The sudden vulnerability of power is explicit here in this vast space.
The production has everything you’d expect from this opera: the evident emotional and physical affection between Figaro (Joshua Bloom, nicely played as not too much of a charmer and with just the right touch of machismo that turns dark) and Susanna (Taryn Fiebig, a lively, determined, easy presence); the Countess’ despair; Marcellina’s (Jacqueline Dark) moral turnabout; the attraction felt by the Countess and Susanna for Cherubino (played perfectly by Ann Yun, replacing an indisposed Dominica Matthews); the emerging alliance of Susanna and the Countess, at once cunning and emotionally shared; the funny-sad revelation of Figaro’s origins; and a wickedly funny and abrasive gardener (Clifford Plumpton). The orchestra was in fine form, conducted by Anthony Legge, the libretto was delivered in Jeremy Sams’ witty translation, and the overall singing was lucid to the point of little need to attend the surtitles.
It was one of ‘those’ nights when I saw Figaro—conductor Simon Hewett and soprano Dominica Matthews were indisposed, and a technical fault brought down the fire curtain during the much-praised, opening gambit in which the rooms of the house, and the characters, are revealed successively and cinematically left to right. We didn’t get to see it. Despite this, and couple of subsequent curtain-falls, the production was an impressive one, faithful, coherent, funny and sad. As we exited, after passionate applause, on one side of me someone said, “That’s it. That’s the last time. We’ve tried our hardest.” On the other, “I’d heard bad things about what it was going to be like.I’m so glad I came”
This was a superb production, capturing at once the opera’s humour and its heart-felt seriousness, its laughter and pain, and grace, by deploying a conversational, quite realistic, closely observed dramatic tone within a deeply symbolic setting, where the impossible becomes possible and cruelty is forgiven. Andrews’ production is the perfect expression of David Cairns’ observation that “Figaro is both reality and ideal—anitheses too deeply interfused to be separated.”
Opera Australia, The Marriage of Figaro, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto Lorenzo da Ponte, English translation Jeremy Sams, conductor Anthony Legge, director Benedict Andrews, designer Ralph Myers, costumes Alice Babidge, lighting Nick Schlieper, choreographer Lucy Guerin, Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Feb 6-March 24
PLAY-READINGS ARE OFTEN WRITTEN OFF AS INFERIOR THEATRE EXPERIENCES, MERE SKETCHES HINTING AT THE TRUE SHAPE OF SOME FUTURE OPUS. IT’S NOT SUCH A STRETCH TO REVERSE THE EQUATION, THOUGH: AN ACCOMPLISHED READING COULD BE SEEN AS (TEXT-BASED) THEATRE STRIPPED TO ITS ESSENCE, THE PURITY OF LINE, THE SENSE OF SOMETHING UNFINISHED, THE GAPS AND SPACES SUGGESTING AN ABSTRACTION WHICH IS OFTEN THE GOAL OF OTHER ART FORMS.
A play-reading by necessity demands its audience construct theatres of the imagination, filling out these voids with colour, detail and meaning. It’s not unusual to view a full production after catching a reading and wonder why the final incarnation seems so strangely thin in comparison.
Music theatre comes up against an obstacle in this regard. It’s one thing to layer your own fantasies of set and lighting and casting and direction onto a heard text. It’s another to have to complete a half-rendered score in your own mind, unless you’re an accomplished composer yourself. This puts Arts Centre Melbourne’s annual Carnegie 18 series in a curious position. The staged readings of new music theatre aren’t just professional development showings—they’re open to the public with a ticket price attached. But neither are they simply pared-back versions of full productions. They’re abbreviated 40-50 minute presentations of works that are still in various stages of formation, and one of the most important elements of the series is that audiences are invited to offer feedback as to where a show needs serious work.
dreamsong
The three pieces that made up this year’s Carnegie 18 differed starkly in intent, style and probable outcome. The most developed of the trio, for instance, would be well suited (eventually) to the music theatre category in a comedy festival. DreamSong is a broad swipe at Evangelical Christianity – a US television preacher finds that the millions of dollars his song-and-dance showmanship have raised for his church have been all but squandered, and decides to manufacture a miracle to put the books back in the black. He grooms a young boy-band style poser to play the role of Jesus v2.0, but the reluctant arrival of the real Messiah on the scene threatens to topple his house of (credit) cards.
It’s farcical stuff—Jesus goes by the awful moniker of Chris T, though playing the Son of God as an over-the-top Woody Allen is worth a few good laughs. The score tends toward rock opera style, which suits the brash and sometimes outrageous plotting and characterisation. It’s not the most layered or sophisticated of musicals, but neither does it take itself too seriously.
cautionary tales for children
Meanwhile, there’s a seriousness to Arena Theatre’s Cautionary Tales for Children which is commendable—not towards its subject matter, but towards its young audience. It was fascinating to watch 6 and 7-year-olds polled as to whether certain elements were too scary for their age group, and which bits they wanted to see more of. Not that the crowd were silent during the showing, of course. The rambunctious outing cleverly adapts Hilaire Belloc’s dark and ironic moral fables of the early 20th century through the conceit of a time-travelling troupe journeying from the past to redeem some of history’s most wicked children—ie the viewers. Various catastrophes and deaths are played out through song (composed and performed on piano by Mark Jones) and, inevitably, each instructional tune fails to provide salvation for the terrible onlookers. It’s fine fun, and given Arena’s resources will likely be honed to a much tighter production in the near future.
the new black
The New Black was perhaps the most ambitious of the three new works, and was clearly still in the development stage. Story-wise it hops around: initially it appears a tongue-in-cheek dig at corporate hypocrisy and racism before shifting into a more emotive exploration of the conflicts experienced by young Indigenous Australians who turn their backs on their communities. The entire second half was more or less omitted, with promises that suggested a kind of road movie to Canberra, adding an extra element to the mix. I’m not sure if the script itself has been completed yet; if so, it could benefit from some dramaturgical sharpening.
But The New Black also offered the most lively and dynamic score of the three, its young musical director Hue Blanes displaying his confidence in working across a range of styles from gospel and soul to the more familiar soaring ballads of commercial music theatre. It was unfortunate—to this onlooker at least—that during the feedback session afterwards no less than two audience members asked why the music didn’t include more Indigenous Australian instrumentation; a didgeridoo, say? Kudos to Blanes for pointing out that the instrumentation is his and he is, you know, an Indigenous Australian himself. But again, when audiences are asked to fill out the curves of a work-in-progress, there’s no way of controlling what they’ll come up with.
Arts Centre Melbourne, Carnegie 18 New Music Theatre Program, The New Black, based on an idea by Leeroy Bilney, director Stephen Lloyd Helper, musical director Hue Blanes, Fairfax Theatre, Feb 1-4; Arena Theatre, Cautionary Tales for Childen, based on the verses by Hilaire Belloc, adapted by Claudia O’Doherty, composer Mark Jones, director Chris Kohn, designer Jonathon Oxlade, Fairfax Theatre, Feb 4-7; DreamSong, book & lyrics by Hugo Chiarella, music Robert Tripolino, director Michael Gurr, musical direction, arrangements Andrew Patterson, Fairfax Theatre, Feb 4-7; Arts Centre Melbourne
The work chosen to go to full production from the 2011 Carnegie 18, Contact!, is about to premier at the Arts Centre Melbourne (see RT102, p36). Written by Angus Grant and directed by Cameron Menzies, Contact! focuses on Australia’s most popular women’s sport, netball, exploring the highs and lows of the Hyatt Park Rangers under-21 team. After the premiere season in Melbourne, Contact! will also be touring regionally throughout Victoria. Contact!, Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre Melbourne, April 11-14, 17-21, 24-28, 7pm, April 13-15, 21-22, 28-29, 2pm; www.artscentremelbourne.com.au
I AM AT BATTAMBANG AIRPORT IN NORTH-WESTERN CAMBODIA AS THE SETTING SUN GLOWS RED BEHIND A HAZE OF DUST AND SMOKE. SINCE THE ROADS TO THE NATION’S CAPITAL, PHNOM PENH, HAVE BEEN IMPROVED THE AIRFIELD HAS BECOME A HANGOUT FOR THE CITY’S YOUTH.
I am learning to ride a motorbike but don’t get far down the runway before meeting Bo Rithy. He is one of the artists enjoying the Battambang artistic renaissance promoted by recent articles in the Cambodia Daily and the New York Times (Travel, Dec 18, 2011). But where does this scene come from and what are its most pressing challenges today?
With expanding international horizons Battambang’s artists are searching for the contemporary surrounded by, but cut off from, the past. Without direct access to the mannerisms of contemporary art there is a question as to exactly what being contemporary means.
A New York Times’ article in December last year advertised Battambang’s historic palimpsest of pagodas, colonial villas and 1960s Cambodian architecture. It also hailed two new artist-run initiatives, Sammaki and Make Maek, as building on the ancient artistic legacy of the town stretching back to Angkorean times. But at the basic level of skills it is not easy for Khmer artists to turn towards the past. With the suppression of traditional culture and killing of artists by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, this history provides contemporary artists with little more than a backdrop or narrative against which to work, one that has been appropriated by French colonial, Khmer Rouge and contemporary governments alike.
“There isn’t any link between contemporary artists and older artists, but I want there to be a link between these two generations,” Theanly Chov, manager of Sammaki art space explains. The scission in Cambodia’s cultural history has recently been addressed by organisations such as Cambodian Living Arts through their efforts to reconnect living masters of traditional arts with young students, but this model has been most successful in reviving the performing arts.
Interestingly, I was often given the names of musicians when I asked people about their favourite Khmer artists. The New York Times article also cited a principally musical lineage of artists from Battambang, notably the 1960s singer Ros Sereysothea. I think this is less an affectation on the writer’s part than an indication of the importance of music in Cambodia, in particular the 1960s golden age of Cambodian pop that commands a nostalgic fascination to this day. But where are the artists?
There are two notable artists from Battambang who survived the Khmer Rouge regime and one of them holds the key to the Battambang art scene. Vann Nath survived in Phnom Penh’s S-21 camp by painting portraits of Pol Pot and later recorded scenes from S-21 in horrifying canvases. His name is now synonymous with a Phnom Penh-based artistic reappraisal of the Khmer Rouge period. Srey Bandol learnt to paint during the Khmer Rouge period in refugee camps on the Thai border and has taught in Battambang at the French-Cambodian art school Phare Ponleu Selpak (the Shining Light of Art) since 1994. The establishment of Phare has given hundreds of students a solid grounding in drawing and painting skills, leaving them hungry for “new techniques” when they graduate.
Artwalk, Make Maek Gallery
photo Justin Lorenzon
Artwalk, Make Maek Gallery
The focus of Phare’s visual arts program was evident at Battambang’s first art walk in February. Lights were hoisted into the air, colourful banners were posted outside shop fronts and tables were set up in the streets. Sammaki and Make Maek showed large collections of paintings and hosted performances from Phare’s circus school. Houses, shops and cafés on the main strip also set up easels to exhibit paintings by local artists.
“It is not hard to be an artist after school, but it is hard to find new techniques,” Rithy told me in his studio at Sammaki during the art walk. I often heard “new techniques” repeated with grail-like zeal. Artists do not always have computer skills, so there is not a widespread culture of looking online for new ideas. The exchange of ideas in Battambang happens face to face, with travel providing eye-opening opportunities for local artists. Robit Pen, a current student at Phare, has recently returned from an exchange in Nantes, in France. There he refined his technical skills and learned about art of the 20th century. Now he wants to make contemporary art, citing Pollock and Picasso as influences. Rithy has just returned from Japan where he was struck by the contrast between its bustling metropolises and cities seemingly abandoned after the tsunami. “Now I am busy thinking about Japan and art,” Rithy explains, “From now on I want to make big art, installations.” Rithy is part of the “second generation” of Phare graduates working in the wake of his older colleagues, the first wave from 2002, who set up the first artist-run spaces in Battambang and have been searching for new techniques for a decade now.
When artists do find a new way of making art they can meet with some resistance from the wider community. Long Loeurn, part of the first generation of Phare graduates, produces high definition photographs of paint dripping down blocks of ice. He performed his art at a pagoda in Phnom Penh during the Water Festival, when two to three million people descended on the city. Suspicious about what he was doing, police tried to stop him until the owners of the local Java café and gallery intervened. Elsewhere his mixing of colours has brought him under suspicion of witchcraft.
Without a tradition of artist-run initiatives in Battambang the organisation of Sammaki and Make Maek has not been easy. Katie Hallaran, one of the ex-pats who helps out at Sammaki, reports it is difficult to get artists to mind or clean the space and critical discussion of the artists’ own works is almost non-existent. Task sharing and finding time for open discussions are problems faced by any artist-run initiative, all the more so when you are building it yourself. There is no shortage of energy though. Mao Soviet, founder of Make Maek gallery, puts it well when he says, “I want Battambang to be the centre of art in Cambodia.” Battambang has an artistic history, but it is up to this generation to build an artistic tradition.
The art walk cited here was held in Battambang, Cambodia, February 3.
For more arts travels see the new online feature: RealTime Traveller
It’s not difficult to describe the Green Ban Art Walks. They were a series of walks through Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo on five successive Saturday afternoons in August 2011. Celebrating 40 years since the first Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) bans, which saved much of the area from high-rise, the walks were sponsored by Performance Space and moved from Cross Art Projects down to Big Fag Press in Woolloomooloo.
Each walk began with a talk by a prominent urban activist of the time, while other former activists spoke at buildings, monuments and plaques along the way. In other words it resembled the architectural tourist walk so common around the world, except that many of the speakers had played a crucial part in the historical events that were being discussed. But where is the art part?
There was the obvious conventional historical connection. Victoria Street in particular has a long bohemian history with many artists living there since the late 19th century. In 1973 the hard edge painter Joe Szabo, for instance, lived in the most contested area of the street and organised an exhibition in support of the Green Ban. Other artists were active in the various resident action groups—the weaver Margaret Grafton was secretary of the Darlinghurst group and painter Vicki Varvaressos was an active member; the Victoria Street group’s Mick Fowler was a part-time jazz musician while conceptualist Dave Morrissey, cartoonist Jenny Coopes, author Sasha Soldatow and myself were all active there; Brenda Humble and Toby Zoates were involved at various times in Woolloomooloo.
In the late 1970s a Margel Hinder sculpture became a centrepiece of the Woolloomooloo public housing redevelopment while Michiel Dolk and Merilyn Fairskye led a group of painters, most of whom had lived in the area, in creating a series of murals on the railway pylons through the centre of Woolloomooloo.
The walks themselves were organised by artists, starting at Jo Holder’s Cross Art Projects gallery where prints by Fiona Macdonald based on local Green Ban imagery were part of the display, and terminating in Woolloomooloo at Big Fag Press where artists and walk co-ordinators Diego Bonetti, Lucas Ihlein, Mickie Quick and Pat Armstrong continue the tradition of artist involvement in the Woolloomooloo community.
All of this and more was discussed on the walk, yet somehow that just scratched the surface. It was clear that from its inception the walk itself was to be seen as art—after all it was being sponsored by Performance Space so surely there would be an element of performance in it?
If you regard art making as the process of generating meaning then the walks fitted the bill, almost too well. However, there is a sense in which a walk with meaning is a good walk ruined. We feel we should be able to merely observe and enjoy the scene without interpretation, or at least that’s what an “art for art’s sake” worldview would suggest.
Green Bans Art Walk
photo Alex Wisser
Green Bans Art Walk
But this was not the aimless ramble of the flâneur, not the process of creating a personal map and mythology through exploration, nor was it the purposeful utilitarian walk to get from Point A to Point B. These walks were the process of imposing memory on an urban space, an almost ritualistic march through spaces loaded with historical meanings, even though they may seem to be comparatively esoteric in the eternal sunshine of our present real estate bubble.
And although walks in recent times have developed into an artistic genre of their own— mythogeography—since time immemorial they have been associated with memory, with monuments and the memorialisation of past events and people. The walk along the River Avon from Woodhenge to Stonehenge with the ashes of the year’s dead seems to have been the real reason for Stonehenge, and religious piety was manifested in the Way of St James, the great medieval Christian pilgrimage across most of Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, or the Islamic Hajj that still brings millions to Mecca each year for the ritualistic circumambulation of the Ka’ba. In Australia it could probably be argued the song lines of Aboriginal migration routes memorialise the Dreamtime ancestors, while Anzac Day and May Day marches memorialise different types of political and social struggles.
It seems entirely appropriate that the Green Bans should be celebrated in walks, after all, marches and street demonstrations were so much a part of their process. The Green Ban and resident action group movements were a challenge to the idea that cities are owned by developers, rather than being a form of commons owned by the entire range of inhabitants. The struggle that followed, often an extremely violent struggle, aimed to defend not just the physical fabric and architectural heritage of Sydney but also to ensure a more equitable sharing of the city by all its inhabitants. Walking through Victoria Street, the scene of some of the most violent confrontations, and then down across Woolloomooloo, an area saved for public housing, demonstrated the movement’s range of successes and failures and also the way the movement itself accommodated a wide spectrum of social and class interests.
But finally, inherent in all this is a different understanding of the term “art.” At the time of the Green Bans only the most radical could conceive of art as anything other than individually created paintings and sculptures in galleries. In the 40 years since, our understanding has moved on and we can easily accept these walks as a form of cultural activity equally as legitimate as any painting, even though they are ephemeral events rather than objects, involve galleries only peripherally and are collaborative to the point where there are contributions by dozens of individuals—I have only named a small number of them here.
Yet I think there is another change occurring. Implicit in the art walks is not just the claim that the walks are art, but also that the events they memorialise were art—or at least an important and innovative form of cultural activity. Recognising that a series of events that are conventionally seen as political activism can be also be seen as art, implies that the official art world does not own culture any more than developers own the city.
In fact our culture´s constant process of innovation and adaptation is the work of all of us whether we call ourselves artists or not. It is only by cultural innovation that anyone can earn the title “artist,” and the BLF members’ cultural innovation in defence of a liveable city made them artists, probably the best artists of their era and greater than any of the shallow decorators we see celebrated in art museums.
At this point in human history, the cultural memes we have created, like consumerism and corporate capitalism, are beginning quite literally to destroy us, and probably much other life on the planet. This is exactly what the media tries to obscure with unrelenting propaganda, insisting that we live the best of all possible lives in the best of all possible systems, that any suggestion otherwise is crazy or treacherous. In the face of such propaganda, issues like cultural innovation are suddenly issues of survival. But there can only be change when there is an understanding that there has been change, that things were different in the past and can therefore be different in the future.
If you ignore the official cultural gatekeepers, it becomes clear that much of the time the most influential cultural players, the “artists,” are unrecognisable, anonymous even, and acting in groups, like the BLF members. If we understand that, then we also open a path to future action—they took control of the city once and we can do it again, and we can take control of other things like the media and the museums. By walking through areas they saved, recognising what they did and documenting and celebrating it, we enact a memorial to them but we also enact a memorial to ourselves because it is our city, this is part of the process of re-occupying it. Every last anonymous one of us can fight back against the destructive values of consumption, greed and narcissism that are constantly impressed upon us by the media and the profiteers bent on private control and ownership of what should be a shared world.
If events like the walks can help to keep alive the residents’ and builders labourers’ example of innovation and activism, then we also keep alive the possibility that we too could adapt our cultural memes into less toxic ones. We could help save civilisation simply by remembering that perhaps it can be saved because others also tried to.
“Ici est tombé pour la libération…” This text was commonly found on eye-level white plaques throughout Paris in memory of Resistance members killed there during the final days of the liberation of the city in the Second World War.
Green Bans Art Walk was a WALK project, part of Performance Space’s 2011 season of walks, promenades, marches and strolls in and around Sydney and beyond.
Performance Space, Big Fag Press, Cross Art Projects, First Draft Depot: Green Bans Art Walk, Sydney, Aug 6-27, 2011
LOVE, REPRESENTATION AND POPULAR CULTURE ENTERED INTO A KNOTTY MÉNAGE À TROIS IN PROJECT 12: THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG AT ANNA PAPPAS GALLERY IN MELBOURNE. EXPLORING WHAT LOVE IS AND ISN’T, FROM THE IMPASSIONED TO THE ETHEREAL AND THE ILLUSIVE, 15 ARTISTS FROM AUSTRALIA AND ABROAD WERE BROUGHT TOGETHER BY CURATORS ANNA PAPPAS AND LAURA CASTAGNINI AND GIVEN LICENCE TO DEPICT, UNPICK AND REMAKE THE NOTION OF LOVE IN A RANGE OF MANIFESTATIONS.
While the work of artists like Sue Dodd and Salote Tawale touched darkly and disturbingly on the twisted desire of celebrity culture, others approached love with open-hearted curiosity and candour. Malcolm Whittaker’s extension of his A Lover’s Discourse project, titled Personal Classifieds 2012—What Would You Love Someone to Love About You?, takes the form of four documentary photos of subjects sourced through personals columns. To each he asked the question of the work’s title and with each photo their response is printed on a side panel. Audacious in its simplicity, the work is realist, voyeuristic and as straightforward as the kids’ toys on the carpet in one photo, or the tidy kitchen bench in another.
Heidi Holmes also takes a straightforward premise, creating an elegant ‘lover’s discourse’ from the list of names of the people she and her husband had sex with before they met one another. The two-column list (one for him and one for her) is accompanied by a recording, on headphones, of the conversation during which the list was written. At face value The List is humorous and light, and at the same time dignified by the clean white frame and gallery setting. But between the lines—lines like “I was not really keen but sorta keen” and names like “Chris…pregnancy scare” is a powerful sense of honesty and the nitty-gritty of sex coexisting—a ‘love’ infinitely more complex than what we think of when we think about love.
Romantic love is also the subject of Tony Garifalakis’ Anonymous. As clean and elegant as Holmes’ work, Anonymous consists of 15 bullets in a neat perspex display case, each engraved with a single capital letter to form the sentence “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” If physically beautiful objects, their soft-glowing gold and bronze colouring and perfection of form disturb. Phallic but also feminine, the coppery tips like unsheathed lipsticks. Though the obvious reading is a dark and conflicted one, the bullets look less like ammunition than carefully polished brightwork, to the extent that one wonders whether perhaps they deliver something other than destruction.
In the work of Garifalakis and Danae Valenza alike, the contradictory qualities of metal—its hardness and malleability, its seeming permanence and corrodability—become metaphors that evade easy interpretation. Valenza’s It’s Just a Matter of Deciding Where to Begin creates a synaesthetic relationship between three objects around the phrase of the work’s title. On the gallery wall, the text is engraved in reverse on a small brass plate while a music box plays the same phrase, translated into Braille on the metal scroll of the instrument. A ‘blind composition’ on paper—a series of painted dots suggesting Morse code, tickertape symbols or, of course, Braille—completes a trio that balances tactility and curiosity, evoking a sensuality that ultimately cannot be contained by its constituent media.
Zoe Scoglio with interaction designer Chris Heywood, Inter-radiessence
courtesy the artist
Zoe Scoglio with interaction designer Chris Heywood, Inter-radiessence
From Lucas Grogan’s enormous needlepoint Private Island and Darren Sylvester’s large-scale Lightjet prints to the intimacy of Meredith Turnbull and Ross Coulter’s almost ephemeral white stoneware in Love Wedge, the works in Project 12: This is Not A Love Song embody states of being from cynicism or nostalgia to spirituality and intimacy. Most arcane is the relational world created by Zoe Scoglio and Cait Foran in Inter-radiessence. On a plinth, under slightly twitching mauve light, a tiny landscape is created from small rocks, crystals, pieces of coloured plasticine and two small vials, one containing an eerie turquoise liquid. Two hand prints are marked out: a pair of viewers each places a hand on the outline, and then closes the circuit by placing their other hands together, over a blue dot.
Sound and light play differently for each new connection: in one, trembling shards of shadow or light grow out of fingertips and all the other objects, like crystals, creating a sense of identification with the ostensibly inanimate props. In other ‘incarnations,’ kaleidoscopic bands of colour or clouds of rainbow ‘dust’ appear—in one, tendrils of smoke seem to curl from the fingertips—all suggesting unseen energies brought to light. To a changing soundtrack of chirpy, thunderous or eerie tones, the work is both playful and finely wrought, and a fitting completion to the gamut of approaches to the theme.
Project 12: This Is Not a Love Song, artists Marco Paulo Rollo, Salote Tawale, Ben Coonley, Darren Sylvester, Heidi Holmes, Malcolm Whittaker, Zoe Scoglio and Cait Foran, Tony Garifalakis, Danae Valenza, Sue Dodd, Lucas Grogan, Irene Hanenbergh, Meredith Turnbull and Ross Coulter; Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 7-March 10
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
photo Andrew Curtis
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
IN THE LARGE CENTRE ROOM AT ACCA, ENORMOUS AMOEBIC BLUE BLOBS ARE CAREFULLY PAINTED ONTO AVOCADO WALLS, THEIR RANDOM BUT FAMILIAR SHAPES REPEATED ON TWO LARGE SCREENS WHICH FACE DIRECTLY DOWN FROM THE CEILING. VISITORS TO THE GALLERY ARE PASSIVELY DIRECTED TO LIE DOWN AND LOOK UP, SPRAWLED OVER THE HUMAN-SHAPED BLOBS CREATED BY ISLANDS OF TIERED CARPET, EACH SUCCESSIVE LAYER SMALLER THAN THE LAST SO THAT THE WHOLE SEEMS LIKE A SERIES OF TOPOGRAPHIC LINES.
It’s an elaborate and carefully constructed decor, reminiscent of some 70s pleasure-pad, the random shapes and textured pile evoking psychedelic dreams. But the ‘art’ is on the screens above: from below we look up at a video which looks down from above, the camera stalking a woman as she walks, climbs trees, drops her bundle of small red balls—are they fruit, are they artifice? The colour is lush, almost unreal, and things keep changing. Surfaces break and swim under swathes of hair or kelp. We surrender, passive and pacified, to an endlessly morphing series of images, elements and colours, as mesmerising and as mutable as the Northern Lights, and in many ways as inscrutable.
Gravity Be My Friend (2007) is one of several works in I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, the first major Australian survey of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s work. The opening line of Juliana Engberg’s catalogue essay sums up the almost naïve flavour that infuses Rist’s work: “Welcome to the wonderful worlds of Pipilotti Rist.” Engberg describes “fantasy worlds born of the poetic psyche” which are “gorgeous and generous,” “ecstatic,” and “restorative.” In other words, Rist’s is a world where pleasure is privileged: while the technology and Rist’s virtuosic video composition are crucial, the purpose seems ultimately to be revelry ahead of revelation.
Rist herself speaks of “freeing the image,” “mixing it with your body, with the rooms.” Describing the gallery as “a collective living room where people meet,” she creates in it “a manual for the people to do it themselves.” “I hope,” she says, “[that] people will go home and put their flat screens on the ceiling.”
There’s an unfamiliar and perhaps refreshing artlessness in the statement. More familiar and perhaps more satisfying than the admittedly joyous hallucinations of Gravity Be My Friend are the two works first seen on entering the exhibition: one, a framed painting of a tourist view of Venice, overlaid with video; the other the polished surface of a dining table on which rich projections play.
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
photo Andrew Curtis
Pipilotti Rist: I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011
Small Laguna (2011) begins with the taken-for-granted ‘frozen’ memory of a place—a framed oil painting of Venice—and overlays it with Rist’s eternally fluid images and colours. A cluster of cherry blossom competes with a raw red sausage; a naked, dancing woman in what seems a stark hospital room gives way to tunnels of mysterious fibre, or lush, veined lips, or wisps of smoke. The images are applied to the ‘canvas’ with the precision of a brush—it’s as though Rist determines to take the trope of a flattened and singular memory and confound it with myriad ‘real’ memories: the constant stream of visual images experienced by everyone, all the time, whose viscerality and plenitude are erased by default in every representation we manage to make.
At the dining table, with its sparse setting of dishes and wine glasses, the moving pool of light morphs from kaleidoscopic patterns to birthday candles to what seem like petals of blue gas flame. Under dim ambient light there’s a sense of the table itself beginning to move and play also; the colours catch in the glasses and seem to animate them. Upside Down Table (2011) is unsettling: a familiar domestic setting, but one where the lush play of mind-images points to a rift between the imaginative and the grounded. Rather than immersing the viewer, it shines uncanny light on the limits of freedom to a soundtrack that seems to echo conversations, muzak and the objects that form the video’s constant play.
If the sequence of the exhibition leads initially from an uncanny overlap of material and immaterial to the supine and sublime immersion of Gravity…, the immersion is completed in the third room, where drifts of voile fabric capture vignettes of pastoral scenes, graphics like smoke rings and curious breezes. Free to wander in the midst of Rist’s visuals, the visitor is, theoretically, completely within the saturated mindscape of Administrating Eternity (2011); at the same time, the tactility and the necessity to return to the body, to walk, to touch, are preparation for the final room in Rist’s series of spaces.
Entitled I Couldn’t Agree with You More (1999), this last room zooms both in and out, strangely stark: one wall of the space is taken up by a screen on which a woman walks around a supermarket, the camera solipsistically turned on herself and the shelves disorientingly slipping by, filled with products to replace the now-expected cornucopia of luscious and colourful images. Superimposed on the woman’s forehead is a vignetted film in miniature—a series of men and women, like forest-creatures, who seem to enact a clumsy, primal love-chase around her mind. Created well before the other works in the exhibition, this piece seems a seed: a suggestion of the stories within stories formed by the interplay of memory, imagination and banal reality which balloon to ecstatic proportions in the more recent work.
Unlike much contemporary video work, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase seems for the most part to sidestep interpretation and intellectuality in favour of unapologetic hedonism. I’m reminded of Linda Dement’s statement that her aim is “to give form to the unbearable.” Pipilotti Rist’s work seems to take an opposing but complementary trajectory, intent on going beyond words to a poetic realm and giving deliberate form to the pleasurable. But it is the slightly unsettling works—the almost-trembling dining table and the weird interior/exterior of the supermarket scene—that have deepest resonance. There is a sense that these are the places where we are allowed to think rather than simply feel. Not captive in the television-like, psychedelic lure of Gravity Be My Friend, the real wonder in these first and last seen works lies in the fragments we cannot quite absorb and must participate in to apprehend; and their suggestion both that imagination is uncontainable and that it inevitably affects and changes what’s around it.
Pipilotti Rist, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, Dec 21, 2011-March 4, 2012
After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2000
jeff wall
A retrospective of the works of inventive Canadian photo-based artist and writer Jeff Wall is cause for celebration. An initiative of the Art Gallery of WA (in association with the National Gallery of Victoria) this first Australian survey of Wall’s work brings together 26 of his luminous and largely life-sized images. Jeff Wall will also be in situ for a time, in conversation with AGWA’s Chief Curator Gary Dufour at 2pm on Sunday May 27. “For Wall, the event depicted, formal composition and poetics are always important and in combination create works that extend photography as a medium and test the limits of ‘near’ documentary and conjectures built on memories. All of Jeff Wall’s photographs create distinctive imaginative new pictorial realities” (AGWA media release). Jeff Wall Photographs, AGWA, May 26-September 10; transferring to NGV in November and to Sydney’s MCA in 2013
skater
Esther Godoy, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia 2010
photo Nikki Toole
Esther Godoy, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia 2010
Skater: at The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra offers a more intimate selection of images by Melbourne photographer Nikki Toole who for the last three years has been collecting images of skateboarders around the world. She observes, “Many skaters speak of a solitary mind space while skating; of entering into another state of consciousness. To make these portraits I asked the skaters to place themselves within this meditative space.” This exhibition is a partnership between the National Portrait Gallery and Geelong Gallery. Skater: Portraits by Nikki Toole, National Portrait Gallery until May 2 and at Geelong Gallery? June 30-September 9
In this frank and entertaining interview Jon Rose talks with fellow musician and improviser Jim Denley about his early instruments, his relationship to the Australian landscape and what really makes him play. www.jonroseweb.com
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The New iPad (one only)
The very latest iPad offers heightened text and visual pleasure and a host of features: 16GB, Wi-Fi (Ultrafast Wireless*), 5-mega pixel iSight Camera, HD video recording, dual-core A5X chip, Retina Display—four times more pixels than iPad 2, razor-sharp text, richer colours;10 hours battery life, Dictation and iCloud. (*NB: Not 3G or 4G model)
Bill Cunningham New York, DVD
courtesy Madman Entertainment
Richard Press’ utterly fascinating feature-length documentary follows 80-year old Bill Cunningham on his bicycle as he photographs what people are wearing on the street for his much-loved New York Times page, cajoles layout artists and attends opening nights. Famous friends, including Anna Wintour, talk about Bill and we visit his home in the Carnegie Concert Hall building where fellow artists of his generation reside. Press’ film is a wonderful celebration of a truly idiosyncratic artist and self-made cultural anthropologist.
Based on Christos Tsiolkas’ best-selling novel, the ABC TV series has enjoyed similar success with its carefully paced, meticulously detailed and emotionally charged account of the book. Each episode focuses on a central character while sustaining the overall unfolding drama of families, relatives and friends wracked by an incident in which a man slaps someone else’s child. It’s rare to see such rich emotional engagement in Australian television drama—the work of leading actors, directors and producers loyal to the book but making it a superb stand-alone series.
In this frank and entertaining interview Jon Rose talks with fellow musician and improviser Jim Denley about his early instruments, his relationship to the Australian landscape and what really makes him play. www.jonroseweb.com
making instruments, ears, audiences
gail priest surveys the issues and events of the REV Festival
RealTime issue #49 June-July 2002 online exlusive
Fantome Island
the human rights arts & film festival
Offering 19 feature films, forums and an exhibition, the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival has no shortage of challenging and thought provoking highlights. The opening night film, Under African Skies, is a documentary by US director Joe Berlinger looking at Paul Simon’s controversial decision to break the sanctions against South Africa to make his greatest selling album, Gracelands. Equally controversial is Beer is Cheaper Than Therapy by Dutch director Simone de Vries, exploring the lives of US soldiers returned from active duty and living in Fort Hood, where the suicide rate is twice the national average.
The Australian feature by Sean Gilligan, Fantome Island, tells the story of Joe Eggmolesse who, at the age of seven, was removed from his family and sent to a leprosarium on an island off the Queensland Coast. The film sees Eggmolesse return to the site and through archive footage exposes the systematic racist treatment and destructive policy of eugenics that was in place at the time (see Danni Zuvela’s review in RT106).
Planet of Snail
Other films deal with issues of child boxing in Thailand, developing a professional surfing event in Papua New Guinea, the integration of Roma children in to Romanian schools and the plight of the low lying Maldives. There are also stories with happier outcomes such as Planet of Snail from South Korean director Seung-jun Yi, a love story between Soon-Ho and Young-Chan who has been deaf and blind since childhood. The couple communicate and explore the world through touch. There’s also Prime Time Soap, a feature which takes the form of a Brazilian telenovela where political activism and disco meet. And then there’s Wrinkles by Spanish director Ingacio Ferreras, an animation based on the comic Paco Roca, depicting the not so benign adventures of two men in a nursing home.
For the Melbourne leg of the festival, there is a series of free forums, including one on the power of art to educate and agitate and the dangers this sometimes brings to the artist; a discussion on the ethics of travel from a humanitarian and ecological perspective; and another on the role of street art as tool for activism. Many of the screenings include a discussion session.
There is also an exhibition titled Echoes Of Others, Illuminating the Gaps Amid Translation which explores how technology and global communication (which is not shared by all) effects human rights issues. While the majority of the action happens in Melbourne, small selections of films will tour Canberra, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Alice Springs, Byron Bay and Perth over the next two months. The Human Rights Arts and Film Festival, director Matthew Benetti, The Forum Theatre, ACMI and Abbotsford Convent, May 15- 27; see website for national tour dates, www.hraff.org.au
the seizure, the hayloft project
Christopher Brown, The Seizure, The Hayloft Project
photo Lachlan Woods
Christopher Brown, The Seizure, The Hayloft Project
Following their successful Sydney Festival season of the quite staggering Thyestes, The Hayloft Project has been in the studio preparing their next work, The Seizure. Continuing their preoccupation with the classics, director and writer Benedict Hardie has adapted Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the story of the Greek archer who is left for 10 years, presumably to die of a hideous wound, on the island of Lemnos while the Greeks continue on their voyage to sack Troy. However, with the inevitable Ancient Greek twist, it’s revealed that the war cannot be won without Philoctetes’ bow and arrow so he is returned to the war to play his part in the victory. Just how much of this storyline and its convolutions survive the adaptation is yet to be revealed. The company says the work is “an unsentimental interrogation of trauma, the costs of war and the pursuit of justice” (website). The cast features Christopher Brown, HaiHa Le, Brian Lipson and Naomi Rukavina who have all been developing their archery skills for the performance. An intriguing trailer for the piece can be found here. The Hayloft Project, The Seizure, Studio 246, Brunswick, May 3 – 19, http://www.hayloftproject.com
boo australia, tim welfare
The King Pins, Polyphonic Ring Cycle (2009), courtesy the artists; Lauren Brincat, Drum Roll (2006), courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney; Anna Davis & Jason Gee, Biohead (2008), courtesy the artists
Curator and media artist Tim Welfare gets around the globe. Back in 2006 he curated The Middle Eastern Video Project for Dlux Media Arts’ D>Art.06 drawing on the years he had spent in Beirut, Lebanon (see RT72 and RT73, and our RT Traveller on Beirut). Recently he’s been living in Santiago, Chile and has been invited by the Centro Cultural Matucana 100 Arts Centre to curate an exhibition of Australian video art. Welfare was bemused by the fascination Chileans seem to have with Australia and how curiously Australia is represented: “Old images of Australians with kangaroos as pets now sit alongside documentary images from 70s exploitation films, long retired musicians (or [those who] should have retired) and street fashion that shouts out words of the ugly and patriotic Australia” (catalogue essay). Welfare wanted to redress this “Brand Australia” by showing a collection of video works that explore, often playfully and irreverently, the many voices that actually make up Australia. In particular he focuses on working methods that emulate the ways Australian culture has developed. He writes, “We took our cue from others. We take. Pinch. Emulate. Plunder. Quote. Appropriate. Remix.” The exhibition features work by some of the heavyweights of Australian video art: Ian Andrews, Emile Zile, The Kingpins, Anna Davis + Jason Gee, Philip Brophy, Denis Beaubois, Alex Kershaw, Lauren Brincat and Tony Schwensen. Boo Australia, curator Tim Welfare, Galería Concreta, Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, April 24-May 27 2012; http://www.m100.cl/
guerrilla girls, vca
Guerilla Girls; b&w poster – Guerrilla Girls Proclaim Internet Too Pale, Too Male!, 1995; colour – Free Women of Zurich, 2011
Guerilla Girls; b&w poster – Guerrilla Girls Proclaim Internet Too Pale, Too Male!, 1995; colour – Free Women of Zurich, 2011
When I ‘got’ the internet back in 1995, one of the first sites I went looking for was the Guerilla Girls, such was their fame and sense of intrigue at the time. The art activist group was attracting attention and ire for their no-back down feminist agenda and cutting wit, producing sticker, poster and billboard campaigns bearing messages about women’s rights and gender and racial inequality, particularly in the art world. Still going strong, their posters are now slickly photoshopped but their messages are still relevant, as their 2011 Free Women of Zurich poster attests. Two of the Guerilla Girls, Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz, are currently in Australia to run workshops and seminars with students from the Victorian College of the Arts. There will also be a talk that is open to the public. GP Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Guerrilla Girls, Public Talk, May 16, 6pm, Federation Hall, Grant Street, Southbank; http://www.vcam.unimelb.edu.au/events?id=356, http://www.guerrillagirls.com/ (Update: Tickets to this event have SOLD OUT. You could chance your luck on the door and arrive by 5.45pm to place your name on a waiting list, as uncollected tickets will be released at 5.55pm)
a hoax, la boite
Commencing its premier season at La Boite in Brisbane is a new play by Rick Viede, The Hoax (to be reviewed in RT109). The play won last year’s Griffin Award for outstanding new Australian writing, a competition open to both established and emerging playwrights. The play will also have a season at Griffin, Sydney in July. The Hoax tells the story of a young Indigenous girl who receives public acclaim for a novel based on her life, however it’s later revealed to be a fiction written by a white, male social worker, with devastating consequences. Viede’s story is a not uncommon one, paralleling the Helen Demidenko/Darville debacle of the 90s in Australia, more recently American bestselling writer James Frey’s faking of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces (fully revealed when the author was challenged by Oprah Winfrey) and another American, Laura Albert, with her invention of the addicted, transgender prostitute JT LeRoy. Viede writes “When you scratch the surface of these kinds of hoaxes, they’re really complicated studies of psychosis, desire, ambition, lack of self-esteem” (press release). A Hoax, writer Ricky Viede, director Lee Lewis, La Boite, Brisbane, May 5- 26; http://www.laboite.com.au; Griffin Theatre, Sydney, July 20-Sept 1; http://www.griffintheatre.com.au/
cue function, hellosquare
Established in 2004, Canberra-based record label hellosQuare offers an impressive catalogue of 49 CD and CD-R releases ranging from label founder Shoeb Ahmad’s own output both solo and with his duo Spartak (see earbash) to Perth new music ensemble Decibel (see earbash) and Melbourne improv outfit Candelsnuffer. The hellosQuare team will be in residence at Canberra Contemporary Artspace over the next few weeks, where they will not only be presenting concerts by Spartak, Ollie Brown (Icarus), Shopgirl, Deafcat and Merewomen, but also an exhibition of visual works complementing the ethos and aesthetics of the label featuring Luke Penders, Elena Papanikolakis, Dylan Martorell, Helani Laisk, Robbie Karmel and Kate Ahmad. CUE FUNKTION, hellosQuare exhibition and residency, Canberra Contemporary Arts Space, May 10-20; http://www.hellosquarerecordings.com/; http://www.ccas.com.au/
courtesy the artists, opening night photo Kate Blackmore
Mobile Projection Unit, Snake the Planet!
THE BACK WALL OF SERIAL SPACE IS FILLED WITH A PROJECTION OF A VIDEO GAME, SNAKE THE PLANET!, EMITTED FROM A TARTAN SHOPPING ‘JEEP’ (TROLLEY). IT HAS THE STUDIED INFORMALITY OF A GRAFFITI RESEARCH LAB PROJECT (SEE RT103), COMPLETE WITH TITLE IN THE ROUSING IMPERATIVE.
The casual flavour is more potent as the background of its creators, Lukasz Karluk, Rene Christen and Nick Clark (aka Mobile Projection Unit, http://mpulabs.com) who have between them worked on enough high-budget commercial interactives that it is clear they could have opted for a more seamless and slick surface. But for now they are all about insinuating themselves into the crevices.
The game is a homespun version of the arcade classic Snake, whose pixellated arena weirdly traces the shapes of the wall itself. Documentation shows the shopping jeep in the company of a ragged sofa and assorted living room furnishings, touring down back alleys and culs-de-sac, resting, it seems, in this most back-alley of galleries before the tour continues. It’s the enactment of an anecdote from writer and activist Jane Jacobs or social theorist David Harvey on the multiple uses of the sidewalk, but here we’re meshing those earlier democratic urban visions with the arcade games of the creators’ childhood milieu. Or, if you like, claiming that earlier politics for the armchair video game generation questions the idea of such games as a cause of urban alienation, countering with an 8-bit social urbanist manifesto for the next wave of space invaders.
George Khut, Distillery II
photo Kate Blackmore
George Khut, Distillery II
Tracing a different history is George Khut’s piece, Distillery II. Khut’s oeuvre sketches in miniature the evolution of computing machinery, from primordial campus behemoths to the portable experience of modern ubiquitous computing.
The core theme throughout is biofeedback. In Distillery II your physiological signals are translated into minimal, asymmetric rings of brightness on an iPad display, the unconscious processes of life made explicit and external. The hook is the visceral way you have to buy in to the work in order to experience it. If you have taken the time to use the machine’s help to change your very heart rate, then it is a contradiction to claim being unaffected.
As raw as this avowed prototype is, it is more polished than its progenitor works, say, Cardiomorphologies v2 from 2007. In that piece the retrofuturist reclining couch recalled ancient room-filling supercomputers, but this iteration, given the tenor of the moment, is necessarily on iPad app. Your heart-rate is measured by a slimline slip-on ear-ring, the visualisations displayed on a solipsistically personal screen.
One day, Khut explains, this experience could be in sundry app stores; he just needs to work out how to get decent biometric data into the phone. And with that, it looks different to me: not so much a feature on the underground terrain of new media art, rather a niche consumer item on the mainstream landscape: a takeaway meditation aid for the modern yogi-on-the-go.
This is not to dismiss it for mass-marketability—the opposite, really. Distillery II is elegant and more minutely worked than the typical eye-candy on your smartphone app-store of choice. The distinctive lines of the portable Apple fetish item do invite us to consider the relationship to Angry Birds and all the other virally unsociable fruit of this decade’s commuting habits. There is nothing wrong with exhibition as focus group, although I think the exhibition opens me to a work that would be invisible on an app-store promotion page—it’s the physical presence of the artist as he greets me that tells me to set that time aside
Paul Greedy, Untitled (Air 1)
photos courtesy the artist
Paul Greedy, Untitled (Air 1)
The show is not all software, by any means. Hands cupped at the other end of the industrial metabolism, Peter Blamey has made another RF-interference sound work from what he could catch—a new copper wire and discarded circuit-board sound installation (see e-dition Aug 23). And, conspicuously handcrafted, Paul Greedy shines for minimalism in form and function. Untitled (Air 1) is made of heating coils couched austerely in lengths of glass piping. They sing in turn, with heat-induced resonance, driven by a tiny Arduino (open-source electronics circuit board). If he wanted to make the contrast with the more computer-heavy works complete, he could have discarded the few integrated circuits entirely for pre-transistor relays.
CJ Conway, i am so into you
vertical photo courtesy the artist; horzontal photo Kate Blackmore
CJ Conway, i am so into you
Instead, the prize for simplicity (there are prizes for this, right?) goes to CJ Conway, even as the literal way that she brings people together has her in with a chance for the community-space awards as well. Her work, i am so into you, is a monochrome inflorescence—a design sketched in graphite onto the bare gallery wall, cleft in the middle to allow for a naked incandescent bulb. That bulb glows when you touch both sides of the sketched shape at once, closing the circuit. The next question, of course, is can you and another person touch one side of the work each and still light the bulb? Curator Pia van Gelder and I stand with our palms to the wall to find out. But the bloody thing won’t activate just for a fingertip touch; we have to interlock fingers.
Dorkbot Group Show 2012, curator Pia van Gelder, artists CJ Conway, George Poonkhin Khut, Peter Blamey, Paul Greedy, MPU (Mobile Projection Unit): Lukasz Karluk, Rene Christen, Nick Clark, Serial Space, Chippendale, March 6 -11; www.serialspace.org
This article first appeared as part of RT’s online e-dition march 20.
A SEPARATION STARTS WITH A FACT—THE BREAKDOWN OF A MARRIAGE—AND ENDS OVER A NARRATIVE AND PHILOSOPHICAL PRECIPICE. IN BETWEEN IS A DRAMA SO INVOLVING IN ITS UNEXPECTED TWISTS AND TURNS THAT THE SUDDEN CESSATION OF MOVEMENT IN A PROLONGED, OPEN-ENDED FINAL SHOT IS SHATTERING IN ITS EFFECT. THE SILENCE THAT COMES AFTER TWO HOURS OF EMOTIONAL TUMULT LEAVES US PONDERING HOW THINGS GOT TO THIS POINT. WHO WAS RIGHT? WHO WAS WRONG? ARE QUESTIONS LIKE THESE EVEN VALID IN THE FACE OF LIFE’S ENDLESS COMPLICATIONS?
Fittingly, A Separation opens in a divorce court, but the breakup of Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) takes up only a small portion of screen time. For much of the movie it is merely a backdrop to the more pressing concerns that pile up on Nader following his wife’s desertion. But the differences underlying this couple’s conflict ripple out from the opening scene and flow into the myriad subplots, informing the film’s reflections on moral obligation, class, religion and the pressures of Iranian life.
A Separation
Nader is a man used to being in command. He is proud, a little haughty and lacking in a spirit of compromise. Yet he is also, as his wife admits in the film’s first moments, a deeply committed and honourable person—perhaps too honourable. An unexpected string of events after he is left alone with his ailing father and teenage daughter leads him into a situation where his painstaking concern for integrity could destroy all he holds dear.
Simin is Nader’s mirror image—pragmatic, changeable, indirect. She wants to leave Iran and its “present situation” to give their daughter a better chance at life. Nader accuses her of cowardice and running away from every problem. The pair stand for two ways of living, their outlooks thrown into relief by Nader’s dependent father on the one hand, and the probing, critical eye of their teenage daughter on the other. The needs of the past and the demands of the future weigh heavily on this family and threaten to tear it apart. Yet director Asghar Farhadi’s skilful writing and the constrained, heartfelt performances mean the characters never feel like symbols. They are people with the same spectrum of failings and strengths as all of us, making their trials all the more painful to watch.
A Separation
Farhadi shoots his rapid-fire story with a nervy, handheld camera that reflects the tensions and conflicted loyalties running between characters. It’s as if the lens itself is afraid that everything we see could slip away at a moment’s notice. This is a deeply anxious film, in which no-one is ever allowed sure footing. For all the emotional charge infusing every frame, however, the drama is surprisingly restrained. Farhadi’s performers convey more depth of feeling in a glance, a gesture, an anxious pace, than many films manage in hours of histrionics.
It’s this ability to wring profound questions about the right way to live from dramas rooted in the earthy interactions of common people that makes much Iranian cinema so affecting. There is no need here for heroics, extraordinary situations, bloody violence or mawkish emotion. There’s certainly no need for grandstanding speeches about our common humanity. In its story and characters, A Separation illuminates the common threads of care, love, stupidity and blindness that bond relations the world over. It subtly traces the profound moral questions that lie beneath the small, prosaic choices we make every day. And finally, it shows that clinging to moral certainties can sometimes wound as deeply as vacillation. We can never live without inflicting some pain on others, no matter how honourable our intentions.
A Separation
When A Separation won its well-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film in February—the first Iranian film to collect an Academy Award—Asghar Farhadi used the opportunity to speak out against those who believe the US and its allies should bomb Iran into salvation. Farhadi’s speech merely put into words what his film had already shown. A Separation asks us to question our own hearts before setting standards for others. Although Farhadi’s is not a world without conflict, it’s one in which empathy might just lead to restraint, and remove the self-righteous glow we so often take on as we do damage to others.
A Separation, director, writer, producer Asghar Farhadi, performers Peyman Moaadi, Leila Hatami, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi, Iran, 2011, distributed in Australia by Hopscotch Films; http://www.hopscotchfilms.com.au
This article was originally published as part of RT's online e-dition march 20.
Christian Marclay The Clock 2010, single channel video, duration: 24 hours
The long awaited renovation and expansion of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is set to be unveiled on March 29, and the celebrations are suitably impressive. The opening exhibition references the long gestation of the museum’s development with the title Marking Time, featuring work by Australian artists such as Daniel Crooks, Tom Nicholson, Lindy Lee and Gulumbu Yunupingu as well as international guests such as John Gerrard (who will also be giving an opening lecture on March 29, 6.30pm; see RT102), Tatsuo Miyajima, Katie Paterson, Rivane Neuenschwender and Jim Campbell.
Coinciding with Marking Time will be the southern hemisphere debut of
Christian Marclay’s all encompassing epic, The Clock. Marclay has gathered excerpts from films across history that reference a particular moment in time, often using the image of a clock face, but also some with less literal means. These are then compiled to create a 24-hour installation that ticks away, minute by minute, in real-time. Of course, because the gallery is closed overnight, generally only half the work is ever seen. But on the opening night and each subsequent Thursday viewers will be able experience The Clock for its full 24-hour cycle—perfect for lovers of endurance art.
MCA has also teamed up with Performance Space who have curated Local Positioning Systems, a comprehensive live art program to celebrate the opening, The aim of the program is to blur “the threshold between the museum and its surrounding environment and communities” by creating participatory, site-specific works in spaces ranging from the first aid room, library and education facilities to the forecourt and surrounding landscape of Sydney Harbour and The Rocks.
Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich Celestial Radio 2004-2012 mixed media dimensions variable
Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich Celestial Radio 2004-2012 mixed media dimensions variable
Bringing a little glitz to the event are UK artists Walker & Bromwich who will create Celestial Radio (March 29-April 15). A small sailing boat will be covered in mirror tiles and stationed on the harbour outside the MCA. The artists will work with local communities to create a soundscape to be transmitted from this sparkling floating radio station.
Julie-Anne Long, The Invisibility Project [performance documentation] 2010. Performance Space LiveWorks Festival, Sydney
photo Heidrun Löhr
Julie-Anne Long, The Invisibility Project [performance documentation] 2010. Performance Space LiveWorks Festival, Sydney
Already attracting attention is Stuart Ringholt’s performative work which is elaborately titled: Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt 4-5pm (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only). That about says it all, although there are rumours of free cocktails as well (April 27, 28 & 29). On the opposite scale of exhibitionism will be Val, the Invisible (April 7-23) by Julie-Anne Long, a durational intervention in which performance and real life blur as Long indulges in “secret pleasures that are yours and yours alone, the illicit invisibilities that you get away with, while engaged in the business of everyday life” (website).
Also on an intimate scale, Jason Maling is offering to cure gallery goers of their art institution related anxieties—issues ranging from “mild conceptual perturbation to severe relational deficiency” (website). Physician (May 5–18), consists of private consultations with Maling guiding the viewer through a range of “pneumatic rituals designed to activate belief receptors.” Perhaps all museums will soon instigate such a program. (In April Maling will also be presenting another curious adventure – Fuguestate, in Melbourne, http://www.fuguestate.info.)
Lara Thoms, The Experts Project #32 Decorative Toilet Roll Holders, 2010
photo Shirley Robinson
Lara Thoms, The Experts Project #32 Decorative Toilet Roll Holders, 2010
Throughout May, Lara Thoms will be in residence at the MCA Library and around The Rocks area talking to people about their particular expertise, often in under-recognised fields. The Experts Project will culminate in presentations and documentation, including a series of portraits in which the ‘expert’ takes a photo of Thoms dressed as them (May 3, 5, 6, 10, 12 & 13). A version of the work presented at last year’s Tiny Stadiums proved this to be genuinely intriguing project.
Latai Taumoepeau’s i-Land X-isle (May 25-26) promises both visual beauty and a potent political message. In this installation and endurance work, Taumoepeau will perform under large blocks of ice suspended using traditional Tongan lashing techniques. Located in view of the harbour, the work references the effect of the melting of the polar icecaps on Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
The program concludes with something for dog-lovers. Bennet Miller’s Dachsund UN (June 2-3) entails the construction of a four-tiered amphitheatre in the forecourt of the MCA to house 47 Dachsunds representing the member countries of the UN’s Human Rights Council. (See mention of this work in relation to ethics in RT104) The work seeks to explore “utopian aspirations of the United Nations, and our capacity as humans to imagine and achieve a universal system of justice” (website).
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Marking Time; Christian Marclay, The Clock; Local Positioning Systems curated by Performance Space; Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney; March 29-June 3; http://www.mca.com.au/; http://www.performancespace.com.au/
photo Dorothy Norman; courtesy of the John Cage Trust
John Cage (Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1973)
“I once asked Arragon the historian how history was written. He said, ‘You have to invent it.’” John Cage, An Autobiographical Statement, 1989
It is hard to dispute that John Cage has had a major impact, perhaps in some ways invented the history of Western contemporary classical music. This year marks the 100th anniversary of his birth, and so it was inevitable that there’d be a variety of commemorative events.
One of the first of these for Australia will be the Cage in Us festival, presented by Clocked Out and the Judith Wright Centre Contemporary Art Centre in Brisbane. This four-day event is commemorative but also involves a healthy amount of reinvigoration and re-interpretation bringing together an impressive array of Australian and international artists.
The festival kicks off on April 5 with a series of films curated by Joel Stern from OtherFilm. Described as Cage-related they include Stan Vanderbeek’s Poem Field No.7 (1967), Jud Yakult’s John Cage Mushroom Hunting in Stony Point (1973), and DA Pennebaker’s Rainforest.
The remainder of the festival takes place April 12-14, opening with Valerio Tricoli (Italy) and Werner Dafeldecker (Germany) performing Williams Mix Extended, a re-interpretation, using digital production techniques, of Cage’s 1952 work for magnetic tape.
On Friday April 13 Swedish Percussion ensemble Kroumata will join Brisbane-based group Ba Da Boom to perform Music for Percussion and Prepared Piano. This will be followed by the Australian premier of Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra performed by Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold and the Queensland Conservatorium New Music Ensemble.
Decibel performing John Cage’s Variations VII
photo DavideCarozza
Decibel performing John Cage’s Variations VII
Saturday April 15 will see Decibel from Perth, recently returned from their first European tour (see video interview with director Cat Hope) perform the Complete Variations I–VIII. Their epic interpretation will include TVs, projections, photo cells, Arduino, dancers, tape recorders and DIY circuitry along with assistance from Joel Stern to create Variations VII. To conclude Lawrence English will team up with audiovisual artist Scott Morrison to rework, or ‘refocus,’ Cage’s only film work, One11.
Before each ticketed event there will also be free performances of Musicircus, co-curated by Rebecca Cunningham (exist-ence, see RT101), Vanessa Tomlinson, and Joel Stern and featuring installation, exhibition and performance elements inspired or based on the works of John Cage.
Clocked Out and Judith Wright Centre, The Cage in Us, Institute of Modern Art & Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, April 5, 12-14; www.judithwrightcentre.com; www.clockedout.org/
Based in Lismore, Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA) is one the countries most ambitious and innovative regional arts organisations. Their 2012 program consists of over 13 productions across the year, ranging from children’s shows such as ERTH’s magical I Bunyip to the extraordinary physical theatre of CIRCA; from Shaun Parker’s impressive youth dance work The Yard to Finucane & Smith’s saucy Caravan Burlesque.
As well as being an important presenting venue on the east coast touring circuit, NORPA also creates a range of inhouse works through their Generator creative development program. Director Julian Louis says “creating our own home grown theatre, through Generator, that is limitless and adventurous is the heart of NORPA. It’s what our audiences love to see” (website).
In 2011 the Generator program saw the beginnings of a three-year partnership with Southern Cross University to create the Home Project, looking at the specific nature of homelessness in regional Australia, particularly in Lismore. NORPA also created the site-specific work Open House with local acrobatic family Gareth Bjaaland, Bronte Webster and their son Gwyn, performing in, around and on a vacated house.
The next Generator project, just about to premier, is Railway Wonderland which takes place on a platform in the old railway station. Drawn from interviews from the local community, the work sees four characters waiting at the station, ready to leave for anywhere. An old lady arrives and begins to tell her story—that of a young immigrant trying to find her place in this regional town. The devised work is directed by Julian Louis, scripted by Janis Balodis and the performers include the always charismatic Katia Molino, with choreography by Emma Saunders (from the Fondue Set) and music by Michael Askill. It looks to be a captivating journey and worth the trip to Lismore.
Now in its 13th year and with Rhoda Roberts currently at the helm, Message Sticks has expanded from a primarily screen-based festival to become a multi-arts celebration of Australia’s indigenous cultures. Highlights include Dancestry, free daily performances incorporating ritual dance and song described as a “modern day corroboree…embracing the history, spirituality and psychology of connection to country” (website).
Those amazingly successful ambassadors of song The Black Arm Band will also be presenting their new project dirtsong, in which the songs take the form of conversations between the artists “conjuring not only a sense of geographical place but encounters, memories, obligations, community and nature” (website).
There’s also two days of free films from Australia and Canada, including Ivan Sen’s recent feature Toomelah (see RT104) as well a free daily exhibition Under the Beach Umbrella, celebrating the courage and tenacity of the Tent Embassy protests.
An extensive screening and talks program rounds off the festival and, courtesy of Sydney Opera House & Message Sticks, we have 1 double pass to give away for each of the following sessions:
Margaret & David at the Black Screen
Wednesday 28 March, 7pm
One double pass
Join Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton as they delve into the small and large screen of Black Cinema, commencing with a screening of Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith featuring Tommy Lewis.
Living the Intervention
Thursday 29 March, 7pm
One double pass
Screening of the powerful documentary Our Generation, chronicling the Yolngu people’s ongoing struggle for land, culture and freedom, followed by a candid panel discussion on the impact of the 2007 'intervention' on all Australians today.
Tent Embassy and Identity
Friday 30 March, 7pm
One double pass
The 1970s were a renaissance period for Aboriginal people, politically, socially and culturally. Essential services and Aboriginal controlled organisations were established, political movements swayed governments and many legacies were created. Forty years on what has a new generation inherited?
What’s the Fuss in the Kimberley?
Saturday 31 March, 7pm
One double pass
The Kimberley landscape, in remote Western Australia, is wild, dramatic and untamed. Some consider it the most beautiful place on Earth. So what's the fuss all about?
Please email onlinegiveaways@realtimearts.net and specify which session you would like to attend.
Please email request by COB March 22. This is a Sydney based event.
The death of Tanja Liedtke at 29, just as she was poised to take on the role of Artistic Director of the Sydney Dance Company, shook the arts community to the core. Liedtke had made such a strong impact with her first two full-length works Twelfth Floor (RT74) and Construct (RT81 & RT83).
Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde’s documentary Life in Movement, attempts to deal with a sense of both collective and personal loss. The filmmakers had worked with the Liedtke documenting her processes. Following her death they follow Liedtke’s partner Solon Ulbrich, and dancers as they tour her last work, Construct, internationally. The result is a film that is described as a “powerfully rendered take on art and artists, creativity and our own mortality” (press release).
The film has won the 2011 Ruby Award for Best New Work, the Grand Judy Award, Cinedans (Netherlands) and the 2011 FOXTEL Australian Documentary Prize at the Sydney Film Festival. It will open in cinemas nationally on April 12.
Courtesy of Closer Productions & Antidote Films RealTime has 10 double passes (in total) for screenings in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.
Life in Movement, directors Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde, Closer Productions and Antidote Film, opens nationally April 12; http://lifeinmovementfilm.com/
A major project for ANAT in 2012 (with key partners Lend Lease and Carbon Arts) will be Echology which will bring together “Australia’s leading artists and urban developers to create data-driven public artworks that engage with serious issues in evocative and playful ways” (press release). The project will draw on the skills of artists such as Julie Freeman (UK), Usman Haque (UK), Joyce Hinterding (AU), Geo Homsy (US), Natalie Jeremijenko (AU/US) and DV Rogers (NZ/AU). ANAT will be conducting a series of seminars around the country where you can meet the artists and find out how you might also participate. Free seminars, registration is essential (click links): Melbourne March 26, Brisbane March 28, Sydney March 29. www.anat.org.au
waterwheel: world water day symposium
Waterwheel interface
Suzon Fuk’s Waterwheel project will be streaming the World Water Day Symposium which will include 50 participants—scientists, artists and professionals from five continents presenting and interacting with people at Sousse University in Tunisia and at UCLA Nanosystems Centre in Los Angeles. “The symposium will promote exchange between all those who are, for various reasons, concerned with water issues, land management and hydraulic infrastructure, for a better sharing of knowledge and governance” (press release). You will be able access the symposium via The Tap—an online, real-time venue and forum, workshop and stage for live networked performance and presentation. World Water Day Synposium, March 22/23 http://water-wheel.net/
4a contemporary asian art: the cola project
He Xiangyu, Skeleton (2010), jade, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy of Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai
photo Zan Wimberley
He Xiangyu, Skeleton (2010), jade, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy of Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai
In case you were in any doubt, cola (specifically branded or otherwise) is evil black stuff. Chinese artist He Xiangyu has found the perfect exemplification by poetically referencing the dissolving tooth-in-a-can urban legend. He Xiangyu worked with factory workers to boil down thousands of litres of cola over a year which eventually transformed into black carbon like crystals. He then ground up this substance to use as inks in paintings in Song dynasty style. With these paintings he also exhibits a life-sized jade skeleton that has been eaten away by the distillation of the drink. He Xiangyu, The Cola Project, 4a Contemporary Asian Art, March 16-May 5; www.4a.com.au/he-xiangyu-cola-project/
sydney chamber opera: in the penal colony
While John Cage is posthumously turning 100, Philip Glass is alive and kicking and celebrating his 75th birthday. In his honour the Sydney Chamber Opera will present the Australian premiere of his 2000 work In the Penal Colony. Based on a short story by Kafka it presents the tale of man forced to witness an execution administered by a machine. True to the company’s name, the production is intimate, performed by two singers, one actor and string quintet, while Glass’ “hypnotic repetition resonates powerfully with Kafka’s nightmarish vision of imprisonment, torture and execution” (press release). Sydney Chamber Opera, The Penal Colony, by Philip Glass, The Parade Theatre, NIDA, Kensington , April 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 7.30pm; www.sydneychamberopera.com
contact, the arts centre, melbourne
Contact!, The Arts Centre Melbourne
Another soon-to-premier music theatre work, but one with surprising subject matter, is Contact! Written by Angus Grant and directed by Cameron Menzies, Contact! was the key work chosen go to full production from the 2011 Carnegie 18 series of music theatre works in-development, part of a special initiative set up by The Arts Centre and The Australia Council (see RT102). Contact! focuses on Australia’s most popular women’s sport, netball, exploring the highs and lows of the Hyatt Park Rangers under-21 team. While a comedy at its core, the work explores “suburban life, the claustrophobia and the comfort of staying within your boundaries, the dynamics of all-female organisations and the danger and rewards of contact” (press release). The full-length work will feature some of Melbourne’s most exciting young operatic talent from Opera Australia, Victorian Opera and the VCA. After the premiere season in the Melbourne, Contact! will also be touring regionally throughout Victoria, where it’s sure to score. Contact!, Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre Melbourne, April 11-14, 17-21, 24-28, 7pm , April 13-15, 21-22, 28-29, 2pm; www.artscentremelbourne.com.au
The 2012 Carnegie season of new music theatre works in development will be reviewed in RT108 April-May.
In addition to the free ongoing compilation series feeding those of us who are hungry for what’s new and curious in Australian music (see review of Vols 1 & 2), the New Weird Australia project also releases a series of limited run CD editions (with free downloads) highlighting the work of particular artists.
One of latest in the series comes from two fellows who, despite their youthful appearance, have already created a significant impact through both their live performances and releases in various other guises. Tom Smith has been masquerading as Cleptocleptics for the last few years, recently changing his ‘stage name’ to Thomas Williams, while Marcus Whale plays prolifically as Scissor Lock and is one half of the pop duo Collarbones (with Travis Cook). They first teamed up for a New Weird Australia benefit gig and have continued to collaborate, with Jewelz being their first EP.
Thomas Williams' work is heavily sample based, while Scissor Lock is known for his gritty swathes of feedback and lo-fi vocals (see Silent Hour review RT103), and while you can hear each artist’s particular signature in the compositions, Jewelz is particularly impressive for the way in which their styles seem to meld into a texturally complex, atmospherically rich yet still essentially melodic sound.
“Cadillic” eases us in with a slightly awkward, lilting melody of mashed sounds. It’s clearly a sample, but of what remains vague; instead it offers a patina of nostalgia—not for the original piece of music itself, but for the early sound of sampling. The rhythm is joined by half-hidden vocals—a cool pop whine—yet the sibilances are distorted, the words buried in grit.
The title track “Jewelz” is the standout. It’s an eight minute adventure starting with what seems to be a melodic fragment referencing Laurie Anderson’s “Born, Never Asked,” but played on tortured instruments, snipped and tucked into uneven phrases until it transforms into a repetitive, degraded nasal stab (a reference to “Oh Superman”?). This is enveloped in escalating sheets of noisy feedback and grit giving way to a childlike chanting of muffled vocals, delayed and cannoning between the left and right field until they fade into flutter distortion.
“Omega” displays a similar fluidity in structure as a loose, breezy sample loop is increasingly stretched and twisted, melding into orchestral crescendos, shifting to hints of beats and eventually disintegrating. “Qusqu” is a structurally simpler affair: a gradual escalation from the hiss of punched-up gain through to heightened fuzz and a growing harmonic bed underpinning wistful vocals, with, once again, that inevitable disintegration.
Jewelz is aptly named—a little treasure. But not in the shiny conspicuous way of precisely cut and polished gems, rather the intrigue comes more from the strange geological forces at work—the melting and compression—that has gone into forging each of these raw sound compounds. Each sonic fragment making up the music is a curiosity, the samples alluding to something—a song, an instrument, a texture—almost recognisable but ultimately remaining elusive. These are then crafted into a set of songs that have enough angularity to offer a challenge, but essentially are still a pleasurable listen.
Canberra duo Spartak have been making a name for themselves outside their hometown through a rigorous touring schedule from which this album is a result, containing a series of tracks recorded live during a recent trip to Japan.
Spartak is Shoeb Ahmad on guitar, electronics, clarinet and vocals, and Evan Dorrian on drums, percussion, field recordings and voice. The duo has a distinct improv feel, particularly evident in the impressive playing of Dorrian, so the live recording format feels like a fitting way to capture their sound.
The album starts with a fragment—“Lover’s Distress” seems like the middle two minutes of an improvisation, introducing us to the sonic territory of swirling guitar figures and artfully scattered percussion, with an occasional feedback swell.
“Snowflake Reflection (opening)” also seems to start someway into the session, after the musicians have established some material. Small guitar arpeggios swell out into occasional larger melodic fragments, the easy-listening guitar sound surrounded by tremors of agitation from Dorrian’s cymbal spatter and drum rumbles with floating electronic textures and samples. The excerpt takes us up one gear from ambient and then cuts dead, into the next track.
On most of the tracks on Nippon, the electronic and augmented sounds seem to sit outside the instruments, a shell-like coating rather than meshing and melding with them. However on “Channels” the swelling, sheering sound is hard to decode—possibly field recording, possibly percussive friction, possibly guitar pedal emanation, perhaps all of these. A distant melody and a small rhythm, slowly building, give the sense of the insistent yet somehow controlled pace and buzz of Japan’s larger cities.
“Colour is the Night” is the centrepiece of the album. At nine minutes it allows the musicians to travel through a range of territories curtailed in the shorter excerpts. Starting with a small ambient loop of guitar string scratches it evolves into a kind of busier version of a John Fahey guitar line with surrounding waves of shushing cymbals and drum patter—a specialty of Dorrian who can make the individual elements of percussion combine into a shimmering sustain. This track too ends abruptly, merging into “Wire + Water,” replacing the meditative space we’ve just reached with an agitated drum solo, augmented perhaps by reversed drum samples and delicately peppered with electronic bleeps.
The album finishes with another version of track 2, “Snowflake Reflections (Closer),” but this recording seems to be a more lo-fi affair, taken from the room rather than individual instrument feeds. It reinforces the point of the album—that it’s a live document— and while the sound feels very different, it’s worthwhile as it seems a particularly good version of the piece with Evan Dorrian hitting his stride in a rocking drum finale.
Ironically, the through-line of Spartak’s Nippon is interruption. Shoeb Ahmad frequently uses filters that break up his guitar melodies depositing them in more challenging configurations. This effect is also particularly evident on the vocally driven “Rail Start Mode” which includes samples of gospel preaching and insistent vocal moaning—somewhat out of place in terms of content and contrivance. The abrupt beginnings and ends of tracks also reinforce the sense of liveness—we are offered moments, not the whole event. It keeps the album moving, but it makes you wonder if the tracks have a sense of structure beyond gradual expansion since we never get to hear an ending. That aside, Spartak’s Nippon, is a well-paced exploration of live performance as document from an engaging duo.
Gail Priest
Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold, Clocked Out Duo
photo Russell Milledge
Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold, Clocked Out Duo
New music group Clocked Out—percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson and pianist Erik Griswold—has been stretching the perceived boundaries of music for over 10 years now. Their first coverage in the published archive of RealTime is in an article from 2001 by Alistair Riddell on Virtuosic Visions, a series of concerts at the Melbourne Museum where Tomlinson impressed with her signature performance, “Dear Judy,” a solo for balloon, dedicated to American composer Judy Dunway (RT42).
Shortly after, Keith Gallasch commends their appearance at the Sydney Spring New Music festival (RT46), stating that Clocked Out “proved to be the most idiosyncratic concert of the festival, a striking and original fusion of minimalist and jazz (and other) impulses realised in piano (Erik Griswold) and percussion (Vanessa Tomlinson).”
What has been consistent in their output over the decade through their is a sense of play in cmbination with serious exploration, drawing influences from a wide range of sources yet somehow maintaining a clear focus. Russell Smith interviewed the couple in RT55 in which he states: “the remarkable thing about Clocked Out Duo’s performances is not so much their wild eclecticism, but the way they maintain a strange cohesiveness and integrity.”
This sentiment is echoed in a more recent review by Greg Hooper of the CD Foreign Objects in which he writes: “There are strange overlays—Griswold might play something dark and rhythmic on piano whilst Tomlinson sounds like she is walking around in a Foley room tapping whatever feels right. This is a real strength of an excellent CD—the coherent layering of consistent and inconsistent attributes into a coherent soundfield that is both abstract and concrete.”
The key to this might be found in their dedication to exploratory processes as stated by Tomlinson in the RT55 interview: “Whether it’s balloons, prepared piano or conventional instruments, the working process is the same. Often it’s a case of one of us coming up with a musical idea, and the other failing to understand it. Then it becomes necessary to push it and play with it until it becomes something we can both work with.”
Clocked Out is based in Brisbane, but have collaborated extensively within Australia and internationally. In RT85 Greg Hooper praises their efforts in bringing the music of little known French-Sovenian composer Vinko Globokar to Australian audiences. Their collaboration with Chinese composer Zou Xiangping from Chengdu in the Sichuan province is praised by Keith Gallasch both as a performance (RT90) and its translation to recording.
Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson, Clocked Out
photo Prue Upton
Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson, Clocked Out
In the last few years Clocked Out have begun presenting concerts with interstate ensembles, essentially expanding the touring network. Through their Trilling the Wire Series they’ve mounted concerts with the Soundstream Collective (Adelaide), Decibel (Perth), Golden Fur and Quiver (Melbourne) and Ensemble Offspring (Sydney). Their efforts have not gone unnoticed—in 2011 they won the Award for Excellence by an Organisation or Individual for their annual programs as well as the Queensland State Award in the inaugural APRA/AMC Art Music Awards (see RT103).
But a tangible quality of the duo remains humility. As Greg Hooper stated in his RT107 review of the Trilling the Wire series in reference to a typographical feature of the program: “Lower casing the title fits nicely with Griswold’s music and public persona (strengths as far as I’m concerned).”
Finally this archive collection also allows us to highlight the writing of one of our favourite reviewers, Greg Hooper, who, as Brisbane correspondent, has covered many of Clocked Out’s activities. Hooper’s open style and wit, yet incisive criticism makes for accessible and pleasurable reading, truly capturing the spirit of the artists and their endeavours.
qbfm feature 2003 (currently not online)
high times
greg hooper:?topology, clocked out duo?australian, contemporary music market showcase,?spiegeltent, south bank, july 24
earbash cd reviews
clocked out the wide alley
September 20, 2010 online e-dition
clocked out foreign objects
September 7, 2010 online e-dition
sound sample
soundcapsule #1
featuring clocked out
December 2009, online e-dition
Nigel Helyer in the Archipelago, operating Thunder Stones—primitive foghorns
photo Aino Kivisaari
Nigel Helyer in the Archipelago, operating Thunder Stones—primitive foghorns
reason for travelling
I was in Turku for three months in 2011 to make a major public sound work, two very orange sonic lifeboats moored either side of the main pedestrian bridge across the River Aura. In the summer you can lounge by it and in the winter skate along it!
kiss my turku
Turku (Åbo) Finland; Cold in Winter but Cool all Summer! A super serious, long-beard bikie dude glowers from the poster proclaiming “Kiss my Turku.” This is the way the city announces itself as the European Capital of Culture 2011, obviously the citizens have a sense of humour.
Turku is the original capital of Finland established by the Swedes in the 13th century and still boasts a fine Swedish castle, now a wonderful museum. Like the castle, the Turku Cathedral is robust and massive, surrounded by elegant stone mansions and wooden courtyard houses.
Nigel Helyer, Vox Aura, public sound work on the River Aura
photo Nigel Helyer
Nigel Helyer, Vox Aura, public sound work on the River Aura
Despite what other Nordics say about the Swedes (that they are unimaginative and boring) I have always appreciated their sociability and capacity to dance on dinner tables whilst singing romantic tango numbers. Turku’s Swedish University seems to be upholding these traditions well and the old university quarter on the banks of the River Aura swarm with late night pique-niques, open air movies and throngs of cyclists.
The capital moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1812 after Finland was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1809, hence the strong regional difference and keen rivalry between the two cities. However these days savvy Helsinki folks come to Turku for summer weekends as, frankly, the bars and restaurants are better, cheaper and more relaxed. Turku’s river promenades and easy access to the stunningly beautiful archipelago make Helsinki feel somewhat claustrophobic.
A famous Russian once lived in Turku. Uncle Vladimir (aka Lenin) worked here as a train driver, eventually taking his locomotive back to Russia just in time to start a revolution in 1917. There is a fine bronze bust of him near the superb Art Nouveau era Museum of Fine Arts. True to its word, Lenin’s revolutionary government granted Finland its independence, thus a new nation state emerged in 1917 as the homeland for an ancient people.
So what do the Finns know about? Fish, berries, Koskenkorva, a lethal Finnish vodka; knives and cabin fever inspired knife fights; Sisu, a kind of true grit concept that helped them thrash the Russian Army in the Winter War; anti-heros a la Aki Kaurismaki; trees (there are lots of them); saunas (there are lots of them too); and contemporary culture which they support well and even seem to enjoy!
Experimental Sauna, Turku. Four were installed in the City during European Capital of Culture 2011
photo Nigel Helyer
Experimental Sauna, Turku. Four were installed in the City during European Capital of Culture 2011
for culture
Titanik an artist-run space on the river, the Aboa Vetus Ars Nova museum located in an old mansion also on the river and perched atop a medieval ruin, Manilla a contemporary theatre space, also on the river (get the idea) and the City Art Gallery (TaideMuseo) and Maritime Museum, naturally both on the river. The Maritime Museum has a very good yacht themed cafe with huge smorgasbord, and just alongside the Bore, a restored 1960s cruise liner, now repurposed as cheap accommodation, bars and café, well worth a visit.
for refreshment
My favourite bars read: Apteekki an old pharmacy which serves a better type of medicine and is a hangout for artists and writers; Koulu, a massive repurposed traditional school house that now serves a better type of education and brews amazing berry ciders; and The Old Bank that now distributes a better type of currency, in the form of Lapin Kulta (Lapland Gold Beer).
for really sore ears
Head for Klubbi, a €5 in, all night heavy metal joint. (My Russian friend screams incomprehensible lyrics on stage; later I write her band two death metal anti-fascist songs and wonder if this is this a new genre or simply a contradiction in terms?)
getting around
Well it is Europa, even better, Scandinavia and that means small organic cityscapes laced with cycle paths, regular high speed trains (Helsinki in two hours and Rovaniemi (the capital of Lapland) in 12. Better still Turku is the gateway to the Baltic and the extraordinary array of granite islands that form the archipelago which, more or less, extends all the way to Sweden. Regular ferries leave for the islands (crammed with cycle tourists, off to ride the Kings Way) and also for Stockholm which is a great overnight voyage. Dock workers can still commute on €19 flights to Gdansk in Poland which, like Turku, was once a major ship building port—Turku built the Russian Imperial Navy and Gdansk the German Imperial Navy.
Nigel Helyer, Vox Aura, public sound work on the River Aura
photo Nigel Helyer
Nigel Helyer, Vox Aura, public sound work on the River Aura
final recollections
Eating smoked salmon, blackened whitefish, Baltic herring. Heading off to the woods every weekend exercising our Everyman’s Rights to pick giant baskets of Chanterelle and Porcini Mushrooms along with litres of berries and barbecuing fish caught next to the Sauna (the Finns may well have invented the Sauna, but they also think they invented the barbecue!).
So think understated; ironic; poker faced; nature loving; dead drunk; design conscious; Harley riding—Kiss my Turku!
Sound Artist and Curator of the Turku is Listening programme, Simo Alitalo gathering fungi in the woods
photo Nigel Helyer
Sound Artist and Curator of the Turku is Listening programme, Simo Alitalo gathering fungi in the woods
Nigel Helyer (a.k.a. Dr Sonique) is a Sydney based Sculptor and Sound Artist with an international reputation for his large-scale sonic installations, environmental sculpture works and new media projects.
I most often travel for work— attending festivals, making site-specific projects and related art—so Barcelona holds a special place in my heart as the only reason I go there is to visit close friends, enjoy the ambience and relax into their luscious apartment and lifestyle.
I didn’t fall in love with Barcelona straight away; over many visits the city has woven her enchantment. Each time I find new favourite places and activities: the dragons in the park; the tilting rusted sculpture on Barceloneta beach; la Boqueria Markets; taking an extravagant taxi ride up to Bar Veolodromo; picking up one of the Bicing cycles (the free community bicycle program) around the city and finally feeling like a local. The dilapidated elegant architecture, incredible food enjoyed with close friends and sunny climate reminiscent of Sydney have all conspired to finally make me succumb to this city’s charms!
for culture
Recently I saw a fabulous exhibition on Russian Constructivist Architecture at Caixa Fòrum close to the Plaça d’Espanya. The latest exhibition, Actions in the Universe runs until May 20 and is an intriguing collaborative initiative by young Catalan artists David Bestué and Marc Vives, who aim to “activate public space and establish direct relations with people—with an uninhibited attitude towards cultural conventions.” Across the road are the Magic Fountain and Mies van der Rohe Pavilion built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition and from here you can easily stroll down the hill to visit the famous Mountjuic gardens and castle.
La Caixa Forum with poster for Russian Constructivist Architecture show
photo Jodi Rose
La Caixa Forum with poster for Russian Constructivist Architecture show
The Catalan Palace of Music is easily the most sumptuous venue I have ever seen and the only modernist concert hall declared a UNESCO world heritage site. Go to marvel at the mosaics, carvings, incredible glass ceiling, and surprisingly diverse musical program. If you find the beautiful Italian restaurant with €10 lunches, just down the road to the left, remind me where it is!
Mosaics on the Palace of Catalan Music
photo Jodi Rose
Mosaics on the Palace of Catalan Music
Arts Santa Monica, a converted convent originally built in 1636, is now an excellent state gallery run by the Generalitat de Catalunya, at the end of the Ramblas on the way to Barceloneta, showing contemporary works from light to radio waves. Walk down to the beach and visit the gorgeous Rebecca Horn sculpture L’Estel Ferit (the wounded star or the injured comet), one of my favourite places to watch the waves and contemplate life.
Rebecca Horn Sculpture at Barceloneta
photo Jodi Rose
Rebecca Horn Sculpture at Barceloneta
Barcelona Art Angels is located in the Raval district close to la Ramblas and offers a glimpse into the city’s vibrant cultural scene through three interlinked venues run by creative entrepreneur Emilio Álvarez. Angels is a contemporary art gallery while Rooms Service Gallery focuses on designer furniture. Carmalitas restaurant (C/Doctor Dou 1) shows video art during meals and promises “an accurate but diverse seasonal menu” based on freshly picked ingredients from nearby la Boqueria Market. Álvarez also directs The Loop Festival for Video Art specialising in moving image and aims to connect the city with local and international artists, institutions and festivals.
Madame La Marquise offers a new gallery space for visual arts, spoken word and unusual events. In the heart of Eixample, this modernist apartment with fabulous views of the city is a veritable Cabinet of Curiosities. Madame la Marquise invites visitors by appointment.
Otrascosas de Villarrosàs (subtitled “Mainly a design gallery”) opens a window onto the beautiful and strange. From The Lives of Others exhibition and book to From Flat to Full—Balloon, Bowls and More, to their Manifesto Project—Work Hard and Be Nice to People, there is always something to inspire. Stroll through the gallery on your way from the Ramblas to the Born district and punctuate a trip with a visit to the Picasso Museum.
Find things you never knew existed and can’t live without at the Museum of Ideas and Inventions in the old city (Ciutat Vella). MIBA is a glimpse into the incredible spectrum of creativity from around the world, curated via themes like Limitless Society, Reflectionarium and the Corner of the Absurd.
Bar Velódromo, serving champagne and oysters
photo Jodi Rose
Bar Velódromo, serving champagne and oysters
for refreshment
I was taken one night to Bar Velódromo and completely fell in love with the art deco glamour. Apparently it’s an excellent breakfast venue, although I can’t go past the baked eggs at Federal created by my wonderful ex-pat Australian hosts. It only too easy to linger for hours in their laidback and extremely stylish cafe near Mercat Sant Antoni. Wander up the hill to Federal owner, Tommy’s favourite Chinese restaurant, Jardin Rosa, where the chef will concoct a delicious creation from your choice of fresh produce. If you’re on the Gaudi Trail, take a break off Passeig de Gracia and revel in the delicacies at Tapas 24, guaranteed to revive you for the next round of culture and architecture! Finish the night on a racing-green leather sofa at the ultra sophisticated Dry Martini Bar where you’ll be served your pink martini by a waiter in a white tuxedo.
other recommendations
In the Born district near the Church of Santa Maria del Mar, Carrer Agullers is home to Vila Viniteca gourmet wine and cheese deli, and Forn de Pastisseria Vila Mala (#14) which produces the most extraordinary vanilla slice (Mil Hoyas) with caramel flaky pastry and richly decadent custard. I always like to visit the dragons in the fountain at the other end of the Passeig del Born, walk along Passeig del Picasso and then through the park. Further along the main street from the dragons, Encants Fleamarket is one of the best in the world, open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 7am to mid afternoon. If you’ve seen and enjoyed the lovely retro postcards of Barcelona around town, visit the new shop Urbana to pick up some of these fabulous nostalgic images, direct from their source to send home.
And anytime you’re lucky enough to find yourself in Barcelona, have a pink martini for me!
Jodi Rose is an artist and writer who has traveled the world since 2002 creating Singing Bridges, a conceptual sound work using the cables of bridges as musical instruments on a global scale. Jodi is working with engineers, architects, software developers and musicians to link the sounds of bridges around the world in the ultimate live networked Global Bridge Symphony, and writing a memoir of this quixotic philosophical journey from her award winning Travel Diary. http://www.singingbridges.net
For more of Jodi Rose’s work in RealTime see:
bridge odyssey
gail priest talks with sound artist jodi rose
After performing in Sarajevo last year, I was approached by renowned Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić, to work on the adaptation of my theatre show seven kilometres north-east, a solo piece I created in 2010 for version 1.0, working with video artist Sean Bacon.
zima (winter) in sarajevo
At Sarajevo Airport, trying to leave, in early February 2012, I clutch my boarding pass as I stare out the window at a wall of white. Is it just heavy snow or fog? Both maybe? Isn’t there a huge mountain right there? Welcome to winter travel in Sarajevo.
I’d been in Bosnia since early December, my fifth visit, and my first time building a snowman. But nothing could have prepared me for the weather that blew in that weekend, quickly throwing the city (and most of Eastern Europe) into a State of Emergency as the shops, trams and streets closed. But the city soaked it up in true Sarajevo style as people and dogs took to the streets, enjoying the craziness.
Cold bird’s feet, Sarajevo
photo Kym Vercoe
Cold bird’s feet, Sarajevo
Sarajevo is a city steeped in culture, given its history as a place where East meets West. This mash of cultural influences pops up all over town, from the food to the architecture. You open the map and see a mosque, a synagogue, an orthodox church and a catholic cathedral all on the same block. If you head down the main pedestrian street called Saraći, you eventually pass onto Ferhadija. At the meeting point between the two streets you will notice a distinct change in the architecture. Look back down Saraći and you’re in the Ottoman era. Turn onto Ferhadija and you’re greeted by grand Austro-Hungarian buildings. (You’re are also at Slatko Ćoše —or sweet corner—so take your pick of a café and get some cake before continuing on!) This historical mix brings a great richness to Bosnia.
for culture
Sarajevo hosts a lot of festivals throughout the year. The two biggest are the MESS Festival of Experimental Theatre in October every year and the Sarajevo Film Festival in July. Both program interesting work from across the globe and the city embraces the festival atmosphere. Last July I could dance all the way to my front door as the streets came alive.
There are also smaller theatres and galleries around town. SARTR (Sarajevo War Theatre) has an interesting and eclectic program, while Kino Meeting Point serves as an alternative local cinema and a place for cool folk to hang out.
Zima Džamija (winter mosque), Sarajevo
photo Kym Vercoe
Zima Džamija (winter mosque), Sarajevo
The Boris Smoje Gallery is a small, smokey gallery/bar that exhibits local and international artists. While Sevdah Art House in Baščaršija is a lovely place to go for coffee and to listen to some live traditional Sevdah music (melancholic folk songs). At the end of the day head for Zlatna Ribica, a quirky bar where even the toilet is worth the visit.
for refreshment
Much of your time in Bosnia should be spent eating and drinking. It’s amazing how easily a five-hour lunch will roll into a five-hour dinner. A change of venue, a fresh glass of travarica (a herbal rakija or herbal sljivovice) and you’re away. Some traditional Bosnian dishes include ćevapčići (grilled meat), pita or burek (pie) and čorba (soup). There are also lovely local cheeses—livanjski, travnički and kajmak—wash down well with a local red—try Blatina or Vranac.
Rooftops from Kibe, Sarajevo
photo Kym Vercoe
Rooftops from Kibe, Sarajevo
Some good local places for traditional food include Buregdžinica Bosna (for pita), Hodžić (for ćevapčići) and my favourite, Kibe, for all things delicious. Kibe is situated up in the hills so you get a spectacular panorama of Sarajevo. You also have wonderful Mediterranean options, notably Delikatesna Radnje and Noovi. If you want to grab some local produce, pop into Markale Market and find a place for a picnic after you’ve stocked up.
In Sarajevo it’s always lovely to spend a day wandering around Baščaršija (the old town), stopping to have a traditional coffee, kahva. Baščaršija is the Ottoman heart of Sarajevo—a labyrinth of small alleys, full of interesting people and shops. The centre of Baščaršija is Sebilj, a square with a fountain of the same name. From here, choose any direction and meander to your heart’s content. But don’t forget to stroll up Kazandžiluk (coppersmith street), just off Sebilj. Here you’ll see craftsmen at work. Kazandžiluk literally glitters in the sun and is a great place to pick up presents.
Baščaršija is also the centre of kahva culture in Sarajevo. Further into town you’re more likely to pick up an espresso. So, if your up for kahva served in a traditional džezva (copper pot) and fildžan (small cup with no handle), then try out one of my usual pit-stops, Morića Han, Đulistan or Havana.
Across the Miljacka River, Sarajevo
photo Kym Vercoe
Across the Miljacka River, Sarajevo
for history
If you want to discover more about the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-96) there are two good museums to visit, The History Museum and The War Tunnel Museum [http://www.visitsarajevo.biz/sightseeing/attractions/historical-sarajevo/war-tunnel/]. The History Museum has a good range of photos and artefacts from the siege, an opportunity to appreciate the inventiveness of people struggling to survive an extreme situation. The Tunnel Museum is onsite in Ilidža, in the house where the tunnel entered the besieged city. The tunnel ran underneath the airport runway, and provided the only entry and exit to the city during the entire siege. You can pick up a tour guide in town.
final recommendations
There are a number of places where you can get a great view of Sarajevo as a whole, nestled as it is amongst the mountains. Park Prinčeva is up in the hills above Bistrik. Grab a taxi, they are cheap and reliable and a good way of getting around to places where the trams don’t go. You can always wander back down on foot after a drink and soaking up the view. On the opposite side of town, you can walk up to Kovači. Up above the cemetery you’ll see an old fort wall. It’s a nice place to sip a beer and chat to the local dogs, while you take in the view down the whole rolling valley.
Kym Vercoe is a devisor-performer who has worked with a range of contemporary performance companies including Theatre Kantanka, ERTH and Theatre Physical. She has worked extensively with Version 1.0 on Wages of Spin, Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue, THIS KIND OF RUCKUS, A Distressing Scenario and The Table of Knowledge. Most recently a solo performance, seven kilometres north-east, exploring the entanglements of place, tourism and atrocity has been presented by Version 1.0 at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Sydney, as part of the 2011 MESS Festival, Sarajevo and at the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2012.
For a selection of Kym’s work reviewed in RealTime see:
New York in early January is the perfect time for any dance or performance maker to visit. There is so much on in such a concentrated period of time, that it makes the perfect research trip.
Coil, Under the Radar and American Realness all offer multi ticket deals. Added to these festivals are programs at places such as The Kitchen and Danspace. Along side performances there are also complimentary programs of forums, workshops, classes and non-performance presentation. You could spend 18 hours a day immersed in dance, theatre and performance.
for culture
Statue of Liberty
photo Tom Burless
Statue of Liberty
So many places—it IS New York!
Frick Collection is housed in the Frick 5th Avenue home which was turned into a museum 75 years ago—intimate and engaging. It should leave every Australian pondering what legacy they would leave if they were a certain WA mining magnate.
Baryshnikov Arts Center was established by Misha (as he’s known) in 2005 to open up contemporary performance to a wider audience. It housed much of the Coil Festival this year while PS 122 waits to move into its new home which I imagine will become a major institution in the coming years.
For dance try the Danspace Project, St Marks in the Bowery. You just need to look at the list of people on their Artist Advisory Board! Like any truly great space that seeks to nurture, explore and investigate contemporary dance, you’ll have your hits and misses—think Antistatic in the 90s (Performance Space, Sydney – see realtime dance archive).
New York sign
photo Tom Burless
New York sign
American Realness Festival, Abrons Arts Center is a new contemporary performance festival, only three years old, embodying what I imagined Under the Radar would be, rigorous and ambitious. It’s not focused on finding the “new”, or the “next big thing” but rather it curates work that has a sense of riskiness an/or experimentation.
Printed Matter is a must in New York. A not-for-profit that promotes, publishes and exhibits publications by artists. You need to dedicate a couple of hours to discover the gems hiding just behind that next shelf. Your gay friends will undoubtedly request you bring back a copy of PinUps. I was a bit too timid to purchase.
Also a highlight is PS122’s Coil Festival held each winter.
for refreshment
Izakaya Ten, 10th Avenue, Chelsea. Sit at the bar and try the more home-style Japanese dishes. The warm sake stewed with puffer fish fin is amazing—drink it down to the fin at the bottom of your cup.
Puffer fish fin in sake, Izakaya Ten
photo Michaela Coventry
Puffer fish fin in sake, Izakaya Ten
Mary’s Fish Camp offers a seasonal menu. I’m still dreaming of the gazpacho with huge chunks of lobster tail I had there last spring.
One word: Brooklyn. Try La Superior for the most amazing seemingly simple Mexican food. $5 margaritas!
Café Colette offers Diner style with great “New American” cuisine – great for lunch/brunch.
for sleeping
The Ace Hotel lived up to expectations and the wannabe-rock-star in me loved having the velvet rope pulled aside for myself and guest on Friday and Saturday nights as I laughed at those who had to line up just to experience the very groovy foyer bar. But, if you’re like most of us, you’ll need to check out cheap deals online.
Empire State Building, from Ace Hotel window
photo Tom Burless
Empire State Building, from Ace Hotel window
other recommendations
The meatpacking district for galleries. You’re not wrong, there’s a lot of mediocre art on those walls but once in a while—wow! Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery in 2008/2009, or more recently Monica Cook at Post Masters on West 19th Street.
Clearview Cinema on West 23rd: Is it still not daggy to dress up and sing along to The Rocky Horror Picture Show almost 40 years after the fact? Friday night midnight showings are worth it just to watch the young ones screaming with delight, dressing up in the bathrooms. Scarily I could still remember every word as I sang along, choking on the hairspray. Perhaps only for those in NYC for a longer stay and running out of options.
final thoughts
Read Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe and “making it” in NYC in the 70s and 80s—walk the same streets and dream of time travel…
Michaela Coventry is the Executive Producer of Lucy Guerin Inc, Melbourne. Previously she has worked as Manager for Stalker/Marrugeku and Project Manager and Publicist for Performance Space, Sydney from 2001-2004. She has also worked as a freelance producer, production manager and publicist for artists and companies such as Julie-Anne Long and Wendy Houstoun, Sam James, The Fondue Set, Tess De Quincey, PACT Theatre, Urban Theatre Projects and Brink. In 2003 she was awarded an Emerging Producer secondment with Robyn Archer’s dance focused Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Soundcapsule will be a bi-monthly online feature where we offer free downloads of music by artists we’ve recently covered in RealTime.
All tracks are copyright the artists.
cat hope (with lindsay vickery), the talking board, performed by decibel
Decibel, performing The Talking Board at Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011
photo Brad Serls
Decibel, performing The Talking Board at Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011
Cat Hope’s practice covers a wide variety of forms and styles, from rock and noise music to contemporary classical composition and gallery installation. In 2009 she started the new music ensemble Decibel which has rapidly proven itself to be a unique contribution to the Australian musical landscape, exploring the combination of electronics, digital technology and acoustic instruments.
Hope says of piece The Talking Board, composed with Lindsay Vickery, that “each player has their own ‘planchette’—a coloured circle enclosing the materials that they must perform. The four planchettes are programmed to independently traverse the graphically notated score creating a progression of material for the performers to realise, including the spatialisation and processing of the acoustic instruments.”
The Talking Board (2011)
Composer: Lindsay Vickery and Cat Hope
Performers: Decibel (Cat Hope, Lindsay Vickery, Stuart James, Malcolm Riddoch, Tristen Parr, Aaron Wyatt)
Recording: Live in Rottenburg, Germany, January 2012
To find more articles about Cat Hope and Decibel use our search facility top right.
eugene ughetti, procession
Eugene Ughetti performing Le Noir de l’Etoile, at Totally Huge New Music festival 2011
photo Brad Serls
Eugene Ughetti performing Le Noir de l’Etoile, at Totally Huge New Music festival 2011
Eugene Ughetti is a composer, percussionist and artistic director of Speak Percussion. He has toured extensively in Australia and internationally and has also collaborated with artists and companies such as Aphids, choreographer Martin del Amo and glass artist Elaine Miles on the Glass Percussion project. He is a recipient of one of 2012-13 Myer Creative Fellowship awards. www.speakpercussion.com/
The track Procession is composed and performed by Eugene Ughetti.
TRACK: Procession: click to stream or right/option click to download
To find more articles about Eugene Ughetti use our search facility top right.
dale gorfinkel, out hear festival 2011
Dale Gorfinkel performing at the Out Hear Festival 2011
photo Emile Zile
Dale Gorfinkel performing at the Out Hear Festival 2011
Dale Gorfinkel is a multi-instrumentalist, improvisor, instrument builder, installation artist and educator. He is interested in finding fresh ways of presenting and making music. These include outdoors, across artforms, and inter-cultural and inter-generational contexts. He brings creative communities together & shifts perceived boundaries of scenes, styles & artforms.
Gorfinkel states “This track is from a performance as part of the Out Hear Festival at Footscray Community Arts Centre November 2011. The festival featured sound installations and performances by artists Joyce Hinterding, Ross Manning, Riki-Metisse Marlow, Anthony Magen, Matt Chaumont, Ernie Althoff and myself as FCAC artist-in-residence. On this recording I am playing a radically modified trumpet along with my installation of a ‘footpump powered brassband’ consisting of many meters of tubes connected to automated tuba, trombone and trumpet attached to the top of flag poles at FCAC. It is a non-electric version of surround sound. In the background you can hear another of my installations, automated kinetic sculptures called ‘boubbly boubblies’, as well as the sounds of industrial footscray, transport, birds and echoes from various walls more than 50 meters away. Through Out Hear I hope to encourage a culture of listening, sound and music in outdoor and unconventional spaces. www.outhear.com www.dalegorfinkel.com
Cat Hope has been a driving force in the Perth contemporary music for many years. Her practice covers a wide variety of forms and styles, from rock and noise music to contemporary classical composition and gallery installation. In 2009 she started the new music ensemble Decibel which has rapidly proven itself to be a unique contribution to the Australian musical landscape, winning the inaugural award for Excellence in Experimental music at the 2011 APRA/AMC Art Music Awards. She completed a PhD from RMIT University entitled The Possibility of Infrasonic Music and was head of composition and music technology at WAAPA, ECU 2004- 2011. She currently holds a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship position at that same university. http://decibel.waapamusic.com/
You can download an audio recording of Decibel via realtime’s soundcapsule #2.
Cat Hope has been a driving force in the Perth contemporary music for many years. Her practice covers a wide variety of forms and styles, from rock and noise music to contemporary classical composition and gallery installation. In 2009 she started the new music ensemble Decibel which has rapidly proven itself to be a unique contribution to the Australian musical landscape, winning the inaugural award for Excellence in Experimental music at the 2011 APRA/AMC Art Music Awards. She completed a PhD from RMIT University entitled The Possibility of Infrasonic Music and was head of composition and music technology at WAAPA, ECU 2004- 2011. She currently holds a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship position at that same university. http://decibel.waapamusic.com/
You can download an audio recording of Decibel via realtime's soundcapsule #2.
Tim Burns, Friendly fire, performance Hope Valley 2011
courtesy the artist
Tim Burns, Friendly fire, performance Hope Valley 2011
Now in its third year and hitting Sydney in March, ArtMonth generates a critical mass of art activity around the city with over 100 participating venues ranging from large scale publicly funded galleries to the plethora of artist-run initiatives.
The program is vast featuring the work of over 300 artists and, along with exhibitions, a variety of activities that essentially map the artistic hotspots of Sydney, including bike tours around a range of suburbs and individual ‘precinct’ celebrations. It’s a potentially overwhelming event, but here are some highlights.
At Tin Sheds Gallery, there is a rare opportunity to see the work of
Tim Burns, “one of Australia’s true avant-garde and socially engaged artists” (Teri Hoskins, curator AEAF, 2010). Originally from Western Australia, Burns lived in New York for 20 years and has created pioneering works in film, video, television, performance and painting, consistently challenging the mainstream art world. This survey exhibition, Against the Grain, will show works-on-paper, archival documentation of performance actions, and a range of screenings including Burns’ 8mm feature film Why Cars?—CARnage! from 1976 described by New York Critic J Hoberman as “an aggressive jumble of car wrecks, TV (interviews), scenes from loft life, and some Chinese propaganda shot off of (sic) the screen at Film Forums” (cited by Hoskins). You can read Tim Burns’ manifesto for community TV in RT65; and a review of his 2008 retrospective, On Record, as part of FotoFreo in RT86. Against the Grain, Tim Burns Survey, Tin Sheds Gallery, March 16-April 15; http://tinsheds.wordpress.com/
Emily Morandini, filet électronique
photo Kusum Normoyle
Emily Morandini, filet électronique
In the CBD is the recently relocated Gaffa Gallery, an artist-run space founded in 2006 with an impressive program focusing on “cross-platform collaboration, collectivity and cohesion within the contemporary arts community” (website). As part of ArtMonth Gaffa is presenting the M.A.K.E Project Part 1 in their poetically titled Failspace gallery. This will feature mixed media creations by Neil Brandhorst who wowed audiences with his Horizon installation at the 2011 Underbelly Arts Festival; Emily Morandini whose delicately crocheted circuitry was reviewed in our Aug 23 e-dition; and works by Julie Burke, Thomas Marcusson and Stephanie Rajalingam. The move to the heritage-listed space on Clarence Street has also allowed the Gaffa team to introduce the Arcade Project, a gallery and store focusing on emerging designers. M.A.K.E Project Part 1, Gaffa Gallery; March 9- 3 April 3; www.gaffa.com.au
My Parents, Richard and Pam Parke, Newcastle NSW
photo Trent Parke
My Parents, Richard and Pam Parke, Newcastle NSW
Other ArtMonth highights include Trent Parke’s Minutes to Midnight (see review of the ACP exhibition in RT65), exhibiting photos from the upcoming book of the same name, at Stills Gallery (February 29 -March 24); performance photographer Heidrun Löhr’s Parallax, previewed in RT107, at the Australian Centre for Photography (March 3-April 15); and Casula Powerhouse’s Panorama: are we there yet? including works by Sarah Goffman, Fiona Lowry, Bennett Miller, Arlo Mountford and Jemima Wyman (till March 13). The team behind MOP Projects will be launching their new commercial enterprise Galerie Pompom with a group show including artists such as Vicky Browne, Izabela Pluto, Jamie North and Heath Franco (March 6-April 1). Even the Audi Centre (yes the car manufacturer) in Zetland is getting in on the act with an exhibition of sculptural pieces by students from the Academy of Fine Arts, Bratislava based on the signature Audi grille design. They will also be celebrating the launch of a new Contemporary Art sponsorship program (March 21-April 5). ArtMonth Sydney; various venues, running through March, http://www.artmonthsydney.com.au/2012/index.html
island sounds
Since 2011, Joanne Kee of Places & Spaces has been presenting Cockatoo Calling, a range of music events, residencies and workshops held on Cockatoo Island on a semi-regular basis. Coming up in March is a new collaboration between two quite idiosyncratic musicians, Adam Simmons and Erik Griswold. Simmons, from Melbourne, is a woodwind player specialising in improvisation, perhaps known to RealTime readers for his part in the Adam Simmons’ Toy Band and Bucketrider. Griswold, from Brisbane, is a pianist, composer and co-founder of Clocked Out which has consistently presented programs of innovative new music over the years (see recent reviews in RT107 and RT105. The concerts mainly take place in Warehouse 15, one of the massive spaces on the upper part of the island. Kee will also be expanding the 2012 program to a pop-up space in the Rocks (for those who get seasick). Cockatoo Calling, March 18, http://pas.inzen.com.au
sexing the cinema
East Bloc Love, Melbourne Queer Film Festival
The 22nd Melbourne Queer Film Festival will kick off March 15 with a range of educational, emotional and just plain saucy films on gay, lesbian and transgender subjects. One highlight looks to be East Bloc Love, a documentary by Logan Mucha. Travelling across six-eastern European countries, notorious for their violent anti-gay sentiments, Mucha talks with activists about their battle for recognition and equality. The screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion about the power of cinema to educate. Also politically charged is the feature from Iran, Circumstance, by Maryam Keshavarz, exploring lesbian love and youth culture in Tehran. Also likely to excite interest is We Were Here by David Weissman which documents the unfolding of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s. Other contributions include the personal story of singer/actor Paul Capsis’ relationship with his formerly flowing locks in the ABC Anatomy series documentary Hair directed by Paola Morabito; and Nerve, directed by Kim Munro, which follows Paul Knight, a London-based Australian photographer as he tries to find two strangers willing to meet and have sex on film. There’s also an extensive shorts program both Australian and international and a range of talks and panels. 22nd Melbourne Queer Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image & Greater Union, March 15-25; www.mqff.com.au
you are the fourth wall
Il Pixel Ross, And the Birds Fell from the Sky
photo courtesy World Theatre Festival
Il Pixel Ross, And the Birds Fell from the Sky
Following on from their season as part of the World Theatre Festival in Brisbane, UK company Il Pixel Rosso will present and the Birds Fell from the Sky… at North Melbourne Town Hall’s Arts House (see the review in RT108). A collaboration between Silvia Mercuriali (formerly of Rotozaza) and artist/filmmaker Simon Wilkinson, the show utilises a form that they’ve named Autoteatr in which an “audience of one or two members escape realism and are invited…to use simple technology and instructions that form the basis of script…there is no actual ‘audience’ beyond the other participants” (press release). Given video goggles and an mp3 player, audience members follow instructions, interact with characters they encounter when they are kidnapped by a group of Faruk clowns. The senses—sight, hearing, touch and smell—are essentially hijacked and redeployed to explore the narrative. If you enjoyed Spat and Loogie’s Holiday in Next Wave 2008 (see RT86), which deftly used video goggles and intriguing sensory manipulation, this 20-minute adventure might be just your thing. Il Pixel Rosso, and the Birds Fell from the Sky…, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, until March 18; http://artshouse.com.au/
escape to the country
Vic & Sarah McEwan, !00 Notions from a Nation of Two (detail)
courtesy the artists
Vic & Sarah McEwan, !00 Notions from a Nation of Two (detail)
A few years ago Vic and Sarah McEwan, known to some from the CAD factory artist-run venue and gallery in Marrickville, purchased an old school house in Birrego, near Narrandera, and headed off for a rural life. In 2011 they began a series of artist residencies and so far have played host to Victoria Hunt, Mayu Kanamori, Jason Wing and US sound artist Bruce Odland. They are kicking off their 2012 program with the third instalment in their Remote Spaces Series, with a concert by Mick Harvey (The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Crime and The City Solution), in an old church in Corobimilla. He’ll be joined by Rosie Westbrook and JP Shilo and support act Grace Before Meals. In addition, the McEwans are presenting a media installation, 100 Notions from a Nation of Two, at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. For 100 days Vic got up at 6.00am to create a song/sound work to which Sarah responded with a visual work. 100 days combines these creation as an interactive, immersive video installation—a portrait of the artists as individuals and as couple. Remote Space #3 – Mick Harvey, old church in Corobimilla, March 17, 5pm; www.cadfactory.com.au/events/; 100 Notions from a Nation of Two, Vic and Sarah McEwan at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery until April 1; http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au
virtual living
Michael Takeo Magruder, Visions of Our Communal Dreams
photo courtesy the artist
Michael Takeo Magruder, Visions of Our Communal Dreams
For anyone finding themselves in the UK March-May, check out the Robots and Avatars exhibition at FACT in Liverpool. Co-curated by FACT and the interdisciplinary design collective body>data>space, the exhibition will delve into multi-identities and “new-representational forms” that will arise in physical and virtual worlds over the next 10-15 years. With input from international artists, designers and architects it asks “how do we envisage our future relationships with robotic and avatar colleagues and playmates, and at what point does this evolution cross our personal boundaries of what it is to be a living, feeling human being?” (website). Along with extant works ranging from gaming to wearable art there are two new works commissioned for the exhibition in collaboration with The National Theatre. The Blind Robot by Canadian artist Louis-Philippe Demers (who collaborated with ADT on Devolution in 2006 see RT71 and RT72) will feature a robotic arm which touches the contours of the viewer’s face, similar to the way in which blind people explore facial features; the resulting portrait will be drawn on screen. Visions of Our Communal Dreams? by Michael Takeo Magruder (US/UK) will be a synthetic meta-verse created collaboratively by participants both in physical and virtual space. Together they will create a communal world using open source 3D application server OpenSimulator. This will also involve a series of workshops with local school students. Beyond the exhibition, Robots and Avatars is larger program of web, event and educational activities that is part of the EU Culture Program 2007-13. Robots and Avatars, FACT, Liverpool, UK, March 16-May 27; www.fact.co.uk/projects/robots-and-avatars/; www.robotsandavatars.net/
picture viewer
Excerpt Magazine #2
Amongst the many visual arts magazines and journals in print and online, the quarterly online publication Excerpt Magazine stands out as a neat conceptual package. Editor Amy Marjoram describes it as “an exhibition within a magazine and a discussion written with pictures” (Excerpt #2 editorial). Basically it’s a 35 page downloadable PDF, with seamless links to some embedded online video material. Issue 2, just out, includes 30 artists responding to the cover artwork by featured artist Izabela Pluta. Marjoram describes Pluta’s work as “picture imperfect” and “self-complicating,” challenging the veneer of perfection so often portrayed in commercial photography. With almost no text, neat, simple design and easy browsing, it’s possibly the closest an online magazine can come to a quality fine art book. http://excerptmagazine.com
FUSING THE LUCIDITY OF A PARABLE WITH THE UNNERVING REVERSALS OF EXPECTATION THAT MARK TRAGI-COMEDY, RITA KALNEJAIS’ BABYTEETH, DIRECTED BY EAMON FLACK, IS A BRACING EXPERIENCE, GRIMLY, IF SCABROUSLY, FUNNY, IMBUED WITH HEARTFELT MORAL PURPOSE AND FUELLED BY THE EMOTIONAL INTENSITY OF A FAMILY STRUGGLING TO COPE AS CANCER THREATENS TO BRING ONE OF THEM DOWN. BABYTEETH IS FUNNY AND MOVING, THE WORK OF A TALENTED EMERGING PLAYWRIGHT.
Babyteeth swings between a grieving present and flashbacks to events that brought each of the three family members in touch with an idiosyncratic personality who will allow them the possibility of transformation. At a railway station, 14-year-old middle class Milla (Sara West) encounters Moses (Eamon Farren), a tough but affable drug dealer in his early twenties. She takes him into her life and family home with surprising ease, his presence, intimacy and loyalty allowing the cancer-suffering Milla to realise independence and wisdom beyond her years. Just how she achieves it provides the alarming point on which Babyteeth turns.
Sara West, Babyteeth
photo Heidrun Löhr
Sara West, Babyteeth
Milla’s over-caring, contrary mother, Anna (Helen Buday)—a pill-popping bundle of nerves—tangles with her daughter’s eccentric Latvian violin teacher, Gidon (Russell Dykstra); he’s loud and cantankerous but adroit at bluntly delineating others’ problems. Anna’s psychologist husband, Henry (Greg Stone)—contrastingly calm, generously liberal with prescription drugs and conceding both wisely and foolishly to his daughter’s needs—is befriended by a pregnant neighbour (Kathryn Beck), a spontaneous if not bright youngster who firmly reintroduces Henry to some of life’s innocent joys. Through these pairings, the inward-looking world of a family in crisis opens out, offering resolution and hope to varying degrees.
If built on the solid foundation of parable and the somewhat vertiginous swing between past and present, Babyteeth is rich in apparently incidental detail, often sitcom funny, constellating around haircuts, the speed at which a car is driven, over-use of medications, condoms, a violin, food, clouds, sex and the baby tooth (Milla’s last) of the play’s title, each growing with symbolic strength as the play progresses. It’s a taut network of imagery and action but always open to surprise and shock. After Moses has spent the night with Milla, Henry gently lectures him (and like Anna, doesn’t let the boy get a word in): “I know I can trust you to give Milla her medication because I know until very recently you worked as a dealer,” adding shortly afterwards, “If she contracts any secondary infections—Do you understand? She’d die of herpes.” He then inadvertently jokes, “I don’t think she’d die of crabs, but it would be so uncomfortable.” The sheer awkwardness of a man struggling to accommodate his young daughter’s needs alongside his fears for her is typical of the play’s dynamic—tense and funny at once.
Helen Buday, Greg Stone, Babyteeth
photo Heidrun Löhr
Helen Buday, Greg Stone, Babyteeth
Despite the sheer starkness of their home with its glaringly white kitchen, Anna, Henry and Milla are not bland middle class individuals liberated by quirky strangers. Kalnejais, Flack and the performers offer us characters who are complex in themselves, quite capable of surprising us—Milla is in fact an agent for far-reaching change, not its object. With these characters from very different backgrounds and ways of being coming into close contact, Babyteeth is a comedy of contemporary manners, and much more.
Kalnejais deftly suffuses palpably comic moments with disturbing tensions, awkwardness, outbursts and tears. She dextrously juxtaposes the gentle humour of Henry holding Toby’s pregnant belly with Milla’s emotional and physical exhaustion as she sociably aims a camera at the pair. However, in the nightmarish climactic bedroom scene with Milla and Moses, where the girl reveals the full extent of her determination, Kalnejais drops her pervasively comic tone without losing impetus or descending into bathos, simply because the line between dark drama and comedy is so subtly inter-woven it can afford to loosen and shift easily in either direction, the mark of very fine playwriting.
I was intrigued that a play so rich in emotion never focuses directly on love. Doubtless Anna and Henry love Milla, their care is on the edge of panic—alone in his office Henry injects himself with morphine (“We’re losing her”); he and Anna, who blunders in, pretend it hasn’t happened (“Some tummy bug”). There’s still sexual attraction between Anna and Henry (in a very funny scene which combines sex and lunch) but love is assumed. Similarly there’s only one brief scene in which Milla and Anna are intimate but, again, love is a given. Milla and Moses are not lovers—she knows he has a girlfriend—but their relationship is such that she can ask of him a seriously dangerous favour. Babyteeth is rewardingly about everything that circulates around love but may or may not be love itself, but is what we find there—care, compassion, self-sacrifice—including the curiosity that generates new relationships, new intimacies, with strangers. And here it is regenerative— as comedies so often are—one life passes, a new one is born.
Russell Dykstra, Sean Chu, Babyteeth
photo Heidrun Löhr
Russell Dykstra, Sean Chu, Babyteeth
I was curious about Moses telling Henry and Anna that, in the night, Milla had told him “The room was full of people…They were saying she could stop struggling.” I could recall nothing else like it in the play. In the script, when Milla looks up at the clouds she hears what Kalnejais describes as “What the dead said to Milla.” The production, however, simply offers us Milla’s engagement with the clouds as a transcendent experience, conveying a distinctive sense of self-contained otherness about the girl. Moses’ report is presumably the odd residue of in-rehearsal editing.
The acting in Babyteeth is outstanding: Helen Buday’s Anna is compulsively jittery, riffing on her preoccupations, hands and legs dancing restlessly; Greg Stone conveys the sadness and bewilderment that underlies a calm exterior; and Sara West creates a convincingly young Milla, capturing her rapid maturation, anger, weariness and, in the end, dark sense of purpose. Eamon Farren’s rangy Moses oscillates nicely between charmer, scary thug and friend; Russell Dykstra expertly realises a fascinating Gidon who, despite his sexism and his anger at God and much else, is a carer in his own belligerent way; and Kathryn Beck’s single mum-to-be Toby is no innocent but is possessed of an appealing tunnel vision that yields friendliness and joy. A small boy, Thoung (David Carreon, Sean Chu), is taken on by Gidon for free lessons on the violin (the iPod-hating teacher describing the body of the instrument in sexual terms), a role performed with the requisite stillness. Collectively the performers embrace Kalnejais’ overlapping dialogue, the demands of comic timing and rapid emotional transformations.
Babyteeth reveals Rita Kalnejais to be a writer of considerable promise, adroitly negotiating the demands of structure, cleverly giving almost equal weight to her six characters to enhance the sense of an expanding if intimate world and deftly deploying symbols that lend poetry to the drama.
Belvoir: Babyteeth, writer Rita Kalnejais, director Eamon Flack, performers Kathryn Beck, Helen Buday, David Carreon, Sean Chu, Russell Dykstra, Eamon Farren, Greg Stone and Sara West, Upstairs, Belvoir Theatre, Sydney, Feb 11-March 18
This article first appeared as part of RT’s online e-dition march 6, 2012.
Robbie Aveniam, John Blades, Slices of My Life, the NOW Now Festival 2007
photo Tom Bannigan
Robbie Aveniam, John Blades, Slices of My Life, the NOW Now Festival 2007
THE BROADCASTER, MUSICIAN AND PERFORMER JOHN THOMAS BLADES DIED 25 NOVEMBER 2011. HE WAS BORN IN DECEMBER 1959.
John was an inspirational member of Sydney’s music community for many years, approaching life with breathtaking passion, never allowing Multiple Sclerosis, with which he was diagnosed in 1982, to arrest his activities. He said in his 2010 radio documentary The Too Hard Basket, “It has been very important to me throughout my MS to never regard myself as sick. The word ‘sick’ is a straitjacket” (360 documentaries ABC-RN).
One of John’s many passions was The Loop Orchestra, and it remains Australia’s most enduring experimental music project—29 years of broadcasts, recordings and performances. MS over time reduced his motor functions and he was eventually wheelchair-bound and had to give up his job as an engineer at the RTA. He continued with The Loop Orchestra, his radio program Background Noise (with collaborator Richard Fielding) and his interests in culture and communication.
On 17 July 2006 the gig series If you like improvised music we like you at PELT gallery presented “a unique collaboration between Robbie Avenaim (percussion and electronics) and John Blades who will be presenting a spoken word piece entitled ‘a slice of my life’.” John performed an expanded version titled Slices of My Life in January 2007 with Avenaim (percussion) and Chris Abrahams (piano) at the NOW now Festival in Sydney. It remains one of the most touching pieces of music theatre I’ve seen.
As in all aspects of his life his preparation was meticulous—perhaps a legacy of his engineering training. John had a script on his wheelchair tray, but during the performance he didn’t refer to it—he’d memorised the 45-minute text. The script was autobiographical—he talked about MS, his work as an engineer, his love of music, film and Art Brut, his involvement in radio, The Loop Orchestra, his interest in serial killers, his relationships with specialist cab drivers and his revelatory introduction to computers.
This public self-dissection of his privacy was presented with humour, generosity, honesty, intelligence and courage—there was no hint of self-pity. He shared his heroic tale, not to self-aggrandise, but because this story is engaging and needed to be told for the sake of others who live with a disability, whose stories usually go unreported. But it was only a script, it had to be contextualised musically, it had to be performed by a body.
When you see interviews on YouTube of John from 1990, you realise how fluent his speech had been as a young man, but MS robbed him of muscle control—you could see and hear the effort it took him to speak. In Slices of My Life his ‘song’ created deeper meanings which would have been lost in written form. His voice after 30 minutes tired and the audience became acutely aware of the effort. But he remained articulate as the voice gradually got slower and less powerful.
There is little else with which to compare Slices of My Life. The fragile song was defined by John’s body’s capabilities in a way that made me think of Stelarc’s body interacting with technology. It also made me think of Ian Curtis’ wavering strength in Joy Division (one of John’s favourite bands). The performance of Slices became a metaphor for his life.
It was appropriate that he chose music to tell his tale: he loved and understood music so much. And despite the powerful content of his text it remained the work of a trio. Abrahams and Avenaim, sensitive to the content of the text and the fragility of the song, were equal players, creating parallel structures that were as engaging as the unfolding story. As in all his endeavours, John was comfortable with collective authorship.
In 2010 John went on to communicate another untold story of sex and disability in the documentary The Too Hard Basket for ABC Radio National. It won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism—All Media, and the Radio Documentary of the Year Award from the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. In this work John communicated with humour, generosity, intelligence, honesty, courage and great dignity. That’s how we’ll remember him.
Jim Denley
John Blades also appeared in the documentary film Scarlet Road (director Catherine Scott, 2008). Eds
Sydney Festival’s L’effet de Serge celebrates the quiet, suburban communality of DIY-at-home Live Art. The idea is catching on. Works in Compass Live Art Festival (Leeds UK) explore exchange as a means of art production and reception. Andy Field, co-director of Edinburgh’s Forest Fringe argues, “Let’s take any economic value out of the work, and understand it on entirely different terms, as a means of social and political shift.” In the Perth International Arts Festival, UK group Subject to Change, invite you to build your own version of Perth. With more luxurious means, US artist Natalie Jeremijenko and chef Mihir Desai feed their audience exotic but sustainable and healthy dishes amidst taxidermied animals in a museum. In Bargain Garden Theatre Kantanka magically recycle anything and everything to create their costumes and the space that houses them. Contributing to the growing art-science field, Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor reanimate pigs’ hearts at Performance Space in an exploration of the ‘porous’ body and organ transplantation. Soon in Sydney, remarkable Berlin artist Thomas Demand (cover image) will convert the Commercial Travellers’ Association hotel rooms in the Harry Seidler designed MLC Building into an installation, with a scent by Miuccia Prada (yes, that Prada) and an accompanying story by US writer Louis Begley. Art is heading in every direction, innovating, hybridising, seeping into the everyday.
COMPLEMENTED BY GARY FOLEY’S SOLO PERFORMANCE, FOLEY, AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE, BLACK CAPITAL, THE CENTREPIECE OF THE 2012 SYDNEY FESTIVAL AT CARRIAGEWORKS, OFFERED AUDIENCES RARE INSIGHTS INTO THE ABORIGINAL HISTORY OF SYDNEY AND OF REDFERN IN PARTICULAR.
My hours at Carriageworks were well spent: there was much learnt and even more that was deeply felt. Elsewhere, Force Majeure’s Never Did Me Any Harm, Rosslyn Oade’s I’m Your Man, Philippe Quesne’s L’Effet de Serge and Rimini Protokoll’s Radio Muezzin were my festival highlights while Chunky Moves’ Assembly, Cheek by Jowl’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Belvoir’s Thyestes appealed with their intense theatricality and inventiveness.
i am eora
The engulfing stage design for I am Eora comprises two huge planes that meet deep upstage; one, the floor, tilts down towards the audience, the other rises high to create a deep sky-scape of the same slate-like texture as the floor while both double as a vast screen. It’s like peering into distance without end, but also into memory, legend and history.
A lone man (Matthew Doyle) in ceremonial attire burns eucalyptus leaves on the far side of the stage and exits. Another man (Luke Currie-Richardson), elegant in a suit, appears centre stage, takes his shoes off, stares at us, flexes his feet, removes and neatly lays out his clothes. He is naked save for white body marking. “I am Eora” is written via projection on the sky. The man’s nakedness silently suggests at once comfort with his skin, pride, a challenge even and a return to the past.
A suited Jack Charles berates a crowd of performers from the auditorium: “You can’t live in the past. Time to move on you mob.” “Shut up you old cunt,” one of them yells and Charles is struck down. He recovers, recalling meeting King George III, telling the monarch he needs to give back some of the taken Aboriginal land, that scars don’t heal. Charles is embodying the spirit of Bennelong, whose compromises with white invaders are not always admired. I am Eora then moves on to dramatise the archetypal power of the legendary, not mythical, historical Aboriginal figures Pemulwuy, Barangaroo and Bennelong. Pemuluy, the guerilla warrior, is represented by singer-composers Radical Son and Nooky as a modern rapping hero in not always distinguishable lyrics in a raw opening night sound mix. Pemulwuy was eventually killed by troops: “Boy you gotta hold your own, your daddy ain’t comin’ home.” Tomorrow’s Pemulwuy emerges as a small boy in a Superman outfit while Radical Son’s antecedent—“All the brothers, women, children who died just to be civilised…I don’t ever want to feel like a Bennelong”—is shot by a policeman. It’s clear by now that I Am Eora is neither history lesson nor simple story-telling, far from it. It assumes some knowledge of the historical figures (aided by the printed program) but otherwise leaves the audience to make connections.
Represented by a solo performer (Miranda Tapsell), Barangaroo’s spirit is largely evoked by action around her—the flow of sustaining water projected above (Barangaroo was a fisherwoman), the voice of Mum Shirl, the powerful singing of Wilma Redding (“Don’t close the door on me”), Linda Burney MP repeating her inaugural parliamentary speech and a group of women gesturing chorally and affectingly in support of Barangaroo. When the nurturing, pregnant Barangaroo does speak, her voice rises into a wild, barely intelligible cry from the heart. This constellating approach to evoking Barangaroo works here and there but is sometimes a testing mix of the literal and the very lateral, of the subtle and the overwrought.
Bennelong returns, repeating his opening words of warning, but now despairing of the loss of stories, of place names (“how will people know they are from here?”) and anticipating his death: “I know this is the night I will die…our footsteps will be swept away…all this I have seen,” suggesting that his attempts at reconciliation were driven by the need for cultural preservation. He dies, and in an act of reconciliation internal to Aboriginal society, Radical Son/Pemulwuy takes up Bennelong’s body.
Wesley Enoch and fellow writer Anita Heiss have taken on a huge challenge in eschewing story-telling and focusing instead on the evocation of three key figures in local Indigenous history, using a collage of song, dance and spoken word (at its best in Charles’ Bennelong) supported by a talented live band and the Stiff Gins, and layered with projections (including, for example, names writ large and then erased, as history does). Enoch, as director, is to be congratulated for melding hugely disparate elements. That they didn’t always cohere and that the performers could not always meaningfully fill Stephen Curtis’ impressive stage was perhaps inevitable on a first outing. A tauter version and a clearer delineation of the tension between the three archetypal figures (especially as it relates to the Bennelong heritage) might make for an enduring work which, as it is, delivered a grand, impressionistic celebration and a sense of heritage that most of us know little of, let alone feel part of, but is offered for sharing in I am Eora.
travelling colony
Brook Andrews’ Travelling Colony comprises caravans painted in the artist’s trademark patternings such that they cluster into a single artwork filling the vast Carriageworks foyer. Likewise, as you move from caravan to caravan, relaxing into a chair or on a bed, you gradually accumulate a history of Redfern as told by its inhabitants on video monitors. Some of these people played key roles in the development of Redfern, recalling childhood years, industries that provided work when there was none in the country, the impact of Charles Perkins, the Block as the first Indigenous landholding, the founding of child care, medical and legal services, the profound Black Theatre years, the terrible drug blight and the death of young TJ Hickey. Speakers believe the latter was the trigger for reform: “it pushed us to turn it around.” The pride in Redfern is palpable: “What happened in Redfern benefited the whole country.” It’s seen as the place where leaders learned to lead, where culture has won out over drugs, where young artists learn their craft in a safe place, says rapper Nooky, while an older male, a community bus driver, admires “the young blokes and women comin’ through” and pays tribute to the role women have played in Redfern’s evolution. Travelling Colony is an ingeniously immersive and educative creation from a leading Indigenous artist. See it now.
181 regent st: addressing black theatre
Also fascinating and informative in a more conventional model is the Rhoda Roberts curated exhibition focused on the National Black Theatre in Redfern in the 70s. I can do little justice to its scope but to acknowledge its tribute to the artists well outside the mainstream who provided the impetus for the flowering of black theatre from the 70s to the present. There are video projections of dramas and documentaries, excerpts of staged play readings, photographic portraits of leading figures and images from key productions, reviews, articles and scripts. In the audio recordings from ABC Radio National’s Awaye, it’s sad to hear late playwright Kevin Gilbert speaking of his need to keep writing and painting inside prison and out given “the horrors I saw and still see and will continue after 1988 [the National Bicentennial]” which he attributes to the absence of a truly national spirit. 181 Regent St is an inspiring celebration. I’m hoping a book or DVD will emerge from it.
foley
If not formally part of Black Capital, Foley at the Sydney Opera House segued beautifully with I Am Eora,Travelling Colony and 181 Regent St. Gary Foley’s personal account of his own history is embedded in and integral to the development of black politics in Australia. As a young man, inspired by Charles Perkins, he found his way to Redfern, became part of the black theatre movement and emerged as a leading activist. The show is an informal lecture with Foley the historian guiding us through sometimes unfamiliar events, from the visit of black American boxer Jack Johnson to Australia in the early 20th century, encouraging the strengthening of social and political organisation, through to Foley’s childhood and on to Redfern, the National Black Theatre, Black Power (wickedly funny) and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which is central to his vision.
Describing himself on stage as “an aboriginal historian in his natural habitat” (the set is built from the cardboard boxes that have held his library and copies of his ASIO files), Foley is consistently and pointedly witty. But always with an edge, sniping at Neville Bonner, Noel Pearson, “1988—the great masturbation of the nation,” and delineating the failure of Labor governments to grasp the need for land rights, not native title. He declares, “The struggle goes on…we changed the world, only trouble is the world changed it back.” If now imbued with wit and wisdom, Foley’s anger is still palpable. The show should travel to a wider audience, and it could make a great film given the ample audio-visual material that Gary Foley and director Rachael Maza put to fine use on stage (Foley drolly indicating that working to cue keeps him on track in a delightfully discursive performance).
never did me any harm
Never Did Me Any Harm, Force Majeure & STC
photo Jamie Williams
Never Did Me Any Harm, Force Majeure & STC
Force Majeure’s Never Did Me Any Harm is an engrossing reverie replete with dream-like discontinuities and the irruption of strange images into an inviting everyday backyard setting. As in much of her work, choreographer Kate Champion draws us into states of being where time is suspended, with either a moment of trauma writ large as in the individual crises of the subjects of Not in a Million Years (2011) or the collective anxiety of the post-crisis Already Elsewhere (2005), or more intimately in the personal reflections on age in The Age I’m In (2008). As with the latter, the recorded utterances of volunteers reflecting on their lives anchors this reverie in everyday reality. This time the subject is parenthood.
Although children have a role in the show—performers transform into amusing or scary children—the work focuses on adult problems and disappointments: a father who manipulates his child’s playfulness to the point of violently shaking her; parents who lose their emotional and physical intimacy; others worn down by the challenge of rearing an autistic child. Suppressed violence is vividly represented by the projection of a pulsing digital grid that envelops the backyard, quaking beneath the performers with a deep sonic rumbling and vibrating their bodies.
I was particularly taken with a scene where Josh Mu as an autistic boy (or as Kate Champion explains in her RealTime online video interview, it could be any child) pushes his comforting mother (Heather Mitchell) down as if to kill her. Doubtless that’s what she might feel about his demands regardless of her love for him. Is this her nightmare? Just as disturbing is the subsequent moment when a home movie image is projected onto the boy’s t-shirt. He takes it off, gently folding it as if to hold on to his past. His shadow, bizarrely white, momentarily parts company from him and has to be retrieved in one of the most memorable images in the show, as if the boy is dancing into a sense of wholeness and independence.
Other scenes are much less mysterious, more literal—a father’s (Vincent Crowley) increasingly loud and bitter speech to the audience about parents who have forgotten their own childhoods, who chauffeur their children in SUVs, who sexualise children, and his concern that no one celebrates having an average child. There’s the scene where projected words like ‘money,’ ‘accessories,’ ‘bored,’ ‘grown-up’ and ‘damage’ magically slide down the tree trunk onto a couple as if to suggest forces at work of which they are unaware. The oscillation between these relatively literal moments and more enigmatic ones provides a strong framework for evoking complex issues and emotions not so easily represented.
Dance doesn’t appear utterly central to Never Did Me Any Harm. There’s Kirsty McCracken’s dancing child and Sarah Jayne Howard’s pregnant mother. But an overarching choreographic sensibility informs the work—it’s evident in the engaging gestural conversation that opens the show, the tussle between father and daughter, the funny family photo scene, the episode where the boy’s shadow peels itself away, and elsewhere. Actors Heather Mitchell, Marta Dusseldorp and Alan Flowers are seamlessly integrated into the movement. The embracing dance in Never Did Me Any Harm is between bodies, voices, images, sound (Max Lyandvert) and design (Geoff Cobham) in a dark if sometimes humorous foray into the private worlds of parenthood.
In my video interview with Kate Champion, made after I’d seen Never Did Me Any Harm, I ask her to respond to some of these observations. Her comments are fascinating.
thyestes
Thyestes
photo Jamie Williams
Thyestes
With its virtuosic theatricality and taut ensemble playing, Thyestes is a bracing contemporary rendering of the Ancient Greek myth of the rivalry between the brothers Atreus (Mark Winter) and Thyestes (Thomas Henning) culminating in a meal in which a vengeful Atreus cooks and serves up his brother’s children to their father. Instead of adapting Seneca’s play, the writers (Winter, Henning, Chris Ryan and director Simon Stone) go at the myth quite laterally, detailing the unfolding story in brief digital readouts between six scenes and then abruptly working back from the twelfth scene to the horrendous, pivotal sacrifice.
The ghastly meal aside, the events in the readout are mostly not portrayed on stage: it’s “the moments between atrocities…play[ed]…in as modern and realistic way as possible” (director’s program note) that provide the work’s focus. The temporal disjunction, on the other hand, is aimed at revealing the causes of the deed and then its consequences (for example, the death of Atreus at the hands of Thyestes’ bastard son) before we witness Thyestes gobbling up his bolognaised children. It’s a strategy that might confuse even an alert and myth-informed audience member, not least because the myth and the contemporary scenes are for the most part at such a great remove from each other. Still the work coheres and is compulsively watchable as the three performers (Ryan playing one male and three female roles) indulge in Tarantino-ish conversations typically imbued with popular culture references, obsessive repetitions, psychotic turns and implicit threats. Or they simply play table tennis (Thyestes and Atreus in exile). Or quietly or overtly torment each other (some nasty business with a strap-on). Raw rock alternates with excerpted classical compositions and Ryan, as Pelopia in an oddly Kosky-an moment, sings Schubert’s “Der Doppelganger” at a grand piano (the characters otherwise show no inclination to high art, quite the opposite).
The ingenious set is a black-framed white box with the audience on either side, looking through. Dark curtains rapidly rise and fall to mark scenes in which, miraculously (behind the aural mask of loud music), surprising new stage arrangements are realised with cinematic verve. Thyestes is like a hyper-archaeological dig: we read beneath the surface of this impressionistic, blokey world, searching below the accretions of contemporary culture and its technologies, from iPod to piano, past Romanticism and the Baroque, to find mere fragments of a mythic world of power hungry, rapacious kings. Now stripped of the mystery of distant time, of any sense of tragedy or even pathos, these men are revealed to be as cruel, manipulative and banal as the powermongers who live amongst us today. Only in the conversation before Thyestes eats his children, where he and Atreus recall their childhood, is there a fleeting sense of brotherhood. But the joy of vengeance outweighs the familial bond. Thyestes is a bold, complex and challenging creation: just what it adds up to is food for further reflection. Mark Winter’s manic but superbly controlled performance as Atreus (who is at the centre of this ‘telling’ of the Thyestes myth) is chilling, Henning is contrastingly cool and Ryan effectively plays the women with a simple directness (the inherent mysogyny of the myth is amplified in this play but, at the same time, it’s perhaps undercut by the casting choice).
radio muezzin
Radio Muezzin
photo Jamie Williams
Radio Muezzin
There’ll be a detailed response to Radio Muezzin in RealTime 108 from Meg Mumford and Ulrike Garde, who have spent time with the producing company Rimini Protokoll (Germany) and they’ll also look ahead to the company’s 100% Melbourne in May this year. As feature-length documentaries play in cinemas and non-fiction moves to the front stands in bookshops everywhere, so has theatre invested increasingly in staged documentaries in a variety of forms with increasing realism—real people, as it were, on stage.
In Radio Muezzin, we meet three muezzins from Cairo who are losing their jobs to a fourth (who has left the show—his words are read to us and we see him on screen, championship weightlifting and winning a Qur’an reading competition in Bangkok) who broadcasts daily prayers to mosques. The three men, one of them blind, one with a damaged leg, another with a day job, speak with humility about their careers, families, status and the Arab Spring (which they welcome) along with revealing incidents from their lives told against a screen the width of the stage. We glimpse their younger selves and the flow of Cairo street life. One muezzin takes two hours to get to his mosque each day, one still works at the holy task of baking, another’s mosque is the size of a tiny room while the broadcasting muezzin has an audience of tens of thousands.
The significance, and challenge, of growing a beard is discussed; ritual ablutions are carefully demonstrated; salary discrepancies (from no pay to a lot) are detailed, and we hear the haunting sung prayers. A set of ceiling fans turn above the carpeted stage to convey, with the projections, just a touch of Cairo. While it’s disappointing that the fourth muezzin doesn’t appear (projected text explains that he was in dispute with the other muezzins in the show) it’s sadly apt that his close-miked, dulcet toned, recorded reading gradually overrides the live voices of his peers at the end of Radio Muezzin. This is affecting theatre, unsophisticated, awkard at times, but it never pushes the muezzin to be anything other than who they are, or as much as they are prepared to reveal. Congratulations to the Goethe-Institut, its partners, and the Sydney Festival for presenting us with this unexpected pleasure—theatre that while un-cathartic is quietly engrossing and culturally disorienting.
anatomy of an afternoon
Paul White, Anatomy of an Afternoon
photo Prudence Upton
Paul White, Anatomy of an Afternoon
In Anatomy of an Afternoon, a work inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun (originally set to Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), dancer Paul White very slowly emerges from tree-like stillness into a creature, initially appearing to discover balance and shape (peering down at his body to see what it is doing), walking on all fours, tongue protruding, becoming increasingly animal-like and crawling rapidly towards us as the music from the three onstage musicians intermittently hints at Debussy, the fragmented, sensual ebb and flow of their score equally taking its own shape.
Standing again, White is suddenly alert to his feet, as if they’re alien; he staggers, hops and turns; he quite unconsciously discards his clothing; he doesn’t understand how trousers work—thinking they should slide on of their own volition.He reminds me of the protagonist of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a man discovering himself and the world, if not manners—White bares his bottom at us and sniffs his fingers. If Nijinsky’s faun flirted with nymphs and naiads, White engages instead with the audience, peering with curiosity, looking at us upside down between his legs or from an extended miraculously slow-turning headstand, the music now fully-textured in this reverie of self-awareness.
I saw Anatomy of an Afternoon at a disadvantage, from the back of the Opera House’s Playhouse auditorium, deprived of the intimacy the work seemed to warrant and not terribly aware of White’s facial expressiveness mentioned by other audience members. However, White, as ever, moved superbly in a work that perhaps evolved too slowly to be consistently immersive and was curiously lacking a third dimension usually evident in the creations of choreographer (and RealTime correspondent) Martin del Amo. But I’d love to see it again, up close.
i’m your man
I’m Your Man
photo Heidrun Löhr
I’m Your Man
The first thing that hits you in I’m You’re Man is the smell of linament, the second is the pummelling of punching bags in the small Belvoir Downstairs Theatre converted into a gymnasium walled with posters of famous boxers past and present and inspirational texts: “The more you sweat the less you bleed.” Loosely built around the career of a young boxer, Billy Dibb (Michael Mohammed Ahmad) aspiring to be world champion, I’m Your Man is a weave of verbatim utterances from boxers about their lives channelled through iPods worn by performers who reproduce what they’re hearing, picking up the pauses and hesitations, the changes of tack and rhythm, the colour of accent. The sense of pride and of ambition (whether for fame or a family’s survival) is as palpable as the punching, push-ups, virtuosic skipping and floods of sweat. We learn about being hit (“It’s the thump, not the pain”), wounds (“you could see the cracks open”), decay (“it’s my eyes, it starts from there”), deaths, constraints on sex and alcohol, defeat, nightmares and the big night. Perhaps on his way to the top, Billy fantasises victory, he’s “willing to die” and his support team anxiously spill out conflicting advice and fears. “The time for talking is over!” yells the coach and the waiting crowd roars. And the audience in this tiny gym-theatre roar too, in approval. I’m Your Man’s is pretty relentless but the pressure is eased by some quiet, amusingly lateral dialogues. As for the headphones, so confident and fluent are the performers that you forget the device and marvel at the brute reality endured as a sport.
l’effet de serge
L’effet de Serge
photo Martin Argyroglo Callias Bey
L’effet de Serge
L’effet de Serge (France) was a festival highlight, a quietly immersive, slow burn, idiosyncratic performance about a man who lives on his own and invites friends singly or in pairs to visit for one-off events and occasionally a larger one, bringing all his acquaintances together. Serge’s actions are most easily described as DIY-at-home Live Art. His long workbench is cluttered with a TV (which he watches while silently working) and numerous tools with which he creates his little actions. To the sound of old movie scores, a tall, loose-limbed actor (faintly reminiscent of Jacques Tati) announces that he will play Serge. Couples or individuals arrive at the barely furnished house at various intervals, seen through the glass door on foot or bicycle or in a (real) car, are offered a drink and witness a brief display—sparklers on a motorized toy car to music by Handel, for example. Or Serge in his guests’ car flashing head lights, parkers and interior light to the beat of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. His audience is allowed to finish their drinks and then are ushered out. Socialising is minimal.
Serge plays table tennis, solo. He sets up a more elaborate display (luminescent spectacles, glo-rope, laser effects, music by John Cage) for a young woman (there are the slimmest of hints of a possible relationship shaping up). Then there’s the big night, many guests, a bigger spectacle, much more sociability and played like the real thing, with much of the dialogue aptly just audible and not at all acted in the conventional sense. It’s not surprising to read that Serge clubs have been springing up across Europe. L’effet de Serge is a work of quiet intimacy, eccentricity and everyday performativity emerging side by side with the virtual fantasies of the digital world.
assembly
Assembly, Chunky Move
photo Prudence Upton
Assembly, Chunky Move
From the opening, enveloping mass chatter to the sight of waves of choral performers flowing over the top of the steep, wide stairs that fill the stage, to a vocally aggressive stand-off between two sudden, huge factions, Chunky Move’s Assembly conjures nothing less than the experience of watching the human crowd at a distance as just another animal species (a reminder of the imagery that saturates previous works, Glow and Mortal Engine). However, interpolated into these mass movements are carefully orchestrated patternings in smaller groups that suggest cooperation, care and intimacy (as well as occasional threat), while eight dancers, alone or in various permutations, become emblematic of the body’s capacity to interact and communicate with wordless eloquence. The dancers glide, often while extended horizontally, with anti-gravitational ease, up and down steps, or fall from one level to another with occasional alarming thumps. The quite dancerly choreography, brief tableaux that recall religious paintings, the vocal beauty of some of the crowd sounds and music from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance yield a quasi-mystical ambience that elevates life and art to something more than mere being. Gideon Obarzanek makes the most of the design and of his large cast, exploiting all the opportunities they offer him aesthetically while evoking a certain thoughtfulness about the tension between individual and mass, between human and animal evident in images of panicky flocking or lyrical circling, like birds. Given the considerable physical demands The Sydney Philharmonia Choir acquitted itself more than ably (as it did gesturally for Peter Sellars’ staging of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex for the 2010 Sydney Festival). Assembly is a grand work which fascinates with its interplay of ideas and images, both visual and aural.
a history of everything
A History of Everything, Sydney Theatre Company and Ontroerend Goed
A History of Everything is a romp backwards through human history to our single cell origins and the Big Bang. It springs from a young woman’s fantasy, delivered at the show’s opening, based on some dodgy science positing that at the point of utter entropy of the universe the flow of time will reverse. The performers unroll a huge map of the Earth across the stage and with a variety of props, including signs for wars and flags to denote nations, reverse time in some detail for recent decades (revealing what one has forgotten) and then in giant steps backwards. Direction and performances are endlessly witty and inventive, drolly noting the delivery of technological developments (revelatory at the time, slight in retrospect), pushing tiny boats backwards over oceans, shifting continents about on their tectonic plates, coolly delineating a hugely shrinking global population. Towards the end the young woman who we met at the beginning can declare that she’s no longer frightened of the universe—there is something oddly comforting about conjuring a compact life of the Earth even if backwards. However, it’s a show built on an exhaustible conceit and, once it arrives at pre-life, becomes calculatedly spectacular if reverentially grim with the Big Bang like an apocalypse in reverse. A History of Everything has nothing of the raw dynamism of Ontroerend Goed’s (Belgium) previous Sydney offering, Once And For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen. However, all credit to the actors, including members of the STC’s Residents, for their role in collaborating on the creation of a work packed with detail as well as performing it with such vigour and dexterity.
’tis pity she’s a whore
‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore
photo Jamie Williams
‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore
Cheek By Jowl’s consistently engaging but not entirely satisfying production of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629-1633) is a pruned back version of the original, depriving the play of its comic sub-plot but unleashing the force of the central narrative by providing it uninterrupted continuity. This allows
the jilted Hippolita to take centrestage in a clear trajectory from her expression of emotional pain to her subsequent murderous plotting and eventual death. Thwarted desire is physically manifest in her sadistic treatment of her apparent ally, the Machiavellian Vasques, twisting his nipples and digging a stiletto heel into his hand. Suzanne Burden’s Hippolita is powerfully realised as a strong if misguided woman. She is juxtaposed with Annabella, the play’s adolescent co-protagonist (with her brother-lover Giovanni). Annabella’s dismissal of Soranzo (Hippolita’s ex) is conducted with dignity and wit well beyond the ken of this aristocrat suitor whom, in an act of desperate expediency, she has to marry anyway.
From then on the narrative drive is pretty much in the hands of Vasques until it escapes even his grasp when the obsessed Giovanni stabs Annabella and presents her heart to the courtly gathering. In the meantime Annabella had come to expect nothing less than death at the hands of the cuckolded Soranzo, but never Giovanni. Refusing her brother’s love, her self-awareness is almost tragic and certainly alert to the additional disadvantage of being a woman in her circumstances. But, very oddly, Cheek by Jowl undercut Annabella’s tragic potential by adding an attraction to, yes, knitted baby wear, as if she is willingly, perhaps delusionally, accommodating herself to a familial future with Soranzo—this puts her in the same basket as mad Giovanni. Instead of tragedy, we get pathos, losing the critical distinction between an insightful sister and a narcissistic brother, between a maturing woman and a sorry girl. Nonetheless Lydia Wilson’s lithe performance as Annabella is the production’s greatest asset, sensual and passionate, subtly realising her transformation, while Jack Gordon as Giovanni is, unfortunately, rhetorical in his delivery and much less certain in the delineation of his progress from lover to jealous murderer.
The pulse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore beats fast from the very start, with its lucid narrative and its energetic ceremonial sequences—the whole cast in ramped-up, pop or folk-inflected dance numbers substituting for the original masques, including a Pina Bausch-Kontakthof swirling circle of gesturing suitors. But it’s initially too fast, not allowing us to fully feel the passion between Giovanni and Annabella and, particularly, her surprise that her brother feels as she does. Instead it’s dominated by adolescent physical playfulness. As well, the presence of ensemble players in early scenes they’re not actually involved in, offering a sense of milieu, feels dated and overcrowded. Also overwrought is the scene in which the maid Putana has her tongue bitten out onstage once Vasques has wheedled from her the truth about the lovers (Ford has her blinded off-stage, Vasques preferring to have her keep her tongue so she can tell her tale to the authorities). While this gross act tallies with the director’s publicised view of the Jacobean and Caroline stage’s goriness it here becomes, along with the mayhem perpetrated in the barely offstage bathroom, a protracted indulgence quelling the play’s thrust. Cheek By Jowl bring a welcome dynamism and fluency to ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, allowing the actors playing Hippolita and Annabella great range and depth but, in the end, reduce Annabella to a lesser being, dulling the play’s power.
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I Am Erora, writer, director Wesley Enoch, writer Anita Heiss, associate director, choreographer Yolande Browne, design, projection Stephen Curtis, associate designer Ruby Langton-Batty, video artist Mic Gruchy, music director Cameron Bruce, lighting Trent Suidgeest, associate lighting desinger Lindsay Williams, sound designer Paul Tilley; Carriageworks, Jan 8-14; Brook Andrews, Travelling Colony, Carriageworks, Jan 8-March 4; 181 Regent St: Addressing Black Theatre, Carriageworks, Jan 8-29; Ilbijerrri Theatre Company, Foley, writer, performer Gary Foley, director Rachael Maza, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Jan 24-29; Force Majeure, Sydney Theatre Company, Never Did Me Any Harm, director Kate Champion, performers Kristina Chan/Sarah Jayne Howard, Vincent Crowley, Marta Dusseldorp, Alan Flower, Kirstie McCracken, Heather Mitchell, Josh Mu, set & lighting designer, Geoff Cobham, composer & sound designer Max Lyandvert, dramaturg, Andrew Upton, associate director, Roz Hervey, Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company, Jan 11-Feb 12; Stefan Kaegi/Rimini Protokoll, Radio Muezzin, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Jan 16-21; Anatomy of an Afternoon, concept, director, choreographer Martin del Amo, choreographer, dancer Paul White, composer Mark Bradshaw, The Playhouse, Jan 9-11, 13-16; Belvoir, Thyestes, after Seneca, writers Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Simon Stone, Mark Winter, performers Henning, Ryan, Winter, set & costumes Claude Marcos, lighting Govin Ruben, composer, sound design Stefan Gregory; Carriageworks, Jan 18-Feb 19; I’m Your Man, creator, director Roslyn Oades, performers Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Billy McPherson (also boxing coach), Katia Molino, Justin Rosniak, John Shrimpton, sound artist Bob Scott, movement director Lee Wilson, lighting design Neil Simpson, Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir St Theatre, Jan 12-Feb 5; L’Effet de Serge, conception, direction, design Philippe Quesne, performer Gaetan Vourc’h, Vivarium Studio, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Jan 8-11; Chunky Move, Victorian Opera, Sydney Philharmonia Choir, Assembly, director, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, music director Richard Gill, lighting Nick Schlieper, costumes Harriet Oxley, set design Gideon Obarzanek, Chris Mercer, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Jan 11-14; Sydney Theatre Company & Ontroerend Goed, A History of Everything, director Alexander Devriendt, text by Alexander Devriendt, Joeri Smet?in collaboration with the cast, Wharf 2, STC, Jan 13-Feb 5; Cheek by Jowl, writer John Ford, director Declan Donnellan, designer Nick Ormerod, lighting Judith Greenwood, sound design Nick Powell, movement Jane Gibson, Sydney Theatre, Jan 17-21
BURIED CITY IS BILLED AS A CO-PRODUCTION BY BELVOIR ST THEATRE, URBAN THEATRE PROJECTS AND THE SYDNEY FESTIVAL, SCRIPTED BY RAIMONDO CORTESE AND DIRECTED BY ALICIA TALBOT. BUT FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN WATCHING TALBOT’S WORK OVER THE PAST DECADE, BURIED CITY FEELS LIKE THE FINAL INSTALMENT OF A FOUR-PART SERIES ABOUT SYDNEY, WHICH STARTED IN 2006 WITH BACK HOME AND HAS CONTINUED AT TWO-YEAR INTERVALS EVER SINCE, WITH THE LAST HIGHWAY (2008), THE FENCE (2010) AND NOW THIS PRODUCTION.
Like its predecessors, Buried City is concerned with the experience of those who exist on our social and political margins. Previously, this has involved audiences travelling to geographical margins too: a backyard in Blacktown (Back Home), a warehouse in Bankstown (The Last Highway) or an old boarding school in Parramatta (The Fence). Here, however, we sit in the city—its skyline visible through a hole in the theatre wall—looking at Belvoir’s familiar triangular stage. Even though Mirabelle Wouters has succeeded in transforming it into a semi-abandoned building site, with scaffolding, milk crates and a small demountable office, it still feels strange. Can it be that there is a margin buried beneath this city centre? More to the point, how will its subjects appear on this very mainstream stage?
The show introduces its six performers/personas (they use their own names) slowly. The first person to speak is the security guard Effie, a confident young African-Australian woman who chastises Russell, a white middle-aged worker, for falling asleep on the scaffolding. Sitting nearby is a young Aboriginal man called Meynedog, whose role at the site is not entirely clear but who seems content just to hang around, stirring. Soon Russell’s friend Perry enters and plays a song on the guitar. Later, Hazem, a self-described “Palestinian Muslim fucking fundamentalist Jihadi fucking queer,” arrives with Val, an Asian woman he’s only just met. Over the course of the evening, these characters cover pretty much everything from the rise of China to the fall of the unions, the role of race, racism and religion, and the number of chickens the Chinese will eat if they adopt a Western diet.
This looping, overlapping dialogue is one of Talbot’s trademarks, as are the split stage (we often have to decide where to look and what to miss) and the deceptively slow unfolding, which eventually explodes into violence. The biggest fight is between Russell and Haz: the former is a proud unionist who still describes himself as a socialist; the latter a young man on the make, talking about money, property and “multiplatform” everything. It seems he used to go out with Russell’s daughter, but it all fell apart. Their messy, inelegant fight is what happens when you reach out to pass the torch only to find the inheritor has his hands full, shaking on deals with the moneymen. If it sounds melancholy, it is, but it is also funny: at the end of the fight, for instance, Meynedog looks down from the scaffold and says brightly, “That was terrific guys.” Similarly, in the final scene, when Perry is playing one of his beautiful songs and the show is threatening to tip into sentimentality, Meynedog interrupts with an aggressive song from the stereo, his lithe frame dancing around the stage like lightning.
While the set and script are strong (apart from the occasional monologue), the performances are slightly uneven: Meyne Wyatt is both mercurial and magical as Meynedog; Russell Kiefel simultaneously belligerent and bereft as he watches the world go by; and Hazem Shammas projects determination as well as confusion. But Perry Keyes’ usually strong stage presence goes missing, as does Valerie Berry’s, and both seem somewhat stilted. Effie Nkrumah does slightly better, but she doesn’t have much to work with. In fact, neither of the women do; as in Back Home, where women were absent, and in The Longest Night, where they were often without agency, the gender lines in this piece are stark.
This is not to criticise Talbot and Cortese for sexism, simply to observe that their interest here is to chronicle the crisis in masculinity brought about by the post-industrial world. In a decade of incredible wealth there has also been incredible stealth, as the gaps between classes, ethnicities, genders and generations have remained or even widened. For this reason, even though Buried City might not be Talbot’s finest or, more accurately, freshest work (it feels too familiar for that), taken together with its three siblings it still marks a major achievement. She, Cortese and the entire artistic team manage to evoke a feeling likely to become more familiar to many of us as the mining boom continues—a strange sense, not unlike like the post-party blues, that everyone else is having a slightly better time of it.
Urban Theatre Projects, Belvoir & Sydney Festival: Buried City, director Alicia Talbot, writer Raimondo Cortese, co-devisors & performers Valerie Berry, Perry Keyes, Russell Kiefel, Effie Nkrumah, Hazem Shammas, Meyne Wyatt, set & costume designer Mirabelle Wouters, lighting Neil Simpson with Sean Bacon, composer & sound designer Paul Prestipino, singer-songwriter Perry Keyes, movement director Kathy Cogill; Belvoir, Sydney, Jan 8-Feb 5
Third Angel, Inspiration Exchange, Compass Festival of Live Art
photo Jonathan Turner
Third Angel, Inspiration Exchange, Compass Festival of Live Art
IN NOVEMBER 2011, WITH TONGUES SUBTLY POKED IN CHEEKS, FIELD THEORY UNDERTOOK DURATIONAL LATTES, A FOUR-DAY CHAT FEST DISCUSSING THE WHO, WHAT, WHERE, HOW AND WHY OF LIVE ART WITH CULTURAL LEADERS IN SYDNEY, WITH A “FINAL REPORT” PRESENTED AT PERFORMANCE SPACE.
Live Art is a sphere that continues to gain traction in Australia, though the then-artistic director of Performance Space, Daniel Brine, noted in his Durational Lattes discussion that it is a term that “has a specific relationship to the British scene.” Shying away from reliance on cultural importation is a valid position, but might negate lessons offered from international perspectives, not to mention a dialogue with similar practices that have long existed in Australia, albeit under a different name. These are some of the thoughts I carried with me as I set off to the Compass Live Art Festival and Symposium in Leeds whilst on a recent trip to the UK.
Compass is an initiative forged between Leeds-based Waymarking (Sarah Spanton) and the Arts Council England, and led by a consortium including festival curator Annie Lloyd and the organisation East Street Arts. Compass presents events throughout the year, but the main focus is the Live Art Festival that couples a weekend-long artistic program with a symposium program of workshop discussions.
The artistic program happened in markets, an empty shopfront, the City Museum, the streets and in galleries and theatres. Activating the city with art in unexpected locations provided a gentle and occasionally critical counterpoint to the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy that seemed to be going on around, and mostly obliviously to, the festival. ‘Exchange’ is now a familiar theme in contemporary art, with artists looking to propose alternatives to capitalist modes of economic exchange and viewing the artwork as a point of exchange for artists, audiences and the public. A number of the works in Compass asked participants to contribute something of their own, and then consider what they received in return.
Brian Lobel, Carpe Minuta Prima, Compass Festival of Live Art
photo Jonathan Turner
Brian Lobel, Carpe Minuta Prima, Compass Festival of Live Art
Brian Lobel’s Carpe Minuta Prima presented an explicit monetary exchange, appropriate given its location at the commercially purposed Leeds Kirkgate Market. Lobel would buy a minute of your time for £1 and in an automated exchange your minute was captured on video. These were later sold as DVDs from a stand for £1, obviously not replicating commercial systems in which Lobel’s labour, additional resources, profit margins and ‘supply and demand’ would have been factored into the resale, but instead creating an almost naïve or Utopian economy where one equals one. I didn’t sell, but instead bought a minute, as did my festival hosts whose living room we later sat in watching the DVDs. We got advice (the best fish and chips in town), a performance (a mimed driving sequence) and a plea for help that will never be answered. I wondered how much participants considered what they were selling. The ephemeral minute that was bought turned into their image captured, distributed and out of their control.
Jenny Lawson, Bake me a Cake, Compass Festival of Live Art
photo Jonathan Turner
Jenny Lawson, Bake me a Cake, Compass Festival of Live Art
In a former United Colours of Benetton shop, another work proposed to take people’s stories and turn them into cake. Jenny Lawson’s imperatively named Bake Me a Cake invited you to drink tea, share your story, choose your ingredients and she would bake a cake to your design. When I arrived I found something of a production line of volunteer bakers and icers. I was offered no tea, but managed to find a piece of paper and a pen and scrawl out a story of significance to me involving cake. I chatted to the women writing next to me but we didn’t share our stories. We left them on a growing pile. If the aim of this work was to make all the participants’ ‘life-cake’ on a single weekend, it was destined for failure. On Sunday afternoon we returned for free cake. Lawson had scrapbooked the masses of outpourings into an impromptu ‘recipe-book.’ Flipping through it provided no intimacy, and even the cakes-from-life that we munched on seemed disconnected from the origins of their aphoristic titles—“Divorce cake” for example, which was particularly tasty.
If exchanges are meant to be fair and balanced and offer something of value to all involved, Third Angel might have hit the nail on the head with Inspiration Exchange. The charismatic Alexander Kelly sat in a Victorian period model kitchen in the Leeds City Museum cataloguing the things that inspire people. You told your story to him and the cramped kitchen audience and then gave it a name to be recorded. In return he chose a card and recited a previous participant’s inspirational story. When people told their stories, they shared with great personal investment. When Kelly re-performed them, whimsy and banality were absorbed by the skill of a master storyteller, always looking to transfer inspiration.
The ‘bigger-ticket’ events recalled the indebtedness of Live Art in the UK to pioneering experimental theatre groups such as Yorkshire locals Forced Entertainment and the English-Belgian group Reckless Sleeper. Reckless Sleeper’s The Last Supper interrogated storytelling and history-making with what transpired almost as a word-association game of recalling the notable dead and literally eating their words, squares of paper disappearing into the performers’ mouths once their contents were recited. Performers and audience sat at dinner tables on the stage, intimately sharing the last meals of executed prisoners as distributed through a kind of raffle. We considered martyrs and criminals alike as defined by their last words and meals. We considered whether we were supposed to eat the cheeseburger and decided we were. Forced Entertainment’s And on the Thousandth Night… (see RT60) further undid the devices of narrative theatre. The pay-offs of duration in performance were explored as themes of half-told stories resurfaced over six hours of stop-start “Once upon a times” that were continuously elaborated and expanded, becoming more and more ridiculous.
It was the Symposium program of workshop-discussions that most defined the issues and politics concerning Live Art as artists, students and academics from a range of disciplines, arts workers and government body representatives mooted questions of access, city making, intimacy, dialogue, touring, funding and more. In the Symposium plenary it was noted by many that more discussions were started than could be resolved. Live Art continues to skirt definition as an art form, and yet still succeeds as a discursive strategy, a research engine and a creative space.
Compass Festival of Live Art and Compass Symposium, various locations, Leeds, UK, Nov 25-27; http://compassliveart.org.uk
THE RECENT TURN TOWARDS HISTORY WITHIN CONTEMPORARY DANCE HAS BEEN BOTH PRODUCTIVE AND ENLIGHTENING. TAKING THE 2005 BOOK ENTITLED MERCE CUNNINGHAM, FIFTY YEARS AS HIS STARTING POINT, FRENCH CHOREOGRAPHER BORIS CHARMATZ RECENTLY CONSTRUCTED A PERFORMANCE FROM ITS IMAGES (50 YEARS OF DANCE).
Brussels based Olga De Soto based a ‘performative lecture’ on a 1932 piece by Kurt Joos (An Introduction). And Eszter Salamon adapted John Cage’s 1949 “Letter on Nothing” (Dance for Nothing). Locally, Jane McKernan curated an excellent program of short works titled Dance History, for Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2010 that began with the dancers reeling off choreographers names from across the 20th century.
This historical turn in dance has shown that some of the most relevant artists were, unsurprisingly perhaps, some of the most controversial in their own time. Lucinda Childs, with a 40-year career, is one such example eliciting a recent homage from Dutch choreographer Nicole Beutler, Dialogue with Lucinda (2010). Beutler worked with one of Childs’ assistants and the choreographer enjoyed the resulting work. Childs is happy to be seen within such a context: “We want the art form in and of itself to be important, to protect and preserve that dance tradition.”
Childs explains that her key work, DANCE (1979), was created in collaboration with composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt following Childs’ collaboration with Glass and Robert Wilson on the landmark opera, Einstein on the Beach in 1976. I asked how the special dialogue between the choreography and music in the work was produced: “Well the music came first—I felt I wanted to work very much with the existing structure in order to create the counterpoint, dialogue and tension with the choreography.” However, Childs carried out the project in a truly collaborative spirit. “I would never want to give another artist an ‘assignment’—I want them to enter into it with a completely open mind and spirit, so they really are involved from the very, very beginning, not stepping into an existing situation.”
Childs would go on to collaborate with Wilson as both choreographer and performer many times and a large part of her work over the last 20 years has been within the field of an expanded notion of opera pioneered by Wilson. Childs has played an important role in ensuring a place for dance within the innovations occurring where the performing arts meet at key moments in the last 40 years.
DANCE is a rarity, now perhaps even more than when it first appeared. It manages to combine original and compelling choreography with highly conceptual work that is intensely dependent on structures and dimensions brought from other art forms. DANCE was first remounted in the US in 2009 and some of the dancers cast in that revival will be performing in a season of the work at Perth International Arts Festival in February. Childs, a member of the influential Judson Dance Theater in New York which re-routed 20th century dance onto its current course, established her own company in 1973 with the aim of developing a distinct choreographic language that broke with the questioning of dance (“making an omelette out of anything but an egg”) that had marked Childs’ work with Judson.
DANCE is the original contemporary dance work to use an intensely limited palette of movement in a composition of infinitely varied phrases. Like Glass’ music, it seems more apt to use the term ‘essential’ than ‘minimal’ in describing the work, a point made by Glass himself. This seems to preserve the positive dimension of the creative process, describing a distillation rather than a process of stripping away. In an article written in 1975, Childs describes a choreographic process where one element acts as a “sounding board” for the rest of the work, so that the composition consists of “reversals, subdivisions, inversions, re-ordering in space, and displacement from one dancer to another.” Childs explains that her interest in DANCE was not in developing a “personal vocabulary” but in creating “simple ideas that relate to the structure of Philip Glass’ score… not so much the content but what he’s done with the material…not to illustrate the music or contradict it, but to set a tension between the two structures.”
DANCE, Lucinda Childs
courtesy PIAF
DANCE, Lucinda Childs
The flow or sustained quality of the work creates an impression of flight; the dancers seem to ride the rhythm and energy of a swinging momentum with ease, as if they are being danced by the score. “In performance, there is an excitement connected to the physical and mental stamina of the dancers…it’s a virtuosic style that doesn’t come out and make a big splash, but we sustain and build over a period of 20 minutes. That’s something we really have to work on. But there is also just the enjoyment of the music—we never get tired of the music.” The impression of ease is deceptive: “The precision required of the dancers is enormous because they have to count the music very carefully in order to perform the kind of structuring I want, which is a counterpoint really.” Precision is also required because they are performing with the virtual ‘ghost’ dancers featured in LeWitt’s projections from the original 1979 production.
Originally shot on 35mm B&W film and projected onto a scrim both with and without the dancers on stage, it is the only film ever made by Sol LeWitt and provides the ‘scenario’ for DANCE, so that everything on stage refers back to the realm of the composition. “The main aim for LeWitt was not to create some arbitrary drop for the dancers to dance in front of, and in a way he wasn’t sure how to collaborate until we decided that the décor should be the dancers.” The projected dancers expand upon the live performers as echoes or shadows, but they also ‘flesh out’ the visual movement by reiterating—but also complicating the already intricate variations on one theme that make up the dance. Lucinda Childs states that the projection provides ‘a different point-of-view because of all the shifts in camera angle and editing—LeWitt did a phenomenal amount of work on that and I think that’s something people can see in performance—it’s very clear.”
Perth International Arts Festival: Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Dance, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA, Perth, Feb 22-25, perthfestival.com.au
GARRY STEWART’S LATEST WORK FOR ADT IS PROXIMITY WHICH WILL PREMIERE AT THE 2012 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL. AS WITH HELD (2004) AND DEVOLUTION (2006) PROXIMITY IS ANOTHER OF STEWART’S VISCERAL YET CEREBRAL EXPLORATIONS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IDEAS, THE BODY AND TECHNOLOGY FURTHERED HERE BY HIS PASSIONATE INTEREST IN NOTIONS OF SELFHOOD AND ITS NEUROSCIENTIFIC CORRELATIVES AS DEMONSTRATED IN BE YOUR SELF (2010). I SPOKE WITH STEWART ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF PROXIMITY AND ITS CONNECTIONS WITH ITS PRECURSORS.
When did you start thinking about Proximity? What came first, an image, the idea or the technology? What kicked you along?
For the last several years, I’ve wanted to do something post-HELD (the 2004 work with US photographer Lois Greenfield), something that again worked with the reproduction of images of dance on screens. HELD was just ridiculously bombastic and ironic, a very particular point of view of the utilisation of dance photography from a quasi-heroic perspective. So I wanted to approach similar technology but work in a softer, more poetic aesthetic territory and find other ways to bring the audience into the detail of the body. I was going to do another version of HELD using stills photography but after a creative development where we also worked with video cameras it seemed more interesting to see what we could do with video.
Then I was commissioned to make The Rite of Spring for Ballet du Rhin (Strasbourg, 2011) and I think I must have thought through about 20 possible different versions of The Rite of Spring. At the 11th hour, as we were about to start rehearsals, I decided to have dancers videoing each other. So it became a dialogue between real time dance and real time video manipulation. That became in a way the first stage of thinking further about Proximity as a post-HELD piece.
So I worked with Thomas Pachoud. He’s Paris-based and doesn’t call himself a video artist but a video engineer. He studied computer science and basically lives in a world of writing code and programming in terms of algorithms. It was a bit of a blind date working with him on The Rite of Spring but it went really well. So I said do you want to come to Australia and continue the investigation? We both felt that we wanted to continue working together. We’d just scratched the surface—in ballet companies you get to work three to four weeks. So he came here and we’ve been working together for a couple of months and we’ve just really expanded upon the ideas that we began with.
It’s very nice to think of the works in terms of a series or of different works having a dialogue with each other rather than necessarily all the time making a work and then trying to make a paradigm leap to something completely different. I think Proximity is also informed by ideas from Be Your Self, the work I made for the last Adelaide Festival [and which will be staged in Sydney later this year. Eds].
That work was primarily based on ideas on the nature of selfhood, which came out of Buddhist meditation classes that we have in the company. We have a Buddhist teacher who comes in once a week and a lot of the discussion is about the nature of self. Proximity is really the convergence in some ways of some of the concerns of HELD and Be Your Self and using video technology to make visible the invisible connections that exist between us and the world around us.
A kind of phenomenological investigation?
Be Your Self is very much rooted in phenomenology. Proximity is a little bit more coming out of philosophies of selfhood but is also informed by neuroscience. I’ve been having a few chats with Ian Gibbins, Professor of Physiology at Flinders University, about body maps and the ways we neurologically engage with the world. In the parietal lobe of the brain there are countless body maps; our entire body is mapped in our brain. So, when we engage with the environment and as agents in the world, these neurological maps actually extend into the world. So if I’m driving my car, my body maps incorporate the volume and weight, the friction on the road and the velocity of the car etc. It’s actually quite a real connection with the body, not just armchair philosophical or poetic.
Watching the trailer I was struck by the lines of force or attraction [discussed as “webbing” below. Eds] that appear between the dancers in the video projections shot live by other dancers.
The video acts as an analogy or metaphor for these fields of neurological connectivity. Another idea in Proximity is the notion of the plurality and multiplicity of selfhood and our sense of the way consciousness works. Because we inhabit one body over a single lifetime we have this sense of ourselves as being a unified if malleable entity. But I think that there are competing selves. When I made Be Your Self I was thinking a bit more literally about competing selves, whereas now I think that rather than a whole group of actual competing selves, the nature of selfhood is in the body’s multiplicity. It’s more fractured and there’s more difference than we can understand. I guess the work in some ways is concerned with revealing that and offering the potential for creativity within it, and a sort of fluidity in terms of identity and who we are in the world.
Proximity, ADT
photo Chris Herzfeld, Camlight Productions
Proximity, ADT
The multiple selves don’t necessarily need to be in conflict do they, if they’re creative?
It’s like an ecosystem. We’re all interdependent, making up the totality or depth of an individual. One of the principal sub-concepts behind the work is the notion of the visual. How do we see, particularly when we’re using technologies such as video and photography. We make choices about what we reveal. We frame objects in the world which then creates a set of relationships, some kind of dialogue that’s culturally underpinned. Inherent in the corollary of framing is what do we omit. Also, how do we evaluate what we’re seeing?
These are like neural networks extending beyond the brain.
Yes. The interesting thing about some of these video techniques is that as you’re watching, as an audience member, they affect you neurologically. The effect we call “webbing” for me is really the cornerstone of what Proximity is about, these algorithmic points that connect the bodies in the space and what we see projected is all the complex rhizomatic network of webs that connect bodies. The way that those lines work—because of the algorithms that have been created [by Thomas Pachoud] to make them—gives you a sense that they have pressure and tension. It’s really interesting because it’s a complete illusion; it’s just a visual effect. But you feel like when you’re looking at the images of the dancers on the screen that they’re really connected to each other within these lines. You somehow feel that force and tension yourself. It’s that phenomenon where, when you watch dancers leaping through the air, you empathise with that and neurologically you quasi-experience it.
The mirror-neurons effect. How does the use of the cameras relate to this? Some dancers will have cameras onstage?
The dancers are operating the cameras. There are three of them, two on the stage and one above. The dancers are moving them about and setting them up in terms of focus and positioning. They can actually film themselves once they’ve set up the camera. So someone might be filming someone’s solo and then they’ll leave the camera and go and stand in front of it themselves.
And they appear on a screen and might be multiplied?
There are a whole lot of effects that we’re engaging in over about 70 minutes. I’m trying to find as many different ways as possible to engage the audience in the experience of the ideas I’ve been talking about. I didn’t just want to make a dance piece with really great video. I’ve noticed working with technology in the past that it’s so time consuming and difficult that you can actually get caught up in just that. But like every work it needs to have dramaturgical rigour; that’s really the driver. The technology falls under the service of it. So I’ve also been concerned with not just taking the audience on a conceptual journey but also an emotional journey.
How do you approach that?
With great difficulty. It evolves over time. I tend to have reasonably lengthy rehearsal periods and this one is over four months. I struggled with the idea of having text in the work. In general I like the audience to enter into some kind of mystery that they don’t quite understand. On the other hand, I think with a work that’s using video technology it can easily fall into just an aesthetic. So some of the ideas are expressed in text that’s printed and embroidered onto the costumes and then that’s filmed, magnified on the screens for the audience to read. It’s giving out just enough information.
Is it literal text or lateral, poetic, informational?
At the moment it’s more an expression of neuroscience—factual rather than poetic, about how, in pedestrian language, you might describe the effect of body maps and mirror neurons. But they’re just clues.
And that emotional journey for the audience?
Well, that was the big challenge with Be Your Self. For me, that was the most difficult thing I’d ever made because it was centred on subjectivity and also the way in which emotions function and are conveyed. Suddenly I felt like the work was heading down a dance theatre track, which was very worrying (LAUGHS) because I think you really need to know what you’re doing to handle that. It’s not something I’m adept in, you know, expressing very particular emotional and psychological states through the body in the way that people like Lloyd Newson, Pina Bausch and others are so brilliant at. For me that was really difficult and I spent a lot of time making material and then discarding it because I felt like I’d seen it before. That just chewed up a lot of rehearsal time and in the end I had to make decisions about a way in which to represent those ideas that in some way didn’t smack of modes of expression that I’d seen in dance theatre for years.
Do you feel you’re pushing yourself into new territory?
In some ways, I think, because I’d made Be Your Self, it had eliminated a lot of conundrums in regard to notions of selfhood. I’d already worked through my problems with that.
You have no idea what the work is going to look like when you set out. No idea whatsoever. And of course, as with everything in life, you lay down some kind of structure, some sort of direction, which is really important because that gives you an energy that propels you. But as soon as it starts to manifest, this thing that you thought you were going to make, it turns into something completely different. And certainly this piece has been no exception.
JAPANESE PERFORMERS, SIVOUPLAIT (NOZOMI HORIE AND TAKESHI SHIBASAKI), WILL ADD A DASH OF MAGICAL REALISM TO THE 2012 WOMADELAIDE IN THEIR OPEN AIR PERFORMANCES DIRECT FROM THE STREETS OF TOKYO AND A VARIETY OF INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVALS. I RECENTLY SPOKE WITH NOZOMI THROUGH AN INTERPRETER—DOUBTLESS NOT A LITTLE WAS LOST IN TRANSLATION, BUT NOTHING IS LOST IN THE PAIR’S ELOQUENT MIME WORKS. ALSO IN THIS YEAR’S WOMAD IS SHANTALA SHIVALINGAPPA, A LEADING EXPONENT OF INDIAN CLASSICAL DANCE IN THE KUCHIPUDI TRADITION.
sivouplait
Sivouplait are mime artists presenting prepared pieces with a bit of room for improvisation depending, says Nizomi, on the nature and size of their audience. Each work starts out from a simple (or sometimes outrageous) premise: a couple decide to photograph each other but a fierce wind wreaks havoc on their efforts; two people transform into big-beaked birds that indulge in a comic courtship ritual; two players enact a larger than life tennis game; and the pair conjure an urban spaghetti western. Each performance is carefully paced, whimsical and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Titles of works and scenes are announced silently using large cards and the soundtrack is provided by a small portable record player. Above all Sivouplait are deft mimes with a finely tuned sense of their audience,
I ask Nozomi about the pair’s training. She says it came from a very good pantomime teacher and that the rest was learnt on the streets where the work was well received and the invitations to festivals began to flow in. As for influences, the press release for the show cites silent movies, manga, animation, dance and physical comedy which are evident in the work (although I’m not sure about the manga). Certainly, their work appears to be very much in the Western mime tradition (which is surprisingly popular in Asia as I witnessed at the Chuncheon International Mime Festival, Korea in May 2009).
Nozomi says that a key influence is the great Japanese filmmaker Yasjiro Ozu because of what his films say about couples whether in his comedies or his dramas. Sivouplait’s press release states, “This curious Japanese couple are always talking about love—yet they never use words.” When I watch Sivouplait in their immaculate tennis whites on video I can’t see many signs of love. But the press release asks insistently, “Is their perfect love dazzling and pristine, or do they encounter the same doubts, troubles and irritations that befall us all in relationships?”
Nozomi explains, “Sometimes in love Japanese don’t express themselves straightaway with, for example, kissing. This fits well with pantomime. Anything is possible—tennis, photography, birds—but love is always there.” So then I pose the question they’re always asked (much laughter), Are Nozomi and Takdeshi a couple? “It’s up to your imagination,” replies Nozomi. “So,” I say, “it is a love story.” More laughter.
Shantala Shivalingappa
photo C P Satyajit
Shantala Shivalingappa
shantala shivalingappa
Also performing in WOMADelaide is Shantala Shivalingappa, a major Indian dance artist who also has a career in European performance, having worked with Maurice Bejart, Peter Brook in Hamlet (as Ophelia) and The Tempest (as Miranda), Pina Bausch (O Dido, Néfès, Bamboo Blues, Sacre du Printemps) and Ushio Amagatsu (Ibuki). Born in India, raised in Paris, introduced to Kichipudi traditional dance by her mother and then trained in it back in India, Shivalingappa has subsequently had works created for her by her Indian masters.
Kuchipudi is a classical dance from southern India, emerging in the 15th century and rooted in folk dance. The name is taken from the village where it was assumed to originate, Kuchipudi, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The form is at once abstract and rhythmical while also overtly dramatic with the performer taking on divine roles. Shantala will, for example, evoke Ganga, the goddess of the Ganges River, as well as Shiva the male God of destruction and transformation, in the very same dance. Hand gestures and facial expressions are central to this dramatisation, while live accompanying music is a vital part of Kuchipudi dance.
Save for some YouTube glimpses I’ve not seen Shantala’s internationally praised dancing, but I have witnessed a Kuchipudi performance and been struck by the power, subtlety and sense of drama emanating from a single body. Shantala’s presence would be a coup for any international arts festival and no less so for WOMADdelaide.
The musicians in WOMADelaide invariably display a great deal of theatricality as an inherent part of their music-making, but for something different make sure you seek out Sivouplait and Shantala.
AT DUSK, A CROWD GATHERS AROUND CHUMPON APISUK IN AN OPEN GRASSY AREA. HE HAS THE AUDIENCE PLACE LIT CANDLES ON THE RIM OF A LARGE STAINLESS STEEL BOWL. HE WRAPS HIS FOREHEAD AND HANDS IN A LONG BAND OF WHITE FEATHERS AND LEADS THE CROWD THROUGH THE PARK, BALANCING THE FIERY BOWL ON HIS FEATHERED RIGHT HAND.
This was a perfect way to lead a procession; a physical act of ritual where movement and transformation are key. Later when I ask about the symbolism of the feathers, he explains that some caged ducks, unable to escape, perished in the Bangkok floods. It heightened the meanings of flight and freedom I ascribed to the work. Apisuk is a leading international figure in performance art. His vision to bring it to Thailand created the impetus for the Asiatopia Festival, now in its 13th year and managed by the efforts of Concrete House Artists’ Collective. Asiatopia is a global event and has established itself as an important space for exchange amongst local and international artists.
Asiatopia 13 was a creative feast, realising the unpredictability often attached to performance art. There were strange happenings and subtle movement, there was blood and glitter and fire and it got very messy. Presented as an International Performance Art Festival, Asiatopia 13 was underpinned by its title Eartheffect [sic] giving artists space to explore and expose schisms on the earth, in the self, humanity, faith, politics, life and love.
Eartheffect was driven by serious events that shook the planet in 2011 in Japan, New Zealand, Chile and Haiti after which lives became irrevocably transformed. This solemn backdrop kept the fragility of life ever present throughout Asiatopia 13 with artists investing a genuine care and mindfulness in their works while still unpacking the complexities of personal and political upheavals.
Asiatopia 13 ran over three consecutive weekends during the flooding in greater Bangkok requiring the first weekend’s performances to be relocated from Bangkok’s Art and Culture Centre to the Fine Arts Department of Chiang Mai University. The following weekend was held in Suan Buak Haad Park (Chiang Mai) and the final performance, Artists’ Party, was a splinter event held on the rooftop auditorium of the Klang Plaza Shopping Mall in Nankorn Ratchassima (Korat City).
Communicating ideas and emotions through performance can be complicated. Asiatopia 13 was saturated with a breadth of imagery, abstract, ephemeral and personal in nature—sometimes exhausting to take in. I viewed the work through the prism and problematics of critique. For the artists, I imagine their critiques are of ideas, the self, the law and bureaucracy. In some cultures it is difficult or impossible to question authority let alone one’s own autonomy. However, performance allows a retreat into the poetics of a symbolic language which transcends both words and borders. This can reveal an artist’s inner anxieties communicated as performance, albeit in only one direction, from the artist to the audience. The artist can also seek to unravel their own performance language.
Nopawan Sirivejkul throws marbles at the start of her piece signifying that she’s playing with her life. She’s surprised when I later explain that in English “losing your marbles” is akin to becoming mentally unhinged. This highlighted the idea of performance as culturally coded and always at risk of being lost in translation.
Suan Buak Haad Park was brimming with a vibrant life of its own, people enjoying Chiang Mai’s temperate climate: running, walking dogs and doing other parky things. Having the festival in a park made it a public event capturing a diverse audience who at times were unaware of what was actually happening, though the artists and the details of the event were announced in Thai and English. The public were truly engaged by the works presented in a country where, as elsewhere, sound financial support is scarce for performance art while traditional art forms are favoured. Artists in Asiatopia 13 largely self-funded their participation with some having additional support from their respective countries.
Boonsong Rodthab, Asiatopia 13
photo Yiorgos Zafiriou
Boonsong Rodthab, Asiatopia 13
It was inspiring to see the involvement of younger artists. Sitthikan O Techadilok handed out ceramic animals to the audience, especially to children who constituted a significant part of the audience in the park. He then sat cross-legged and after some playful gestures with his menagerie on a small checked tablecloth, he folded the animals into the cloth and reached for an enormous metal wrench. The result was carnage, one brutal act echoing the human relationship with nature: interventionist, controlling and sometimes ultimately destructive.
It’s a rare occasion when performance ceases to be a cerebral experience for me, becoming something far more elusive. Boonsong Rodthab’s performance had me gasp in awestruck fascination. In the cavernous space of the top floor of a shopping mall, a handful of glitter is abruptly sprayed onto the artist’s face and a beautifully clustered bunch of lotus buds, when overturned, literally bleed onto his hands, arms, over his body and then onto a white cloth. The work was serious and serene. It was Oriental and Occidental; it’s blood that binds us all.
Perpetua Rodriguez actions a more intimate work. She strips bare and circles herself with earth. Then using a 10m rope she connects herself to a randomly selected member of the audience, leading him on a path through the dimly lit auditorium to a space under the stage with the rope firmly tied around his waist. There was an elusive type of vulnerability in the slow walk through the space with her nakedness in marked contrast to the clothed stranger and the audience following in slow procession. The piece pivots on an historicising of performance art, referencing Rope Piece (1983/84) by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh in which the two were tied together for one year. Rodriguez’s piece acted as a reminder of the important role Asian artists have played in developing performance art.
Asiatopia firmly places itself as a centre for performance art and demonstrates a maturity that extends beyond any seemingly fleeting fascination with the form found in the region through the 90s.
Asiatopia 13 was a phenomenally interesting experience, at times exhausting to watch and a challenge to unravel meanings in the works of so many artists. It was bold and brazen, expressing a fresh freedom for artists to explore performance art. As writer and critic Thomas Berghuis has proposed, performance art is an unsung yet critically developed medium in the Asia Pacific.
Asiatopia 13, Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand, Nov 23-Dec 11, 2011
Katia Molino, Ari Ehrlich, The Babel Project (2007), Alan Schacher, Gravity Research Institute
photo Heidrun Löhr
Katia Molino, Ari Ehrlich, The Babel Project (2007), Alan Schacher, Gravity Research Institute
THE STRONG PICTORIAL CONTENT OF EACH EDITION OF REALTIME ATTESTS TO THE EXPERTISE OF A NUMBER OF SPECIALIST PHOTOGRAPHERS. FOR THE EVOCATIVE IMAGES REGULARLY FEATURED ON OUR PAGES, WE’RE GRATEFUL TO ARTISTS SUCH AS JEFF BUSBY, CHRIS HERZFELD, PONCH HAWKES, LISA TOMASETTI, PRUDENCE UPTON AND OTHERS.
When you’re reading about performance in Sydney, the photographer whose pictures you’ll see most often is Heidrun Löhr, a dedicated and gifted artist who has documented the performance scene in this city for 25 years.
Sarah Jayne Howard, Already Elsewhere (2005), Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Sarah Jayne Howard, Already Elsewhere (2005), Force Majeure
In 2007 Heidrun Löhr received an Australia Council Fellowship to create an archive from her thousands of still images. A selection of these were featured in a moving exhibition entitled Projections: The Archive Project at Critical Path (RT92, p20). Löhr’s work is now to be introduced to a wider public in an exhibition at the Australian Centre of Photography entitled Parallax: The Performance Paradigm in Photography. “Parallax is a simple enough problem for photography: the image you make depends on your viewing angle. But when you add the variable of the moving body in performance, the parallax factor multiplies to a point when the camera captures something no human eye will ever see in any other way…This respected photographer of live performance is famous for her active use of the camera around the stage, tracking across the various viewing positions (possible and impossible) of the spectators. Her photographs are more than documents of a vanishing work, they are collaborative works, images built out of the action of the photographer as much as the gestures of the moving body on the stage.” (ACP media release)
Simon Stone, Eloise Mignon, The Wild Duck (2011), Belvoir
photo Heidrun Löhr
Simon Stone, Eloise Mignon, The Wild Duck (2011), Belvoir
The exhibition has allowed Löhr to transfer some of her most striking dance theatre and performance slides to large format prints. There are also colour images, photo sequences—some echoing Eadweard Muybridge—and an animated sequence involving some 3000 still images produced for the SEAM2010 conference at Critical Path with performer/choreographer Nikki Heywood. On what she calls “the multitude wall” a range of work is documented—from 1986 (Judy Best performing in a disused building in Kings Cross—a performance we agree would probably not be possible with contemporary OH+S legislation) through to Martin del Amo’s 2012 work for dancer Paul White, Anatomy of an Afternoon. As well there are two vitrines displaying more archival material and a number of Löhr’s limited edition artist books.
Marnie Palomares, Rowan Machingo, Back from Front (2008), Dean Walsh, Performance Space
photo Heidrun Löhr
Marnie Palomares, Rowan Machingo, Back from Front (2008), Dean Walsh, Performance Space
In her choice of most of the works in this exhibition, Löhr says she has favoured photographic interest over historical/documentary function. Considering so many possibilities, it’s “iconic images, ones that compress time or that still take me by surprise after all this time” that rise to the surface. Some images capture directors like Benedict Andrews and Simon Stone working behind the scenes while the majority convey dramatically, poignantly and playfully the world of contemporary performance from the vantage point accorded to Heidrun Löhr as a highly respected member of that community.
Heidrun Löhr, Parallax: The Performance Paradigm in Photography, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; March 3- April 15, artist talk March 3, 11 am; http://www.acp.org.au/
Scottee in Eat Your Heart Out‘s Performance Doesn’t Matter
photo Christa Holka
Scottee in Eat Your Heart Out‘s Performance Doesn’t Matter
TRASHING PERFORMANCE WAS A WEEK LONG PROGRAM OF SEMINARS, PERFORMANCES AND SCREENINGS IN LONDON. IT MARKED THE SECOND YEAR OF PERFORMANCE MATTERS, A THREE-YEAR RESEARCH COLLABORATION BETWEEN ROEHAMPTON UNIVERSITY, GOLDSMITHS UNIVERSITY AND THE LIVE ART DEVELOPMENT AGENCY. THE PROGRAM QUESTIONED STYLES OF THEATRICAL AND SOCIAL PERFORMANCE AND MODES OF ADDRESS. IN THIS REVIEW, WE’VE TRIED TO REFLECT THE DIVERGENT, AND SOMETIMES CONTRADICTORY, STYLES AND ATTITUDES OF TRASHING PERFORMANCE.
performance doesn’t matter
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up, roll up for the night of your lives! Join us for an extravaganza, join us for a spectacle, join us for a bit of fun. Because “Performance Doesn’t Matter,” or so the organisers of a cabaret night at Toynbee Hall would have you believe. Your sensational host Scottee, dressed in sequins and high heels, will introduce you to “light art”—part live art, part light entertainment— between costume changes and tweets. Make sure you have a drink in your hand, and try to avoid the glare of the makeup lamps at the front of the stage, where tonight’s acts are getting ready.
“Performance Doesn’t Matter” blows a raspberry at establishment figures— universities, festival curators and even you, dear and earnest audience. A troupe of dancing girls (Figs in Wigs) spends more time bowing than dancing, and ends their routine by declaring “Chekhov is not our Dad!” A figure called “Baghdad’s Got Talent” dances, strips and performs magic tricks under a burkha. It’s a double taboo—she questions your attitude to religious veils, while rendering her own performance invisible.
For all its flippancy, don’t forget that “light art” can be political. Nando Messias lip syncs to the sound of a woman describing a homophobic attack. His thin frame bends and twists in perfect time with the unnamed voice, transforming genders, ages and identities and displaying the fragility of the human body under the weight of meanings it has to carry. Later, Johnny Woo performs as man and woman, in his own voice and miming to the voices of others. His mesmerising performance slips between identities like a singer sliding between notes.
This is more than just entertainment—these artists have an air of desperation, as if performing for survival. Performance does matter after all. Well, nobody said anything about being consistent.
spotted!
All the superstars of the Performance Studies academic world, together in one place! All week, they were to be seen hanging out at seminars on subjects like “Emotion and Performance,” “Mainstream and Underground” and “Outsider Actions”—and that was just the daytime program. We spy those young dreamboats Adrian Heathfield and Dominic Johnson smiling at their fans. Golden-voiced crooners Gavin Butt and Tavia Nyong’o on the mike. Even the famously shy Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency took a turn in the spotlight. And what an audience: a sea of tattooed iconoclasts and bespectacled hipsters in which the occasional dorky young writer (like yours truly) felt a little out of place!
this is not a dream
What is this for, this technology that sends images into our dreams? The demand for consumption is pumped around the world by the bloodflow of our culture: the mediated image. But what possibilities might it contain for other purposes? For circulations and counter-
circulations of desire and subversion?
This is the subject of This is Not a Dream, a documentary-in-progress by academic Gavin Butt and curator and critic Ben Walters. It ranges from the early days of video art and public access television, when Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party imagined itself as explicit resistance to the mainstream, to Cole Escola’s queer sketch comedy, whose viral success on YouTube led to a commission from the MTV-owned Logo channel.
Along the way, a more complicated set of interconnections between opposition and seduction is exposed through interviews and selected footage: Nao Bustamante creates a character to guest on The Joan Rivers Show, where she tells middle America she “met a multigendered ambisexual at an aquarium.” Scottee, for whom “YouTube was my university,” appears on X-Factor having a cake fight with Rhianna. Kalup Linzy creates low budget videos in the style of his favourite daytime soaps. Embraced by the artworld as “outsider art,” a final twist leads to a guest role in General Hospital. In one of the episodes, future Hollywood superstar James Franco has the line: “You know the problem with most performance art? It doesn’t go far enough.”
These entanglements take material form in a series of exquisite live interventions by Dickie Beau, moving and lip-syncing with such careful precision that his painted face feels more cinematic than real. Beyond the critique of mediated image as source of alienation, this is a world filled with longing, a world of quivering desires and unreleased energies.
disputed!
US firebrand Lauren Berlant stirred things up when she took the stage. I think you’ve got it wrong, she said to the organisers, it’s not as simple as opposing emotional responses and critical analysis. Most of the time, we don’t even know what we feel! Crisis doesn’t always feel like crisis, she went on. Sometimes it just feels like boredom. Or depression. Or, like, whatever. Incoherence is a symptom of history, says the canny psychotheorist. Your humble writer couldn’t agree more.
the open university
What do you stand for?
Where do you stand?
What do you stand in?
Marcia Farquhar invites you to stand in a skip and listen to other skip dwellers deliver lectures, manifestos and/or their opinions. This is “Open University” and it is, literally, trashing performance.
Do—feel yourself welcomed by Marcia’s friendly chatter.
Do—agree with Dr. Raimi Gbadamosi “in favour of inefficiency.”
Do—nod sagely with Justin Hunt in praise of Courtney Love.
Do—follow Flora Pitrello’s elegant ode to surfaces.
Do—stamp your feet with Kitty Finer against Facebook.
Do—aspire to Ansuman Biswas’s spiritual take on trashing everything.
Do—enjoy the inauspicious surroundings, improved by Marcia’s charisma and her friends.
Do Not—ask if the skip really stands for “trash,” or if it is just a(nother) stage.
Do Not—worry whether the backyard context disrupts the mode of performance, or makes the event more exclusive.
Do Not—ask if the people whose voices get heard are always invited, or if they can ever insert themselves, unanticipated, into the dialogue.
Just as you begin to wonder how “Open” this university is, Marcia will ask the audience to join in and a student called Adam Young will step into the skip. He will tell you about his experience at the Occupy London protest camp, recently set up in central London. He will urge you to visit. Someone will suggest we take the skip along.
fired up!
“Recovery will never come!” exclaimed wiry old-school Italian Marxist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, giving a wake-up call early Saturday morning. We need to re-activate the social body, he declared, his finger pointing insistently in the air. It’s not a movement of the will, but a movement of material bodies. Only then will the next step be possible: dismantling the financial machine. Nice one, Bifo! Bring it on!
FeMUSEum
Tammy Whynot, the feather-boa-wearing femme persona of Lois Weaver, says it’s difficult to share a stage with a drag queen, because of the force of a man’s physical presence. Making her point, Tammy stands in front of the stage at Toynbee Hall, with a tray of homemade cupcakes by her side.
Lois Weaver, Carmelita Tropicana, Amy Lamé and Bird la Bird are here to celebrate women they admire. Carmelita Tropicana references a 17th century nun, a British Bulldog and Marlene Dietrich. Bird la Bird creates a series of vignettes inspired by Angela Carter’s feminist fairytales and the punk singer Polly Styrene. Amy Lamé asks audience members to write the name of their favourite femme on a doily. And Lois/Tammy recounts her own life (and femme-journey) in landmark years—throwing a cupcake into the audience to mark each birthday.
If drag queens usurp the performance of gender, femmes over-perform femininity. They harness a gentler kind of power: doubt. Where does the woman end and the femme begin? What is performance and what is not? And of performance, what is performed for the self and what is performed for the other?
confessed!
It all got a bit emotional when University of California scholar Jennifer Doyle interviewed Adrian Howells, the UK artist best known for his works that produce “accelerated intimacy” (in Doyle’s words). Sprawled on a cosy sofa at the front of the stage, Doyle held nothing back, remembering old lovers and stalkers and her own most embarrassing moments. Meanwhile, Howells talked via Skype from beneath the covers of his own bed, speaking with painful honesty and clarity about the way depression is interwoven within his artistic process. I think we all know how he feels.
this is performance art
New Art Club in Mel Brimfield’s This Is Performance Art Part Two, Experimental Theatre and Cabaret
photo Christa Holka
New Art Club in Mel Brimfield’s This Is Performance Art Part Two, Experimental Theatre and Cabaret
Culture will eat itself. It’s a fact! So don’t miss out—get in on the feeding frenzy today! Not sure how to do it? Follow these easy lessons from Mel Brimfield:
CUT-AND-PASTE from assorted organising schemes: art history canons, TV best-of shows, tabloid headlines. MIX performance lecture, documentary film and live brass band accompaniment. SPRINKLE with pompous accents, outlandish costumes, parodies of British upper class eccentricity. FOLD NEATLY so that the lines don’t show, and Richard Serra becomes a shirtless beefcake in a welding mask. Joseph Beuys becomes a loveable rabbit-ventriloquist. Rosalind Krauss becomes a celebrity gossip columnist.
Now confidently STUFF the highbrow up its own backside. REPEAT AND RECYCLE until you can’t tell the original from the derivative: Morecambe and Wise as Gilbert and George. Yoko Ono as burlesque sex kitten. Nude tableaux vivant as living sculpture. Action painting as heavy-metal machismo. In a pinch, REGURGITATE your previous work. SERVE with a dash of slapstick juggling and SCATTER with nymph-like dancers.
THIS IS PERFORMANCE ART. This is culture. Just remember: eat it before it eats you.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE’S INTERNATIONAL SPACE TIME CONCERTO COMPETITION IS UPDATING ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST PERSISTENTLY EXCITING MUSICAL GENRES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. 
AFTER AN EXHAUSTIVE REVIEW PROCESS, WHICH INVOLVED SEVERAL ROUNDS OF CONSULTATIONS, AN ISSUES PAPER AND A DISCUSSION PAPER AND HUNDREDS OF SUBMISSIONS TO BOTH, THE AUSTRALIAN LAW REFORM COMMISSION HAS SEEN ITS FINAL REPORT ON THE ENQUIRY INTO AUSTRALIA’S CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM, THE FIRST FOR 20 YEARS, TABLED IN FEDERAL PARLIAMENT LAST MONTH.
IN THE LATE 1990S, PERFORMANCE STUDIES WAS DOMINATED BY DEBATES ABOUT ABSENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND DISPLACEMENT. PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS TEXT TO EMERGE FROM THIS PERIOD WAS PEGGY PHELAN’S UNMARKED: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE (1993), IN WHICH SHE PROPOSED THAT: 
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![Julie-Anne Long, The Invisibility Project [performance documentation] 2010. Performance Space LiveWorks Festival, Sydney](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/52/5243_loop_val.jpg)
![Bennett Miller, Dachshund U.N. [performance documentation] 2010. Next Wave Festival, Melbourne](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/52/5244_loop_miller2.jpg)
