OF ALL THE AXIOMS BY WHICH WE EVALUATE A WORK OF LIVE PERFORMANCE, ITS SUCCESS IN MEETING ITS AUDIENCE SEEMS RELATIVELY IGNORED. I DON’T SIMPLY MEAN THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN A WORK AND THE BODIES AND MINDS OF THOSE WHO WITNESS IT—THERE’S NO LACK OF DISCUSSION AROUND THE FOURTH WALL, IMMERSIVE THEATRE AND THE LIKE. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THINKING THROUGH WHO IS ATTRACTED TO A PARTICULAR WORK AND WHY, IT WOULD SEEM A MATTER OF MARKETING RATHER THAN AESTHETICS. IT’S FOR THIS REASON THAT TOO MANY THEATRE-MAKERS, WHEN ASKED ABOUT THE ASSUMED AUDIENCE OF THEIR EFFORTS, CAN REPLY ‘EVERYONE’. WHICH TOO OFTEN AMOUNTS TO ‘NO-ONE.’
Four recent productions to grace Melbourne suggested more nuanced and considered answers, playing on audience expectation and knowledge and seeming to understand that a work that will appeal to a universal audience is as unlikely as the existence of a universal human. I’ve never come across an instance of art that hasn’t found its detractors; to acknowledge this is a primary step for artists, and to proceed anyway an act of essential, necessary bravery.
big hart, namatjira
Big hART’s Namatjira takes a bold stance in this regard. The work is an exploration of Australia’s most famous Indigenous painter, Albert Namatjira, whose art was among the first to gain widespread recognition in white Australia from the 1940s onwards. But far more than straightforward biography, Big hART incorporates a mode of direct audience address that denies its viewer the opportunity to experience the work as if through a one-way mirror. From the outset performer Trevor Jamieson speaks to his audience, but not just any audience: Namatjira assumes that its audience is white.
As a work with a heavy touring schedule, I can’t tell how this gambit would travel, but in the inner-city surrounds of the Malthouse it seemed disarmingly appropriate. Jamieson jokes about progressive white Australians who might want to give their children Aboriginal names, and wonders whether a service should be established to advise them on this. He prods at the white nervousness surrounding Indigenous protocols and anxieties about causing offence through sheer ignorance. Most of all, Jamieson subtly circles around the expectations his audience may have towards something we’ve come to call “Indigenous theatre”—what does that mean? Is it a label that liberates or confines? Can it do both?
If it has to be labelled, Namatjira might be thought of as postcolonial Indigenous meta-theatre; it doesn’t merely give voice to the history and experience of Aboriginal Australia but questions how that voice is heard, what conversations it is part of. It’s a rich celebration of a fascinating figure, but also one rife with irony: in recreating the painter’s rise and fall in heroic terms, Jamieson notes that this is “the story whitefellas want to hear… the only story people seem to remember.” Alongside this drama we are given counter-narratives, most obviously incarnated through Jamieson’s co-performer Derik Lynch and the descendants of Albert Namatjira himself who work on a massive chalk mural dominating the back of the stage throughout the piece. They are reminders of the presences which persist beneath any official telling of the past, of the continuities which cannot be captured through biography alone, since a biography must perforce end, while a life’s legacy is more complex.
Timothy Ohl, Fiona Cameron, Look Right Through Me, KAGE
photo Jeff Busby
Timothy Ohl, Fiona Cameron, Look Right Through Me, KAGE
kage, look right through me
Another Malthouse production engages with the legacy of an icon who is still very much at work. KAGE’s Look Right Through Me took as inspiration the cartoons and drawings of Michael Leunig, an artist of whom no Melburnian would be unaware. But how to do justice to an oeuvre that carries with it the weight of many decades, and to an iconography that has very specific significances to the legion of fans Leunig has accrued over this time? To attempt an act of translation, in this sense, opens up the possibility of getting it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ according to what meanings each individual reads into the artist’s work.
It helps that KAGE’s physical theatre methodology is very much based around images, but director Kate Denborough wisely avoids a literal staging of the Leunig with whom we are familiar. Rather, she has pieced together an independent narrative that seems to riff on the artist’s canon like a jazz take on a standard score; the cartoonist’s themes and characters rise and fall like a refrain, but the work itself doesn’t rely on recognition as its fundamental source of meaning-making. Of course, Denborough knows that in this city at least recognition will have its own potency, but this is a work that would make as much sense to an audience unfamiliar with its source.
On its own terms, Look Right Through Me has strengths and weaknesses. Some of its vignettes, which chart the course of an alienated everyman shadowed by his own childhood, are of unarguable impact: a rope swing dangling from a tree takes on the grim aspect of a noose; a patch of grass becomes both comforting bed and unsettling grave. It may be in the relationships between performers that Denborough’s work really shines here, and her choreography is both deftly athletic and emotionally charged, producing a very visceral realisation of the dynamics that connect and divorce humans from one another. At other times, such as an extended sequence of carnivalesque abandon, both the narrative and its emergent themes become more muddied, and it’s at these times that I found myself turning back to the artist and wondering if there was an element of his work that I was missing and which was vital to interpret the on-stage events. These were rare moments, however.
Mary-Helen Sassman, Liz Jones, Special, The Rabble
photo Marge Horwell
Mary-Helen Sassman, Liz Jones, Special, The Rabble
the rabble, special
The Rabble is a company equally interested in the power of image-based theatre, often producing far more disorienting results. In the case of Special, this isn’t a bad thing. For much of the shortish piece I didn’t really know what was going on, but this didn’t hinder enjoyment of it in the least. Mary Helen Sassman plays a belligerent, heavily pregnant woman harassed by her equally self-obsessed mother; they inhabit a strange space of hyperreal colour dominated by a massive mound of sand. Their interactions are fragmented, not quite nonsensical but obscure in nature, and the whole comes across like Beckett directing a children’s party. As their condition of static animosity plays out, however, a series of bizarre rituals is introduced whose intentions are left deliberately open to the audience, but which clearly possess an internal logic to which we are not privy.
With the slightest of changes Special could be wilfully obscurantist, an exercise in self-indulgence and a frustrating severing of signification and referent. But director Emma Valente somehow pulls it off marvellously, keeping her audience onside even while maintaining a constant distance between performer and viewer. She seems to acknowledge that we understand this mode of playmaking and expect more from absurdity than a basic deferral of meaning. Rather, the strangeness of what we see seems as real as any more rational presentation of plot and character; we may not understand the motivations that compel these figures, but how many of our own drives are unquestioned and equally odd, when put in the spotlight?
Thrashing Without Looking, Aphids
photo Ponch Hawkes
Thrashing Without Looking, Aphids
aphids, thrashing without looking
And into the spotlight is exactly where Aphids’ Thrashing Without Looking thrusts its audiences. Indeed, whether ‘audience’ is an applicable term here is moot. The work makes its participants both spectator and spectacle, simultaneously, as half the crowd is equipped with ingenious headsets that channel the footage being shot by a range of video cameras moving around the room. The other half direct the course of events, which are established according to the kitsch conventions of karaoke music videos—a romantic dinner for two, a turn at a pumping nightclub, a slow dance that ends in heartbreak. Those given the active roles are watching themselves at a distance while playing out each scene, and it’s a profoundly giddy experience. If the pleasures of classical cinema are of the voyeuristic kind, giving the passive viewer a sense of power over what is depicted on screen, this dynamic is up-ended when the gaze is directed back on itself.
Thrashing Without Looking was a short, sharp shock that managed to provoke questions about the place of the audience in a way quite rare these days. Hopefully it will go on to enjoy an expanded life in some form, as these are questions that deserved to be asked, and in this case at least, were a joy to be part of. (See also Jana Perkovic’s review)
Malthouse Theatre and Big hArt, Namatjira, writer, director Scott Rankin, performers Trevor Jamieson, Robert Hannaford, Derik Lynch, Kevin Namatjira, Lenie Namatjira, Michael Peck, Elton Wirri, Hilary Wirri, Kevin Wirri, designer Genevieve Dugard, composer Genevieve Lacey, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Nigel Levings, sound design Tim Atkins, Malthouse. August 10-28; Malthouse Theatre and KAGE, Look Right Through Me, concept, direction Kate Denborough, creative collaborator Michael Leunig, co-devisers, performers Craig Bary, Fiona Cameron, Timothy Ohl, Cain Thompson, Gerard Van Dyck, composer Jethro Woodward, designer Julie Renton, lighting Rachael Burke, Malthouse. September 7-18; The Rabble, Special, director, Emma Valente, concept Emma Valente, Mary Helen Sassman, devisor-performers Liz Jones, Mary Helen Sassman, lighting, sound, composition Emma Valente; La Mama Courthouse, August 4-21; Arts House and Aphids, Thrashing Without Looking, creators Martyn Coutts, Elizabeth Dunn, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms, Willoh S Weiland, producer Thea Baumann, sound designe Alan Nguyen; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall. 3-7 August
IN PART 1 OF THIS SURVEY OF AUSTRALIAN CONTENT IN THE CURRICULA AND SYLLABUSES OF COURSES IN AUSTRALIAN THEATRE AND CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE IN TERTIARY EDUCATION, IT WAS CLEAR THAT THERE WERE SOME VALUABLE RESOURCES AVAILABLE IN PRINT AND ONLINE FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS, BUT ALSO MUCH THAT WAS MISSING.
I concluded that “there was a strongly felt need to be able to understand and teach Australian performance on its own terms but within the framework of national and international perspectives that this country has struggled so long to attain.” Here are further responses to my query to academics about how and where Australian content fits in their courses.
university of melbourne
Peter Eckersall, Associate Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, wrote to me that his subject, “‘Live Art Beyond Theatre,’ addresses many contemporary Australian artists and practices (and the RealTimeDance portal is a remarkable and helpful teaching resource). Our teaching tends not to be based on ideas of national arts practices, however, and Australian artists are discussed alongside, in comparison to, and in collaboration with developments, events and trends internationally. We also have Master of Arts and PhD students who are working on contemporary Australian performance. Some of these projects are focused on historical practices from the 1960s-1990s. Others are focused on contemporary performance works. A number of these projects have been/are being undertaken with creative components.” Eckersall identifies “a tendency to think about arts practices more regionally, locally and conversely more globally. Australian artists and practices have become so diverse that we often discuss them with a focus on more specific, or more diverse, analysis and critique. I would say that it is not the arts practices that are elided, but the notion of an ‘Australian artist’ and what this means is more complex and sometimes less meaningful.”
Eckersall also believes that “there is a need for more publishing on contemporary performance. There are many more research articles and documents than books …There are some good resources such as Ausstage and RealTime but there is a need for more perspectives and more ways to disseminate findings.”
murdoch university
Helena Grehan, Senior Lecturer in the English and Creative Arts program at Murdoch University in Western Australia, writes that the work of Australian artists is important “as the work reflects (often) issues and themes that are of interest to our students and the work is also often inspiring in terms of identifying what can be done in a constrained environment (fiscally).”
Grehan’s own teaching focus is “primarily on current practitioners (or at least from the last 20 or so years).” As for written resources she “directs students to available books but also RealTime (I use it all the time with my students), Australasian Drama Studies, Performance Paradigm (www.performanceparadigm.net) and About Performance (Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney), which are all very useful, as are blogs. There could always be more but l’d like to focus on quality rather than quantity. Alison Croggon’s Theatrenotes is, for example, outstanding.
university of sydney
Laura Ginters, lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney writes, “Contemporary artists and their practices are central to what we teach and research in Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. While we don’t create work with our students, and nor do we train artists, the Rex Cramphorn Studio is filled, year round, with our artist-in-residence program and the work of these artists feeds directly into our teaching and research. For example, the 3rd Year Honours entry courses, Rehearsal Studies and Rehearsal to Performance, are based around a project where students observe, document and analyse two weeks of a rehearsal or creative development process taking place in the Rex. In 2011 the students observed My Darling Patricia at work on a new piece; last year it was Version 1.0, developing Table of Knowledge.
“In researching the company whose work they will observe, RealTime is often a valuable resource for students. Our Honours students also sometimes undertake their professional placement—they observe and analyse a full-length rehearsal process, then write up a casebook on the experience. This can be with one of the artists or groups of artists working in the Rex—or they will undertake such a placement with a company or artist outside the department: this could be anything from Tess de Quincey Co to Opera Australia. We also offer an Honours level course in Contemporary Performance (which is heavily focused on Australian artists), and this will sometimes include a practical workshop component for the students with a practising artist like Barbara Campbell.”
In second year, students commence performance analysis, seeing live performances and writing about them. Other courses—Embodied Histories, Theories of Acting, the Playwright in the Theatre, Playing Politics, Cross-Cultural Performance and Gender and Performance—”use the work of contemporary practitioners in dance, contemporary performance, performance art, and theatre and other genres. In my own Dramaturgy course in third year my students have had the opportunity to observe a director, actors, writer and dramaturg developing a new work for performance. And while we’re not training practitioners we’ve got a long history of practitioners coming to us for postgrad study—enjoying the chance to reflect on their own practice or a related topic.”
Study in this department is advantaged by having a large archive in print and video of performance documentation. Ginters is appreciative of RealTime, Currency House’s Platform Papers “and (a very few) good bloggers—like Alison Croggon and James Waites for “delivering interesting commentary and reviews of work I can’t see myself and/or won’t see reviewed elsewhere. Our own journal, About Performance, also often includes analyses of the work of contemporary practitioners: recent editions have included essays on ‘refugee theatre,’ the work of Back to Back Theatre, Marrugeku, Pork Chop Productions, Australian Dance Theatre and the Gathering Ground project in Redfern’s The Block, to name just a few.”
Ginters would like more books on contemporary practitioners, “and indeed their forebears: I’m writing a book on drama activities at Sydney University in the late 1950s and early 1960s has made me very aware of how little has been written about the pre-1970 era.” Often, she says, the primary material exists—”the ausstage project is a great example of this; so is the National Library’s Trove search function. Having more of RealTime’s earlier editions also available would be a terrific addition. Personally I’d also be thrilled if I could get access to the Sydney Morning Herald archives online after 1954 without having to visit the State Library in person!”
university of new south wales
Clare Grant, Lecturer in the School of English, Performing Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, tells me that, “artists of late 20th and early 21st centuries such as The Sydney Front and Jenny Kemp are specifically studied in John McCallum’s survey course, Staging Australia, along with earlier Australian artists. In his Program and Repertoire course, close attention to current performance programming forms part of the curriculum.” The Introduction to Theatre course “refers to several contemporary performance makers such as Deborah Pollard, and from an earlier era, Ken Unsworth.” In Reading Performance and Multi-Media production, artists include Australian drag performance (eg The Kingpins), both live and mediatised, William Yang, Stelarc, Tony Schwensen, Australian dance companies, Mike Parr, version 1.0, Back to Back Theatre, Marrugeku, Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s Museum of Fetishized Identities, as well as local festivals.”
In the practical courses Grant teaches, students also see performance works— including media art, live art, ‘documentary’ performance, site-based work—in Sydney, “many of which involve the students or ex-students themselves…The work of Australian artists is vital to the department of Theatre and Performance Studies, especially as the work of students forms part of the contemporary performance milieu in Sydney. Many of the students work with practising artists through PACT Centre for Emerging Artists and Shopfront Theatre, often undertaken alongside their studies at UNSW.”
For 12 years Grant has produced an annual student devised work for the public. This year, however, she says the process “will shift to a number of smaller group shows created through contemporary performance-making practices. As well, each year a class of up to 35 solo performance makers publicly present their works.”
As for resources recommended to students, there are “extracts from Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman’s Performing the Un-nameable (Currency Press with RealTime, 1999) in various courses; Edward Scheer’s book on Mike Parr (RT102, p47); John McCallum’s Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century (Currency Press, 2009); plus Marrugeku’s Burning Daylight in DVD and booklet form. But we always need more; any new documentation is taken up quickly and used; Australian work with the physical and the documentary could use more attention. Streaming options, which Artfilms is working to develop soon, are valuable and probably more economical. Many of us teach the works we happen to have on DVD courtesy of the performance makers themselves.”
The evidence in Parts 1 and 2 of this brief survey provides clear evidence of commitment of teachers to Australian performance content in their courses, not only turning to print and online resources but, in various ways, putting students in touch with artists in residence, encouraging them to see productions, teaching analysis, developing dramaturgical awareness, making works and placing Australian work in the larger contexts of overseas works and the issues of the day. Most teachers would welcome books on contemporary artists (as more commonly happens in the visual arts) as well as stronger, more available video documentation. The emergence of contemporary performance from the 1960s to 80s warrants particular attention.
artfilms
A very special resource is the Melbourne based artfilms (www.artfilms.com.au/) with its growing collection of Australian performance works and documentaries on DVD. Artists and companies include Jenny Kemp, Stelarc, 5 Angry Men, Trevor Jamieson (Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, a documentary about Big hArt’s Ngapartji Ngapartji), Melbourne Women’s Circus and others alongside their international peers. In the dance realm, Artfilms has works available from Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc, Chrissie Parrott, Igneous, Bangarra Dance Theatre and Meryl Tankard. The company’s latest project, director Kriszta Doczy tells me, is its Australian Avant-Garde series featuring Nigel Kellaway, Mike Mullins, Ken Unsworth and the experimental films of Gary Shead with work currently progressing on a DVD about the Sydney Front. Artfilm’s director Doczy eagerly encourages Australian artists to make documentation of their performances available to universities, schools and individuals. You can read more about Artfilms in the December-January edition of RealTime.
Another valuable resource is the National Library Oral History Collection’s interviews with leading theatre professionals Peter Oysten, Richard Cottrell, Richard Murphet, Nicholas Lathouris, Alan Seymour and others conducted by James Waites. Waites has been conducting these “whole life” interviews with a variety of people in and outside of the theatre business (http://www.jameswaites.com/) since 1996.
Theatre/Performance education part 1 appeared in RT 104 – see article.
LASALLE acting students learn Kathakali performance skills
photo Crispian Chan
LASALLE acting students learn Kathakali performance skills
PROFESSOR PETER BOOTH, SENIOR DEPUTY VICE-CHANCELLOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY WAS RECENTLY REPORTED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD AS SAYING OF AUSTRALIAN ‘STAY-AT-HOME’ STUDENTS: “WE AS A UNIVERSITY THINK IT’S QUITE SAD AND WE’VE MADE A LOT OF EFFORT. IT WOULD BE BETTER FOR AUSTRALIA TO HAVE MORE POSITIVE PROGRAMS TO ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO DO SOME OF THEIR STUDY OVERSEAS” (SMH, SEPT 14).
If you have ambitions in the performing arts and a strong interest in intercultural performance Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts might be the place for you with its embrace of Asian and Western traditions, excellent facilities and teacher-student ratios, as well as a related media arts faculty and film school.
For many years Australian universities have relied financially on a steady flow of overseas students, mostly from Asia. Although, after USA and Britain, Australia has the third largest take-up of foreign students globally, some 22% of the Australian university population, numbers have dropped by 9.4% in 2010-11. This is for a variety of reasons: fears of racist violence, the high Australian dollar, foreign student management scams outside of the university sector and, given new visa restrictions, decreasing opportunities for students to stay on in Australia after graduating (the Australian Government has recently relaxed somewhat the visa and post-study work restrictions to help universities sustain numbers and income). Another reason is the growing attractiveness of universities and other tertiary education institutions within Asia itself, particularly as the region plays a growing role in the world’s economy and develops its tertiary education sector.
Focusing on fine art, design, media and performing arts in a culturally rich island state LASALLE is located in Singapore’s cultural centre. Equipped with one theatre and two black box spaces, its Faculty of Performing Arts was spearheaded by Aubrey Mellor, a leading Australian theatre director, formerly Director of NIDA. Mellor was the Dean of the Performing Arts 2008-2011 and is now a Senior Fellow at LASALLE. The faculty has long had connections with Australia through a number of teachers working there over many years, for example composer Lindsay Vickery (now returned to Perth), virtuoso saxophonist Timothy O’Dwyer, NIDA alumnae Edith Podesta and a former concert soloist with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Bronwyn Gibson.
What LASALLE offers students is a rich cross-cultural, practice-based curriculum in the performing arts with a very attractive and highly competitive (not least for Australian universities) ratio of one teacher per seven students.
Venka Purushothaman, LASALLE’s Vice-President (Academic) and Provost, and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Performing Arts, says, “Singapore is at the ebb and flow between the west and east. LASALLE is therefore able to capitalise on the rich and diverse groups of visiting artists from North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Through its link to UK film producer David Puttnam supporting the development of young filmmakers in Asia, The Puttnam School of Film, part of LASALLE’s Faculty of Media Arts, has also been instrumental in growing the creative talent base for the film and video industry.”
Wolfgang Muench, Dean of the Faculty of Media Arts, writes, “The philosophy within LASALLE is to encourage students to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects in order to learn new skills and sensibilities that will stand them in good stead when they enter the real world. Many of the Media Arts students have collaborated with dance and acting students on performances that showcase the diversity of the range of talents that are developed here.”
Aubrey Mellor likewise emphasises a diversity of experience and interaction: “In the Diploma in Dance, contextual studies support the understanding of distinct stylistic features, but dance practice and dance skills take precedence. The aim is a versatile and flexible dancer, equally at ease with any choreographic demand from popular, ethnic and period dance. Essentials of classical ballet, contemporary dance and physical theatre are used but are not specialisations.” As for music training the focus is on “knowledge of style, rhythm and cultural sources and the inclusion of cross-disciplinary subjects such as Performance Art, Film and Video Collaboration and Southeast Asian Cinema that accord students with the scope to exercise versatility and to think and practise across artforms and cultures.”
Timothy O’Dwyer, who heads the School of Contemporary Music within LASALLE’s Faculty of Performing Arts, elaborates: “In the popular music oriented Diploma in Music, students rehearse in small groups and perform every week. They learn how to improvise, have lessons on their instruments, learn music theory, compose their own songs and learn about the history of music from some of the most experienced performers and educators in the region. The BA(Hons) Music covers classical, jazz and popular music as well as composition and music technology. Taught within a western musical discourse, the programs introduce a diverse blend of ideas found in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas—and schools students in a range of contemporary musical practices, in both practical and theoretical contexts.”
LASALLE students perform Journey To Nowhere
photo Crispian Chan
LASALLE students perform Journey To Nowhere
For students undertaking the Diploma in Performance, the first year course in acting, improvisation, voice, movement and script analysis is framed within the history of the performing arts and visual culture. The second year focuses on musical theatre, with the experiential work underpinned by lectures and seminars in Southeast Asian performance traditions as well as dramatic writing and dramaturgy. The third year involves acting work in LASALLE’s Screen Acting Unit and studies in Southeast Asian Cinema.
For the BA(Hons) Acting, through classes, projects, workshops and productions, the course develops students’ abilities to work in an ensemble environment and with awareness of their own imaginative resources. The program collaborates with other faculties, specifically The Puttnam School of Film in the Media Arts faculty and offers rich training within a wide cultural and historical context. For students from non-Asian cultures an attractive feature in Level 1 is the Asian Theatre Project plus intensive stylistic workshops, from Commedia to Kabuki. In the final year, Level 3 operates as a theatre company, with ensemble members experiencing a range of roles, styles, genres and disciplines.
Recent First Class BA(Hons) Acting graduate Walter Hanna, who hails from Perth, feels privileged to have been given the opportunity to experience different forms of Asian theatre practices during his studies at LASALLE. Hanna says, “From the very beginning, we were trained by very experienced practitioners who are skilled in Kathakali, Chinese opera, and Indian martial arts. The Asian Theatre Project in our first year of acting school gave us a wide spectrum of learning opportunities and allowed us to be schooled in traditional Asian artforms. This is something that I would not have had the chance to experience if I had studied in Australia.” Hanna participated in a LASALLE production, Journey To Nowhere, in 2010—a tongue-in-cheek take on the famous Chinese epic Journey To The West. “Before doing this show, I had absolutely no idea about Chinese myths and cultural beliefs,” says Hanna.
The distinctive BA(Hons) Theatre+Performance degree with its orientation on leadership is intended for theatre devotees who do not wish to work onstage or backstage. Aubrey Mellor writes, “Graduates are equipped to initiate theatre-making or writing and find employment collaborating with creative leaders locally, regionally or internationally. It engages with traditional and contemporary theory and current and traditional methods of both the East and West are valued. Emphasis is placed on developing the leadership skills for those students wishing to become directors, playwrights, dramaturgs, critics or drama teachers. Level 3 includes advanced studies in inter-cultural theatre practice, developing a specialisation and a major personal production and thesis.” The BA(Hons) Musical Theatre is the first of its kind in Asia designed to prepare students for professional careers in musicals, plays, cabaret, film and television. Numerous graduates from both Musical Theatre and Acting programs have found employment around the world.
There are also Diplomas in Technical and Production Management and in Audio Production as well as a BA(Hons) Technical Theatre, where stage management is central and students can specialise in scenography, lighting, sound and production management. These programs deliver to the huge number of fully produced plays and musicals as well as dance and music shows. Graduates are in high demand from the rapidly growing performing arts, both nationally and regionally, with another 39 new performing spaces brought on line in Singapore.
There is emphasis throughout on a solid grounding in performance administration and financial management as well as professional theatre internships and periodical performance projects. In all diploma and degree courses, leading directors, conductors and choreographers from the region and beyond are involved in the creation of productions.
Bronwyn Gibson, Program Leader for Musical Theatre, says, “LASALLE offers a unique opportunity for Australian students to receive internationally-recognised tertiary education while developing the self-sufficiency and personal growth that comes with living in a foreign country. Student life is enriched by the constant cross-cultural dialogue and learning opportunities derived from peers of diverse backgrounds. Singapore is an inherently multi-racial country and offers an excellent introduction to the dynamic potential that Asia has to offer on a global scale whilst positioned in close geographical proximity to Australia. LASALLE offers the Australian student the best of both worlds.”
According to a recent OECD report, Education at a Glance, there are “24 international students in Australia for every one national studying overseas. The ratios for both the US and Britain are 1-11” (SMH, Sept 14). Certainly, given the impact of traditional Asian dance and theatre traditions on Australian performing arts, you’d think more young Australians would take up opportunities that combine both their own Western and increasingly familiar and pertinent Asian traditions and innovations in performance.
LASALLE College of the Arts, Faculties of Performing Arts & Media Arts, www.lasalle.edu.sg
THE TITLE OF SHOPFRONT’S LATEST PRODUCTION, MACHINE ATLAS, SUGGESTS SEVERAL POSSIBILITIES. FIRST, IT CONJURES AN ATLAS OF TECHNOLOGY, AN IMPOSSIBLE COMPENDIUM OF ALL THE MACHINES EVER MADE. SECOND, IT MAKES ME THINK OF AN ATLAS FOR A MACHINE—A VAST MAP OF ITS MYSTERIOUS INTERIOR—AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE BORING MANUALTHAT USUALLY ACCOMPANIES A PURCHASE. THEN OF COURSE, I WONDER WHETHER THE ATLAS ITSELF COULD NOW BE PUBLISHED AS A MACHINE. UNTIL I REALISE THAT IT ALREADY HAS BEEN, IN THE FORM OF GPS DEVICES. MACHINE ATLAS SETS MY IMAGINATION FIRING BEFORE I EVEN LEAVE THE HOUSE.
The evening begins on a Kogarah footpath in Sydney’s south in front of six screens roughly two metres high. Through a combination of projection and backlighting, a series of silhouettes emerges. The shapes suggest that machine-human hybrids are hiding on the other side: there are some recognisably human profiles and limbs, but also some suspiciously odd-looking additions and protrusions. This is followed by a magnificent monologue from one of the young performers about the long and complex history of humans and their machines.
The screens are moved to the side and we are invited to enter a mall where a “mysterious night market of mechanisms” awaits us. To the left, a man is distilling a “truth serum”—a complicated process that involves a member of the audience, several cups full of coloured fluids (red for love, green for envy, yellow for innocence) as well as some shredded paper and a sieve. Eventually a tiny vial of truth serum emerges to much applause. Further along we enter the Reanimator, constructed from black sheets and glow-in-the-dark stickers and with the casual and wayward look of a living-room fort. Winding our way through we soon meet a young man, who asks us who we would like to reanimate. We’re feeling scientific so we say Francis Bacon. He types the name onto an old typewriter and produces an old computer mouse, which he claims belonged to Bacon.
When we exit the Reanimator, we come across the Machinist Photobooth (really a small stage with a performer operating a digital camera). This is a great hit with the younger audience members: resplendent against a backdrop of rainbow stripes and fairy lights, they are photographed for posterity. Next to the photo booth there is a large screen with black and white animations made by and about school students. Nearby you can interact with Robosoft Windows, which places an individual performer in a clear box and the audience in control. When the spectator selects a tool such as the pencil, eraser or roller the performer enacts each of those actions.
While I can’t bring myself to interact with Robosoft Windows (too close to home for someone who spends her days on a word processor), I can’t resist entering the Biomechanics Booth. Here I am asked my age, birth gender, current gender, how long it takes me to power up in the morning and down in the evening, and when I had my last upgrade and service. The performer, looking a little like a manga cartoon figure with her blue wig, then asks me to close my eyes while she inserts a new chip into my wrist (bandaged on) before sending me on my way.
Every so often this mechanical carnival is interrupted by a siren or whistle, signalling another more theatrical interlude. Early on we are invited onto the street to see a boy dancing in and on a car. Later we stop to watch the human-machine hybrids perform a weird waltz in the middle of the crowd, while we step awkwardly out of the way. If it reads like chaos, it sometimes is—but it’s also exciting and there is a constant sense of anticipation.
As with technology itself—will it liberate or enslave us?—the dramaturgy of Machine Atlas is not always clear. It opens strongly but then seems to grind to a halt as we stand about waiting to access individual installations. Other times it lurches into action and we have to move fast in order not to miss it. One of my viewing companions comments that he’d like to see a human emerge at the end and put all the machines away, perhaps evidence of the almost irresistible desire to reassert human agency. But maybe this ambiguity is okay and more importantly, maybe it is a more accurate reflection of our relationship with machines. This prompts one last thought about the work’s title—what if we are not mapping but rather being mapped by our machines? What on earth would an atlas of humanity look like and where, for that matter, would actors fit in?
Shopfront Contemporary Arts & Performance, Machine Atlas, director Caitlin Newton-Broad, outreach director Sarah Emery, performed by members of Ensemble 2011, movement, Victoria Hunt, sound Michael Moebus (Meem), lighting Stephen Hawker, video Sasha Cohen, design Robin Whitmore, costume design Katja Handt; Kogarah, Sydney, Aug 26-28
THE SETTING IS THE PRODUCTION OFFICE OF THE BLACK LUNG THEATRE AND WHALING FIRM COMPLETE WITH POT PLANTS. THE COMPANY NAME ALREADY CONNOTED A CORPORATE SPOOF IN CONGENIAL TERRY GILLIAM STYLE.
But what to make of a show where a portrait of Zionist military icon David Ben-Gurion crashes to the ground, Theodor Adorno’s famous statement that after Auschwitz there will be no more poetry (no more comedy?) is enunciated by the character Aaron who opportunistically proclaims his Jewish heritage in the context of appropriating someone else’s script—“It’s all about me”—followed by the outrageous remark that the office was run like a concentration camp, only with more (or was it less?) discipline. What to make of this confusion of signs (and the obvious lacuna of Palestine)? I didn’t take it, as some others did, as a comment on anti-Semitism. Semitic/anti-Semitic? Stop/Go?
Part surreal review or a series of brilliantly crafted, satirical skits on film, television and theatre in the Swiftian sense of being often grotesque and graphically disturbing (Thomas Wright covered in blood as the aftermath to a ritual bacchanal of hysterical male rage), it was also reminiscent of pre-digital pastimes in more innocent, stoned days, where by switching channels on the TV set we sampled our own reconstructions of the public narrative.
On a naturalistic, ‘real life,’ level of presentation, it was like a more offensive version of The Office which belongs to the vein of 21st century comedy that gets much of its mileage from making the audience cringe. In this case, the all-male, apparently misogynist ensemble of The Black Lung exploit and sexually harass the tribe of young Brisbane performers (beautifully integrated into the mature ensemble) whom they are supposed to be mentoring as work experience students. The degree of subtly portrayed power plays and the complete ignorance of having crossed boundaries on the part of the perpetrators was appropriately squirmacious. But these young people were wised up. There was the facsimile of a palace revolution, but I was moved by the young woman who declared, “I don’t know what to do now” (an echo of the Russian revolutionary Lenin’s pamphlet “What is to be Done?”).
A narrative conceit of the demise of Michael Gow, the former artistic director who commissioned the work I Feel Awful for the Queensland Theatre Company, seemed part affectionate tribute, part celebratory slaying of the father. His memorial portrait also suffers a similar fate to that of fallen idol Ben-Gurion as theatre flats crash to the ground signalling the ultimate collapse of the societal (and theatrical) structures we are all implicated in preserving. The fractured lesbian fairytales provided by comical (mis)readings from Gow’s works caused some ire, but again I read it as this company’s anarchic concern to explode implicit binarisms wherever they exist in the minds of the audience.
There seems to be a salutary awareness on the part of this company that they are fatally involved in an industry of distraction. They appeared to be resisting the homogenisation that implies a classless, genderless world that is the result of media technologies that dematerialise, de-individualise, de-centre the subject and to have re-invoked the notion that, as the French Situationist Guy Debord put it in the Society of the Spectacle, “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” But as a theatre of revolt to wake us from liberal dreams, it seemed compromised by its own situation as part of the Brisbane Festival.
Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm and Queensland Theatre Company: I Feel Awful, writer, director, designer Thomas M Wright, performers Liam Barton, Gareth Davies, Aaron Orzech, Vaczadenjo Wharton-Thomas, Thomas M Wright, Courtney Ammenhauser, Finn Gilfedder, Will Horan, Tiarnee Kim, Mary Neary, Essie O’Shaughnessy, Charlie Schache, Nathan Sibthorpe, Stephanie Tandy, design consultant Simone Romaniuk, lighting Govin Ruben; QTC Billie Brown Studio, Brisbane, Aug 22–Sept 10
THE STAGE IS SIMPLY BUT STYLISHLY SET FOR A PRESS CONFERENCE. BEHIND THE LONG BLACK TABLE WITH DESK MICROPHONES AND GLASSES OF WATER IS A RED AND WHITE WALL POSTER WITH A BOTOX-INJECTED FONT REPEATING LOUDLY “THIS IS IT.”
Entering the PICA performance space, the audience have been given a press kit for a fictitious film of the same name as the show, but not much time to read it. When the lights go down we are shown five short cinematic trailers, each one laden with suspense, desire and danger: a woman’s fingernails plunge into eroticised back flesh; a man discovers a buried suitcase while walking in a grim Australian forest; and a cloaked, menacing figure is silhouetted by tongues of fire.
Shot in distinctive art house style but also with unashamed cliché, these suggestive glimpses prepare us for the press conference to follow, the format on which the rest of the performance is based.
The charismatic media presenter for the PICA performance season is special guest Mark Naglazas, a journalist from the West Australian newspaper, acting for all the world as if the audience are also members of the press who will soon be in possession of the roving microphone. Promoted thus to industry colleagues, we all applaud when Naglazas introduces the faux celebrities onto the stage. As they gesture regally to the paparazzi, we take in the elegant Natalie Kate Randall, who plays Caroline the smouldering vamp and victim; a slightly goofy Malcom Whittaker, the naive hero Jim, Caroline’s devoted lover; and Frank Mainoo, an Olympic silver-medalist boxer turned actor who is the villainous kidnapper in the film. Just as the five trailers were an excessive introduction the actors also deliberately take their time waving, smiling and loving their audience loving them. When Naglazas kicks off the questions we hear vague and seemingly articulate accounts of working with a risky, mad director (Dara Gill, also the director of the performance), coping with the demands of largely improvised shoots (writer credits actually go to Simi Knezivic) and dealing with the on and off-stage sexual tension between cast members. The performers have a strong and relaxed rapport, even if their stage presence is not always amped or magnetic.
The show intensifies when a complicit audience starts to fire the questions, introducing themselves as official representatives from real or fake radio stations, newspapers or magazines. It is an intimate crowd, and some are known local performers (not plants) who take on the mantle of the press club expert with relish and comic sensibility. This foray into multiple authorship and improvisation adds a frisson and live-ness to what has now become a choose-your-own-adventure story. Open to any twist or turn that questions and answers may take, the film’s narrative and its behind-the-scenes antics build in horror, humour and sordidness. On this particular evening, the implied gratuitous violence and sexual antics involving Caroline are especially disturbing, mirroring the same morbid fascination that television has for dead or compromised women. We cannot know if the same stories emerge in other performances or if this trajectory is as provisional as everything else in This Is It.
This is a cheeky show that delights in playing with art and artifice. Rather than competing with the film genre, it confidently exploits that genre’s codes and celebrity culture to make participatory theatre. Renewing itself and its possibilities with every run, audiences are invited to speculate, enter into dialogue with and, potentially, reflect on what puts the pop in our popular entertainment. In Baudrillard’s terms, this is a work that perpetuates “the simulation of something which never really existed,” giving the title its sharp irony.
For some, this performance will have interrogated the vacuousness of our increasingly marketing-driven and fame-obsessed existence, and our mythologising of artists. For others, it will have been as unmemorable as the gossip and scandal in yesterday’s trash magazine. Those who loved the fun, confusion and masquerading of it all may even have hung around after the show to collect signatures on the dedicated autograph page at the back of the film’s deluxe brochure. With its foundation of illusion and spectacle, This Is It can flicker in and out of all these readings and more.
This performance is the work of Team MESS, an energetic and interdisciplinary collective of emerging artists (mostly graduates from Wollongong University) who are worth keeping an eye on. Enabled by the development and presentation programs of PICA and Performance Space, they have spun a playful ruse entangling truth and fiction with art and identity.
This Is It, created and performed by Team MESS, Dara Gill, Sime Knezevic, Frank Mainoo, Natalie Randall, Malcolm Whittaker; PICA, Perth, July 13-16
PERHAPS IT’S THE MOOD I’M IN BUT THE PRODUCTIONS I’VE SEEN OVER THE LAST FEW MONTHS, ALTHOUGH HAVING THEIR SHARE OF EVERYDAY UNHAPPINESS, ALSO SUGGESTED VARYING DEGREES OF MELANCHOLY—A CONDITION THESE DAYS REGARDED AS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SADNESS AND DEPRESSION AND CAPABLE OF DEEPENING INTO THE LATTER. COINCIDENTALLY, IN THE FINAL PARAGRAPH OF HER REVIEW OF THE 2011 EUROKAZ FESTIVAL, JANA PERKOVIC IS CRITICAL OF WHAT SHE SEES AS A CURRENT WESTERN PROCLIVITY FOR MELANCHOLY PERFORMANCE ALONGSIDE APOCALYPTIC CONCERNS.
belvoir: the seagull
The plays of Anton Chekhov are melancholy writ large: sad, wise reflections on constrained lives, dreams unrealised, love lost and empathy thwarted by deeply engrained defense mechanisms. Benedict Andrews’ version (from a literal translation by Karen Vickery) of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull gently transposes the play’s setting from a late 19th century Russian country estate to a fibro holiday shack on an Australian rural property in our own 21st century. Somewhat pared back and brush-stroked with touches of Australian English and a smattering of contemporary references, production and text are faithful to the spirit and much of the significant detail of the original play. For an Andrews’ production this is an unusually but aptly relaxed affair, taking the requisite time to establish mood, the informal comings and goings, incidental encounters and the emotional flash points so common to family holidays.
Designer Ralph Myers’ L-shaped cream painted shack is an immaculately neat imitation of the real thing, with an open space before it where much of the play unfolds. Although appropriately furnished inside, the house outside is not aged—not touched up with rust or rot or fringed with weeds or shaded by trees. The playing space is equally stark. But as part abstract and calculatedly liminal as this design is, Damien Cooper’s lighting makes the most of its blankness to glare or haze in intense summer light and glow warmly at night. The outdoorness is emphatic. Of course, it’s where Konstantin’s experimental play is staged—with Nina reciting from inside a glass box (perhaps Andrews is mildly parodying his own productions of Eldorado and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Belvoir’s The Wild Duck). The box, framed by the words REAL LIFE spelled out in neon, subsequently becomes a handy metaphorical device, but as an instance of 21st century avant-gardism the transposition from the 19th isn’t easily made.
In this space a strong cast realises The Seagull with an easy sense of ensemble. Judy Davis as the ageing actress Irina is elegantly volatile (no wonder she takes exception to her son Konstantin’s play; not only is it “pseudo avant-garde”, it embraces mortality) and wickedly comic at moments; David Wenham’s deadpan Trigorin is scarily manipulative; Bille Brown’s cheerily mellow Dorn, the doctor, has sympathy for Konstantin but not enough insight to save him; John Gaden’s frail Sorin, the owner of the property, is a self-contained comedy of regret and Emily Barclay’s Masha is a blunt, joint-smoking Goth. As Konstantin, Dylan Young faces the play’s largest challenge, one he almost meets—to convey sufficient emotion and complexity in the course of the play to warrant our belief in his suicidal destiny, not least when it’s Nina who gets, as it were, the last word centrestage, desperately struggling to express her fate: “One day, a man comes along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her. An idea. For a story. No, that’s not it. What was I saying?” Maeve Dermody vibrates with Nina’s continuing passion for Trigorin but knows she must leave, regretting lost innocence, reciting the very words she had spoken in Konstantin’s play, about a world dying, and then rushing away. The last vestige of Konstantin’s fantasy of a life with Nina evaporates, his belief in himself as a writer already shattered. The melancholic aura of incomplete lives (even the successful Trigorin describes writing as obsessive-compulsive), of life-sustaining delusions and semi-conscious cruelties is ruptured by suicide—a step too far, into either pathos or tragedy.
version 1.0: the table of knowledge
You wouldn’t expect anything melancholic of version 1.0’s The Table of Knowledge. It’s a scathing, straight from the horse’s mouth account of astonishing corruption within the Wollongong City Council and the local business community (for details see the interview with David Williams). It’s riotously funny in its judicious selection of verbatim material, in its deployment of a mock injunction to shut down the show and having blocks of the audience play out the dodgy council property development approval process. But as the second act progresses the mood shifts into darker emotional territory when the woman at the centre of the scandal, Beth Morgan, realises at the inquiry that she has been betrayed by her partner in crime—this at the very time she has found the whole sexual and financial adventure beyond her capacity to manage. Her isolation is profound. But as with the whole production, conventional acting is not version 1.0’s tool. Here Kim Vercoe as Morgan brings just enough emotional intensity to the role to suggest not tragedy but a degree of pathos, drawing from us empathy for someone caught in their own machinations. Equally, version 1.0 are careful not to make the sexual favours, so focused on by the mass media, the centre of their investigation.
Characterisation is otherwise broadly brush-stroked, largely played straight to the audience and with the performers adopting multiple roles against screens that constantly, even relentlessly reveal the unfolding visions of developers’ dreams—architectural fantasies of an anonymous high rise regional city. Late in the second act as the scheming collapses, the waves that break on Wollongong’s shores turn suggestively pink as if bloody. The Table of Knowledge is richly inventive, a feast of appalling information, revelations about criminal cunning and stupidity in equal parts (two men pretending to be ICAC investigators blackmailed the “table of knowledge” conspirators). If it wasn’t so funny it would be depressing, but by the time we watched on as Beth Morgan and her former lover Frank Vellar stood alone and apart and one time Council General Manager Rod Oxley lectured us about the impediments of regulation to innovation, we knew we would leave the theatre feeling more sad than angry—a degree more helpless, a little more worldly.
Version 1.0 made great comic play on the uniqueness of this story of corruption to Wollongong while presenting a litany of the many other councils that have likewise fallen across the country. This is a production that should be seen widely as councils play an increasing role in our lives—from fleecing us to building our arts centres. The fact that Wollongong’s citizens turned out in droves to see The Table of Knowledge, extending the season, speaks both of the work’s relevance and the power of an idiosyncratic theatricality, largely new to this audience, that they wholeheartedly embraced.
Africa, My Darling Patricia
photo Jeff Busby
Africa, My Darling Patricia
stc next stage: africa
In My Darling Patricia’s Africa, three children—two sisters and a neglected boy from the neighbourhood—immerse themselves in an African fantasy world, identifying themselves with particular animals and even setting out for the airport to make the journey to a land “where chips grow on trees” and “animals talk.” As in the events in Germany that inspired this work, the children are returned to their home by the authorities. But My Darling Patricia takes the story further, into the dark territory of parental neglect and sexual abuse.
The power of Africa comes from its vivid and detailed realisation of the children’s fantasy world, made especially potent by its use, principally, of puppetry in the Bunraku tradition, intricately generating expression (including the mouthing of words) and movement—not least with characterful ways of walking and dancing.
The children’s room is a cleverly designed tiered set with spaces between each level for the puppeteers to move freely. The topmost level reveals only the legs of adults (actors, not puppets) in their world apart, dancing, drinking, fighting—it’s comic at first, threatening later. Eventually the adults enter the children’s room: a devious male bearing gifts and a less than fully caring mother who transforms into a snarling lion when the man transgresses. In the end, the mother must move her family, leaving the boy behind. For a moment it appears that he will be able to sustain the children’s Africa on his own—long leaves of grass sprout from the floor, but then sink and disappear, the collective fantasy lost. It’s a deeply sad final moment in a now otherwise bare room—the sheer volume and density of toys and enacted fantasies gone forever. The puppeteering, design, music (making fine use of toy piano and accordion), props and projections are seamlessly integrated in a production that is endlessly inventive and emotionally demanding, if often very funny. The ending resonates with a line uttered by one of the children after the police have brought them home: “People like us don’t go to Africa.”
At the commencement of Bully Beef Stew, a performance commissioned by PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, the three Indigenous male performers announce that this will “not be a variety show” while everything they do suggests it well might be. It’s certainly funny. However as it progresses, Bully Beef Stew becomes an engaging and moving meditation on reconciliation—between fathers, who have passed away, and sons. Director Andrea James and performers Sonny Dallas Law, Colin Kinchela and Bjorn Stewart embrace a variety of simple means from solo testaments and song and dance to the inventive deployment of a toy train set (the adult becomes child again on a tiny chair), packing tape, a boxing glove, sound design (a speeding car roars like a jet engine) and projections. What emerges from this playfulness is melancholic: these young men miss their fathers, wondering what they’ve inherited from them, what might need to be forgiven, and what it means to be an Indigenous man: “can I be beautiful”…”am I spiritual?” They are not sentimental, some of the lines are tough: “You’ll never be my equal, just my father.” The world they have inherited and might duplicate is suffused with alcohol, abuse, neglect and deaths in custody. As one of them asks about his father, “Is he me?” But ultimately Bully Beef Stew is about acceptance, forgiveness and reconciliation, the mood sombre and physically shared with the audience as the performers gently reach out to touch our hands. This production reveals the considerable promise of the performers and the potential of the work.
Stefan Gregory, Robyn Nevin, Kris McQuade, Neighourhood Watch, Belvoir
photo Brett Boardman
Stefan Gregory, Robyn Nevin, Kris McQuade, Neighourhood Watch, Belvoir
belvoir: neighbourhood watch
Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch is a whimsical fable with melancholic and even darker undercurrents; with a subdued melodramatic structure; and characters living on if almost over the edge of neurosis. The setting is Australian suburbia, the design two vast, overlapping grey walls cradling a performance space that becomes the everyday only by dint of costumes, occasional props and the opening ritual of the weekly placement of rubbish bins on imaginary footpaths where isolated neighbours are otherwise unlikely to meet. It’s a liminal space where past and present, reality and fantasy can likewise overlap at a word or the turn of a revolve.
Ana (Robyn Nevin), one of two central characters is a Hungarian immigrant—child of an uncaring father who dies young; near teenage victim of a serial killer; a nurse during World War II; prisoner in post-war detention camps for 14 years across Europe; and the literally imprisoned wife of an Italian in Australia. On the upside, she travels into Russia on behalf of a legless soldier she met in hospital and her marriage, in Australia, to a Serbian has been a happy one—until his death from cancer, from which Ana herself is also dying. This challenging life is revealed piece by piece across the duration of the play, building a complex character, exquisitely realised by Robyn Nevin, who oscillates between paranoia and brusque friendliness, often comically phrased in her broken English. She now lives alone with Bella, an aggressive Alsatian and constantly rejects the friendly approaches of an elderly Serbian woman, Milova (Kris McQuade), whom she regards as a spy, and treats her doctor appallingly as a murderer who seduced her husband: “You deliver first the news of my husband’s death and now of Ana’s. You kill us both.” Despite her paranoid disposition she chats amiably with a neighbour, Christina (Heather Mitchell), another cancer survivor, the local pharmacist and especially Catherine (Megan Holloway), a would-be actress in her mid 20s lamenting the loss of a lover, Martin (Ian Meadows).
The play’s momentum is predicated on the developing relationship between the older and the younger woman. Ana’s belief in her own sixth sense, her own “ultrasound,” is what she would like to instil in Catherine—a capacity to be distrustful of the world, while at the same time encouraging her, very conventionally, to find a relationship, or open up about the one she might have. She makes little headway. Ana, however, gives much to Catherine, a willing fantasist who slips easily into Ana’s role as the Hungarian woman’s past is played out—the revolve turns and the characters walk back in time, even to comic effect as Ana magically has Catherine and those she encounters speak in her odd English. But it can’t be said that Ana reciprocally draws Catherine out; this is a problem. Late in the play Ana learns that Martin is dead, a suicide, a ghost; in the meantime we’ve witnessed Catherine’s encounters with a returned Martin as real; she is more of a fantasist than we thought. Catherine’s closed life is echoed by that of her housemate, Ken, a diabetic in his 30s and would be filmmaker whose friends are online game-players. These two thinly support each other emotionally, although that falls part, each knowing the other can’t face reality.
While Ana is an idiosyncratic force to be reckoned with, Catherine is a simpler figure whom I wished had more character (despite Megan Holloway’s best efforts), brittleness perhaps, flights of fancy about her acting career, moments of giving way just a little to Ana’s probings. In the end Ana, Milova and Catherine come together; it’s a redemptive moment of a kind for Ana, conceding to see the film Mamma Mia with the two women and to have coffee at Milova’s home. In that very moment she collapses and presumably soon dies. Catherine and Ken are re-united, Ken has found a producer for his film, Catherine might have a role in it and they share the house with Ana’s dog. It’s an all too easeful crowd-pleasing ending, difficult to equate with the intensifying melancholy and the revelations of the play’s progress. But Katz and Nevin nonetheless create a powerful, complex stage force in their realisation of Ana.
Linda Cropper, Russell Kiefel, No More Shall We Part, Griffin
courtesy Griffin Theatre
Linda Cropper, Russell Kiefel, No More Shall We Part, Griffin
griffin: and no more shall we part
A potential suicide in Tom Holloway’s And No More Shall We Part comes in the form of euthanasia, as a middle-aged wife, Pam, decides to end her life rather than endure the agonies that will come with her dying months. In her final hours as she waits in bed for the drugs to take effect, she and her husband converse with inevitable awkwardness, intimacy and moments of recollection. Scenes from previous weeks are interpolated into this grim night-watch, revealing Pam’s determination to die at a time of her own choosing rather than surrender to her husband’s accusations of selfishness or his fanciful suggestion of a trip to Switzerland for legal euthanasia—or, he hopes, advice there to abandon it. Don is progressively revealed to be something of a fantasist, not fully comprehending his wife’s need, clinging to a togetherness that cannot last. The play offers a gruelling experience not least in its disturbing, indeterminate conclusion.
Russell Kiefel as Don and Linda Cropper as Pam deliver subtle, sympathetic performances, passionate in the flashbacks, tentative and tender in the present, although Pam does not spare Tom her criticisms of his character. The sombre mood is occasionally if blackly alleviated, for example Don wondering if he goes to the toilet he’ll miss the moment of Pam’s dying. Amidst all the moral complexities, the overriding mood is one of sadness, not simply with regard to an impending death but because it’s the significant differences as much as the similarities between these two fairly ordinary people make them the couple they are. And sadder, Pam reveals herself to be something other than ordinary in her clarity of purpose and preparation without ever rejecting Don’s love. Sadder still is the alarming ending when Pam’s determination is defeated, but for how long? The mood however is somewhat undercut by the playwright’s insistent use of short lines of dialogue that overplay the tentativeness of the situation, adding too heavy an air of artifice. Holloway’s idiosyncratic stage language is usually much more effective; here it is in constant danger of locking into fixed rhythms. The set design is also somewhat awkward, alternating between bedroom and, behind it, dining room, making me wonder about the logic of the play’s flashback structure. But the calibre of the performances and the topicality of a demanding subject made for sustained if melancholy reflection long afterwards.
performance space: the harry harlow project
The Harry Harlow Project, a show from Melbourne written and performed by James Saunders and directed by Brian Lipson is a considerable challenge to one’s sense of empathy. The American psychologist (1905-1981) set up an experiment placing baby rhesus monkeys with surrogate ‘mothers,’ one a piece of terry cloth to show that the need for touch was critical and, the other, a wire structure that provided food—even then if the cloth was available it was preferred. But Harlow went further, torturing baby chimpanzees in his “pit of despair” for up to 24 months, driving them into psychosis by isolating them, depriving them of real maternal affection. Radically, he was out to prove that ‘love’ should be in the lexicon of mainstream psychology and that touch and nurture were crucial to the emotional and cognitive development of children. It’s almost impossible to believe that this was not a cultural given in the first half of the 20th century, but it wasn’t—intimacy was seen as spoiling the independent growth of the child.
The Harry Harlow Project reveals a man in decline, presumably at the end of his career, in a pit of despair of his own. The play creates a purgatory for Harlow, punishing him for his sins—his indifference to animals, his multiple marriages, his unscientific language (a forced mating device he named a “rape rack,” the wire mother an “iron maiden”). He feels nothing, loves nothing, he disconnects his phone, the shadow of a cage falling across his bed. Earlier, he lectures us, appears on TV, embraces a huge toy monkey and then crushes it. He inhabits a large white room. On the walls are dimly projected images of his monkey victims, but he declares, “I have no cloth…I am not a monkey.” His focus has been on what he can learn about human children via monkey behaviour, a desire “to save 100 million mistreated children, not monkeys.” While Harlow apparently changed attitudes to child raising and is much lauded for it, the means were appalling. That other scientists enacted similar torments on children makes Harlow no less a villain. Ironically his experiments are regarded as a trigger for the evolution of the animal liberation movement.
If you didn’t know who Harlow was then finding your way into The Harry Harlow Project could have been difficult: it’s a work that commences rather surreally, requiring considerable attentiveness as Saunders’ American-accented rendering of Harlow’s tirades and panics frequently hit the one note. But by the end the picture is clearer if complex. Are we supposed to pity this man in his living hell?—it’s a hard call. You leave the theatre curious, as if having watched a quite unfamiliar animal for the first time, but above all saddened at the inflicting of suffering on one species to reduce the pain of another.
Belvoir: The Seagull, writer Anton Chekhov, a version by director Benedict Andrews, performers Emily Barclay, Bille Brown, Gareth Davies, Judy Davis, Maeve Dermody, Mel Dyer, John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Terry Serio, Thomas Unger, David Wenham, Dylan Young, designer Ralph Myers, costumes Dale Ferguson, lighting Damien Cooper, composer, sound designer Stefan Gregory, Belvoir Upstairs, June 8-17; version 1.0 & Merrigong Theatre, The Table of Knowledge, devisor performers Arky Michael, Jane Phegan, Yana Taylor, Kim Vercoe, David Williams, deviser Alan Flower, video design, deviser Sean Bacon, sound design Gail Priest, lighting Frank Mainoo; Illawara Performing Arts Centre, Aug 30-Sept 20; Sydney Theatre Company, Next Stage: My Darling Patricia, Africa, concept Sam Routledge, director, writer Halcyon Macleod, performers Anthony Ahern, Michelle Robin Anderson, Clare Britton, Jodie Le Visconte, design Clare Britton, Bridget Dolan, composer, sound designer Declan Kelly, puppets Bryony Anderson, lighting Lucy Birkinshaw, STC, Wharf 2, Sept 1-17; Bully Beef Stew, co-creator director Andrea James, co-creators, performers Sonny Dallas Law, Colin Kinchela, Bjorn Stewart, choreographer Kirk Page, media artist Jacqui Mills, sound design Melissa Hunt, lighting Clytie Smith; PACT Theatre, June 29-July 9; Griffin Theatre Company: And No More Shall We Part, writer Tom Holloway, director Sam Strong, performers Linda Cropper, Russell Kiefel, designer Victoria Lamb, lighting Verity Hampson, sound design, composer Kelly Ryall, Griffin, Aug 4-Sept 3; Belvoir, Neighbourhood Watch, writer Lally Katz, director Simon Stone, performers Charlie Garber, Stefan Gregory, Megan Holloway, Kris McQuade, Ian Meadows, Heather Mitchell, Robyn Nevin, design Dale Ferguson, lighting Damien Cooper, composer, sound designer Stafan Gregory; Belvoir Upstairs, July 23-Aug 28; Performance Space & Mobile States: The Harry Harlow Project, writer-performer James Saunders, direction, design Brian Lipson, video artist Martyn Coutts; CarriageWorks, Sydney, Sept 7-10
INCREASINGLY, I WANT EACH ARTS HOUSE SEASON TO COME WITH A CURATORIAL STATEMENT. YES, THE ART WORLD HAS, FOR AT LEAST A DECADE, BEEN ENGAGED IN A FURIOUS DEBATE ABOUT WHETHER CURATORSHIP HAS COME TO SUPERSEDE THE WORK OF ART.
Curation, in Anton Vidokle’s much-quoted words (e-flux Journal 16, May, 2010) now routinely oversteps the line, becoming a “reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts. Movement in such a direction runs the serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.” However, as Alison Croggon has put it elsewhere, without critical reflection on the art of the times, without drawing connections, instead of a culture we will merely have ‘a lot of art.’
While offering much to enjoy this year, Melbourne’s Arts House has so far presented us largely with a lot of art. While I concede that it might understand its role as presentational rather than culture-shaping, as serving the artist rather than imposing a zeitgeist, Arts House is nonetheless the premiere venue for live art in Victoria. It makes programming decisions that shape how this city understands an artform; its lack of explanation does not diminish its curatorial power—it merely renders it opaque. Finally, I am unsure whether artists benefit from this silence at all if, as this year, the programming presents works of clashing sensibilities; works that, without proper juxtaposition, appear to negate each other’s propositions, ideas and statements.
By way of example: members of Sydney-based Team MESS introduced two intriguing participatory works, both sitting broadly within the British-inflected tradition of live art in which the unpredictable, artless liveness of the performance event is its chief intriguing ingredient, and art-ness obtained almost exclusively from the framing of the encounter. The first, This Is It, is set up as a press conference for a non-existent film that—judging by the promotional material we are offered—merrily merges an infinitude of clichés of Australian cinema: a moody drama about a childless couple, haunted by suburban malaise and a mysterious dark-skinned stalker. The actors are terrific as diplomatic mouthpieces for the film: some with underlying anxieties (Malcolm Whittaker’s hands almost imperceptibly shaking throughout the evening), some unflappable in their pretty muteness (Kate Randall, perhaps a dumb starlet, but perhaps simply settled into her role as conference eye-candy); and finally Frank Mainoo, explaining that his character is simply “darkness,” “the Other” and “really a plot device more than a character.”
This Is It, Team MESS
photo Ponch Hawkes
This Is It, Team MESS
The format opens up for playful interaction as the event opens for questions invited from the floor. Questions start pouring in: about the reason for including zombies, shooting in 3D, possible sequels, Pasolini influences, interlaced with inquiries into Dara Gill’s directing method and racism. It was thrilling to watch the performers respond to this barrage of challenges, rising to incorporate our flights of fancy while remaining true to the characters and the set-up. “Well,” opined critic Paul Harris, the host of the event, “I’d say it might be a racist movie, but it does not endorse racism.” (See Julie Robson’s review of Team MESS at PICA)
The second work was Malcolm Whittaker’s A Lover’s Discourse, a love-letter-writing project for perfect strangers. As any performative dimension is completely absent from this collaborative effort, it presented itself through participants’ personal accounts, followed by attempts to find their correspondents live on Omegle (a roulette-like, random pairing chat room). While the event soon became tedious, as one’s recommended daily intake of irony was surpassed, it ended with a queue to sign up for further letter writing.
Both these works create only tenuous artistic frames around a collaborative exchange between participants who are only vaguely aware of the project’s agenda and in no way prevented from hijacking it. Indeed, the wide margin allowed for creative play is the biggest strength of both projects and much of the enjoyment seems to derive from actively testing the elasticity of the artful boundaries.
By contrast, Thrashing Without Looking, a project bringing together a number of prominent Melbourne-based live artists, divided the audience into two groups: one that assembled a karaoke video from a cryptic menu, and the other, strapped into video goggles (thus watching the event from the camera’s point of view), obediently executed their selection. Participation is the wrong word entirely to describe the audience’s role in this work. It is more accurate to think of us as theatre fodder, disoriented bodies reacting to a confusion of sensory inputs, or choosing through such a short list of options that a randomising script could have easily done the same job. However, the main interest of Thrashing Without Looking is in something else entirely: the old-fashioned blurring of mediated and live experience and the emotional and sensory vulnerability it provokes. (See John Bailey’s review.)
Post’s Who’s the Best? sails through similar waters, although the blurring here is, as usual, between the performers’ real and their performed selves. The technology is not only reduced to the bare bones of theatre (curtains and lights), but even those are wonky: the contest to decide which of the three members is the best is constantly undermined by the stage going about its own business, structuring the banter into a Shakespearean dramatic curve largely on light and sound alone (not dissimilar to Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s NO DICE). (See review in RT104)
I left My Shoes on the Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain, Gabrielle Nankivell
photo Ponch Hawkes
I left My Shoes on the Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain, Gabrielle Nankivell
Next to it, Talya Rubin’s Of The Causes of Wonderful Things, a one-woman play that involves a town in the American South, missing children, a private detective and many small props, looks like an archival piece. While Rubin’s is an evocative performance—her ability to shift character is instantaneously mesmerising—there is so much style in the work (the 1940s noir, which has come to replace the Gothic as immediate indicator of macabre) and so little evidence of the concerns present in the rest of the season (liveness, mediation of reality, audience experience) that these qualities all but dis-appear in context. (See review in RT101)
The same could be said for Gabrielle Nankivell’s poetic I Left My Shoes on Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain. It is a dance work weighed down by dense narration closely collaborating with sound and light (Luke Smiles and Benjamin Cisterne) to create a syncretic image of anxieties and fears plaguing a young woman. While technically impeccable and brilliantly performed, formally it is no more than an introspective dance poem, and it is unclear what prompted its inclusion in this ostensibly live art program.
Finally, what to make of the inclusion of Joan Baixas’ Pregnant Earth? An astonishing work, which incorporates live painting, puppetry and spoken narrative, from one of Spain’s great artists, it was both timeless and not of the moment. It revealed a depth of craft and a relatively independent set of concerns that needed to be somehow brought back into relation with the more fumbling, but fresher, set of local performances we had witnessed immediately prior. Without such a context, Baixas’ delicate and violent narrative, which moved from the burnt National Library of Sarajevo to a puppet that did not like to perform, was both weighty and stupefying.
We have come to expect such radical decontextualisation from mainstream festivals, which in Australia function exclusively as showcases and, indeed, Pregnant Earth would have made perfect sense had it been programmed in the Melbourne International Arts Festival. And yet, if even food and film festivals shape their programs with some subheadings and introductions, how is it possible that suggesting the same to an arts festival has become a hallmark of art sabotage?
Arts House: This Is It, created by Team MESS, performers Frank Mainoo, Natalie Randall, Malcolm Whittaker, Meat Market, Aug 5; A Lover’s Discourse, devised by Malcolm Whittaker, Meat Market, Aug 12; Thrashing Without Looking, creators Martyn Coutts, Elizabeth Dunn, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms, Willoh S Weiland, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 3-7; Who’s the Best?, devised and performed by post: Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose with Eden Falk, Meat Market, Aug 3-6; Of the Causes of Wonderful Things, writer, deviser, performer Talya Rubin, co-deviser, director Nick James, Meat Market, Aug 11-13; I Left My Shoes on Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain, text, physical content & performance Gabrielle Nankivell, sound Motion Laboratories – Luke Smiles, design Benjamin Cisterne, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 11-13; Pregnant Earth, devisor, performer Joan Baixas, Arts House Meat Market, Melbourne Aug 16-17
SLAVE PIANOS’ PERFORMANCE OF THE GIFT—REDACTION AND DECONTAMINATION (2011) AT THE MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART CLOSED A PARTIAL SURVEY OF SOME OF DANIUS KESMINAS’ VARIED COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS. THE GIFT SPECIFICALLY ‘PERFORMANCISED’ THREE ROOMS CONTAINING KESMINAS’ PROJECTS—MEANING SLAVE PIANOS ELABORATED THE THEMES AND REFERENCES FROM EACH OF THESE INSTALLED SPACES INTO PERFORMED WORKS.
Let me briefly sketch these complex spaces. The Slave Pianos room contained a Cold War-era fabrication of a global bunker for disseminating obtuse musical texts composed by contemporary artists. These were ‘audio-visualised’ via a huge wall map across which an automated map-plotter bore a small TV screen which named a piece’s title, date and composer when it reached that composer’s country of residence, at which point a MIDI-controlled grand piano (affixed to a fashioned electrical chair) ‘performed’ the quoted piece. The Punkasila room contained numerous artefacts from Kesminas’ collaboration with the Indonesian agit-punk group Punkasila, displaying the band’s ‘meta-batik’ costumes, hand-painted banners and rifle-prop guitar constructions. And the Pipeline To Oblivion room projected Kesminas’ documentary interview with a Lithuanian farmer who illegally distilled vodka, while in the centre of the room a working still was hooked up to a pump organ to play a Lithuanian folk melody.
While the installations featured the objects and texts described above, the Slave Pianos’ staging of those objects and texts rendered all references musical. The rooms generated the score for the performance, and in turn illuminated their musical genesis. All of Kesminas’ art is wilfully and sardonically tainted by music and musicology, and while many of his performance projects have occurred in a variety of music venues and contexts, his Slave Pianos project often occurs within galleries and museums. The Gift was an astounding declaration of the trajectory Slave Pianos has refined over decades.
Now if this were 1961, we could continue tra-la-la-ing down a Fluxus garden path. I could programmatically champion how the gallery allows space for contra-musical pro-conceptual investigations of music—a sort of music heavy on conceptualising the performative and light on exploring the sonic. For those early Fluxus manoeuvres were warranted retorts to the academicism of notational avant-garde music—especially the revolutionary atonal/post-tonal modes which had struggled to define a post-war canon for the concert hall. Inspired by John Cage’s late 50s philosophising on musical eventfulness and procedures for activating a consciousness in musical practice, Fluxus were trans-medial in the true Dada tradition, de-specifying art forms and in the process welcoming actionist tactics and conceptual strategies.
Unfortunately, if one reads supposedly critical (let alone theoretical) writing on contemporary music sixty years later in 2011, it seems we are still living in 1961. Many things currently appear to be at stake—the drive to explore, the will to comment, the need to subvert, the power to startle, the mandate to re-orient—but a theatre of ideological gestures qualifies these views. Rarely has experimental/exploratory music/sound/art (pick your own T-shirt: one size fits all) evidenced conceptual rigour which opens up a critical space for discussing music. In place, experimental music enacts experimentalism as a series of codified tropes, almost as if the 60s is fetishised as some golden period where, well, experiments were undertaken. Sure, modulating nodes like punk, Max-DSP, globalism, the internet etc have changed a few things in the now, but as a survey of the names of the myriad new-sound/music festivals around the world attest, their claims to radicalism reside in their branded logos more than generative outcomes.
Yet Slave Pianos’ staging of The Gift achieved so much of what Fluxus only ever flaunted in its insular pseudo-utopian conceptualisation of a revolutionary/liberating/empowering art. Far from making effete claims to being music of an exploratory post-Cageian form, The Gift instead uses music as a platform to articulate and vent a dense conceptualism of music as a textual force. Hilariously quoting risible bourgeois waffle about ‘the art world’ from a Joanna Murray-Smith play, an autobiography by Nikola Tesla, ruminations on Nietzsche’s pessimistic attraction to pianos and Soviet journalist Vitali Vitaliev’s earthy embrace of vodka, The Gift plotted an obtuse series of incidents where music and creativity are treated as produce of ‘the gifted.’ Kesminas seems bent on debunking creativity as a privileged act, and his conceptual interrogation of the muse in music—via his quoted texts performed by actor Richard Piper—ably queries musical production and its musicological reception.
Slave Pianos, The Gift: Redaction and Decontamination, Performance
photo Andrius Lipsys
Slave Pianos, The Gift: Redaction and Decontamination, Performance
There is boldness in this move. In the arts, few things are so upsetting to more people than shifting (more like dragging screaming) music into the conceptual domain. That most turgidly theoretical and nullifying abstract of places wherein the sonic, the experiential, the exploratory should not venture. The fundamentalist tenets of music believe it to be somehow capable of mystically escaping discourse. I sense this in just about any writing on sound and music: the feeling that the words distrust themselves, that they are dreadful linguistic apologies for the supreme essentialism of ‘music itself.’ Such a view verges on the theological: as if to speak about sound/music with any conceptual bent incurs wrath. This implies that music is mired by an awful iconic orthodoxy which prohibits discourse due to sound and music’s inalienable unutterability.
Cage—in a supreme stroke of authorial scripture which is rarely critically attributed to his oeuvre—actively halts discussion post-performance. It is as if the event—the thing which most excited Fluxus—allows conceptual birthing but forbids conceptual growth. Discussion about the Cageian legacy tends toward discussing the concepts behind the sounds of works like the Variations series (its instructions, their interpretation, the works’ eventfulness etc), rather than discussing the sounds conceptually. This has partially shaped the ongoing impasse of incisive writing on new/experimental sound/music: its critical writing enforces either humanist performance mechanics (paraphrasing traditional jazz ideologies) or reverts to authorial acquiesence. It’s a situation I find entirely conservative.
The thing is, Cage—via Duchamp—gave me license to accept that all material and plastic arts (ie everything but literature) are powerful enough to carry any conceptual weight thrust on them. Music especially seems that way to me. Far from shirking from the fear that one might ‘kill’ sound/music by being too analytical about its materiality—let alone its cultural semiotics—I’ve always figured sound/music to be an immersive world which activates critically reflexive thought while it incites psychologically responsive feeling. To write about music—to acknowledge its textual potentiality—is inevitable, exciting and productive. To continue invoking historically proscribed pseudo-radical truisms about music’s linkage to avant-garde, experimental and exploratory strategies seems quite the opposite.
Experiencing The Gift as an actual outcome of Fluxus practice, I was forcefully reminded that ye olde white cube still has power. This particular Slave Pianos event maximised the ‘void-space’ of art to consider music in a way that is unthinkable in the current social contexts for experimental/exploratory music-making. And while maybe a recording of The Gift would be played as few times in my collection as my Cage recordings, the eventfulness of the staging sharpened the conceptual precision of the project. More Godardian than Cageian, The Gift returned the conceptual to music. Think of it as a welcome home gift.
Slave Pianos, Punkasila, Pipeline to Oblivion, 3 Projects by Danius Kesminas and collaborators, curator Max Delany; Slave Pianos performance, The Gift—Redaction and Decontamination, July 23; Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield campus, Melbourne, May 5-July 23
IN THE FINAL PART OF THIS SURVEY OF EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC ACTIVITIES AROUND SYDNEY (AND A LITTLE BIT BEYOND) I ATTEND ONE OF THE LONGEST RUNNING AND MOST NOMADIC EVENTS, 1/4_INCH, AND THE YOUNGEST OF THE BUNCH, PSH.LIVE, OPERATING OUT OF A NEW ARTIST-RUN-SPACE IN ROZELLE .
¼_inch
¼_inch began in 2002 in the heady days of the first wave of experimental audio events. Started by Aaron Hull and Julius Ambroisine, then students at the University of Western Sydney, it sought to complement gigs like Caleb Kelly’s impermanent.audio. Both took place at The Frequency Lab and while Kelly certainly programmed emerging artists ¼_inch had an arguably more laid-back curatorial approach, presenting more student works and a more diverse range of musics.
In 2005 Hull moved events to Wollongong (where he lives and works) still presenting occasional Sydney shows; however as of 2010 he has concentrated solely on Wollongong. Since 2008 events have been co-curated with Greg Hughes taking place in a range of venues including the iconic Headlands Hotel in Austinmer (now closed, the site slated for redevelopment), a modern industrial unit and various spaces around University of Wollongong. The night I attended, the venue was Yours and Owls, a cute café bar in the heart of Wollongong’s CBD.
It was hard not to expect a playful tone to the night with band names such as Gregisms, Wizard Bong, FUKNO and a DJ known as AKA. Gregisms is Dean English & Jariss Shead, students at the University of Wollongong, playing, to my taste, the most engaging set of the night. Using no-input mixing, voice, iPhone and various other effects they create sculpted layers of textured feedback, filling the harmonic spectrum to create an intense soundscape with satisfying internal logics and plenty of detail.
Next up was Wizard Bong—Fraughman (Steve Stuart) on guitar/vocals and Swerve (Steve Harris of DualPlover label) on analogue synthesiser/vocals. Perhaps their sound was too big for such a small room serviced by a non-attended PA, as even they admitted that they struggled to create any sense of structure or relative clarity within their particular brand of guitar assault cum big synth effects and vocal screamo. A shame, as listening to their tracks later online (http://wizardbong.bandcamp.com/releases) there’s definitely something intriguing going on there that sounds completely different from their live performance.
Final act for the night was local hero FUKNO who appeared with a yellow T-shirt fashioned into a balaclava with drawn-on smiley face, playing a range of electronics housed in a plastic bread-delivery crate. The music is noisy, crunchy idiosyncratic techno, with unpredictable squeals and squelches over great thumping beats that he bribes us to dance to by passing out tabs of “acid.” Maybe they worked as a few lads hit the one-by-one-metre dance floor. It’s a neat, well-executed parody (or extension of a form, I’m not quite sure which) and particularly amusing given the inappropriateness of the venue.
This session of ¼_inch had cohesion in its selection of acts, playful and chaotic as they were. Other events have had more serious approaches and the very presence of the gig in a regional city (admittedly one very close to Sydney) is important in terms of developing local musicians and the beginnings of an east-coast touring circuit for both interstate and international artists.
Defektro, PSH.Live
photo Gail Priest
Defektro, PSH.Live
psh.live
It seems fitting to end this series on sound events in Sydney with the newest gig on the scene, PSH.Live. The PSH gallery is part of Anyplace Projects, a collective that negotiates between property owners and potential tenants to allow temporary use of unoccupied spaces for community and cultural purposes. The Terry Street warehouse in Rozelle includes the Blood & Thunder printing press, a screen-printing facility open to the public, a cinema, a band rehearsal room and artists’ studios. The PSH gallery is basically the garage of the warehouse, allowing one-night-only exhibitions, and also opens its roller door once a month on a Sunday afternoon for live experimental music curated by Romy Caen (also curator of Sound Series see Part 2, RT104) and Liam O’Donoghue.
The July instalment focused on handmade and home-hacked instruments. Anomie kicked off the afternoon with John Papert on cobbled together drum kit augmented with glass vases and objects and Mark Hall on pedals and guitar. Papert’s percussion has an orchestral feel, with deep tom rolls, cymbals, gongs and glassy boings on the vases, spacious and well integrated with Hall’s sheets of affected guitar feedback moving through a nice mix of rhythmic shifts.
Next up was Defektro (Hirofumi Uchino) who makes his own effects pedals and instruments. With a startling array of electronics on the table in front of him, his version of noise is curiously restrained and minimal with only a few sonic elements introduced at one time—a slow insistent beat, scraping metals, small taps and the occasional squall of dirty feedback. The effect is of small episodes of sound and I wish for more momentum in the middle section but he makes up for this with his shredding jet engine sequence near the end, augmented by a military-like parabolic speaker scattering sound around the small space in unpredictable directions. Of course it’s impossible not to mention the gas-powered sound cannon that shoots a burst of flame when the spring mechanism is hit, producing a surprisingly sweet clang and quiet whoomf. Defektro also sells his pedals, which are beautiful hand-made objects in themselves.
The final act of the afternoon was Mike Majkowski and Dale Gorfinkel working with extended techniques on double bass and vibraphone respectively, an interesting analogue complement to the earlier acts, and covered recently in RealTime (see Part 2, RT104).
Given the range of events discussed in this series of articles, one might wonder whether we needed another experimental music gig, however PSH.Live offers a point of difference by including an after-show discussion. The conversation following this performance covered instrument building and its political, economic and creative motivations as well as lively debate around the difference between experimental practices and experimental music. All the discussions are transcribed and published online, along with full sound files of each to the sets. This is a great resource (though difficult to find on the Anyplace site without the direct link from Facebook; www.anyplaceprojects.com/?p=129), and makes PSH.Live a vital addition to the culture of experimental music in Sydney and most particularly its documentation.
life cycles
The gig series featured in this three-part survey are key activities that ensure a vibrant spirit of adventure and innovation across a range of music practices including pop, improv, noise and electronica, which for better or worse can be defined as experimental in agenda. In addition to these events there are also venues that mount individual gigs such as Dirty Shirlows and the CAD Factory, and a few loungeroom events that wish to remain under the radar for fear of the imposition of town council regulations. There’s a range of activities more in the jazz realm such as 501, Colbourne Ave at Glebe Cafe Church, Impermanent Studio, Cockatoo Calling and regular SIMA events that also have an impact on the vibrancy of the non-mainstream musical landscape. While some of the events occasionally receive funding, allowing artists to be paid a small fee, on the whole these activities are fuelled solely by a passion to provide avenues for artists to explore their practice and for audiences to experience new sounds. This DIY model inevitably leads to short life cycles, although this survey illustrates that longevity is sometimes possible. As the impact of new liquor and public entertainment licensing laws is just beginning to be felt in Sydney, I look forward to seeing which events will thrive and what new activities will develop in the future.
THE SECOND OVERGROUND, THE FESTIVAL-WITHIN-A-FESTIVAL SHOWCASING “CREATIVE AND IMPROVISATIONAL ARTISTS” AT THE 2011 MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL, WAS AS CONTESTED AND CURIOUS A BEAST AS THE INAUGURAL EVENT, WHICH TOOK PLACE AT THE 2010 FESTIVAL.
The focus this year was on international, inter-generational and inter-scene collaboration, which is laudable enough as a buzz-word gambit, until you realize exactly what this kind of unguided, ‘pick-a-name-out-of-the-hat’ cross-wiring often leads to—‘experimentation’ in its most pejorative sense, as if some kind of dumb mathematical equation (ie Tony Conrad + Chris Abrahams) could equate to engrossing performance, simply by resting on brand power. It was not to be.
The highlights came early. Entering the main room in the Town Hall, I caught Charlemagne Palestine and Oren Ambarchi in deep commune, Palestine working the Town Hall organ with rigorous yet sensitive force, Ambarchi further mutating the bottom-end. Both artists have pretty much defined their aesthetic remit by now, such that the combination of Palestine and Ambarchi yields exactly what you’d expect, but in this case the duo was both a no-brainer and perhaps the most genuinely sympatico collaboration of the day’s events. They managed to do one thing, brilliantly, over the course of a simple half hour—a lesson that many of the other performers at Overground would have done well to learn.
Palestine’s next performance was to be a solo set of his electronics, but he backed out, which meant the organisers wisely bumped Jérôme Noetinger’s solo performance across the schedule, into a longer slot. After a charming spoken introduction, Noetinger spent 19 minutes proving why he is still the master of the Revox: few other artists have such a clear, eloquent grasp of their instrument and of the possibilities of live electroacoustics. Part of the pleasure of Noetinger’s performance was its tactility, the sheer sensual pleasure of watching a tape gently looping around reels laid flat, while he toggled switches, manhandled the tape to slow, speed or warp the audio, turned his concrete vocals to rough, abraded signal and generally mapped his mastery of the idiom into a concise, gripping performance. Nothing to fault here—Noetinger is in a class of his own.
Après, le deluge. The remaining hours of Overground, sadly, offered little of merit. Collaborative endeavour within experimental music is a tricky beast, one further complicated by the presence of free improvisation as a sub-set within the meta-genre. But improvisation is not a simple metonym for experiment and Overground repeatedly placed artists together who were fine working within their own dialect, but not (yet) able to speak across boundaries. As one local wag mentioned later, “If it were Derek Bailey playing with another top-flight improviser, things would be different,” but this wasn’t—not to take away from the performers necessarily. However too often this kind of all-in-one love-fest of experimentation offers little to the audience beyond the sum of its parts.
The pairing of Jim Denley and xNOBBQx was a clear example. The set felt like a botched attempt at entente cordiale between xNOBBQx’s wild punk primitivism and Denley’s glossolalic improvisations. There were moments dotted throughout where they almost built up momentum, but mostly this consisted of two ideas running parallel, without the thrills that seemingly random, post-Surrealist juxtaposition can throw at the listener. In the end I simply wished I’d seen both performers do their usual fabulous things. Sky Needle and Snawklor were perhaps more suited, but they faced a similar problem. Both worked well with their own idiom, but the results didn’t gel. Sky Needle also seemed a little lost, the initial charm of their shtick—hand-made instruments turning out brilliantly odd avant-pop miniatures—wearing a bit thin, with little new to offer. Let’s hope this is just a holding gesture, while they figure out their next step.
Will Guthrie and Cured Pink was another abortive mismatch. Since moving to Nantes, France several years ago, Guthrie’s playing has shot through the firmament, but this new articulacy was lost in his duo with Brisbane-based agent provocateur Cured Pink, who spent the set playing at the kind of fifth-rate body/sound art that was practically dead in the water by the mid 80s. Guthrie responded with some of the most physically vicious playing I’ve seen from him in some time, and if anything, this set was worthwhile just to see him behind a full kit again, playing with a desperate edge—I guess that’s called making the best of a tough situation.
Two of the drawcards of the festival were Krautrock pioneers Faust and their one-time collaborator, minimalist Tony Conrad. Tellingly, they were also drawcards for festivals in the Northern Hemisphere, such as the Table of the Elements in the mid to late 1990s. Faust’s set with Noetinger and Sean Baxter was an abject disaster of aimless ‘out-rock’ doodling, despite the brave attempts of both Baxter and Noetinger to get things on track. (It proved beyond doubt that the brilliance of Faust’s sainted 1970s albums was all due to their studio construction.) Closing the night, Conrad’s duo with Chris Abrahams was another botched collaboration, with Conrad treating Abrahams as an accompanist, playing weak-kneed, scraping violin improv stylings with all the style of a remedial Jon Rose, giving Abrahams nothing to actively work with. It speaks volumes of Baxter and Abrahams that they pushed against the odds; and if anything, Overground proves that Australian experimental and improvised music is both thriving and deserving of a far better showcase.
The presence of the festival’s roamers and installation artists was most telling of the contentious relationship between official festival culture and the feverish creativity of the underground, loaded and uncomfortable though that word may be. There’s no denying that they added character to the event – walking past disco auteur Fabio Umberto doing his thing in a stairwell was one of the day’s highlights. But when performers dared to cross an invisible psychic line, such as when vocal scream artist Kusum Normoyle set up and gave an electrifying solo scream performance while ‘official’ festival musicians were playing in an adjacent room, only to be abruptly shut down by a festival co-organiser, the poverty of the set-up was made clear, despite co-curator Joel Stern’s assertion in Mess and Noise that the roamers were “asked…to be mobile, flexible, interventionist and interactive” (personal disclosure: I know Normoyle).
So, just remember, don’t be too interventionist and don’t disrupt the sanctity of official culture. (You can see the performance here: http://vimeo.com/25476198.) While Normoyle’s performance may have momentarily disrupted other artists, such are the risks one must accept when ‘intervention’ is encouraged. The moment was sadly telling of an overall lack of heart and spirit in an event that felt much more about hedging bets than really taking risks.
Overground, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, co-curators Sophia Brous, Lloyd Honeybrook, Joel Stern, Melbourne Town Hall, June 9
CHRONOLOGY ARTS, A COLLECTIVE OF COMPOSERS PREDOMINANTLY CONSISTING OF GRADUATES FROM THE SYDNEY CONSERVATORIUM, WAS FORMED WITH THE AIM OF PROVIDING A PLATFORM FOR THE AIRING OF NEW AUSTRALIAN MUSIC.
Addicted to Bass, the performance I attended, was part of this ongoing project. Alicia Crossley had approached seven of Australia’s leading young composers during her Masters research into bass recorder performance, to compose “pioneering works that would launch the bass recorder into the twenty-first century, pushing extremes.”
Financing these commissions herself, Crossley was determined not only to develop the repertoire of her favourite instrument but to feed Sydney’s budding new-music scene. This endeavour ticked all the boxes of contemporary composition: obscure instrumentation, sexy performer and underground venue (Sound Lounge is a concrete bunker under Sydney University’s Seymour Centre). The ambitious compositions delivered by the beautifully bejewelled Crossley varied in listenability. Some compositions explored the crossovers and divides of timbral combinations, including Tristan Coelho’s As the Dust Settles. Others felt like they might have been better expressed through poetry or dance rather than the abstract world of sound. In some cases, such as Night Seller Tissue Season by Hayden Woolf, Canto-Fiato by Chris Williams or Calliphora by Mark Oliveiro, the concepts were easier to appreciate than their execution in composition and performance.
Calliphora is the Latin name for the common blowfly. Oliveiro’s work for bass recorder and electronics was designed to mimic the sounds that might be heard if a tiny microphone were placed under a fly’s wings. Making use of trills and overblown high notes, it would make the perfect soundtrack to an interactive aeronautical museum. At times echoes seemed to come through long tin piping, hinting at the digestive system of a mechanical cockroach. A motif of overblown harmonics had Aboriginal dreamtime overtones.
Woolf’s trio for soprano, piano and bass recorder entered the bleak world of illegal organ trade. Supposedly this was a metaphor for the recorder’s innocent, disjointed and vulnerable reputation. With lyrics that included: “thieves laugh, cash comes in…vascular vulture he is slicing our surgical frown…we are meat, just meat to you, milked of our meat…payment refused, organ abuse…” and a rollicking piano line, the treatment of this very serious issue played out musically as too tongue in cheek. “Defective subjects screech…” soprano Anna Fraser shrieked. As pure musical romp, it had good movement and contrasting sections but it could have been written for any instruments. The bass recorderness was not immediately apparent.
Doppelganger by Elias Constantopedos continued in the language of 20th century composers for recorder including Hans Ulrich Staeps and Chiel Meijering. However, rather than creating layered lines in ensemble writing, he let technology duplicate and modify solo sounds. All electronics were created live from the bass recorder input and shaped by sound engineer Ben Carey.
Impulse Stream, Alex Pozniac’s work for solo bass recorder was the stand out, seeming to come from a well-defined source, a self-etched canon including solo works Mercurial, Interventions, Crush and Flying Verticles. To communicate the value of the usually marginalised recorder, Pozniac revealed some of the technical skill required to play it well. Recognising the big recorder’s tone production as “fragile and malleable” Pozniac’s piece allowed Crossley to demonstrate her technical brilliance by withdrawing her instrument from the equation, at times having her sing and vocalise the tonguing she would otherwise direct into the recorder: T k t k t tktktktktktk. WoooooOOOooooo. The composition also captured allusions to childhood self-consciousness by having Crossley whistle and sing in a high-pitched, nervous way. Her little girl voice begged pardon for her technical virtuosity in a wonderful opposition. Pozniac not only explained the technical stream of recorder playing but the impulses of the recorder player’s self doubt.
Andrew Batt Rawden introduced his piece E, for bass recorder and electronics, as a battle. His title is derived from the abbreviated name for Ecstasy, a drug Batt Rawden admits he has never tried. He imagines the drug helps to “transcend consciousness and exit corporeality into a darker side of the mind” and that while the drug is said to produce a friendly haze, there is “more to love than the fluffy bits.” But what of the performance? Crossley looked great in chunky headphones but her recorder was so heavily miked that sheet-music page turns turned out to be major sound events in the battle.
Addicted to Bass was built on a solid base of musical integrity if sometimes competing with an aura of glamour. The project has been a success in the sense that repertoire for bass recorder has been expanded. By producing a commercial recording a space of reverence has been carved out around these new compositions: a sort of self validating gesture which is absolutely valuable because who is better equipped to judge the merit of this innovation than musical peers? These young composers have collectively asserted that these works are worth circulating.
Alicia Crossley and Chronology Arts: Addicted to Bass, performers Alicia Crossley, Vatche Jambazian, Victoria Jacono, Joshua Hill, Anna Fraser and Ben Carey, Seymour Centre, Sydney, Aug 25
HAVING WON THE APRA/AMC ART MUSIC AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE BY AN ORGANISATION FOR THEIR ANNUAL PROGRAM AS WELL AS THE QUEENSLAND STATE AWARD (RT103), BRISBANE’S CLOCKED OUT ARE PRESENTING THE SECOND OF THEIR THE TRILLING WIRE SERIES WHICH BRINGS TO BRISBANE DARING NEW MUSIC PERFORMERS FROM ACROSS AUSTRALIA. THE MOVEMENT OF NEW MUSIC ACROSS STATE BORDERS, FOSTERED SO STRONGLY BY THE NEW MUSIC NETWORK AND EVENTS LIKE TURA’S TOTALLY HUGE AND MONA FOMA, IS GIVEN EXTRA AND MUCH-NEEDED IMPETUS BY THIS CLOCKED OUT INITIATIVE.
Erik Griswold, co-director of Clocked Out with Vanessa Tomlinson, tells me, “I started The Trilling Wire Series last year upon realising that there were a number of really great contemporary/experimental music ensembles around the country doing fantastic programs that never made it to Brisbane. So I invited Perth’s Decibel, Melbourne’s Golden Fur and Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring to come and present some of their best programs of 2010. Held in the intimate Shopfront space of the Judith Wright Centre, The Trilling Wire Series was a rare chance for audiences to hear avant-garde chamber music in a non-conservatorium environment.”
First up in the 2011 series is Adelaide’s Soundstream Collective, led by Gabriella Smart and resident ensemble at the University of Adelaide. Their program entirely focuses on the idiosyncratic Polish composer Hannah Kulenty’s Circle series (1994-96) representing “Kulenty’s self-titled ‘European trance music,’ her original version of ‘post-minimalist’ style…In many ways this music is closer to the meditative qualities of Indian ragas, rather than Western minimalism” (press release).
Chris Reid wrote about hearing the Fourth Circle at the Soundstream Adelaide New Music Festival in 2009: “Kulenty’s is a stunning piece, emotionally overwhelming and brilliantly executed. Following a long piano passage like a tolling bell, the cello begins a series of questioning phrases that become incessant, using short, microtonally notated glissandi, crying imploringly—why? why? why? An intense crescendo is then slowly relaxed, with the glissandi curling downward. I was speechless for some time afterwards, so affecting were the writing and the performance” (RT93). The Brisbane performance, a very special occasion, will be the first time the series will be played in its entirety, featuring musicians John Addison, Janet McKay, Martin Phillipson and Gabriella Smart.
Melbourne’s Quiver, led by Matthias Schack-Arnott, will present the meeting of Louise Curham’s “hyper-expressionist” 8mm film with David Young’s watercolour graphic scores—”Shot in Yokohama Japan, this 45-minute hand-processed Super 8 film/music work forms the basis of the musical scores…The inter-medial nature of the work creates a hovering connectedness between image and sound, shifting the boundaries between the artforms” (press release). The program also premieres a Quiver commission from James Rushford—Viper Gloss, with “a compositional process…informed by the ‘grisailles’ technique of staining glass, where different shades of grey are used to create the effect of a relief.”
The final concert in the series, Early Warning System, launches a new percussion-based ensemble directed by Michael Askill and Vanessa Tomlinson.
Tomlinson describes the concept for the group: “Michael has contributed so much to the identity of Australian music over four decades of work, commissioning composers, composing himself and generating huge enthusiasm for Australian music through his work with Synergy. Early Warning System harnesses his pioneering experiences and combines with my eclectic style of playing and interests.”
The group’s debut performance features works by American John Luther Adams (not the other John Adams; see The New Yorker, May 12, 2008, available online) and a premiere of a new composition for cello and percussion by Erik Griswold. Tomlinson says, “Both composers represent a way forward for acoustic percussion performance that acknowledges the listening detail of electronic music and is accepting of particularities of place. We will also be playing Chinese composer Tan Dun’s Snow in June—which obviously makes more sense in the southern hemisphere than the north—and a classic of Michael Askill’s, Free Radicals, dealing with rhythmic cycles and the joy of percussing.”
The title of the series comes from TS Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, but what does it mean for Clocked Out? “The trilling wire in the blood/ Sings below inveterate scars/ And reconciles forgotten wars.” Erik Griswold says, “Yes, the TS Eliot connection is there. I also like the connection to a news wire—transmitting contemporary music developments around the country, and more generally to the notion of the trilling wire emitting vibrations, both acoustic and electronic. Taking a slightly broader context of that section of the poem, there is much brighter imagery which suggests energy and lightness: ‘The dance along the artery/ The circulation of the lymph/ Are figured in the drift of stars/ Ascend to summer in the tree/ We move above the moving tree/ In light upon the figured leaf’.”
Clocked Out, The Trilling Wire Series: Soundstream, Nov 3; Quiver, Nov 17, Early Warning System, Nov 23; The Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane. www.jwcoca.qld.gov.au/; www.clockedout.org
PUBLICITY FOR MATTHEW LUTTON’S MALTHOUSE PRODUCTION OF SCHUBERT’S DIE WINTERREISE PROMISES TO “CARRY US ACROSS THE AGES OF MAN TOWARDS SOMETHING THAT MAY NOT BE SALVATION, BUT MIGHT RESEMBLE SOMETHING LIKE GRACE.” MEANWHILE, IDA DUELUND HANSEN AND JETHRO WOODWARD’S RENDITION OF THE SONG CYCLE, TITLED BLOOD, IS PREFACED WITH AN IMAGE OF SCHUBERT PLAGUED BY SYPHILIS IN THE FINAL YEAR OF HIS LIFE, COMPOSING WHILE HALLUCINATING AND COUGHING UP BLOOD. THE IMAGES OF THE COMPOSER AS EITHER A WISTFUL INVALID OR AN ANGRY YOUNG MAN CAN OVERSHADOW THE ROMANTIC CONVENTION OF LITERARY IRONY THAT PERMEATES SCHUBERT’S LIEDER.
These two productions came closest to achieving bitterness and repose when they refrained from presenting “sad” or “angry” Schubert and—often by radically altering the original score—delicately portrayed conflicting effects.
In his memoir, Schubert’s friend Josef von Spaun recalls being “dumbfounded” by Die Winterreise’s “gloomy mood,” before suggesting that the intense emotion of the work contributed to the composer’s early death. Here we find von Spaun under the sway of an 18th century notion of the melancholic artist, an image that we cling to today.
The protagonist of Lutton’s Die Winterreise is one such character: a middle-aged man (George Shvetsov) pondering his turbulent life from the vantage point of a hot suburban living room. Sound designer Kelly Ryall diffuses Schubert’s songs—performed around the contemplative figure by Paul Capsis and Alister Spence—through a meditative fog of reverb. The songs are occasionally slowed down and their fragmented melodies repeated like the ruminative malcontent replaying his memories. Similarly, as part of Chamber Made Opera and The Malthouse’s Things on Sunday event, Blood, bassist and vocalist Duelund Hansen and sound designer Woodward mused over Die Winterreise’s text, harmonic turns and fragments of melody.
Another of Schubert’s friends, Johann Mayrhofer, remarked that “[h]e had been long and seriously ill, had gone through disheartening experiences, and life for him had shed its rosy colour; winter had come for him. The poet’s [Wilhelm Müller’s] irony, rooted in despair, appealed to him: he expressed it in cutting tones.” In Lutton’s production anger and bitterness were represented by unbearable, amplified shrieking.
The use of reverb, repetition and amplification in these productions presented unconvincing musical analogues of the emotions they were supposed to convey. Slow down, fragment and reverberate any music and it will become a ponderous sonic landscape. This device, much abused by sacred minimalists such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, presents a hollow image of the sublime that very quickly becomes tiring. Amplifying any sound enough will, far from triggering an existential crisis, leave the audience resenting the production for their ringing ears. In the context of Schubert’s music such one-dimensional presentation of affect mistakes the ends for the means. Schubert and his contemporaries understood that despair and the sublime were hard won through literary contradiction or irony.
As musicologists Susan Youens and Richard Taruskin have pointed out, Schubert’s lieder express suffering through a conflicting relationship between words and music. For example, dancing mockingly around the solemn protagonist of Lutton’s production, Capsis played up the sinister subtext of the sad–happy key change in “On the River.” In the song cycle, Schubert’s wanderer comes upon a frozen river and remembers its former joyful sound. At this point the piano accompaniment does not play an imitation of the remembered cheery bubble, but a menacing, loping bass line. When the wanderer writes his ex’s name on the river’s now frozen surface, a gesture that is hardly innocent and happy, the accompaniment modulates from E minor to E major. Recognising the similarity between the hard river and his broken heart, he asks whether there isn’t also, under its frozen surface, a raging torrent, whereupon the piano breaks into a frenetic clamour. As Capsis recognised, Die Winterreise does not smile, but smirks.
To Schubert’s favourite philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, irony as the incongruity of appearance and reality was a literary device engineered to produce a shock through which one could glimpse the irrational, the divine and the infinite. Duelund Hansen produces such an ironic effect on the word “Stürme” (storm) in “Einsamkeit” by changing the original score. Stürme, combining the roar of rain, a crack of lightning, and a peal of thunder, is usually howled over tumultuous piano chords. Duelund Hansen makes a decrescendo on this word, rendering the melodramatic gesture an impotent sob. This frustration of expectation reveals for a moment one’s distance from the raging storm, and in doing so, the magnitude of the storm itself.
I would argue that Schubert’s illness provides us with a situational irony that changes the way we hear his literary irony. It is one thing to hear an ironic passage and be confused for a second (read: glimpse the infinite) and quite another to feel oneself at odds with the world, such as during prolonged illness, when everyday activities seem hopelessly impossible. It is this situational irony, that of writing a clever song while using a chamber pot, that gives the true smirk to the first.
It is in expressing this situational irony that sincerity is required—and achieved—in both performances. Duelund Hansen begins her rendition with a mashup of two songs of estrangement, “Gute Nacht” and “Einsamkeit.” She delivers the lines “As a stranger I came, as a stranger I will leave” in a clear and direct tone, accompanying herself with chords played high on the double bass fingerboard. These chords, with their natural, unsaturated sound, provide a matter-of-fact plodding behind the remorseful statement. Lutton’s production concludes with the protagonist, after communicating his tragic past in a monologue, dancing to “Die Leiermann” (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man) with wry resignation. By understating and bringing together the conflicting emotions of Die Winterreise the productions develop a more complex and even sublime emotional palette. At these moments, though deviating or adding to Schubert’s original score, they are closer than ever to its spirit.
The Malthouse: Die Winterreise, songs Franz Schubert, concept, direction Matthew Lutton, orignal text Tom Holloway, choreography Chrissie Parrott, set, costumes Adam Gardnir, performers George Shvetsov, Paul Capsis, George O’Hara, Alister Spence, sound design Kelly Ryall, lighting Paul Jackson, music supervisor Iain Grandage, additional arrangements, composition Alister Spence; Malthouse, July 20-31; Malthouse & Chamber Made Opera, Things on Sunday series: Blood, songs Franz Schubert, double bass, voice Ida Duelund Hansen, performer Caroline Lee, sound design Jethro Woodward, other compositions Alex Garsden, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Jesse McVeity; Malthouse, Melbourne, July 31
Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont, Harold Holt 1968, Juan Carlos Ongania 1968
courtesy the artists
Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont, Harold Holt 1968, Juan Carlos Ongania 1968
IF EVER THERE WERE A RACE TO BE PERTH’S ART DARLINGS, TARRYN GILL AND PILAR MATA DUPONT WOULD WIN. THEY TROT OUT A SUMPTUOUS AESTHETIC LIKE PROUD SHOW PONIES LADEN WITH RIBBONS. IT IS CLEAR TO SEE, HOWEVER, THAT IN THEIR COMPETITIVE SPIRIT, THEY ARE NOT BENIGN, OR AT LEAST THIS IS WHAT THE IMAGE ADVERTISING THEIR LATEST EXHIBITION, STADIUM, AT PICA (PERTH INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART) SUGGESTS.
This image [see our cover] humorously reminds us that while the art game might be about prancing and parading, foul play is certainly not out of the question. The two artists link arms as a formidable duo on the racetrack, with the carnage of their fallen competitors splayed behind them. Their faces sport elated grins and their hair groomed to perfection contrasts with blood-splattered fists, tops and knees, that tell us a different story. This type of play of meaning underlies many of the duo’s works, though not always so literally; it is often articulated tongue-in-cheek. The seductive glamour, burlesque, kitsch-Australiana and Hollywood styling is adopted with a wry stare derived from a deeper critique of issues anchored in nationalism, militarism and patriotism.
Stadium marks Gill and Mata Dupont’s first survey exhibition, spanning a decade’s practice which has seen their meteoric rise to prominence through a bold and savvy aesthetic across a range of media encompassing performance, video, installation, design and photography. It is entirely appropriate that the PICA gallery be transformed into a sports arena for this show, replete with bleachers, a custom vinyl logo pasted on the ground and a mini-stage with weights and a boom box. The contextualisation of their practice expresses a degree of self-consciousness of their own torch-wielding power in the art world arena. It is articulated here in several series that demonstrate Gill and Mata Dupont’s fitness across the field in an intersection of ideas about art, sport and war, drawing from influences grounded in propaganda, autobiography, art history and most significantly, cinema—ranging from John Huston’s film of the musical Annie to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3.
left – With Terrific Power Behind It The Shotput Hurtles High Above The Arena; right – In Their Dash to Victory The Runners Circle The Main Stadium
Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont
left – With Terrific Power Behind It The Shotput Hurtles High Above The Arena; right – In Their Dash to Victory The Runners Circle The Main Stadium
On entry one encounters the raw structure of the rear of the stand of bleachers, opposite which are three photographs from the Stadium Series (2009) referencing the life and pioneering aesthetic of German filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl. Each black and white image features the same model in states of focused determination, aiming for victory. She’s captured in statuesque poses defined against the high-intensity glow of the sun, her face expressing the sheer exertion involved in fighting for the nation in the games arena. The nation is not Germany, but Australia, as attested by the swan logo decorating the model’s top. This kind of investigation into the sporting figure as iconic nationalistic hero subject to a fascistic routine recurs in another work on display, the video piece Gymnasium (2010), winner of the 2010 Basil Sellers art prize.
Gymnasium screens alongside other video works viewed from the bleachers. In a gymnasium, athletes are filmed mechanically and repetitively working through robotic routines. The ideals and values of the military are here aligned with sport, as the proud and grinning Aussie athletes imply.
In parallel gallery spaces a series of works are taken from Heart of Gold, an epic-scale project that propelled the duo, on their glittery trail, to a theatre production finale (see RT94). In Gallery 1, the Heart of Gold Project 5 blooms with a sumptuous intensity in the All Australian Lifesaver Series (2008), based on the Cronulla riots of 2005-2006. Here, Varga style girl models feature in sparkling red and gold skullcaps and shiny gold onesies, belted with red sashes. The images show no attempt to conceal their fiction; their celebration of artifice is excessive, from the cherry-red lips to the painted sunset backdrops. As such they reside in a realm of simulacra to poke fun at the high status of the lifesaver as an archetypal Australian hero. Of course, these ladies are more Hollywood Baywatch than Aussie surfer gritty and their gestures belie action in the static nature of their poses. But like the very image of the lifesaver in the Australian psyche, they are presented as women of action, women who have it all, sporting bodies and glamour-girl looks, “A Gladiator Class, Envied by all the Men, Adored by all the Women,” as one of the titles sardonically suggests.
Hero mythology is further explored with specific attention to the war hero. In the Heart of Gold Project 3 (2006-07) WWI and WWII propaganda posters are referenced in staged photographs (RT94, p42). Pictured are such scenes as women in the place of men on the front line, part of the ‘Boys Brigade’, their tarnished faces ever-enthused and glowing in blessed, blinkered, nationalistic pride. Drawing from their own autobiographies for The Presidential Portraits series (2008), Mata Dupont is made-up in the guise of Juan Carlos Onganía, defacto President of Argentina, while Gill becomes Harold Holt, each in their politically turbulent year of 1968. Troubled history also courses through Lament for the Argentine Military (2010), made for the 2010 Sydney Biennale. This work, part installation, photography and video, addresses Argentina’s history from the military perspective. It adopts such symbols as a teary Virgin of Luján, patron saint of Argentina, in a large-scale portrait and in the song and dance video a silvery green Ford Falcon, reportedly used in the middle of the night to forcibly take civilians from their homes. This work, like others in the exhibition, is crafted with keen attention to detail and framing made accessible through its adoption of the codes of high-fashion.
A Gill and Mata Dupont show would seem almost incomplete without the added seduction of a live event. On opening night and several dates in the exhibition season, the collided spectacle of art, sport and war was made performative. On the mini-stage, flexing muscles and pumping iron, was a body builder à la Charles Atlas and, to detract from the abjectly mesmerising quality of his bronzed pecs, was the piece de resistance, the premiere of a new performance, Ever Higher. In this work an aerialist triumphantly tackled a rope, rose and fell in a gracious tangle analogous to the precarious risks of sudden drops at the heart of a career in the arts as much as sport or the military. The aerialist climbed to reach a megaphone and, hanging upside-down, barked a chant at a troupe of cheerleaders dancing below who enthusiastically belted out spiked lyrics such as “Take your safety off your gun, let’s go have some combat fun.”
Gill and Mata Dupont demonstrate just how easily a golden propaganda machine can mask sinister realities. They dance through the games of the art world distracting and seducing onlookers with their rich and glittery aesthetic. Using the languages of fashion and dance, they have deployed archetypal sports star, war hero and glamour girl avatars in the last decade. For the next project can we anticipate Gill and Mata Dupont using the conceptual strength of their sense of irony and parody as a launch pad for a deeper critique? It is evident that their work contains the promise of something else, something more challenging, more disturbing, a little weirder.
Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont, Stadium, curator Leigh Robb, STADIUM, PICA, Perth, Sept 3-Oct 30; Performances: Oct 15, 2pm; Oct 28, 4pm, as part of the Commonwealth Festival for CHOGM.
FROM CAO FEI’S ENTRE TO THE ART WORLD IN THE LATE 1990S SHE WAS PITCHED AS “NEW GENERATION”—A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE MUCH NEEDED NEXT WAVE OF ARTISTS TO CARRY ON FROM THE THEORETICAL DILEMMAS (AND HYPE) GENERATED AROUND THE CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ARTISTS WHO HAD PRECEDED HER. DRAWING ON THE LANGUAGES OF POP AND YOUTH CULTURES, SHE SIGNIFIED A NEW VOICE ON CHINESE SOCIETY, ONE THAT WAS SAVVY WITH GLOBALISATION AND COULD COMMENT ON CHINESE CONSUMERISM WITH THE TOOLS OF THE SYSTEM ITSELF.
More than 10 years on, Cao Fei is astoundingly accomplished, having spent the greater part of her 20s engaged in elaborate experiments with multimedia, collaborative performance pieces and deep explorations into the world of virtual reality. While primarily a video artist, Cao Fei’s interest in theatre has extended her work to the stage, often toying with the distinction between the digital and the real. Films inspired by the cultures of hip hop, pornography and gaming have given verve to her artistic vocabulary; meanwhile her cool eye is manifest in a number of shrewd documentaries. Cao’s works have been included in biennales around the world and dozens of catalogues and compendiums include essays under her name.
Is Cao Fei still next generation then? When asked, she raises her eyebrows sarcastically and, with characteristic minimalism, points to the eight-months pregnant belly before her (she also has a two-year-old son). “You’d still call me a young artist?” Whatever the relevance of such categories, however, Cao’s work maintains the same exuberance that first attracted the label of youth—the vivid colours of popular media and a preoccupation with fantasy.
at play with commercial culture
Cao Fei, East Wind (2011)
In Cao Fei’s most recent video work, East Wind (2011), a dinky blue Chinese truck with the face of Thomas the Tank Engine beetles around the streets of a Chinese city to the theme tune of the BBC program. The truck stops for petrol, attracting a crowd of delighted fans. It collects rubbish from a demolition site and then merrily takes this to a dump on the outskirts of town (the driver stopping for a pee by the side of the road on the way). With a sense of joyful conquest, the bright smiling face of Thomas charges through the changing Chinese landscape, announcing the triumph of simplicity at every turn.
“When I had my son, I came into contact with all these new DVDs. They gave me this new kind of feeling of innocence,” says Cao Fei. “You can learn a lot about the adult world through children’s culture,” she adds. As is common in Cao’s works, however, the spirit of innocence in East Wind belies the film’s sophistication. Using a nationally manufactured truck for this naively made Thomas (a truck developed by Mao in the 1950s and named East Wind with reference to the proverb “the East Wind will prevail over the West Wind”) and adding its own synthesised version of the theme song, the film is as much about Chinese appropriation of Western culture as it is about Western hegemony.
Raised in the country’s South, on a diet of MTV, foreign films and Hong Kong comedy, Cao has a droll kind of ease with the global commercialisation of culture: “Our generation of Chinese artists, those born in the 1970s, grew up after the Cultural Revolution so it didn’t really influence us that much. Of course our parents gave us a sense of that time, but the larger influences came from the 1980s—when Western culture came to China.” Curious rather than anxious about questions of authenticity, her art takes a playful approach, deploying these same images of commercial culture for its nimble social critiques.
a second life china
The activities which have most defined Cao Fei’s reputation to this point are those associated with her RMB City project—a highly ambitious and multi-faceted venture into the online world of Second Life. Beginning in 2007, with Cao’s creation of an avatar called China Tracy, the project quickly spiralled out into more than a dozen artworks and events, each one an experiment with popular media and a consideration of its power as a means of escape. The framework for all this was the RMB metropolis, built within virtual reality. A bubble-like
topography of Chinese landmarks and inflated pandas, RMB City was a vision of an aspirational China—”a city at the top of the economy”—named after the Chinese currency and dizzy with its own possibility.
With land for sale, and subjects needed, RMB City rapidly evolved into a collaboration with the contemporary Chinese art world. Prominent collectors such as Uli Sigg and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art purchased buildings and were accordingly given positions as mayors. Curators and fellow artists took on Second Life avatars and engaged with the project as citizens. A virtual Yokohama Triennale was even held in the city’s streets (a dancing, slightly drunken version), resulting in the film Play with Your Triennale (2008) which was shown later at the actual festival. As the city developed, its pumped up colours, youthful avatars and illusions of confidence came to suggest not only the hyper-reality of contemporary Beijing, or even global consumerism, but the international art world itself.
“It was a bit like a residency,” says Cao, referring to the role played by her investors and collaborators. “You could do a two- year residency in virtual space. And if you asked me what aspect I’m most proud of in RMB it would be the fact that it combined so many elements and people.” Accompanied by a range of press materials and merchandise—from stickers to newsletters to advertisements—RMB City became a major, almost orchestral, production. When asked about this penchant for theatrics, Cao points to her earliest film and documentary projects, and even beyond that to her years at school. “New media came later, along with the internet. But my first interest I’d say was performance.”
Cao and her gallery, Vitamin Space, are now looking to hand RMB over to new caretakers, ideally a university or research institute. “Students could use it, or people with the right kind of specialty,” she says. “This way we wouldn’t have to ‘delete’ it. It could continue as something alive.”
fantasy & melancholy
Not all of Cao Fei’s art is so colourful. Some of her best-known films are comparatively gritty, depicting China’s economic development with images conveying the reality. Even these works however are leavened with the effects of pop culture, the private desires that keep people going, or an editing that gives life to industrial machinery. Cao’s interest in China’s development appears to be largely in the aspirations that keep it churning and the melancholy that is the flip side of fantasy.
“Perhaps there is something in me which just can’t grow up,” she says. “The humour in my art—it might be a social critique, or a national critique, but it’s not so direct. It’s closer to daily life. It praises life and shows how people in all kinds of situations can find the happiness they need to live on.” Good-humoured more than ideological, Cao’s work often bristles with mischief and can brighten you on a bad day. It doesn’t challenge the consumer system so much as tease it gently (and articulately) from within. Perhaps Cao Fei could try an Annie Leibovitz move and do a strange Walt Disney commercial on the side. Her work is already a collaboration with various dream factories—a voyage of pop utopias conducted in the languages of illusion.
Splendour in the Grass, Close Encounter, Jordana Maisie
photo Brenden Allen
Splendour in the Grass, Close Encounter, Jordana Maisie
FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW, ARTIST CRAIG WALSH HAS OVERSEEN AN ARTS PROGRAM AT THE LARGE-SCALE ROCK FESTIVAL SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS. THE INCLUSION OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT SUCH AN EVENT HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN SOMETHING OF AN ANOMALY IN THE AUSTRALIAN MUSIC FESTIVAL LANDSCAPE—OR AT LEAST AT THE MORE ROCK’N’ROLL, GEN Y-ORIENTED END OF THE SPECTRUM—SO SPLENDOUR’S INVESTMENT IN THIS AREA IS AN INTRIGUING AND NOTEWORTHY PHENOMENON THAT HAS THUS FAR FLOWN LARGELY UNDER THE RADAR OF MAINSTREAM AUSTRALIAN ART DISCOURSE.
From humble beginnings, the Splendour in the Grass Arts program has continuously expanded, in what seems like an ongoing investigation of just what exactly the possibilities for art might be in this spectacular, pop culture-oriented event. Walsh is an experienced media artist and a leading proponent of the creation of work for non-gallery environments, so he is a fitting choice to head up this project. Particularly interesting amongst these creative possibilities has been the development of the Splendid Arts Lab: a program inaugurated in 2009 and largely funded by the Australia Council’s Opportunities for Young and Emerging Artists initiative, in partnership with Splendour itself and a consortium of regional galleries and organisations situated close to the festival’s original site of Belongil Fields, in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales (the festival has relocated to Woodford, Queensland, for the past two years). In 2009-2011, the Splendid Arts Lab has supported a group of young and emerging artists to attend Splendour in the Grass and a connected art-making laboratory that is designed around the conceit of making a site-specific, interdisciplinary, collaborative work to intervene into this loaded environment. Following the lab and a development period, the artists propose their works to a curatorium, and several works are selected to be made for the following year’s festival.
On paper it seems like a no-brainer, particularly from a funder’s perspective. Gen Y artists, making work for a Gen Y festival, in a groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary style. But the realities of making art for this context are more complex than those tick-boxes would suggest. Firstly, the field of site-specific and socially engaged practice is somewhat under-resourced and underdeveloped in Australia, with few of our major arts institutions supporting the development and presentation of this mode of work. Secondly, as far as situations for site-specific work go, you couldn’t get a site more specific than Splendour in the Grass. A clear-felled, rambling area in the middle of the bush, usually occupied by an annual folk festival, being temporarily overtaken by a massive rock festival, replete with 30,000-odd (mostly white, mostly twentysomething, mostly intoxicated) punters, food stalls, amusements and of course the dozens of bands, DJs and musicians across genres that everyone is there for in the first place.
In short, Splendour is like a mini-city, built around the particular desires of a particular demographic, designed to solicit their interaction, enjoyment and, of course, their cash. Such a setting would be a challenge for any artist to grapple with, and for a young emerging artist who is launching into their practice, the complexities of such a proposition might be especially daunting. Having been employed by Splendid as a Provocateur on the 2010 Lab, I have a particular attachment to these artists and to the developmental process that they undertook. It was encouraging to see them respond to the abovementioned challenges with unflinching rigour, enthusiasm and curiosity. Opportunities to focus on process, and really unpack the complexities around making work—particularly site-specific work—are rare, and so Splendid has provided an important service in this regard. For this year’s festival, three artists from the 2010 Splendid Arts Lab were selected to create work: Jordana Maisie, Jimmy McGilchrist and Matthew Kneale, although Kneale’s performance intervention was unfortunately abandoned due to logistical uncertainties—a real shame considering the rich potential for performance practices in this arena.
Jordana Maisie’s sculpture Close Encounters provided a meeting point at the festival’s Mix Up Stage. Taking the form of a large-scale UFO, its gleaming metallic surface hovering over the crowd, Close Encounters offered an inverted reflection of the ground-level spectacle of the punters themselves. Embedded in its side surface was an LED screen, the kind beloved by lottery kiosks and Jenny Holzer alike. Through an SMS service, festival goers could “talk to the aliens” and have their short-form communiqués broadcast on the screen for all to see. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of jokes and friends shouting out to other friends, a kind of banal toilet-door-graffiti talk. But these were punctuated by the odd message that was genuinely eccentric or heartfelt. Meanwhile, the artists were concealed behind a nearby fence, sending the punters’ messages to the screen and posting their own replies, presumably from the aliens’ perspective, creating micro dialogues. These text-based interactions were an odd reflection on the ‘heightened’ state of the festival audience, and became mini portraits of the strange modes of socialisation that were taking place around the festival. Despite the technical wizardry, my favourite part of the work was its central shaft—a cylindrical mirrored portal at the centre of the UFO that visually transported punters away from this tangle of crowd and (mis)communication, into the uninterrupted calmness of the sky. A moment of quietness and the sublime amidst the relentless spectacle.
Behind the scenes, Curious Creatures
photo Brendan Allen
Behind the scenes, Curious Creatures
The other work commissioned through the Splendid program was Jimmy McGilchrist’s interactive shadow projection Curious Creatures. Half-concealed up a hillside, people were drawn towards the work by the strange animal-like noises it emanated, and the soft white glow of the projection screens. Across a panoramic screen surface, the shadows of several peculiar, children’s story-book animals roamed a sparse, alien landscape. As viewers approached the screen, their own shadow appeared in the scene and the creatures were drawn to it, running over to interact in vicious, loving, or baffling ways. This deceptively simple effect was in fact a complex programming feat, operated by McGilchrist and his collaborators behind the scenes. Though markedly different in their aesthetic and conceptual strategies, it is interesting to note that both McGilchrist’s and Maisie’s works harnessed digital, interactive technologies to engage the distractible festival-goers, suggesting a potential-laden way of connecting art with a transient crowd such as this.
Beyond the Splendid program, Walsh has been exploring other ways to activate the festival site and its audience through artistic intervention. This year, the Cream program, curated by Annemarie Kohn, brought three artists working with ephemeral, street-based practices together to create temporary interventions into the festival landscape of Splendour. The masking-tape murals of Buff Dis; Oliver in the Sky’s cardboard pop sculptures; and Fernando Llanos’ projections onto a customized blimp provided a counterpoint to Maisie and McGilchrist’s tech- and material-heavy works. Installed responsively throughout the three-day festival, the execution of these temporary works gained an extra performative edge in the heightened but highly contained festival site. Fleet-footed and engaging, the Cream program hinted at exciting approaches yet to come in the Splendour Arts context.
WE ARE LIVING IN UNCERTAIN TIMES. STABLE CLIMATE, LIBERAL DEMOCRACY, CAPITALISM AND THE GLOBAL DOMINANCE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION ARE ALL LOOKING LIKE THEIR TIME MIGHT HAVE PASSED. A SIMILAR SENSE OF IMPENDING CRISIS IS TANGIBLE ACROSS THE STATE FUNDED ARTS IN EUROPE. THIS YEAR’S EUROKAZ PROCEEDED IN A SPIRIT OF AUSTERITY, ITS BUDGET REDUCED BY A STAGGERING 30% AT THE 11TH HOUR.
With the program accordingly thinner, it was hard to escape the feeling that much contextualising of the remaining works had also disappeared. The curatorial thread of the festival was reduced to a dashed, disconnected line: successful works remained, but were significantly less eloquent about each other than is usually the case.
Between tableau theatre, Congolese performance, dance on science and an entire video retrospective on Christoph Schlingensief, critics had to deal with a cacophony. However, the highlights of the festival could be lined up as examples—if stand-alone—on how to speak, how to make a sound, on the future of the world.
noise
This year’s program-within-the-program consisted of four performances by emerging artists, created within the European Focus on Art and Science in the Performing Arts. Unfortunately, the majority of works presented could be dismissed as ‘Chunky-Move-on-a-Shoestring.’ The conceptual framework often appeared no deeper than placing a machine among the dancers and turning it on, but the machines—unlike Chunky’s often brilliantly innovative technology—seldom excited with their possibilities. So Santasangre’s Bestiale Improvviso (Beastly all of a Sudden) delivered dancerly twitching to harsh sounds and stormy lighting, atmospheric but hardly thought-through. Technology in this context, disappointingly, was largely interpreted as noise and flashing lights, a well-worn metaphor for impending catastrophe. In contrast, WE GO vzw/Vincenzo Carta presented Gnosis #1, a research-driven work, the main thrust of which was the dancers’ states of mind activating stage lights of different colours. However, while this resulted in fairly opaque stage business, the mechanics of the translation of mind to light was never explained sufficiently, leaving the audience sceptical as to the exact method employed and unable to judge its success or failure.
I would single out Dewey Dell’s Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti (Furious Fifties, Roaring Forties, Shrieking Sixties) as the most successful in this program—not because it offered significantly greater dramaturgical thrust (it did not), not even because it engaged with technology beyond the obvious (it did not), but because its sheer strangeness was unapologetically devoid of either facile catastrophism or technophiliac laziness. Three young women, the next generation of the Castellucci family, appear on stage in padded black unitards that exaggerate their thighs, white-painted arms and faces in similar blistering white, but with central black circles, resembling the traditional Venetian moretta (or ‘mute maid’—a small, round woman’s mask, held in place by biting onto the button on the underside). A series of very simple movements—arms slicing, small hops, upper body swaying—rigorously correlates with Demetrio Castellucci’s music, a rhythmic bunch of roaring, shrieking noises, every so often embracing a broad tune, such as a two-tone siren wail. But instead of attempting to illustrate a tragedy, Dewey Dell create a dark, childishly primal pantomime of a badly remembered nightmare. There are seas, shipwrecks, maidens in distress and sandmen in this show, all executed in an aesthetic realm halfway between Lemony Snicket and Michel Gondry’s music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World.” Vaguely built around the mystical harshness of the Antarctic winds, the performance lacks the maturity of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s adult works, but is powerfully visceral in the best sense of the word.
Big Bang
photo Martin Argyroglo Callias Bey
Big Bang
silence
From these relatively superficial explorations of a noisy cataclysm, Philippe Quesne and Vivarium Studio proceed to play with silence. Big Bang, defying expectations, opens with a woman reading at a table, silently constructing the word BANG from wooden letters. The end of the world again. However, instead of pathos, Quesne offers soft, benevolent humour. The evolution recommences. Amoeba-like creatures, crawling on barren land, rise into hairy apes around a fire and surprisingly quickly evolve into humans sitting in an upturned car, reading Chris Ware’s comics and drinking beer from cans. A lake appears, as do astronauts, and someone is always walking around with a sketchbook, finding aesthetic pleasure in the cataclysm. The scale shifts between miniature and lifesize, a number of performers in green overalls walk around unperturbed, setting the scene and a small island is formed from the debris upstage.
Quesne’s background is in set design, and the work builds as a series of gradually shifting tableaux; the dramatic structure is entirely unencumbered by words. His professed aim is to develop a new dramaturgy that evolves around an almost anthropological observation of the human microcosm, sidelining the simplistic inquiries of text-based theatre. Ambitious, but Big Bang—despite sometimes gruelling slowness—is never hostile to the spectator; Quesne has quickly become an audience favourite in France. His post-Bang trajectory from plankton to postmodernism is gentle, melancholy and humorous and we are quietly entertained despite having sat through the end of the world—twice. However, Big Bang also plunges one into the sludge of First World resignation, no less genuine, or troubling, for its Tati-like sweetness. Watching it almost feels like making peace with despair—or perhaps walking into and through it.
More more more future
photo Agathe Poupeney
More more more future
talking
Faustin Linyekula and Studio Kabako’s More more more…future begins where Quesne ends, with impotent silence at the end of the world. Linyekula starts at a real, non-metaphorical place of catastrophe: his native Democratic Republic of Congo, still blistering from the biggest war in African history. Trying to use the social power of music, Linyekula wants to marry ndombolo—hugely popular Congolese pop music, wild and energetic and profoundly escapist, carrying with itself a culture of bling—to the political spirit of punk. The show is structured as a musical performance, centre-stage given over to the Kinshasa guitar sensation Flamme Kapaya. He performs a powerful mix of hip-swinging ndombolo and raging rock to the seething lyrics of poet Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a political prisoner in Kinshasa and Linyekula’s childhood friend.
So far, so predictable. But the emotional trajectory of this concert is devastating. Muhindo’s lyrics unravel the history of Congo, from clinging to tradition, idols and ideology to the revolution against Mobutu, and the illusory promise of democracy that ends in civil war. Muhindo weaves in Zarathustra’s thoughts on the ever-turning cycle of history, but continues to invoke a break to the pattern: “more than a glorious past, give us the future.” The future here stands not even for a time in which our optimistic plans come to fruition, but a time in which optimism has a chance to exist. It is a call for hope, the same one spoken about by Deo Masugi in SBS’s documentary Go Back To Where You Came From (director Ivan Mahoney). After 10 years in a refugee camp, “we can’t ask for anything more than tomorrow.”
While the musicians are dressed in ‘authentic’ ndombolo glitter and gold, the three dancers wear frilly, ballooning outfits made from refugee bags [cheaply made sacks of woven nylon fibres. Eds]. They begin with simple ndombolo dancing. As the music heaves and grows in anger, it also transforms into trance, madness and, finally, violence. The energy on stage is numbing. Why not live for today, if there is no tomorrow? “Carpe diem, even if it’s the middle of the night.” And then, after the physical fighting has subsided, the thread of the performance is slowly picked up again.
Writing on political performance, cardinal Flemish dramaturg Marianne Van Kerkhoven has said, “A process of truly interiorising the social options is for the ‘political artist’ probably the most important artistic deed.” This is a profoundly political work, agitating without propaganda and empathetic without resignation. In a Gramscian sense, it couples pessimism of intellect with optimism of the will. Unlike others in the program, it is not a romantically apocalyptic narrative, but an attempt to articulate a way out of a real cataclysm. Linyekula does not romanticise the political power of music, nor African sensuality, but neither does he cerebrally avoid them. Instead, he acknowledges ndombolo’s agonistic tendencies, seeks to uncover its generative potential and allows it to disintegrate as it naturally would. Yet the performance does not end in despair, but with sombre, tenacious hope. Linyekula goes that one step beyond Robyn Orlin’s Dressed to Kill…Killed to Dress… (RT 87,p38), not simply staging a culture of escapism and excess, but pushing it to come to its own catharsis.
An ethical question that increasingly troubles me at Eurokaz is the misplaced colonialism of the continuous importation of First World melancholy and cynicism, through art, into a culture of a developing country. It is often genuinely unsettling to see the apathy of a consumer society, in which all of one’s insignificant wishes are a priori sated, performed in front of an audience of precariously-employed, politically disenfranchised, economically doomed citizens of an unstable democracy. Last year’s Ballad of Ricky and Ronny (RT98) was one such instance, this year’s Big Bang another. The high value accorded to such art, its forms and ideas, always teeters on the possibility of creating an educated apathy where it is least needed and imports melancholy as a baseless fashion. There is a place for melancholy performance, and for apocalypse, but there is also a somewhat conspicuous excess of both in the world today—perhaps a natural extension of the general state of crisis we are living through. There is a lot more to take home—from the kind of questioning to the cathartic path out—a lot more that is intelligent, emotionally rich and, ultimately, new from the work of Faustin Linyekula.
Bestiale Improvviso, Santasangre, authors Diana Arbib, Luca Brinchi, Maria Carmela Milano, Pasquale Tricoci, Roberta Zanardo, MSU, June 28; Gnosis #1, WE GO vzw/Vincenzo Carta, concept, choreography Vincenzo Carta, concept, soundscape Ongakuaw, MCUK, June 29; Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti, Dewey Dell, choreography Teodora Castellucci, performers Sara Angelini, Agata Castellucci, Teodora Castellucci, sound design Demetrio Castellucci, set and light Eugenio Resta, MSU, June 29; Big Bang, Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio, concept, direction Philippe Quesne, artistic and technical collaboration Yvan Cledat, Cyril Gomez-Mathieu, production Vivarium Studio, ZKM, July 4-5; More more more… future, Faustin Linyekula/Studios KABAKO, author Faustin Linyekula, music Flamme Kapaya, Patou ‘Tempête’ Kayembe, Le Coq, Cédric ‘Béton’ Lokamba, Patient Mafutala Useni, dancers Dinozord, Papy Ebotani, Faustin Linyekula, text Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, production Studios Kabako, Dance Centre Zagreb, July 3, 5; Eurokaz festival, Zagreb, June 27-July 5
WHILE REAL TIME HAS RECENTLY DOCUMENTED A NUMBER OF MEDIA AND VISUAL ARTS PROJECTS DEALING WITH ISSUES OF SUSTAINABILITY (RT103), THERE HAVE BEEN FEW REPORTS OF THEATRE, MUSIC OR DANCE PRODUCTIONS TACKLING GREEN TOPICS. WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS, THE PERFORMING ARTS SECTOR SEEMS LESS INCLINED TO INCORPORATE THE CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE OF CARBON TAX DEBATES INTO STAGED PRODUCTIONS.
If all things sustainable have not yet infiltrated the rehearsal room, they have started to change the producing structures. Sydney Theatre Company, for example, is positioning itself as a world leader, with its Greening the Wharf program, “believed to be a first of its kind for any theatre company in the world in its scale and comprehensive approach to sustainability” (sydneytheatre.com.au/visit/greening-the-wharf). The rainwater harvesting, solar power, waste reduction and programming of science and art talks (The Wentworth Talks series) makes STC a model for engagement with green issues.
Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne is another production house that is engaging with sustainability in major structural and program changes. Malthouse Greenlight includes an innovative recycling program for the many industrial lights used throughout the building and on the stages (malthousetheatre.com.au/page/MALTHOUSE_GREENLIGHT). A carbon surcharge on tickets, educational programs with green themes and the hosting of the very successful Tipping Point meeting in 2010 all contribute to a lively and multifaceted corporate engagement with sustainability.
Other major organisations in Australia engaging with infrastructure change include Queensland Theatre Company who launched the Green Theatre Initiative in 2008 and The Australian Ballet who are reducing the carbon footprint across their operations. City of Melbourne venue and producer Arts House has a very popular Green Tix for Nix project (melbourne.vic.gov.au/ArtsHouse/Program/Pages/GreenTixForNix.aspx) where those who travel by public transport, foot or bicycle receive free tickets to a weekend matinee.
These initiatives and many more are listed in Greening the Arts, the online resource published by Tipping Point, an international organisation that “energises the cultural response to climate change.” In Australia it is led by Angharad Wynne-Jones who is now the Creative Producer for Melbourne’s Arts House. Greening the Arts surveys sustainable arts and culture activities in Australia and is still the most comprehensive resource for the sector. When taken in conjunction with the many international publications to which it links, such as the Green Rider or the Green Mobility Guide created by Julie’s Bicycle, the pioneering London based organisation “making environmental sustainability intrinsic to the business, art and ethics of music, theatre and the creative industries,” this document will assist most arts organisations in achieving carbon neutrality while starting to introduce dialogue around green matters into their programs and projects. See on-the-move.org/files/Green-Mobility-Guide.pdf; tippingpointaustralia.com/resources, and juliesbicycle.com/resources/jb-green-riders.
Since the guide was released in 2010 there have been a few new initiatives, such as Earth Station, a satellite event to WOMADelaide. Earth Station is “both forum and festival” and includes a full program of performances and art works as well as panels and debates over three days. Art works dealing with sustainability topics such as Stan’s Café’s installation, Of All the People in All the World, are accompanied by speakers such as former Al Gore chief of staff Roy Neel and Giselle Weybrecht, author of The Sustainable MBA as well as Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton. Perhaps inspired by international projects such as A Greener Festival, where leading music festivals have prioritised camping, reduced waste and emissions and incorporated discussion and debate, this new addition to the Australian festival sector will hopefully inspire other forward thinking festivals to follow suit. For details take a look at earthstationfestival.com.au and www.agreenerfestival.com.
So, as old buildings are renovated to reduce their carbon footprint and organisations strive to be carbon negative, artists are starting to explore new ways of making their work and taking it to their audiences. In a rousing article in Greening the Arts, Wynne-Jones looks forward to a new cultural entrepreneur: the artist-as-producer. “Who better than artists-as-producers to re-imagine the cultural infrastructure, funding frameworks and networks we’ll need in a zero carbon future, who better than those for whom the bottom line has never been the motivator.” Wynne-Jones writes about the need for a “fit-for-purpose infrastructure” where the artists-as-producers design a new set of tools for creating art and taking it to audiences. She imagines alternative forms of artistic encounter, where “our virtual capacity needs to be imaginatively maximised.” She writes of “face-to-face as a privilege” and has followed through on these thoughts in her Tipping Point commissions. In Home Art (homeartproject.com) in partnership with City of Melbourne, Lucy Guerin has been commissioned to create a series of art works in the homes of audiences, taking the art out of the infrastructure and into another form of connection. In Riot, the Tipping Point/Dara Foundation/Malthouse Theatre Climate Commission, Torque Show will stage a riot in which popular dissent and direct action become a form of performance.
Tipping Point is also partnered with the Australia Council’s IETM Collaboration Project on a climate commission with Kaaitheater in Brussels. Entitled Time’s Up: Control of the Commons, this project by Tim Boykett takes a series of watercourse journeys in Australia and Europe, investigating water usage, attitudes to water and kinship/friendship networks. The presentation at the Burning Ice Festival at Kaaitheater in June 2012 will include direct documentation, interviews, photography and video mapping.
Long term artist-producer, David Pledger, the outgoing Director of the Australia Council IETM Collaboration Project, contextualises this project in a European dimension in his blog on the Australia Council website entitled Do Nothing Do Something. Pledger is working with Julie’s Bicycle to measure the carbon footprint of his entire program. Pledger’s blog responds to the second of the Slow Boat conferences, initiated in 2009 by The British Council and Arts Admin to consider sustainable arts touring and perpetuated in 2010 by Kaaitheater in Brussels. He wrote of the conference’s problematising of cultural exchange and mobility as “a motivation and opportunity for artists, programmers and presenters to rethink what we do, and evolve cultural production imaginatively by developing new dramaturgical templates to create new work and new producing environments in which that work can happen” (www.australiacouncil.gov.au/special_projects).
The Slow Boat conference challenged the value of mobility with questions that included: “How can we genuinely reduce the ecological footprint of all our travels and tours?”; “Would better and more efficient co-operation and networking be a way of bringing down CO2 emissions?”; “Are such terms as ‘relocalising’ and ‘permaculture,' which crop up increasingly in the debate on a transition to a sustainable society, relevant to the arts too?”; “Is the nomadic existence many artists lead still desirable?” (vti.be/en/projects/slow-boat-2).
With the current political, social and financial turmoil in Europe and North America many Australian artists will be rethinking their touring plans and hopefully, inspired by Greening the Arts and other publications and initiatives, they will begin to explore more inventive routes to audiences, whether in their own communities or internationally via new media. Having recently collaborated on a publication examining the trend for international co-productions and in these same pages reported upon the growth in the international activity of Australian artists and companies, it is interesting to note that the tide that has to date so favoured mobility and exchange may now be turning. Ironically, the restrictions imposed upon artists often lead to the most impressive art, so there is great hope that straitened times might lead to longer residencies, works remaining in repertoire, more participatory projects, more innovative communications over distance between artists, more inventive exchanging of scores and other performance 'texts' and a general flourishing of the inspired and dynamic artist-as-producer.
COMBINING A CINEMATOGRAPHIC FLAIR FOR MOMENTUM AND A PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE FOR THE MOMENT, MERILYN FAIRSKYE HAS, IN PRECARIOUS, HER FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH FILM, CREATED A CHILLINGLY BEAUTIFUL ACCOUNT OF THE AFTERMATH OF THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR REACTOR DISASTER OF APRIL 26, 1986 IN THE NOW INDEPENDENT UKRAINE, BUT EFFECTING IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER LARGE PARTS OF THE POPULATION, ECONOMY AND ECOLOGY OF THE FORMER USSR. WE ARE TOLD IN THE OPENING TITLES, “OVER 600,000-700,000 PEOPLE KNOWN AS LIQUIDATORS TOOK PART IN THE CLEAN-UP.”
These people from across the USSR, along with the plant’s workers, locals and the citizens of nearby towns continue to be the victims of the Chernobyl catastrophe with an expected surge of cancer cases in 2011—25 years after the fire.
Precarious opens with a bleak winter landscape viewed through, but not visibly framed by, the passenger window of a moving car—dark, leafless trees and now and then apparently deserted houses glide by, the sky as white as the snow on the ground. We will learn later what this place is. The sense of desolation is reinforced by Robert Hindley’s haunting sound score (Fairskye had asked the sound designer to “put himself inside the reactor”).
Our gaze is focused on the landscape while we listen to five people—a former helicopter pilot, a scientist, a medical specialist, an information officer, a researcher and a former Intourist worker). They remain unseen and the filmmaker’s questions elided. Their accounts (in Russian and spare English, subtitled) of the event and its consequences are woven through the body of the film. One of them, a former newspaper photographer, speaks of his frustration at being denied access to the incident site during the crisis. An oncologist in Kiev speaks about his commitment to rehabilitation and the prevention of radiation poisoning. Another voice tells us that the layer of contaminated surface material in the region is buried in snow, making the place relatively safe in winter. The mesmeric ride through this grim landscape and these calmly spoken but disturbing testaments create the first of an increasing number of polarities.
Precarious, Merilyn Fairskye
We find ourselves on the boardwalk in Alushta gazing at the contaminated Black Sea, the movement now in the waves and the sound of their fall; the camera is still, framing the water, the immediate coastline walkway and buildings from various points. People amble by. One of the intreviewees recalls “respectable men using means legal and illegal to get through the checkpoint,” to flee the disaster. Families, not trusting government assurances, soon sent their children away—sometimes “trainloads of children were turned back.” But many did go to other parts of the USSR. Alushta was now “[a] city without children…it was like an unpleasant science fiction film.” As for today, one interviewee simply says, “we’ve got to live; adjust somehow.” Meanwhile night comes on and sea and sky fill the screen, this time enveloping us with barely contrasting Rothko-ish deep and deeper grey-blue.
Taking in the elegant, elderly city of Yalta, we hear of the 8,000 workers who continue to flow into Chernobyl and the city of Prypiat for one-off three-week shifts and of the young firemen who battled the Reactor 4 blaze in 1986 only to “quietly disappear from life.” One of two eerie satellite images in the film closes in on the region, indicating the direction of the flow that will come with Spring of contaminated water from Chernobyl to cities and into the Black Sea.
In a grey Kiev the camera tilts to take in the golds, greens and blues of Orthodox churches and then fixes on a distant view of the city from a park as we listen to recollections of a warm, sunny, cheerful May Day parade. The government had issued no news about Chernobyl—there were only rumours almost a week after the event, only dignitaries sending their children away. And then came the news and advice: take charcoal and iodine and drink vodka. Kiev becomes a city inhabited only by men. The helicopter pilot speaks for the many liquidators: the job was an honour, there was no choice, “We were educated to be like this.”
Now we’re on the road to Chernobyl, on the edge of the Exclusion Zone where residents are banned from hunting, fishing and gathering berries and cannot sell their produce: “Ten years of our lives have been stolen from us.” Soon we’re inside the zone, the camera closing in on the rusting “sarcophagus” of Reactor 4, its new containment as yet still not built. An aerial view suspends us above the Reactor’s inadequate cooling pond. A line of trees is described as the Red Forest because after the explosion its summer leaves turned red—the soundtrack flutters as if to evoke in the distance “the crazy singing of Geiger counters” that one interviewee spoke of earlier in the film.
Within the Exclusion Zone we drift through the ghost city of Prypiat, its streets full of wild new growth stilled temporarily by Winter. But we know liquidators will be somewhere here while, around the city, displaced locals illegally search the zone for fish, animals and scrap metal. The helicopter pilot, like many others has received a Badge of Honour but his illness drives him away to Israel. The camera pans to rest on a never-to-be-used Ferris wheel, due to begin operating at the time of the fire, adding the faintest touch of colour, not to mention irony, to the otherwise black and white scene. In the Stills Gallery, a large, wide photograph of the wheel dominates our gaze as the film plays out on the mezzanine.
Precarious, says Fairskye at her artist’s talk, was “never planned, but came out of a Black Sea holiday [because] of a long term fascination—I had to go to the Crimea.” She went alone in 2009, staying in “an otherwise empty 5-star hotel in a deserted town [Alushta] on the edge of contaminated water.” There she picked up a silk map of the region, “once restricted information from 1947.” A name grabbed her attention—Chernobyl. She felt she must go there and, once through the checkpoint, found herself “immersed in another world, faced with a remarkable opportunity and provided with an official driver and a guide heading into the heart of Prypiat,” 18kms from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and inside the Exclusion Zone. It was after being taken to see the Ferris wheel that Fairskye felt like she was “at the end of the world. There was not a sound. That’s when the film began to take shape. Before that I’d been shooting randomly and when I got home to Australia the material looked patchy.”
So, at exactly the same time a year later, Fairskye returned, this time with her Russian-speaking partner as interpreter and plenty of research behind her about the consequences of the Reactor 4 explosion in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. She was anxious that the promised new containment of the reactor might provide imagery quite different from that of her first visit, but the government had not followed through on its promised spending, “so, ironically, I got continuity.” All that can be done with Chernobyl is containment while 35% of the GNP of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine goes towards remediation, health and the 8,000 workers who manage the zone.
Fairskye thinks that “there’s a national state of mind that the site is a force that cannot be contained. At its centre is the so-called ‘elephant’s foot,’ 200 tonnes of festering fuel.”
For her interviews, Fairskye’s strategy was to ask a simple question or two and let people speak, which they did: “they wanted to tell their stories. But none of the speakers appears onscreen. I had no desire to be dramatic—we just listen and watch.” She found herself “humbled by the stoicism” of the people she spoke with, the effort evident in their tone “to be nice, to make things normal, even though there is no end in sight.” She was struck by the strangeness of Prypiat “taken over by dense curtains of foliage and vines,” and the heavy covering of snow—”snow and ice damp down the radiation, so the bleaker the landscape the safer.”
As for her filming, “I have a fondness for the pan—to take it all in and see what’s there.” In the car, “I had the camera on all the time, handheld, but I wasn’t looking through it.” She speaks of a sense of “looking out,” which we share with the people who wander through the Kiev scenes, like tourists. Sometimes she used a tripod, panning and not knowing how it would turn out. At times “it was a real nightmare, the camera and the tripod freezing in the cold, making some material unuseable.” Although shot in colour, the effect is monochromatic because of the Winter weather: “I’ve always admired Kieslowski’s Decalogue where he almost pulls out all the colour, but in this case it was natural.”
Was Precarious made as a statement about nuclear power and political irresponsibility, I ask. Fairskye is firm: “I had no political intention. I was just taken by it all. Life was tapping me on the shoulder, saying look at this.” Nevertheless, as Edward Scheer writes in his fine accompanying essay, “In the year of the meltdown at Fukushima [the film’s images] provoke some reflection, not only on the nuclear question, which is everywhere in the public discourse, but also on the status of the image to both reassure and to trouble the way we think about a disaster as fundamental as a tear in the fabric of the natural world.”
As the film speeds us away from this haunted zone, the sun appears low in the sky, partly veiled in swathes of grey and white cloud, an almost Baroque vision with an abstract expressionist overlay: trees blurring past, black verticals as if grimly brush-stroked in, apt accompaniment to the final sad sentiment as a woman quietly says, “We don’t learn from our mistakes.”
TUCKED AWAY IN A REMOTE CORNER OF MIDLAND, IT’S DOUBTFUL THERE WAS A BETTER LOCATION THAN THE MIDLAND RAILWAY WORKSHOPS FOR THE REALISATION OF TWO OF MARINA ROSENFELD’S MORE ARCHITECTURALLY FOCUSED COMPOSITIONS, TEENAGE LONTANO AND CANNONS.
The huge industrial space was impressively illuminated with stage lighting for maximum impact, the rig’s installation a feat in itself—a clear embodiment of the effort that has gone into realising these works. Visibility was minimal which only served to add atmosphere to the music.
The evening began with Teenage Lontano. As the audience entered the vast warehouse a teenage choir stood motionless and expressionless in the thin strip of light that cut directly through the performance space. Teenage Lontano is halfway between a ‘cover’ and an interpretation of Gyorgy Ligeti’s choral work Lontano. While Rosenfeld’s composition keeps the choral sound mass as its central sonic characteristic, the addition of pointillist synth sounds curiously obscures the foreground and background of the music. Synthetic and vocal sounds are fused, with changes in either highlighting unique musical characteristics.
The most visually engaging aspect of the work is the rotating speaker suspended above the choir spinning at 33 revolutions per minute, the same as a gramophone record. While the speaker was smaller than expected, it remained something of an engineering feat (on all accounts), adding a Doppler effect to the synthetic sounds also emitting from other speakers during the performance.
The audience was encouraged to wander to experience the work from multiple locations—only a few individuals took advantage of this option. This was a shame, because as you moved past the choir different parts of the sound were highlighted, revealing the intricacies of the work’s functioning in the space. Performers were cued from synchronised iPods, which, in the context of the eerie siren calls, emergency whistles and the tense harmonies of the voices, added an undertone of cultural assimilation to the work making it all the more unsettling.
After a short break the audience returned for Decibel’s performance of Rosenfeld’s Cannons. This work utilises four bass ‘cannons’—large steel pipes fitted with subwoofers that act to resonate and alter the sound—in association with viola, cello, bass percussion and turntables. Beginning with Rosenfeld’s renowned ultra-minimal electronic sound objects the piece builds to a busy conclusion with an industrial feel.
Once again the audience was encouraged to wander around the space, which many did this time, experiencing the way the piece utilised the unique characteristics of the space. Sitting close to the ensemble, individual details and their direct connection to the musicians are apparent but the listener may have the sensation that they are unable to understand these sounds in the larger context of the work, thanks in particular to the directionality of the cannons. Further away from the ensemble more sonic details become apparent and the separate nature of the sounds slowly collapses into one huge combined sound object, aided by the absence of visual association between sound and performer and their location in the space. Truly a unique experience—no two people hear the performance in the same way.
Teenage Lontano and Cannons rounded out perfectly Marina Rosenfeld’s contribution to the Totally Huge New Music Festival. These works demonstrate different yet connected elements of Rosenfeld’s music exploring the role of projection of sound in space. As such, the performances offered a very special experience of sound sculpture in composition.
Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011: Marina Rosenfeld and Decibel, Teenage Lontano and Cannons, composer Marina Rosenfeld, Decibel artistic director Cat Hope, choir coordinator Laura Lowther, performers Decibel (Stuart James, Tristan Parr, Aaron Wyatt), Teenage Lontano choir members, cannon construction supervision Karlos Ockleford, Michael Bradshaw, production support Jeremy Pownall; supported by Tura New Music, Midland Railway Workshops; Sept 24; www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/about
AN ANNUAL TRADITION OF THE TOTALLY HUGE NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL IS BREAKING OUT, A CHANCE FOR YOUNG COMPOSERS TO PRESENT RECENT COMPOSITIONS CHOSEN FROM SUBMISSIONS. THIS YEAR'S CONCERT PRESENTED 12 WORKS PRIMARILY FROM STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA AND THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF PERFORMING ARTS (WAAPA), EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY. WHILE 12 WORKS MIGHT SEEM A LOT FOR A SINGLE CONCERT, THE DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO STYLE AND FORM, AND THE VARYING LEVELS OF EXPLORATION ENSURED THE AUDIENCE A FULFILLING AND ENJOYABLE CONCERT.
First up was Red River for percussion, laptop and visuals by Sam Gillies (also one of the RealTime writers for Totally Huge 2011). While the drum and cymbal playing is spare it triggers a range of responses from the laptop, snatching sounds and transforming them into soft-edged pulsing phrases of saturated digital texture. The video depicts shifting monochrome washes resolving near the end to give the impression of skin—either that of a drum or perhaps human flesh. It's an interesting approach that doesn’t necessarily provide satisfying gestural and sonic syncs between acoustic, electronic and visual elements but rather allows them to co-exist in a unified yet differentiated atmosphere.
Sharon Wong's piece, Isolations, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano explored the thematic of its title. Starting with a clearly recognisable ascending/descending theme, the musicians fall out of sync with each other creating an atonal canon. At different points they each stop and move to another part of the room, literally starting out again on their own. Eventually they come back together, physically and musically ending on a single extended note. The harmonic angularities are challenging and it appeared a difficult piece to perform, going against the musicians' instinct to 'play together,' however it was bold in concept and form. It might be interesting to explore the physical isolation more fully by positioning the musicians at significant distances rather than the largely symbolic gesture of moving only a few steps away.
Tiffany Ha's composition offered another challenge to playing together. In String Quartet No. 1, she uses a Bach chorale but introduces anomalies: pitches sliding into dissonance; notes held in the middle of phrases creating stasis; and a final part in which it appeared each of the musicians must complete the section in differing time frames measured on their mobile phones. It was witty, well executed and genuinely surprising.
A similar playfulness was to be found in Jake Steele’s Hip Hop Symphony Spectacular for string quartet, brass and rhythm section. Scored for the largest ensemble this was perhaps the most ambitious piece of the night. Exploring the myth of Orpheus myth it shifted through a range of musical flavours with the flamboyance of a feature film score. Elizabeth Bonny also used a classical myth as source material in her work, Of Ten Parts, A Man Enjoys One Only [That’s What Tiresias Said], a jaunty piece for woodwinds, brass and percussion drawing on dub step rhythms which morph through a bolero style to end in a kind of bouncy Balkan revelry.
Kelly Curran presented the only jazz inflected piece of the evening with Deep Fry for piano, flute and percussion mashing together snippets of Bee Gees and House Martin songs with great agility. In Gareagre, Aaron Tuckey seemed almost cruel in the challenge he set his four clarinetists to play rapid ostinatos, constantly shifting lead melody between the players: a nice take on maximalist minimalism.
There were also two solo piano studies. Lament by John Mulligan explored a range of emotional territories from quiet and lyrical to strident. Kit Buckley’s Piece for Solo Piano worked with ideas of omission—the pianist free to choose to omit a note in a phrase, leaving a silence in its place—creating a quiet, spare piece reliant on phrasing for its gentle impact.
Suzanne Kosowitz presented Inveiglement for string quartet, percussion and tape. Originally the soundscore for a dance work the piece moves assuredly through a range of atmospheres with a sense of rhythmic fluidity. R E Smith’s Audio6—In Memory, also for string quartet, was a particularly lovely work. Led by a melancholic viola it traversed a range of emotional territories from exhilaration to devastation: a confident, accomplished and moving composition.
Mitchell Mollison’s Emulation 2: Trio employed digital technology but in a rather analogue manner. The three performers on saxophone, conga and guitar listen to a pre-composed piece and must re-create the sound as accurately as possible. I’m not sure if the instrumentation of the pre-set work is the same as here—this may make for an intriguing process of translation. The live instruments are used mostly for their timbral and textural rather than harmonic qualities, and this overall scumbling augmented by finger clicks and handclaps imbued the piece with a Beat poetry feel. It was also announced at the concert, that Mitchell Mollison was the recipient of the next Tura New Music Commission.
Given the overall scope of Totally Huge, the influence of various lecturers at local universities and the very wired-in nature of youth culture in general, I was a little surprised that there were so few compositions exploring technological devices and interaction. However, the works presented offered a real sense of exploration within their chosen styles. There was a strong feeling of playfulness and a sense of plasticity in the manipulation of classically inclined music modes that made for an evening of engaging and often challenging works by some very talented young composers.
RESIDUAL, A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT BETWENN PETER KNIGHT AND DUNG NGUYEN, IS A MEETING OF OPPOSITES. WEST AND EAST, HUMAN AND INHUMAN, OLD AND NEW ALL FEED INTO THE DUO’S GENRE-LESS MUSIC.
The pair’s influences are vast, spanning jazz, Vietnamese folk, drone, rock and electronica. In their improvisations at Fremantle’s Kulcha, the final show of Tura’s Totally Huge New Music Festival, each influence is extracted from its original context and given fresh meaning in new surroundings. Residual is what remains.
east and west
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Residual is the integration of classical Vietnamese influence and instrumentation. Nguyen was trained by his grandfather on the dan tranh (a 17-stringed zither) and the dan bau (a single-stringed zither with a flexible bar attached to the string allowing pitch bending) and he improvises on both. One of the key difficulties in integrating such instruments into a Western aesthetic is their indeterminacy in regard to pitch. In Residual, however, there is little need for exact tuning—sounds are used for their timbral and gestural character rather than as part of any definite pitch structure. In their final piece in particular, the free, smooth movement of the dan bau lofted beautifully above skittering electronics of Knight’s laptop.
Another important reference point for the duo is jazz. Both Knight and Nguyen are members of the Melbourne ensemble Way Out West. The jazz influence in the duo is best understood as an attitude or an approach rather than a particular sound: the shared improvisation and the measured pacing of the music seem to stem from the genre. Knight plays trumpet in much of the music and his improvisations on the instrument speak of calm virtuosity. His playing is subtle but often incredibly demanding technically and he appears quite happy to move between such virtuosic playing and simple textural techniques, such as breathing through his trumpet, as the music demands.
The great filter for these influences is the duo’s use of laptop. The tone of the trumpet and of Nguyen’s Vietnamese instruments are fairly diffuse but with the laptop, Knight is able to extract these tones and manipulate them, creating a vital middle ground. The tendency is toward additive composition, taking residual elements of the live performance and channelling them into the laptop with the sound quickly becoming a thick mass of disparate influences.
human and inhuman
Residual blends the very human sounds of breath and fingers with the very digital sounds of Knight’s laptop manipulations. The duo combine the elements effectively, playing each to their strengths. The sound of the live instruments is organic and Knight and Nguyen, as humans, are capable of spontaneity within improvisation. Nguyen in particular seems thoroughly invested in his performance, hunched over his instruments in a kind of rapture. For the laptop sound is simply data—it cannot make aesthetic judgements—but it can transform the data in ways that are novel and often surprising.
There is a sense of the laptop functioning as a kind of hive mind for the improvisation, the software as the central logic to which the other sounds adhere. Delicate string sounds and extended trumpet techniques are subsumed by laptop textures which become ever thicker with sampled and manipulated sounds densely overlaid. This provides a useful way of unifying the composition (always important in collaborative improvisation) but it also creates a sense of disconnect between the two live performers—each communicates with the laptop, less so with the other.
old and new
Residual is steeped in history. The dahn tranh and dan bau belong to a family of Chinese instruments which were brought to Vietnam around the tenth century. The trumpet is considerably more modern but far from a new instrument with the first valve trumpets constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Aside from the obvious new-ness of running these instruments through a laptop the duo employ several other innovative approaches to bringing these instruments into a twenty-first century context.
Nguyen’s dan tranh is prepared—objects placed on and between the strings to alter the sound. The result is incredibly effective, allowing the natural ornate tones of the instrument to sit beside percussive outbursts. Extended techniques are also a clear focus for the duo. Nguyen scrapes his fingers along the dan tranh to create ethereal glissandi and Knight breathes, whistles and sings through his trumpet to unexpectedly entrancing effect.
Residual is a collaboration in a far wider sense than simply being the work of two performers. The pair weaves an interesting counterpoint between East and West, human and inhuman, old and new. The aim is not to hold these elements together but to position them against one another. What is cancelled is the expectation of context and genre, Residual is what remains.
ina Stuhldreher, HOW I GOT GLOBALISM – Elements of a magic serendipity circle, (work in progress), 2011
courtesy the artist
ina Stuhldreher, HOW I GOT GLOBALISM – Elements of a magic serendipity circle, (work in progress), 2011
live art galleries
Whether by chance or design, two Sydney galleries are opening their doors for a month of performances and live art. At Tin Sheds Gallery, Rules of Play includes a series of readings, performances and works in progress. This is the Australian iteration of the exhibition which first took place at the Bell Street Project Space in Vienna in 2010 and features familiar faces from the growing live art/visual art cross-over scene such a Sarah Rodigari, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Teik-Kim Pok, Michaela Gleave and Kathryn Gray alongside international guests Bernadette Anzengruber, Michael Poetschko and Nina Stuhldreher.
Family photograph of Teik-Kim Pok performing magic in Singapore circa 1995
courtesy the artist
Family photograph of Teik-Kim Pok performing magic in Singapore circa 1995
Teik-Kim Pok is available for psychic readings, Brian Fuata asks his audience to learn and pass on a performance while Michael Poetschko continues his video-work-in-progress made across a number of cities exploring the idea of the “zone” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The exhibition component is open during the day with performances Wednesday-Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. Rules of Play, curator Kathryn Gray, supported by the Tin Sheds Curate/Innovate grant, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sept 9 – Oct 1; http://tinsheds.wordpress.com/; http://playingrules.tumblr.com/
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton: THE GREAT WINTER
photo courtesy the artists
Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton: THE GREAT WINTER
September has also seen Peloton (P25) hosting Performance Month showcasing “both emerging and established artists within the field and spirit of Performance” (website). The final performances will feature Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton presenting the Great Winter, an endurance work built around movement and stillness inspired by the Norse myth of a three-year Winter—prelude to a devastating battle destroying heaven and earth. Sach Catts continues his ongoing investigation into stress and points of failure using concepts from structural engineering. Kevin Platt hopes to sing with a dog named Alfie, and the work by a collective of 80s performance artists R.O. & S.Q. remains deliberately mysterious. Art band Ex-Trendy (Robbie Ho and Matte Rochford) will finish off the month rocking the final night party. Performance Month, curator Francesca Heinz, Peloton, p25, Sept 1-25 peloton.net.au/
roaming sydney streets
Victoria Hunt, No Cold Feet, De Quicney Co
photo Paris Spellson
Victoria Hunt, No Cold Feet, De Quicney Co
For 10 years the annual Art and About festival has been chipping away at the reputation of Sydney’s CBD as a cultural wasteland and the program for the 2011 festival looks like they’ve really made some headway. A particular highlight will be Janet Echelman’s Tsunami 1.26 (actually based on the Chilean earthquake in 2010, not the recent Japanese catastrophe)—a gigantic piece of crocheted netting based on a 3D model of the tsunami. Made from high-tensile rope and suspended above the city it will “create an oasis of sculpture delicate enough to be choreographed by the wind” (website). Tsunami 1.26 is part of Powerhouse Museum’s Love Lace exhibition.
UK artist Michael Landy will present the 24th Kaldor Public Art Project, Acts of Kindness, in which he maps the collection of stories of small moments of kindness from Sydneysiders. Contested Landscape: Art Meets Science at Customs House Square curated by Leo Robba and produced by Anthony Papp, brings together a collection of artists and scientists “to tackle the complex contests for scarce land and resources facing our local communities” (website). At Sandringham Gardens in Hyde Park, Liane Rossler and Heidi Dokulil will present Happy Talk, building a pavilion using traditional methods and instigating talk and sharing around design in Pacific Island culture. And of course there’s the next installment of Laneway Art running until January 2012. (See review of the 2010 installment in RT101)
As well as the main program there’s a range of associated events such as the Mad Square After Hours activities at the AGNSW and De Quincey Co’s No Cold Feet, a dance/BodyWeather performance taking place in and around the architecture of St Mary’s Cathedral Square (See realtimedance for a profile on Tess de Quincey). Art & About, various locations, Sydney, produced by City of Sydney Events Unit, Sept 23- Oct 23
thou dost protest too much
Insomnia Cat Came to Stay, Crack Theatre Festival, TINA
courtesy the artists
Insomnia Cat Came to Stay, Crack Theatre Festival, TINA
Almost here is This is Not Art, the multi-headed beast that includes the sub-festivals Electrofringe, The National Young Writers’ Festival, Critical Animals Creative Research Symposium and the Crack Theatre Festival. Back in July, the situation seemed dire with Newcastle City Council deciding not to renew the festival’s triennial funding leaving them with an $18,000 shortfall. However in a show of support for the event, over $9,000 was raised via crowd-funding, with the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) coming on board with matching funding. In addition, local businesses chipped in and now the Council has seen the error of its ways and looks like increasing support in the future. So TINA lives on!
Now in its 14th year, Electrofringe is, as always, jam-packed with geekery, but with an emphasis on accessibility. You can learn about Arduino interfaces, hackerspaces, digital prototyping, solar-powered sound systems and the artistic integrity of robots. Then you can experience a range of innovative performances including electronic music duo Icarus’ album of 1000 variations; witness audiovisual meldings in the Electrobinge showcase and get into ‘digital freestyling’ with instruments generated in the Experimental Digital Instruments and their Performance course. Not to mention the Treasure Hunt where you pick up digital clues on USB sticks around Newcastle. There’s also the annual Electroprojections video screenings and Soda_Jerk’s Pixel Pirate II. (See RealTime’s Studio for the duo’s The Carousel. Festival co-director Cara Anne-Simpson also features in our studio)
Cracked Theatre Festival is a recent addition to the TINA family, starting out as a performance program of the 2007 National Young Writers’ festival. This year it’s offering workshops with Restless Dance Theatre, Leisa Shelton, Ever After Theatre and MKA. Also on offer are performances including Laura Scrivano’s Rapid Response, creating short site- specific performances around the city; Insomnia Cat Came To Stay, a kinky cabaret by Fleur Susannah Kilpatrick; and the Remix project by dancer Emiline Forster conjuring new choreographies from audience remixes of video clips.
Sound Summit, which has been part of the festival since 1998, has now separated from TINA, but will take place at the same time, same place, producing a range of workshops, label showcases and gigs headlined by MONO (Japan), Moon Duo (USA) and Wet Hair (USA) plus industry panels and DIY workshops.
It seems Spring breeds fringe festivals, with Brisbane’s Under the Radar almost over, Sydney Fringe continuing and the Melbourne Fringe kicking off on September 21. As usual there is a plethora of performance, dance, music and visual art experiences from independent artists, too numerous to offer highlights here. As well as presenting a range of independent productions, the Melbourne Fringe produces some programs itself and this year their ‘keynote’ project is Atlas. For the last three months local artists Benjamin Ducroz, Kieran Swann and Kit Webster have been consulting architects and designers in order to adapt their practices towards creating large scale installations and instigations around Melbourne, looking to actively engage the spectator as performer. Ducroz uses pattern based stop motion animation exploring the movements of nature; Swann ranges across performance, video and installation; while Webster works with audiovisual installations, digital sculptures and projections. The projects are expected to be “of a scale and standard that is beyond the usual financial or technical capabilities of an independent artist. And the audience can watch it as it unfolds” (media release). Melbourne Fringe, various venues; Sept 21- Oct 9; www.melbournefringe.com.au/
music takes flight
While Perth audiences are being treated to the banquet of events that is Totally Huge New Music Festival (see RealTime’s daily onsite coverage http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Totally_Huge_New_Music_Festival_2011) Sydney audience will have the pleasure of a one-off performance by acclaimed New York sextet Eighth Blackbird (named after a Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”). Playing from memory, the group is widely recognized for their “theatrical flair—and for making new music accessible to wide audiences” (website) with the New Yorker describing them as “friendly, unpretentious, idealistic and highly skilled.” For their Sydney concert they’ll be performing works by Philip Glass, Fabian Svensson, Mayke Nas, Timo Andres, Dan Visconti and Stephen Hartke. Eighth Blackbird, Studio, Sydney Opera House, Sept 22; www.sydneyoperahouse.com
local sites and sounds
The Leichhardt Council is calling for proposals for their pilot program that will see the historic town hall opened up for a variety of cultural activities across Autumn 2012. Individuals and groups are invited to submit proposals for a one-off, or series of events between March and May that will “will entertain, provoke, stimulate, and/or educate local and visiting audiences” (submission form). There’s an emphasis on engaging with the local community but events can include performances, concerts, festivals, workshops and even balls and markets. While the Leichhardt Town Hall is the focus for this program there is the potential to extend to other town halls and spaces within the Leichhardt local government area which includes Balmain, Rozelle and Annandale. Applications are also open to artists and groups not based in the area. Applications close October 11, 2011, www.leichhardt.nsw.gov.au/Grants.html
NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE DECIBEL HAS PRESENTED A NUMBER OF CONCERTS AT PICA THIS YEAR, EACH HIGHLIGHTING SPECIFIC UNDERCURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL THOUGHT. THE THIRD IN THE SERIES, ENTITLED CAMERA OBSCURA, FOCUSED ON THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN SOUND AND SIGHT.
Visuality plays an enormous role in the interpretation of sound and vice-versa. In film, dance, theatre, games and live music visual and sonic textures intermingle, each feeding the other. The tendency is toward a direct relationship. In film, for example, music is used principally to heighten the emotional content of a scene. However Camera Obscura explored musical works with a more dynamic relationship between sound and image.
The first piece, Mothlight, by NSW composer Austin Buckett is inspired by a Stan Brakhage silent short film from 1963. As Brakhage did not want his silent films to be accompanied by music, the sound and image are isolated from one another. The musicians play flute, percussion and synthesiser tones which flutter, insect-like, about four speakers. A blank screen and large film projector onstage cast the players in a light of anticipation.
After a short pause in the performance the film projector whirs into life and Brakhage’s Mothlight plays while the performers sit in silence. The film is gorgeous—red silhouettes of moths skittering in grainy handmade animation. We recall the sonic textures, the remembered performance becoming the film’s soundtrack. The shimmer of percussion, the whir of the projector and the quivering moths of the film combine in an insect hum.
The next piece, Talking Board, is a collaboration between Decibel members Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery. The score is a huge composite image of various drawings and photographs projected onto the screen at the back of the stage, which the performers also face. Four circles representing the four instruments (bass clarinet, bass flute, cello and viola) move about the image instructing players as to which section of the graphic to read. The notation is all asemic—not prescribing any specific meaning in terms of pitch, rhythm etc but rather implying a sonic texture. The conversation between sight and sound in the piece is beautiful. Jackson Pollock-inspired drippings and alien landscapes are answered by percussive murmurings and velvety drones.
In Talking Board, the score itself is allowed a voice in the performance. The circles move according to their own rules of chance and logic. This creates a mobile form, where no two performances will repeat and the performers are no more certain of the next move than the listener. The shared drama of such a form is a big part of what makes this piece so involving for the audience.
Samuel Dunscombe’s West Park adopts a similar mobility. A fully notated score for clarinet and flute is pulled apart and randomly rearranged. The live sound of the instrumentalists is mixed with field recordings made at West Park Asylum in Epsom, UK. The visual element of this piece is mostly imagined whereas the field recordings are directly referential, describing the world in exact terms. Particularly when such loaded material is used, the sounds conjure instant and vivid imagery. The live instruments heighten the experience, creating an immersive and unsettling event.
Next was recent WAAPA graduate Kynan Tan’s piece, Split Mirror Planes, featuring four live performers, four speakers and four visual sources (networked laptops whose screens were visible to the audience). The eye is drawn around the space as various flashes and abstract motifs are passed between the laptops. Spatialising audio is by now a fairly common technique in new music but spatialised visual material is something I have not seen before. The sound and images here do not merely reflect one another but rather create a sonic-visual counterpoint, constantly in motion toward or away from each other.
The final piece of the night was White Lines by Marina Rosenfeld, who joined Decibel, playing turntables. The piece uses a film score with two parallel white lines changing width and opacity to direct subtle shifts in sound. The background of the film used much more concrete imagery than the other films of the night, with footage of flowers, cigarettes and churches all tied together by the visual motif of the white lines.
Connotation is a huge part of Rosenfeld’s work. The associations of imagery and sound take on more complex meaning when they are juxtaposed. White lines suggest associations ranging from division to purity to cocaine and it is interesting to see how these all play off one another. One particularly intriguing section involved delicate swelling sounds from percussionist Stuart James superimposed over footage of an 80s glam rock band at full fervour, their teased hair and pelvic thrusts taking on some surprising new connections.
Sound and imagery create a feedback loop. Image directs the way that one hears sound just as sound frames one’s reading of imagery. Such relationships have existed forever. What Decibel has done in Camera Obscura is to foreground these relationships. What the audience is left with is a fuller sensory experience: sight and sound as a dynamic conversation.
Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011: Decibel, Camera Obscura, performers Cat Hope, Lindsay Vickery, Stuart James, Malcolm Riddoch and Tristan Parr, with Marina Rosenfeld supported by Tura New Music, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Sept 19; http://www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/about
Joan Wright performing Andrew Ford’s Dark Side, THNMF 2011
SINCE ITS INCEPTION LESS THAN A YEAR AGO, THE ETICA ENSEMBLE HAS PRESENTED CONCERTS WITH AN EMPHASIS ON CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL MUSIC FROM THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES. OFFERING A PROGRAM OF SOLO AND ENSEMBLE WORKS FROM A VARIETY OF GENRES, TWILIGHT, PART OF TOTALLY HUGE NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL, PROVIDED PERHAPS ONE OF THE BEST OPPORTUNITIES TO PRESENT TO PERTH WHAT ETICA IS ALL ABOUT.
The first work for the evening was Andrew Ford’s Dark Side for solo double bass, performed by Joan Wright. Inspired by the vocal stylings of Bing Crosby, the double bass is amplified to make the intense murmuring noises of the lower register more prominent, positioning noisy string whispers against dark melodies that wind around one another. In a technically flawless performance Wright coaxed subtler nuances from the instrument and their musical implementation was interesting. However much of the piece seemed to be fairly static, always changing but not really feeling like it was developing. While the use of stasis can be a perfectly legitimate tool for musical expression, it didn’t seem to be the point of this work. Nevertheless Dark Side was a good start to the concert, engaging the audience with its emphasis on the subtle elements of the instrument.
Any momentum the concert had at this stage was swiftly halted by an overly long introduction to Charles Ives’ Piano Trio. While pianist Myron Romanu is to be commended for trying to communicate Ives’ complex musical language to the audience, his excessive detailing of each borrowed melody line and motif, and self-evident outlining of interactions between instruments made for a sluggish start. The performers themselves only really seemed to warm to the music halfway through the second movement, after which the piece really took on some life as interaction between musicians emerged. An ensemble performing the music of Charles Ives at its best captures both the distorted beauty inherent in the composer’s highly dissonant harmonies and the delightful emotional schizophrenia in his grotesque manipulations of popular and folk music. There is a strong place for Ives’ work to be performed by contemporary chamber ensembles such as Etica, but the full effect of the work can be lost when the music is only partially realised.
Philip Everall perfomring Nigel Westlake’s Onomatopeia, THNMF 2011
Philip Everall perfomring Nigel Westlake’s Onomatopeia, THNMF 2011
Philip Everall took to the stage next to perform Nigel Westlake’s Onomatopeia for solo bass clarinet and delay. Everall’s concise introduction and obvious enthusiasm for the work really helped to re-energise the concert. An undeniable classic of the Australian bass clarinet repertoire, Onomatopeia utilises a delay system to create thick, shimmering sheets of texture that slowly build and then evaporate. Minimalistic pulses help to drive the piece onward and give the work an involved yet accessible rhythmic character. Everall’s interplay with the electronic component was impressive, as he clearly understood how to control phrasing and dynamic elements of the music to draw out the best relationships in the sound. Minimalist music is always a crowd pleaser and Onomatopeia stood out as an obvious highlight of the evening.
Etica concluded their performance with a large ensemble work written by Perth composer James Ledger. Mean Ol’ World draws on blues motifs and attempts to transpose the form’s associations with despair and loneliness to the context of the modern chamber ensemble. Etica performed the material well, the work was sweet and accomplished and yet unchallenging.
This was always going to be a difficult performance for Etica in the context of the Totally Huge New Music Festival. The ensemble was coming off the back of three nights of inspiring concerts by Speak Percussion, Mark Gasser and Anthony Pateras that featured accomplished showcases of new Australian works as well as other challenging pieces from the 20th century. By comparison, Etica’s programming for the evening didn’t seem to have quite the same level of cultural significance. There is certainly a place, even a need, for an ensemble such as Etica in the Perth music scene, and the work they program appeals to a dedicated audience, but in the context of a Totally Huge New Music Festival, it seemed a little out of place.
Philip Samartzis and Gabriel Nodea, field recording near Warmun
photo courtesy the artist
Philip Samartzis and Gabriel Nodea, field recording near Warmun
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE PHILIP SAMARTZIS WAS TO UNDERTAKE TURA’S REMOTE ARTIST IN RESIDENCE POSITION IN THE WARMUN COMMUNITY OF EAST KIMBERLEY, A FLASH FLOOD WIPED OUT THE TOWN AND ITS 400 RESIDENTS WERE EVACUATED TO KUNUNURRA. WHEN THE RESIDENCY RCOMMENCED THE COMMUNITY HAD ONLY JUST MOVED BACK AND WORK WAS UNDERWAY TO REBUILD THE TOWN. THIS HAS MADE SAMARTZIS’ PROJECT ALL THE MORE RELEVANT AS HE HAS SONICALLY DOCUMENTED A COMMUNITY IN THE PROCESS OF PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION.
Samartzis’ project is titled Desert, ironic now obviously as the area has greened up with the rain, but also as its isolated, wilderness connotations are shattered by the presence of much machine noise from the rebuilding process. Nevertheless Samartzis and his assistant Madelynne Cornish have treated this contrasting range of sounds with equal care and curiosity. The surround sound presentation at Totally Huge New Music Festival was a work-in-progress, as Samartzis begins the process of condensing the vast amounts of material and shaping it into a final work.
Given the circumstances it’s not surprising that the piece begins with water, a gentle fade-in that gradually envelops us in its flow. It’s not the roar of the flood but a reminder of water and its force. The presence of machines is introduced very early—part of the environment as much as the overarching sonic dome of insects, frogs, laughing birds and barking dogs. Large trucks drive past, or rather through us (the audience clustered in the middle of one of the underground studios of the State Theatre Centre, closest to the sweet spot); planes and helicopters fly low overhead; wind rips through trees making metal objects creak and clank.
Occasionally we are offered the voice of an older Indigenous woman, mixed with the metal clangs, so that we hear only the texture and warmth of her voice but not much of her meaning. She re-appears at the end, overlayed by cavernous thwumps of a water tank being hit and we can just make out phrases about “cleaning the water tank,” “tough old-man.” The only other human voices we discern as distant murmuring and chatter. It seems Samartzis wants to avoid recognisable speech, maybe for fear this might encourage a semantic listening, searching for the meaning and cause of the sounds. However as the sources of his landscape recordings are quite clear—we recognise birds, dogs, fire and insects—perhaps the shift to text might not impose such a rupture. While aware that this is not an attempt at text-driven documentary, it feels as though a little more sense of the people through their own voices and words may be beneficial.
Philip Samartzis discussing Desert, THNMF 2011
photo Brad Serls
Philip Samartzis discussing Desert, THNMF 2011
The quality, depth and clarity of Samartzis and Cornish’s recordings are absolutely breathtaking and the sense of immersion, particularly if you close your eyes, is total. Yet it’s a hyper-real world—all the natural sounds are larger than life, as if the insects and birds are five times the scale. We hear individual grains of campfire crackle as if we are, in fact, inside the fire. I imagine sci-fi scenarios of being shrunk down so I can observe life on a molecular level. I’ve not experienced this slippage between reality and fantasy in field recording-based pieces before. It’s utterly engaging and raises interesting questions around ideas of authentic representation and artistic intervention in the documentation of natural sounds.
A surprising highlight, particularly for the more industrially inclined, is the ‘metal machine music’ made by the range of construction going on in the town. (Samartzis cites Lou Reed’s album of the same name as a seminal influence in his early noise making days in the duo Gum; see Experimental Music in Australia, USNW Press, 2009, Ed Gail Priest.) Creaks, scrapes, cataclysmic clangs and whining power tools are deftly sculpted into almost rhythms and seeming songs, while never feeling artificially musicalised.
At the end of the residency in the community the project was presented as an installation in the Warmun Art Centre (from which, the curator Maggie Fletcher mourns, 1000 paintings were swept away in the flood). The performance presentation at Totally Huge is a 45-minute piece and while it loses some structural cohesion around three-quarters of the way through, it ends beautifully with the small sounds of running taps, water tanks and a final clang, perhaps the slam of a rusty gate. Samartzis will continue to work on the composition for further presentation and I look forward to its next iteration but for now our time in Warmun is over.
Space-Shifter, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth
photo Christo Crocker, image courtesy the artists & Conical Gallery
Space-Shifter, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth
SPACE-SHIFTER, AN INSTALLATION BY SONIA LEBER AND DAVID CHESWORTH DIVORCES VOICE FROM CONVENTIONAL MEANING, ALLOWING VOCAL SOUNDS TO RUN FREE AROUND THE SPACE, COMPLETELY LIBERATED FROM CONTEXT. AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE, SPACE-SHIFTER IS, AT BEST, AN EXAMPLE OF SOUND ART FUNCTIONING AS AN INTRICATE AND FULLY REALISED COMPOSITION.
At face value, the stark minimalism of the presentation means that you almost expect some sort of dry, scientific examination of psychoacoustic effects. Sound emitting objects—transducers attached to various sheets of metal—are grouped and oriented in fixed positions around the space. Thankfully, initial fears are laid to rest, as the sonic character of the work proves unique.
Various kinds of rattles and plate reverb-style thumps help to give the disembodied vocals a strong presence in the room. The use of the PICA performance space’s black box as the site for the work adds gravity to the sound, creating a darker and more theatrical take on the antagonistic ‘trickster’ running around the space—at times creating a real sense of paranoia.
The visual aesthetic is decidedly minimal. The use of dented, broken and warped pieces of painted metal gives the impression that we are in the aftermath of some kind of powerful event that has caused the voice to be dislodged from the body and left free to run amok. While the physicality of the installation is a strong element, the audience might not ponder its significance, so immediately visceral is the sound content of the work.
It’s difficult to characterise these sounds. Treated as acoustic objects in their own right, a collage of extended vocal techniques fills the space. Initially the sounds are off-putting because of their disembodied unfamiliarity. However, after a while the various sequences of vocal extensions—squeals, grunts, growls, hisses, and laughter—become somewhat normalised within the context of the space. While you never quite know what to expect, the audience is able to quickly tune into the work’s lexicon and anticipate the kind of sound that could occur.
The spatialisation of this work is a real achievement. The distance between the sound emitting transducers is perfect and the dampened acoustic space of the PICA performance space creates a precise embodiment for the sound. It’s an immensely immersive listening experience as sounds bounce around, up walls and over the audience’s head.
But there is more to this work than just strange spatialisation. There is a real sense of composition, of arc and development over the duration of the 15-minute work. Dynamic variation is key to creating lasting interest in a piece such as this and is not neglected. Sound intensities rise and fall at rates that seem to be a little bit less than what the audience expects at any given time, adding yet another ‘trickster’ element to the work as it craftily eludes your expectations. With no obvious beginning or end, the constantly changing interaction between sound elements seems to allow the audience to derive a form from the work that is based upon their own experience of the space: a great achievement.
Pollen Trio
courtesy the artists
Pollen Trio
NEW MUSIC IS AN UNEASY PROPOSITION. IT COVERS AN INCREDIBLE ARRAY OF DISPARATE PRACTICES POOLING PEOPLE FROM CLASSICAL, ELECTRONIC, JAZZ, POST-ROCK AND VISUAL ARTS BACKGROUNDS INTO SOMETHING NOT FULLY BELONGING TO ANY OF THESE LINEAGES.
For the second of TURA’s Club Huge events, the PICA bar was home to a cross-section of the new music community with the performers and audience traversing a variety of ages, backgrounds and artistic spheres. The difficulty then is in finding a shared language with which to communicate across this musical Babel. The two acts of the night, free improvisers Pollen Trio and noise junkies Anthony Pateras and Malcolm Riddoch adopted separate but interesting stances on this pursuit of a musical language.
Pollen Trio is Miroslav Bukovsky (trumpet and electronics) Austin Buckett (piano) and Evan Dorrian (drums). The instrumentation suggests jazz and certainly this is a reference point (in particular the avant-jazz of The Necks), but there is more at play here. Buckett is a composer in the experimental and classical vein; Bukovsky was classically trained as a trumpet player in Soviet era Czechoslovakia and has been active in Australian jazz for many years while Dorrian considers fringe hip-hop such as Flying Lotus an influence. Their challenge, to take these musical dialects and synthesise them into something coherent and original and to do all this within the context of free improvisation, is more impressive still.
Free improvisation can be connected with automatic writing, a literary practice of the Surrealists in which the author attempts to write without critical thought. Read any piece of automatic writing and the result is a wash of texture. Language is used not for specific meaning but for impression, shape, tone and gesture. Free improvisation is not so much about forgetting one’s musical language as forgetting the rules of grammar and syntax that would normally apply. Similarly the result is a wash, tones and textures ebb and flow. Occasionally a lyrical escape of jazz piano, a heartfelt trumpet solo or a sudden stabilisation in the drum sounds occurs. These moments of musical language, taken in isolation, do not express any clear meaning, rather they appear as sentence fragments in the warm swirl of overlapping language.
Anthony Pateras, Malcolm Riddoch, Club Huge #2
photo Gail Priest
Anthony Pateras, Malcolm Riddoch, Club Huge #2
The night’s second performance was by Anthony Pateras and Malcolm Riddoch, playing a quadraphonic noise set of acoustic, analogue and digital feedback. If free improvisation is in tune with Surrealism then noise music has more to do with Dada. Noise explores the point where language fails, where function is ignored and form is all that’s left. With little in the way of discernable pattern or intent and at high volume, the sound of Riddoch and Pateras’ performance became a physical presence. Moments of swelling low frequencies and abrasive highs moved about the four speakers in aperiodic waves. The effect was of being submerged in sound.
Feedback is a mercurial element, constantly changing and impossible to predict. For the performers improvising with such material the role shifts from trying to produce sounds (as with traditional instruments) to managing sounds. Pateras and Riddoch’s performance was largely reactive. At each point throughout the performance one had the impression of the sound itself leading the improvisation with the two performers trying to elongate interesting sounds and quickly transform others. This has an interesting effect on the audience as well. The absence of any kind of objective ordering to the sound makes noise music incredibly subjective. Rather than trying to deconstruct the intent in the sound (as a listener at a classical concert might do) the task for the audience is to construct it, to build a sense of form within the random nature of the music.
New music is a language in process; its uneasiness will not be solved in a single evening. The two acts of TURA’s Club Huge #2 illustrate distinct approaches. Pollen Trio attempt to combine their various musical dialects into something more universal whilst Pateras and Riddoch highlight, and even revel in, the holes of such idealism: free improvisation as an attempt to explore and deconstruct one’s language; noise as the point where language fails. The experiment continues.
SPEAK PERCUSSION’S FINAL PERFORMANCE AT THE STATE THEATRE’S STUDIO UNDERGROUND FOR THE TOTALLY HUGE NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL WAS A TRUE SHOWCASE OF AUSTRALIAN TALENT. PERFORMING FOUR COMMISSIONED WORKS FROM AUSTRALIAN COMPOSERS LUKE PAULDING, THOMAS MEADOWCROFT AND LONG TIME COLLABORATOR ANTHONY PATERAS, SPEAK PERCUSSION, WITH ASSISTANCE FROM PERTH-BASED PERCUSSIONISTS, PERFORMED A FLAWLESS SET OF INSPIRATIONAL WORKS.
Refractions, an Anthony Pateras composition, was the oldest piece in the program, originally premiered by Speak Percussion in 2009. A piece for six performers, the work utilises a wide variety of percussion instruments, from bass drums, gongs and snares to glass bottles, keys and wine glasses. Refractions has a real emphasis on texture, ranging from harsh and brutal to moments of delicate beauty. The arrangement of sound for the acoustic ensemble is akin to experiments in electronic music. Very fast motifs fuse sounds together to form complex timbres and Pateras’ manipulation of the orchestration takes on, in parts, an almost granular character.
The ensemble is laid out in a semi-circle, with identical instruments arranged opposite one another. This allows for acoustic manipulations of the stereo field of perception, with sounds appearing to transition from one side of the ensemble to the other through the use of slight delays and subtle pitch relationships. Here, Speak Percussion demonstrate their formidable performative abilities in realising the subtleties of these sound movements, moving between various states of solid sound mass via moments of sonic fluidity that kept the audience mesmerised.
Thomas Meadowcroft’s The Great Knot followed. Alluding to a domestic environment through the incorporation of a variety of household objects laid out on a large kitchen table, Meadowcroft’s composition begins gently. A slow melody is performed on the thin sounding CASIO keyboard as the three performers create long drones from perfectly pitched wine glasses. With occasional inclusions of additional recorder drones and the noisy sound of marbles being spun in CD containers and mixing bowls, the piece feels almost synthetic, approaching the calm tranquillity of the synthesis works of Alva Noto.
Just as the audience begins to settle into a state of reflection however, backing music built from the sounds of the CASIO keyboard is triggered. Sounding like a campy soundtrack to an 8-bit video game from the 1980s, the change is totally unexpected. Noisy textures continue to be performed by the ensemble, and while the composition doesn’t exactly build to a climax, it is certainly clear that the music is getting busier. Somehow, this sudden change climbs above a simple shock tactic and takes the piece to a new level. What began as a quiet, contemplative composition by the end displays a playful sense of parody that seems to delight in so easily manipulating the listener’s expectations.
Luke Paulding’s work Surface Given Radiance was the first piece following the intermission. Utilising pitched-metal resonating instruments, the emphasis of this work is on the sound possibilities of the 80 microtonally tuned aluminium tubes and their interaction with the vibraphones and crotales. The latter instruments create a mesmerising blur of sound, a thick washy texture against which the dampened, microtonal pitches of the aluminium tubes can be sounded. The end result is an overwhelming sound mass that appears tonal, but which allows for various subtle microtonal fluctuations to be played out over time, brought out perfectly by the measured performance of Speak Percussion.
The final piece was Anthony Pateras’ second composition for the evening, Flesh & Ghost. The piece was premiered by Speak Percussion earlier this year at MONA FOMA (see RT102, p5), and was originally received on the eve of Speak’s 10th birthday. As with Refractions there is a strong spatial element to this work. Maximising the performance possibilities of all 12 performers, frequencies are sent up and down the length of the ensemble and bounced from performer to performer, elegantly curving in precise patterns. New material muscles its way through old material to propel the work forward, and while the general structure of the piece consists of blocks of rapidly developing rhythmic material, the general emphasis of the piece is on the movement of and relationship between different sounds. Thunderous toms and intense bursts of marimba disguise what is essentially a playful manipulation of frequencies and sound relationships and the variety of ways sound can be manipulated by the ensemble.
Speak Percussion’s final major performance for the Totally Huge New Music Festival (they had one more performance including a repeat of The Great Knot at The West Australian Academy of Performing Arts on Sept 20) was an excellent demonstration of some of the most exciting new Australian music written in recent times. Speak Percussion’s skill and dedication in realising these pieces is impressive and only serves to reinforce how much better off the Australian music scene is for their interest in commissioning new and original works.
Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011: Speak Percussion, Flesh and Ghost, composers Anthony Pateras, Luke Paulding, Thomas Meadowcroft, performers Eugene Ughetti (artistic director), Matthias Schack-Arnott, Peter Neville, Leah Scholes, Matthew Horsley Louise Devenish; presented by Tura New Music; Studio Underground, Perth State Theatre Center; Sept 17; http://www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/about
FOLLOWING THE VIRTUOSIC PERFORMANCES OF ROSS BOLLETER, MARK GASSER AND ANTHONY PATERAS AT THE PIANO TAPESTRIES PERFORMANCE, A SMALL GROUP OF NEW MUSIC ENTHUSIASTS RETIRED TO THE PICA BAR FOR CLUB HUGE #1, SOMETHING OF AN AFTER PARTY FOR TURA’S MAIN PRESENTATION THAT EVENING. THERE, MARINA ROSENFELD AND JULIAN DAY PERFORMED STRIPPED BACK, ELECTRONIC PERFORMANCES.
Julian Day’s set was of a continuation of his synth drone project, An Infinity Room (or AIR for short). This has included up to 30 separate synthesisers, but tonight was reduced to two with each synthesiser connected to a separate speaker. Using large metal bolts to continually sustain notes, Day manipulated thick six-note chords, one note at a time, gliding from synth to synth, his minimal gestures creating maximal results.
Exploring various approaches to the manipulation of drones makes up a large part of Day’s composition practice, something that has been clearly realised with his AIR project. In this context, Day is able to construct tension and release through slight adjustments in the chords, generating beat frequencies and other psychoacoustic effects by creating clusters of notes close to one another. While the initial addition of a note stands out, it is quickly absorbed back into the larger sound mass. At the same time the removal of a note before it is replaced creates a noticeable gap in the chord bringing abscence to the foreground.
The PICA bar space offered a unique experience of the music. While sound filled the space, rather than being particularly reverberant some areas of the room were successful bass traps which gave the work a nice, inadvertent interactive element. By and large however, much of the audience was content to remain seated in a fixed location. While the set was too loud for some, others were content to bow their heads in a kind of monastic reverence for the 25-minute duration.
Following a brief intermission, New York artist Marina Rosenfeld performed a 25-minute turntable-based set. Rather than using pre-existing recordings of other people’s sounds, Rosenfeld transfers her own pre-recorded sounds to acetate records. This gives the samples a different sound quality from traditional vinyl, which is fully exploited as a unique musical characteristic.
Compared to Day’s, Rosenfeld’s set was a decidedly minimal affair, with rhythmic clicks and bursts of noise playing against gentle, evolving tones. Unfortunately the noise of Perth’s Friday night Northbridge clientele imposed itself on what was otherwise a more meditative set.
Rosenfeld occasionally built up several layers of intensity but the more remarkable element of her performance was how willing she was to use space between her sounds. While Julian Day’s performance maintained a consistent intensity, Rosenfeld was able to incorporate space and dynamic nuance into her performance, placing an emphasis on the relationship between different sounds. Bass tones were used sparingly, almost more to add emphasis in certain places and to remind the audience that a fair proportion of the music consisted of mid and high-ranged sounds. This interplay between samples embedded the entire set with a sense of gravity and significance, the result of which was an engaging performance that brought the evening to a surprisingly introspective end.
Overall Club Huge #1 was the perfect response to the intense, virtuosic nature of the earlier Piano Tapestries concert. After the breakneck performances of Mark Gasser and Anthony Pateras, a couple of hours of laid-back, minimal electronic music from Julian Day and Marina Rosenfeld was exactly what was needed to clear the head.
Ross Bolleter, Daughters of Time, Piano Tapestry, THNMF 2011
THE PIANO IS PERHAPS THE MOST ENDEARING SYMBOL OF THE ROMANTIC ERA COMPOSERS. IMAGES OF LISZT SWAYING BACK AND FORTH AT THE KEYBOARD OR BEETHOVEN TAKING THE LEGS OFF HIS PIANO TO BETTER HEAR ITS VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE FLOOR FORM PART OF THE SYMBOLISM OF THAT MUSICAL ERA. IN THE 20TH AND NOW 21ST CENTURIES THE PIANO PRESENTS MORE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS FOR THE COMPOSER. PIANO TAPESTRY DISPLAYS, THROUGH STARTLING VIRTUOSITY, SOME WAYS IN WHICH CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS HAVE APPROACHED THE INSTRUMENT.
The opening piece of the night, and the one furthest removed from the romantic tradition, was by Ross Bolleter improvising on what he calls “Daughters of Time.” These are three pianos taken from various locations in outback Australia where, through years in the harsh climate, they have been weathered to the point of ruin. The instruments are heavy with memory. They have spent lifetimes in outback hotels and on verandas at the mercy of the elements. The symbolism is stark but affecting. It is impossible to distance the sound of these pianos from their connotations. The unevenly resonating strings and muted chimes instantly conjure images of the Australian outback and of an uneasy relationship to European heritage.
The visual element of the performance furthers such associations. Bolleter sits not on a piano stool but on a cushion on the floor, his head down and arms outstretched in order to reach the three pianos surrounding him. It’s a far remove from the exaggerated raptures of Liszt or Chopin but Boletter’s performance is nonetheless intense and introspective. Improvised freely, the music exists in two time frames; firstly in the immanent present of the improvisation, and secondly in the imagined memory of these Daughters of Time. As Ross Bolleter writes “Ruins are what remain–still passing away to be sure, but lingering.”
The romantic image of the piano is also closely associated with those other romantic inventions, the solo recital and the instrumental virtuoso. This is a world that second performer, Mark Gasser, inhabits. To see a performer so totally in control of his instrument is mesmerising. In Gasser’s first two pieces by Ronald Stevenson, there is an incredible athleticism to the performance. The music is loud, complex and unrelentingly fast.
Gasser’s third piece, Luigi Nono’s …sofferte onde serene… (…serene waves endured…) uses a recorded performance of Nono’s friend, the pianist Maurizio Pollini as its seed. This recording, made slightly before Pollini’s death, blends with similar material played by Gasser. Nono says that the recorded piano resonates like the bells in the lagoon near his house and the serene bells of a funeral. The result is of still, calm beauty in the face of tragedy.
The last piece, by Australian composer Lindsay Vickery, employs the Yamaha Disklavier, which uses data from a laptop to drive small motors attached to the piano’s hammers. This automated material blends with passages played by Gasser–a duet for man and machine. Having keys move of their own accord thwarts associations with the piano as an extension of the performer’s fingers. Coming straight after Nono’s piece, there is a supernatural element to the performance, as if ghosts live in the keyboard.
The final performance of the night was from Anthony Pateras. Classically trained, he spent years experimenting with prepared pianos—using nails, coins and other objects inserted between the strings to expand the timbral and gestural capabilities of the instrument. Tonight’s piano is not tampered with but under Pateras’ fingers gesture is still the dominant force. The notes are so densely overlaid that any sense of pitch (other than in the most general sense of high or low) is meaningless. The music pivots between swarms of clustered notes and hammering percussive tones.
This performance too was improvised but with a stronger sense of form than Boletter’s. Pateras’ personality features prominently in his performances and he had clearly made a conscious effort not to engage the audience in any direct manner. He walked onto the stage in sandals (which he removed to play) and sat motionless at the piano for almost a minute before commencing, willing himself into a musical trance. This aesthetic is a big part of the way that Pateras brands himself. It seems to be a reaction against the ego and conservatism of the solo recital and, simultaneously, a bid for the audience’s undivided attention. This contradiction only serves to heighten the appeal of his music and of Pateras himself as an indispensable part of it. This is music that only he can play.
The aim of Piano Tapestry was to present three different approaches to the piano. Bolleter’s symbolism, Gasser’s virtuosity and electronics and Pateras’ gestures formed a triptych of contemporary approaches to the instrument—modern tastes, techniques and technologies meeting with the ghosts of the piano’s history.
Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011: Piano Tapestry, Mark Gasser, Ross Bolleter, Anthony Pateras, presented by Tura New Music, Perth State Theatre Centre, Studio Underground, presented by Tura New Music, Sept 16; http://www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/2011/about
LE NOIR DE L’ETOILE IS A WORK ABOUT SOUND IN SPACE…
Composer Gerard Grisey considered sounds as living objects—their time consisting of birth, life and death. Le Noir de L’Etoile is scored for six percussionists and tape, performed here by Melbourne’s Speak Percussion, with the musicians positioned in a circle around the performance space, audience seated in the middle. The sounds of the various gongs, drums and cymbals emanate from discrete points, move about the room, meeting in the reverberant space—their lifecycles intermingling. Grisey implements a number of dramatic spatial techniques, subtle gong sounds spill from one performer to the next, centrifugal drum rolls cycle rapidly around the players and a mess of independent tempi create a web of interlocking sound.
Visually, there is a ceremonial and communal, almost tribal aesthetic created by having audience members huddled together in semi-darkness while around them visceral and often violent percussion plays. Percussion is very gestural in comparison to most other instruments, the physical movements of the player forming a direct relationship to the sound the audience hears. With sounds appearing from all points around the audience, however, this relationship becomes confused and the results range from mesmerising to terrifying.
Le Noir de l’Etoile is a work about sound in space…
The impetus for the piece comes from a meeting between Grisey and Joe Silk, an astronomer and discoverer of the Vela Pulsar, the remnant of a long dead star whose electromagnetic fluctuations are made audible by radio receiver. This sound is taken, literally from space, and distributed via four speakers into the constructed space of the performance where it interacts with the live sound of the percussionists. In fact, the two sound sources are remarkably similar. The signal from the Vela Pulsar is so regular and percussive that it was originally believed to be a communication from alien beings. The sound of the pulsar, interacting with the tones of the percussionists, becomes another member of the ensemble.
The Speak Percussion Ensemble (Eugene Ughetti, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Peter Neville, Leah Scholes, Matthew Horsley and Louise Devenish) was truly awe-inspiring. The overriding impression of their playing was of total dynamic control: moments of still and delicate texture were interspersed with frenzied outbursts of noise without ever feeling abrupt or out of place. Even in moments of near silence there was an incredible intensity to the performance.
Underlining the spiritual and ceremonial undercurrents in his work, Gerard Grisey refers to the sound of the Vela Pulsar as “a meeting with the eternal timekeepers.” The performance then becomes a totemic celebration of this far distant sound. The resonant tones of the percussion contribute to a feeling of togetherness, the influence of something beyond the performance space. The intense, shaman-like concentration of the performers too played an important role in the overall environment in which the sounds were to live out their time.
Le Noir de l’Etoile is also a work about sound in time…
The influence of music on one’s perception of time was an area of fascination for Grisey. Sound in space and sound in time are intimately related concepts though they do differ. Sound is a way of breaking up and measuring time, just as time is a way of separating sound. There is an interesting distinction to be made between the different ways sound is experienced by players and audience.
The piece’s six performers have a difficult relationship to time in the piece. Each is sent individual click tracks while they perform, allowing mosaic-like effects of overlaid tempi. The speed of each click track is not static either; a glance at the score reveals that at points throughout the performance tempi are changing every bar. For the performer this requires intense concentration—keeping exact measurements of time in complex circumstances and over such duration is no mean feat.
For the performer an understanding of time dictates their approach to sound. For the audience however, the understanding is much more subjective, the ebb and flow of time informed by the sounds of the performance. At points of relative quiet there was a feeling of anticipation among the listeners—time lengthened by expectation. During moments of climax the raw adrenaline of the performance took over and time seemed to speed up.
Le Noir de l’Etoile is an exploration of sound, space and time.
Speak Percussion act as conduits, their imposing array of instruments sounding in sympathy with a fundamental universal rhythm. A profoundly impressive experience.
Totally Huge New Music Festival 2011: Speak Percussion, Le Noir de l’Etoile, composer Gerard Grisey, performers Eugene Ughetti (artistic director), Matthias Schack-Arnott, Peter Neville, Leah Scholes, Matthew Horsley, Louise Devenish; Studio Underground; Perth State Theatre Centre, presented by Tura New Music, Sept 15; http://www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/about
AFTER AN EXHILARATING BEGINNING TO THE FESTIVAL WITH SPEAK PERCUSSIONS’ DELICATE AND BRACING INTERPRETATION OF LE NOIR DE L’ETOILE, THE BRAVE AND DEDICATED ONES (OR THOSE WHO COULD FIND A LIFT) JOURNEYED TO THE DEEPEST, DARKEST INDUSTRIAL ZONE OF PERTH—OSBORNE PARK—TO THE ARTIFACTORY, FOR A SONIC ONSLAUGHT IN THE FORM OF NOIZEMACHIN!!
This was the third iteration of NoizeMachin!!, a new series presenting six to eight artists performing for around eight minutes, with the each act transitioning into the next. The first amalgamated set was by one of the event organisers Sam Gillies (also one of the RealTime @THNMF writers), Mitchell Mollison, HomeWrecker, Karl Ford and Anthony Pateras.
Gillies established a comparatively gentle tone with his laptop set: a thick layering of growling purrs peppered with sweeping beeps and dial tones. Moving in and out of the mix, almost subliminal, is a pretty melancholic melodic line. Gillies’ wet flutters transition neatly with Mitchell Mollison’s deep, glitching sinetones, sounding like CPU overload (immediately making this laptopper anxious), but nicely crafted to make angular rhythms. Mollison’s is a patient set with incremental shifts and additions winding down into a just-audible subiness.
HomeWrecker (aka Fur Chick or Clair Pannell) overlaps with a nice sonic and gestural rupture, spinning a metal disc on a miked-up plate. She very quickly transforms the dry rattle via several pedal-punches into a solid chunk of rumble which she tends and adds to with actions like miked-up scissors snipping through cardboard to make rhythms; or small, pretty vocals that are immediately swallowed back into the texture.
Anthony Patera, Karl Ford, NoizeMachin!! #3
photo Gail Priest
Anthony Patera, Karl Ford, NoizeMachin!! #3
Karl Ford enters the sonic picture with deep metallic tones, perfectly pitched to the remains of HomeWrecker’s rumble, elicited from miked and affected turntable beds struck like gongs. These sounds are looped and manipulated to create a curiously meditative industrial music. Anthony Pateras finishes off the set with some heavy ructations, penetrating oscillator pings and crazy glissandi. It’s full to overflowing, but never too much in Pateras’ signature way, ending with a sea of static.
Malcolm Riddoch, NoizeMachin!! #3
photo Gail Priest
Malcolm Riddoch, NoizeMachin!! #3
Significant atmosphere was lost as the fluorescent lights were turned on for the changeover, but quickly regained by the second set of Malcolm Riddoch, I.n0jaQ and Christopher de Groot. (A group jam planned at the end was cancelled due to the lateness of the hour.) Riddoch sets a mike up in the space and, working across four speakers, sculpts the feedback into pulsing cycles, pulling overlapping tones closer and closer together until they join in a persistent nasal attack, with deep under-thumping. The final touch is a beautiful glassy flutter making something really complex, perplexing and quite magnificent.
I.n0jaQ, NoizeMachin!! #3
photo Gail Priest
I.n0jaQ, NoizeMachin!! #3
I.n0jaQ then approaches his workstation—a ladder with pedals placed on the steps so that he must climb to activate them. His sound consists of layers of dirty, swirling, granulated feedback issuing from a guitar amp, increasing in volume to the extent that the physical gesture, while intriguing, doesn’t really have a discernible sonic impact. Finally he climbs to the top of the ladder, places a wooden box contraption on his head, from which a cannon ball is suspended, and attempts to activate it, but the sound of the ‘spring reverb cannon’ is also lost in the mix. He concludes by tilting the ladder until he and it topple to the ground leaving us with that sad feedback of a smashed guitar, or ladder in this case.
The dramatic ending of I.n0jaQ and the unfortunate computer crash of Christopher de Groot meant that there wasn’t really a transition between the two acts, but the chime and silence of reboot was a good ear cleaner. With a strong interest in film scoring, de Groot’s work offers a sense of deep perspective within the sonic field; a throbbing bass in the distance, small harsh crescendos of gritty noise in the foreground; and a particularly beautiful sound with the elasticity or shape of a voice, but none of the organic timbre, like an otherworldly siren song or alien opera. A mesmerising finish.
The innovative format for NoizeMachin!! makes for an ever shifting palette of sounds without overloading the audience. I can’t help wondering how satisfying it is for artists to play for only 10 minutes, and I wouldn’t have minded hearing more from some and perhaps some longer transitions. However, overall it’s pacey and never gets the chance to be boring. The performance was also accompanied by a quite dazzling display of laser projections—not just your standard radioactive green, but deep blues, purples and pinks—which while not necessarily enmeshed with the audio, created a sense of dynamism and energy in the space. The venue, The Artifactory, is itself pretty interesting, a warehouse full of gadgets, calling itself a hackerspace—a membership based collective of nerds, noodlers and geeks exploring all manner of electrical wizardry out in the suburbs. For those that way inclined, their workshops, and of course NoizeMachin!!, are definitely worth the trip.
“A great festival is one that exposes participants and audience to new directions and ideas and the 2011 Totally Huge New Music Festival promises to do just that with an impressive program of Australian and international work.” (Tura website) The program will include concerts, installations, surround sound presentations, live broadcasts, workshops artist talks and more. Highlights include Space/Shifter, an installation by David Chesworth and Sonia Leber, and a surround sound concert by Philip Samartzis who has been Remote Artist in Residence in the Warmun community in the East Kimberley. Speak Percussion will perform two concerts: Gerard Grisey’s epic percussion masterwork, Le Noire de l'Etoile; and Flesh & Ghost featuring works by Anthony Pateras, Luke Paulding and Thomas Meadowcroft.
Special guest for this year’s festival is New York composer and turntablist Marina Rosenfeld renowned for her ongoing performance, Sheer Frost Orchestra: a graphically notated score performed by 17 females using nail polish bottles to activate electric guitars. For THNMF 2011 Rosenfeld who will present Teenage Lontana at the Midland Railway Workshops working with local teenagers to create a 35-voice choir and speaker installation. Rosenfeld will also be the keynote speaker of the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference focused around the theme of Immanence.
Other artists in town for the festival include from Australia, Speak Percussion, Decibel Ensemble, Etica Ensemble, Pollen Trio and Ross Bolleter along with guests Mark Gasser (UK) and from Japan FourColor, minamo and moskitoo.
realtime writers at totally huge
RealTime Associate Editor Gail Priest will be joined by two Perth-based writers.
Sam Gillies
I am a West Australian based sound artist and composer with a taste for everything from chamber based electro-acoustic works to experimental sound art and conceptual pieces.
I studied at UWA, completing a Bachelor of Arts with majors in Communications Studies and English Literature, before completing a Certificate Level IV of Music Composition at The West Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2008. I started studying a Bachelor of Music (Composition and Music Technology) at WAAPA in 2009 under the tutelage of Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery, and will finish these studies at the end of 2011.
As a solo artist I am active in the Perth new music scene curating the regular NoizeMaschin!! event at The Artifactory hackerspace and performing at venues such as the Velvet Lounge and the Bakery and as part of TURA’s Club Zho series. I also perform with two local bands, The Shallows, an 11-piece indie rock band and Cycle~ 440, an electro-acoustic duo of piano and laptop.
In addition to my musical pursuits, I have been making my own films and multimedia experiments while pursuing an interest in journalism and academia, having contributed works to a variety of publications and conferences over the last four years. I also currently co-host the Difficult Listening program on public radio station RTRFM, along with Bryce Moore and Philip Everall.
Henry Andersen
Sound, for me, is a source of fascination. Sound, real or imagined, is a big part of the way in which I think about the world. It’s everywhere, inescapable and infinitely variable.
As a composer, what interests me most about music is gesture and contrast, taking disparate musical elements and making them into something that has its own unique logic and identity, but is still visceral. The kind of music I enjoy listening to shares these traits—a balance between what one hears directly (the sound itself) and what one hears indirectly (the intention behind a piece, its logic, its place within the artistic landscape.)
What one experiences when they listen to music is the synthesis of these two elements – all sound carries some connotation. It is these connotations that change the way that we experience music, from culture to culture, person to person and even day to day. Connotation and intention in music is something that I love to unpick and so, for me, writing music and writing about music go neatly together.
Projection Playground, Olaf Meyer, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
photo Bernie Phelan
Projection Playground, Olaf Meyer, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
THE RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT THAT RENOWNED FITZROY VISUAL ARTS INSTITUTION GERTRUDE CONTEMPORARY MAY FACE AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE WITH ITS BUILDING BEING PLACED ON THE MARKET HAS RENEWED DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE INCREASING GENTRIFICATION OF THE INNER SUBURBS OF MELBOURNE. GERTRUDE STREET IN FITZROY HAS FORMED A LOCUS OF SUCH DEBATES, HAVING WITHIN A GENERATION TRANSFORMED FROM A GRUNGY, NEGLECTED STRIP INTO A SOUGHT-AFTER PRECINCT OF GALLERIES (COMMERCIAL AND NOT-FOR-PROFIT), DESIGNER BOUTIQUES, QUEUE-INDUCING BARS AND HIGH-END RESTAURANTS.
Gertrude Street epitomises the eternal progression as well as the contradictions of gentrification, linked strongly to Melbourne’s persistent, prolonged and generally successful attempts to increase its tourist appeal. Gertrude Street nowadays is a must-see local spot for visitors, yet amongst the high-end stores and eateries, the central and most recognisable buildings of Gertrude Street remain the Atherton Gardens housing commission flats while the locally infamous 86 tram—immortalised by the Bedroom Philosopher—tracks down the street on its way to and from Bundoora.
The Gertrude Street Projection Festival began in 2008 as the initiative of the Gertrude Association, an organisation established by local residents and business owners Kym Ortenburg and Monique McNamara, as a response to changes in the demographic of the street and the local area. For just over a week in late July, Gertrude Street transformed into a long, outdoor gallery of light and projection-based artworks, displayed on and at times integrated within the street’s architecture and commercial spaces. Involving 29 sites and over 50 artists the theme of this year’s festival was Hidden: Places & Spaces, with a particular emphasis on projects that engaged diverse local communities as participants and makers.
Façade, Greg Giannis, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
photo Bernie Phelan
Façade, Greg Giannis, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
Many such pieces could be seen to respond to an idiom of being ‘hidden in plain view.’ Greg Giannis’ Façade engaged with the architecture and residents of the housing commission flats, imposing structures in themselves yet all too easily disregarded (consciously or unconsciously) by passersby. Giannis’ work re-inscribed them into the Gertrude Street landscape by presenting an interactive, community-based piece. Through the artist’s website people could create their own images and designs to be projected throughout the festival on the south-facing façade through a colourful tetris-like grid. Fittingly, the blockish nature of the projected images also hinted at the standardised and homogenous nature of public housing architecture.
Stars & More, Arika Waulum, Yandell Walton, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
photo Bernie Phelan
Stars & More, Arika Waulum, Yandell Walton, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
Particular emphasis was placed on the Indigenous history of the local area, connecting the festival’s theme to a sense of forgotten histories and rarely told stories. In addition to a camp-fire storytelling night at the Atherton Gardens involving elders and members of the local Indigenous community, vital places of Indigenous culture and history were highlighted through the 10-night projection series, in particular an imposing but relatively overlooked building on the corner of George Street, The Melbourne Aboriginal Youth, Sport and Recreation Centre (MAYSAR). This was the site of one of the festival’s most visible projects, with Indigenous artist Arika Waulu working with Yandell Walton to create a large-scale projection, Stars & More, on the building’s exterior. Combing archival images and photos of current MAYSAR participants with imagery of native Australian flora and Indigenous dancers, the piece presented a powerful image of ongoing and regenerative cultural practice. Waulu and Walton’s project re-animated a place of importance and ongoing involvement for Fitzroy’s Indigenous community, which remains perhaps little-known to many residents as well as passersby.
A number of the pieces were equally prominent—anything but hidden—projected large-scale onto recognisable buildings such as the Gertrude and Builders Arms Hotels. Olaf Meyer’s Projection Playground re-envisioned the Post Office rotunda as a spinning merry-go-round, offering a playful and compelling beacon and invitation to explore the outdoor gallery.
The festival largely reinforced a conceptualisation of time-based practice within public art, but moved it away from screen-based presentations. In contrast to pieces that enveloped the architecture of entire buildings, a number of artworks integrated themselves obliquely and unassumingly into the environment. In a sense, many reclaimed the spaces of commercialised interests in Gertrude Street for artistic expression and collaboration. Salote Tawale’s In the Bag elicited surprised responses from viewers as they searched for and eventually found the discreet installation in the window of a Crumpler store, with the video being precisely projected within one of the label’s distinctive bags. The piece illustrated the constraints to creativity by incorporating the image of the artist writing, sleeping and inhabiting a confined environment.
Portrait of a Man 1, Yandell Walton, Clare Hassett, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
photo Bernie Phelan
Portrait of a Man 1, Yandell Walton, Clare Hassett, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
Yandell Walton and Clare Hassett’s intervention into Francis Antiques, Portrait of a Man 1, reconceived a symbol of decorative and homely adornment into an image of reserved melancholia. Taking a rather unremarkable portrait of a male figure on display in the store, the artists subtly projected a fine track of tears down the figure’s cheek, hinting at some unknowable story or secret. It was a poetic reminder of the memories and narratives attached to and embodied within objects, so easily lost and forgotten once personal ephemera become ‘second-hand’ objects of trade.
The Encounter with the Shadow, Sabina Maselli, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
photo Bernie Phelan
The Encounter with the Shadow, Sabina Maselli, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
Other artworks offered fantastical and imaginative musings on the ‘inner lives’ of their inhabited spaces. Sabina Maselli’s elegant The Encounter with the Shadow revealed the ‘second life’ of the Gertrude Street store Bistrins Emporium—which doubles as a venue for evening dance classes. By incorporating an animated and silhouetted flamenco dancer against a folding screen in the shop’s rear, the piece evocatively re-activated the this space.
Fitzroy Learning Network, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
photo Bernie Phelan
Fitzroy Learning Network, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2011
Ultimately, some of the most moving pieces in the festival were the most modest in nature, made by and reflecting a diversity of local community groups. Located off Young Street and rather easy to miss was a simple photo montage—barely a few frames—offering a poignant image. Created by students at the Fitzroy Learning Network, the piece illustrated a group of young people shunning and physically excluding one of their peers from their friendship group. The piece resonated within the cold and dark streets, simply conveying the vital importance of individual and community bonds. Amongst the visually spectacular and crowd-pleasing installations of the festival, it was pleasing to discover that some of the most memorable artworks really were hidden, or at least requiring some patience and searching from the viewer, even on a chilly Melbourne winter’s evening.
Gertrude Association, The Gertrude Street 2011 Projection Festival , founding concept Monique McNamara, creative producer, director Kym Ortenburg; various sites, Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, July 22-31; www.thegertrudeassociation.com
Dave Sleswick, Noa Rotem, The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble
photo Morgan Roberts
Dave Sleswick, Noa Rotem, The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble
IN THE HAMLET APOCALYPSE, DIRECTOR STEVEN MITCHELL WRIGHT AND DRAMATURG CHRIS BECKEY WITH THE DANGER ENSEMBLE PLAYERS (KATRINA CORNWELL, MARK HILL, ROBBIE O’BRIEN, NOA ROTEM, POLLY SARA, DAVE SLESWICK AND PETA WARD) AND THE CRUCIAL ASSISTANCE OF SOUND AND LIGHT CREATIVES DANE ALEXANDER AND BEN HUGHES HAVE PRODUCED A TOUR DE FORCE OF RAW, PHYSICAL THEATRE PERTINENT TO GENERATION Y.
On the evidence of some representatives pontificating on the ABC program Q&A, this generation can appear shallow and egotistical but in the theatre is producing work that, as in this case, is refreshing and strikingly insightful. The Hamlet Apocalypse proved a resounding finale to the La Boite Indie program—La Boite’s opening of its doors to Brisbane’s independent sector.
There was no attempt to deconstruct Shakespeare’s Hamlet but instead to distil its essence, a project which electrically proved itself along the nerves of an entranced audience, however fragmentary its final descent into chaos and however much it relied on the audience pulling together its own conception of the Ur-play. The rather simple conceit was to have the actors perform Hamlet while awaiting an unspecified but awfully imminent apocalypse that was announced at intervals by a shattering merge of light and sound which had the audience literally on the edge of their seats and the actors dealing with the prospect of their own demise.
As performers, they clung to what they knew best—performing a play but also performing themselves performing a play (in the tradition of Hamlet’s play within a play), spinning off in directions suggested by the characters or situation they were acting out that struck a personal chord in their own lives. Their energy and passion drew in the audience, creating poignant vignettes often absurd, comical or heart-breaking and presented in a fashion that created the sheer goddamned beauty of life, howsoever bitter the knowledge that these golden lads and lasses we had so briefly come to know must, implacably, come to dust.
The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble
photo Morgan Roberts
The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble
Hamlet’s reduction of man to a “mere quintessence of dust” equals the declaration by the Chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus that, “Alas, generations of mortals, I count your life as equal to zero.” In both cases, the fate of the protagonist is a paradigm, not an exception. But the Greek play is closer to a sense of moira (fate) conceived not as the classical moira of the theoreticians of tragedy but as something darker looming in the distant background, something undefined and threatening that cannot take the form of gods, abstract ideas or forces of nature. Something “rotten” in the state of Denmark is only a poetic construction for this innate, savage fate that entangles us all in a common destiny (the etymology of the word moira means lot, share.) We are all subject to a dreadful wound, and guilt towards the divine, whether conceived as Greek hamartia or Christian original sin. Life, as the godless Kafka proposes, is a trial. This full force of tragedy was conveyed in the production by accelerating breakouts of chthonic sound and light counting down to an apocalypse that bore no historical significance but instead seemed innate to existence, relegating to tragi-comedy a society that prefers to go shopping.
The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble
photo Morgan Roberts
The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble
If anything, I would question whether the individualistic ‘post-apocalyptic’ pronouncements by the line-up of actors at the end were altogether too modest, even timid and fatuous after the journey we had taken together. The famous “To be or not to be…” speech by Hamlet was saved by Dave Sleswick to this very last, when it was underscored by having only the instantly recognisable opening lines quoted. “There is only one liberty,” wrote Camus in his Notebooks, “to come to terms with death. After which, everything is possible.” Feeling free and charged up after their performance, I wanted instead to raise my fist in the air and collectively take on the world.
What I admired about The Danger Ensemble was that they seemed to be working at full pitch not merely to break the mould of expectation regarding a familiar cultural artefact, but to emulate the tentative, flowing, continually improvised balancing act of life itself. They were constantly allocating to themselves private time and space to breathe in an atmosphere which seemed despotically totalitarian and to represent their own quotidian lives post 9/11 where, as in Elsinore, the currency of real political debate appears debased and scenarios for real planetary apocalypse abound. As a company, they seem to be exploring that friable edge which divides the tolerable from the intolerable, but they’re equally committed to physical precision, lucidity and direct expression that comes from training in the disciplines of Butoh and Suzuki method. The Danger Ensemble has created, in my opinion, a definitive homage to the tragic muse for its own generation.
La Boite Indie and The Danger Ensemble, The Hamlet Apocalypse; director, designer Steven Mitchell Wright, dramaturg Chris Becky, performers Katrina Cornwell, Mark Hill, Robbie O’Brien, Noa Rotem, Polly Sara, Dave Sleswick, Peta Ward, lighting design Ben Hughes, sound design Dane Alexander, costume designer Georgina Blythe, producer Katherine Quigley; La Boite Theatre Company @ The Roundhouse, Brisbane, Aug 24-Sept 10; www.dangerensemble.com/
This article first appeared in rt e-dition sept 6.
RealTime will be on-site at TURA’s upcoming Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth. Gail Priest will be joined by local writers Sam Gillies and Henry Andersen, delivering daily reviews of concerts, installations and events across the 10-day festival. Highlights include Space/Shifter, an installation by David Chesworth and Sonia Leber, and a surround sound concert by Philip Samartzis who has been Remote Artist in Residence in the Warmun community in the East Kimberley. Speak Percussion will perform two concerts: Gerard Grisey’s epic percussion masterwork, Le Noire de l’Etoile; and Flesh & Ghost featuring works by Anthony Pateras, Luke Paulding and Thomas Meadowcroft. International guests include the inspirational Marina Rosenfeld who will present Teenage Lontana at the Midland Railway Workshops working with local teenagers to create a 35-voice choir and speaker installation. Local ensembles Decibel and Etica will present concerts, and there is a three-day conference including Rosenfeld as a keynote speaker, panels and artist presentations. TURA, Totally Huge New Music Festival, various venues across Perth, September 15-25. www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/events.
Since the demise of the Live Bait festival based at Bondi Pavilion in the mid 2000s Sydney has been fringeless but 2010 saw a new Sydney Fringe emerge, run by the Newtown Entertainment Precinct Association, drawing on the wealth of venues, bars and vibrant culture of the inner west. This year the festival continues to grow with 300 events taking place over three weeks, extending beyond the inner city with activities in Leichhardt, Parramatta, Chatswood and beyond. With so much on, and heaps of new and emerging artists, it’s hard to pick out highlights (fringe festivals, by their nature being gloriously variable), but here are few intriguing possibilities.
For those seeking dance, Angela Hill’s piece Laying Down Bone (Bringing up Brain) with sound designer Andre Hayter at the Newtown Theatre explores the “body mind connection to trauma” (website), in a lecture, dance theatre hybrid. Hill’s work is playing in a double bill with Margot Politis’ Woman on Verge described as “Part Pina Bausch part Gloria Swanson…40s screen glamour, horrendous psychotherapies and definitions of insanity” (website). Over at PACT in Erskineville, Emiline Forster performs a solo, Dust, about a housewife defending her home from encroaching corporations and personal neuroses.
From Japan, Theatre Group Gumbo present Level 7 at the Greek Theatre in Marrickville, a provocative farce about three irradiated survivors of the post-tsunami nuclear incident trapped in a resort-style reality TV show. In Spinning a Yarn at PACT, Simone O’Brien and Susan Williamson become Mrs Polly Mer and Mrs Polly Ester (the Plastic Bag Ladies of the Sea) creating a coastal cubby house out of knitted refuse and inviting you in to share their stories. With a set by Joey Ruigrok and costumes by Matty Stegh, this short performance installation could hold hidden treasures.
Nice Work If You Can Get It, The Lost Rung
photo Ben Mitchell
Nice Work If You Can Get It, The Lost Rung
At the Newtown Theatre, The Lost Rung (Adam Jackson and Josh Mitchell) will present Nice Work If You Can Get It, an acrobatic onslaught as the two men fight to climb the corporate ladder. Also at the Newtown Theatre IPAN (International Performing Arts Network) presents Bite Size offering six new works by women writers drawing on the theme “things aren’t always as they seem.” See the full program for information on visual arts, cabaret, burlesque, music, special events and more. Sydney Fringe Festival, various venues, Sept 9-Oct 2; http://thesydneyfringe.com.au/
notes from the underground
Dad Made Dirty Pictures
Now in its fifth year the Sydney Underground Film Festival continues to hunt out “unique, quality independent films that transgress the status quo and challenge the conservative conventions of filmmaking” (website). RealTime contributor Katerina Sakkas reports here on her sneak peak at some of the fare:
Dad Made Dirty Movies takes an affectionate look at Stephen C Apostolof, the man who fled communist Bulgaria to eventually produce and direct such schlock classics as Orgy of the Dead (1965). Told mainly by his four children, with commentary from actors and film historians, the film features interesting archival material from Apostolof’s life and plenty of footage from the ‘dirty movies’ in question.
Better This World is a stranger-than-fiction documentary charting the events which led to two young Texans being charged with domestic terrorism after they were found in possession of Molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Engagingly told through a mix of interviews, surveillance footage and court transcripts, it raises serious questions about the role of FBI informants and the justice of the US sentencing system.
Guilty of Romance
From Japan’s Sion Sono, writer and director of cult horror film The Suicide Club (2002), comes the trippy thriller Guilty of Romance, a titillating, violent descent into sexual degradation wrapped up in a murder mystery. And finally William S. Burroughs—A Man Within pays tribute to the iconoclastic Beat writer, sometime heroin addict, gun enthusiast and ‘Godfather of Punk’ through a multitude of interviews with fellow Beatniks, ex-boyfriends, Burroughs biographers, filmmakers and punk rock luminaries such as Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. (KS)
Other highlights include Recycled Cinema featuring Soda_Jerk’s sample masterpiece Pixel Pirate 2, The Director’s Cut (see RT’s Studio), The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (previewed in RT103) and a range of short film programs with evocative titles such as Animation Fornication, LSD Factory and Mother’s Milk featuring shorts by female directors. Sydney Underground Film Festival, The Factory Theatre, Marrickville, Sydney College of the Arts, Rozelle, MuMeson Archives, Annandale, Sept 8-11; http://suff.com.au/
ozasia
Continent, CAVA, OzAsia 2011
courtesy OzAsia
Continent, CAVA, OzAsia 2011
The fifth annual OzAsia festival at the Adelaide Festival Centre will have a distinctly Japanese flavour. Japanese mime company CAVA will present their 2010 Edinburgh Festival smash hit Continent: a cartoon-style physical farce based on the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink. KOAN presents a concert of Japanese chamber music led by Natsuko Yoshimoto, violinist and concertmaster of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, along with Shakuhachi master Akikazu Nakamura from Japan and Claire Edwardes on percussion with Bernadette Harvey on piano. On the other end of the musical spectrum the festival will also feature the Australian debut of Shugo Tokumaru, known for his eccentric pop creations and Japanese Ska band Cool Wise Man with singer, songwriter, producer DJ Likkle Mai. The Japanese Film Festival has also been incorporated into this year’s OzAsia.
Rhinoceros in Love, National Theatre of China, OzAsia 2011
courtesy OzAsia
Rhinoceros in Love, National Theatre of China, OzAsia 2011
Non-Japanese fare includes Rhinoceros in Love by the National Theatre of China, directed by Meng Jinghui, which is said to have “reinvented modern Chinese drama” (website) when first performed in 1999. The show will debut at OzAsia and then tour to the Brisbane and Melbourne festivals. South Australian based Indonesian dancer Ade Suharto collaborating with composer David Kotlowy will present In Lieu, an evening of dance and contemporary gamelan music. And the festival would not be complete without the Shaolin Warrior touring spectacular featuring 22 Kung Fu Masters. OzAsia, Adelaide Festival Centre, Sept 2-17; www.ozasiafestival.com.au
monumental visions
Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Blood Sport, 2010 (detail). Courtesy of the artists and Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth.
photo Kim Tran
Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Blood Sport, 2010 (detail). Courtesy of the artists and Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth.
Presented in PICA’s Central Galleries, Stadium will be the first survey exhibition of work by Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, who create large scale theatrical, video and photographic works exploring historic themes and cultural propaganda. The gallery will be literally transformed into a stadium, tiered bleachers and all, equating the idea of exhibition with “games or contests of strength” (press release). The centrepiece of the exhibition is Ever Higher, a performance inspired by the controversial 1930s films of Leni Reifenstahl involving an aerial performance and local cheerleaders, the Perth Angels. Along with the performances there will also be an artist talk hosted by curator Leigh Robb and a screening of Riefenstahl’s Das Blaue Licht (1932). A review of the exhibition will appear in RT106 (Dec-Jan). Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Stadium, curator Leigh Robb, PICA Central Galleries, Sept 3-Oct 30,; see website for performance times; www.pica.org.au
challenging perspectives
Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011
Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011
Warwick Thornton’s Stranded, a 3D installation depicting the artist, dressed as a stockman nailed to a neon cross in the outback, bemused and challenged audiences when it first appeared in Stop(the)Gap, an exhibition of international Indigenous media art curated by Brenda L Croft, and part of the 2011 Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival. RealTime reviewer Tom Redwood wrote “Perhaps what we are seeing here is the juxtaposition not only of ideologies but of histories: the ‘newness’ of the flash cross (Christianity) highlighted by the ‘ancientness’ of the surroundings (Country, Dreaming)…Perhaps in Stranded we encounter another ‘muddying of the waters:’ art that worries at the line between Indigenous and non-indigenous, elusively pushing beyond established concepts.” (See full review.) Sydney audiences will be able to experience this intriguing work including a series of accompanying photographs at Stills Gallery through September. Warwick Thornton, Stranded, Stills Gallery, Paddington, Sept 7-Oct 8; www.stillsgallery.com.au
Bindi Cole, Made for Each Other, 2008, pigment print on Hahnemuhle (cotton rag) paper
courtesy the artist
Bindi Cole, Made for Each Other, 2008, pigment print on Hahnemuhle (cotton rag) paper
Meanwhile Melbourne audiences will be treated to a survey exhibition of works by Indigenous artist and curator Bindi Cole. The exhibition, Seven Times Seven, will feature three major image series and a video work exploring the “classification of indigenous Australians according to the darkness or lightness of their skin” (press release). In her Not Really Aboriginal series Cole explores her own perspective on Aboriginality in contemporary Australia, while Post Us explores the influence of the “white Anglo-Celtic male viewpoint” on culture; and Sistagirls looks at transgendered people from the Tiwi Islands. Finally the video centrepiece, Seven Times Seven, explores ideas of forgiveness. Bindi Cole, Seven Times Seven, Nellie Castan Gallery, Sept 15 – Oct 8; www.nelliecastangallery.com
Elma Kris, Waangenga Blanco, Daniel Riley McKinley, Belong
photo Jason Capobianco
Elma Kris, Waangenga Blanco, Daniel Riley McKinley, Belong
Melbourne and Wollongong audiences can also experience Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Belong as it continues its east coast tour. Consisting of two works—ID by artistic director Stephen Page (see RealTime Dance for a full profile), and About by choreographer and company dancer Elma Kris—Belong has roused enthusiastic critical and audience responses in Brisbane and Sydney. Bangarra Dance Theatre, Belong: Merrigong Theatre Company, IMB Theatre, IPAC, Wollongong, Sept 8-10; www.merrigong.com.au/shows/belong.html; Playhouse Theatre, The Arts Centre, Melbourne, Sept 16-24; www.theartscentre.com.au; www.bangarra.com.au
Ross Gibson and Carl Warner, ‘protection’ 2011, C-type photograph and blackboard paint; source material courtesy of Fryer Library, The University of Queensland
courtesy of the artists
Ross Gibson and Carl Warner, ‘protection’ 2011, C-type photograph and blackboard paint; source material courtesy of Fryer Library, The University of Queensland
IN THE WEEK I FLY TO BRISBANE TO SEE THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND ART MUSEUM’S THREE EXHIBITIONS ABOUT ASYLUM SEEKERS, SBS SCREENS THE DOCUMENTARY GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM, TO MUCH CONTROVERSY AND ACCLAIM. IN THE WEEK I WRITE THIS ARTICLE, THE HIGH COURT RULES AGAINST THE MALAYSIAN SOLUTION, LIKEWISE TO MUCH CONTROVERSY AND ACCLAIM.
Not only do these two events bookend my encounter with these exhibitions, they also seem to encapsulate some of our representational habits when it comes to refugees. In both instances, asylum seekers are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere; being spoken about but rarely spoken to or with; being represented through images and text but rarely representing themselves. In other words, they seem to oscillate between invisibility and hypervisibility—disappearing into detention centres, only to reappear just in time for the next election.
Ross Gibson and Carl Warner, ‘protection’ 2011, C-type photograph and blackboard paint; source material courtesy of Fryer Library, The University of Queensland
courtesy of the artists
Ross Gibson and Carl Warner, ‘protection’ 2011, C-type photograph and blackboard paint; source material courtesy of Fryer Library, The University of Queensland
Such an economy of visibility puts artists who are not asylum seekers in something of a double bind: if they choose to represent refugees, they risk reproducing them as spectacle; if they choose not to represent refugees, then they risk further hiding the already hidden. One solution is to work with images produced by asylum seekers themselves, as Ross Gibson and Carl Warner do in their commissioned work Waiting for Asylum: Figures from an Archive. The archive is the Elaine Smith Collection, held by UQ’s Fryer Library and named after the activist who donated it. From 2002, as part of Rural Australians for Refugees, Smith and her husband coordinated support for asylum seekers held on Nauru. Not only did they write letters to detainees, they often wrote for them—to parliamentarians, lawyers, anyone who would listen. They also sent disposable cameras to detainees so that they could document their lives on Nauru. When detainees had finished the film they would post it back to the Smiths, who would then develop two sets of photographs: one to send to Nauru and another for their own records.
In the archive these images are postcard-size, remarkable in their domesticity, even banality. Rather than being pictured as cargo on a boat or as convicts in a prison, these images show asylum seekers in the supermarket, on the beach and preparing for a birthday party. In the gallery, however, they become poster-size, blown up to 29.4 x 41.4cm: their figures are too large, the tropical colours too lurid. The danger of spectacle awaits, but Gibson and Warner forestall this possibility by painting thick black stripes across the faces of these figures, in a gesture that both protects and censors, as Gillian Whitlock and Prue Ahrens point out in their excellent catalogue essay. There are 69 images in all, displayed in three rows of 23, an arrangement that recalls the family photo album but also reminds me of the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Meet the Barcode Kids” article (2005), proof that even an intervention as astute as this cannot fully undo our spectatorial histories and habits.
Benjamin Armstrong, Witness 2010, ink and pigment on paper
Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2010. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
photo Carl Warner
Benjamin Armstrong, Witness 2010, ink and pigment on paper
Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2010. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
If one way to intervene in the economy of visibility is to include images by asylum seekers themselves, then another is to examine the machinations of this economy, specifically its main motor, the media. This is what the second exhibition, Collaborative Witness: Artists’ Responses to the Plight of the Asylum Seeker and Refugee, sets out to do. The ambivalent movement from within the detention centre to without is beautifully captured in Benjamin Armstrong’s ink and pigment drawing Witness (2010), in which a face without eyes—a mask perhaps—peers through the wire. Initially it reads as yet another image of a refugee in detention, until we realise that as well as looking into these unseeing eyes, we could also be looking through them.
John Cattapan, Imagine a raft 2003
oil on linen, private collection, Brisbane
courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
John Cattapan, Imagine a raft 2003
oil on linen, private collection, Brisbane
Jon Cattapan’s Imagine a raft (Mirror boat no.1) (2003) also plays with our sight, depicting a ship that could be carrying refugees but is covered in pale blue scratchings, red and white ink blots and a very faint grey grid. It might be a map, a series of data projections or an infrared image but we can’t tell and what’s more it obscures the boat beneath it, suggesting that for all our technologies of vision, we still cannot see.
Guan Wei, On the water no. 4 2007, synthetic polymer paint on cotton rag. Private collection, Brisbane. Reproduced courtesy of the artist
photo Carl Warner
Guan Wei, On the water no. 4 2007, synthetic polymer paint on cotton rag. Private collection, Brisbane. Reproduced courtesy of the artist
Guan Wei depicts a smaller boat in On the water no. 4 (2007) in a cartoonish style that reminds me of a book I had as a child, Pamela Allen’s Mr Archimedes’ Bath, in which Mr A and his friends frantically hop in and out of the tub in order to work out why the water always overflows when they bathe together. Only here on this tiny boat, there is no escape, no exclamation, only terror as the boat starts to sink. Wei’s lines of water also look like contours on a topographical map, as if we could map the mountains of bodies beneath.
Rosemary Laing, and you can even pay later 2004, c-type photograph
Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2007. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Rosemary Laing, and you can even pay later 2004, c-type photograph
There are no bodies in Rosemary Laing’s remarkable photograph titled and you can even pay later (2004), only desert and distance. Taken from the perimeter of the Woomera Immigration and Reception Processing Centre after its closure in 2003, all we can see is pale pink sand, a bleached blue sky, white demountables and, cutting across it all, a steel fence with razor wire. There are several other strong works, which I can’t do justice to here, but which all seem to interrogate the relationship between blindness and insight in some way.
Safety Zone 2010, John Young, digital photographic prints; chalk and blackboard paint on paper
60 parts. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
photo John Young
Safety Zone 2010, John Young, digital photographic prints; chalk and blackboard paint on paper
60 parts. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
The third exhibition, Safety Zone by John Young, takes a different approach again, by examining an historical event, the Rape of Nanjing. Immediately prior to the Japanese invasion in December 1937, 21 foreign nationals stayed in the city to set up the Nanjing Safety Zone in order to protect 250,000 Chinese citizens from Japanese troops. The main part of this exhibition records this act of remarkable resistance through a combination of images, texts and documents which are displayed on 60 separate boards and hung across two walls. Some feature pictures of the doctors and nurses who saved lives; others issue instruction such as “Girls: 1. Cut your hair 2. Blacken your face 3. Wear men’s clothes.” On others, there are images of sheet music, lists of names, scraps of interviews—the detritus of history reassembled, though not completely rescued. Perhaps in 74 years, another artist will be making a similar work about our own period, its policies and the artists and activists who so strongly resisted them.
Exiting the exhibition, I see a small sign that says: “Caution: Images in this gallery may disturb some viewers. Parental guidance recommended.” It is a gesture of such caution and care, but in combination with the images it warns against, it seems absurd, almost offensive. Why is it that we can summon compassion for the viewer, but none for the victim?
Waiting for Asylum: Figures from an Archive, artists Ross Gibson and Carl Warner, curators Prue Ahrens and Michele Helmrich, project research Gillian Whitlock; Collaborative Witness: Artists’ Responses to the Plight of the Asylum Seeker and Refugee, artists Benjamin Armstrong, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Jon Cattapan, Tim Johnson and Karma Phuntsok, Rosemary Laing, David Ray, Judy Watson, Guan Wei, curators Prue Aherns and Michele Helmrich; John Young: Safety Zone; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, June 11-August 7; www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/2011-exhibitions
With thanks to Professor Gillian Whitlock for arranging access to the Elaine Smith Collection at the Fryer Library.
This article first appeared in RT e-dition sept 6.
{$slideshow} MARTHA GRAHAM WROTE, VERY BEAUTIFULLY, “TO UNDERSTAND DANCE FOR WHAT IT IS, IT IS NECESSARY WE KNOW FROM WHENCE IT COMES AND WHERE IT GOES” (MARTHA GRAHAM, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1966).
Some theorists, such as André Lepecki, make a big deal out of the melancholy of the dance critic, imbuing the experience of writing about movement with a sense of loss (however unintentionally) that I have always found melodramatic. But the question of remembrance is related to culture, to fashion, to fame, to legacy and as such is more interesting to the critic and to the choreographer than to the dancer. To dance is to revel in the now.
Dance improvisation has to be understood as something very different from finished choreography. Choreography is to movement what a play is to stage presence: a set of directions, located outside particular time and space; universal and thus generic. Says William Forsythe: “The purpose of improvisation is to defeat choreography.” All the arguments made in Performance Studies, in favour of presence over representation, apply.
To witness an improvisational dance performance requires the observer to look beyond the movement itself. It cannot be judged as choreography, because it is deeply unrefined, unedited movement: at best serendipitous, often cacophonous. To watch improvisation is to watch a performer shed layers of performance until, if lucky, we are left with a body moving as if for the first time; a raw and vulnerable, unpredictable life; pure presence. As Paul Romano, one of the Little Con organisers, says, “Improvisation is living amplified.” In that sense, improvisation is more thoroughly dance than any other kind.
At The Little Con special, the audience sits in a cross-shaped line of chairs, dividing the performance space into four rectangles, each with a different 'curator.' The one closest to the entrance is animated from the start: Fiona Bryant and Lucy Farmer are engaged in frenzied movement anchored in a recognisable social reality, like over-caffeinated secretaries. At five-minute intervals, other rectangles join in. After an hour, they similarly fade out.
Different quadrants expand on different areas: Bryant and Farmer present a poppy, humorous and very accessible exploration of states under pressure. Tony Yap and his two dancers, on the other hand, explore both ritual movement and voice, using the tools of the Malay shamanistic trance dance tradition: singing on the very border of inarticulation accompanies movement. Peter Fraser, whose background is in Bodyweather, and his three dancers, work strongly as a cohesive team of bodies, splattering across the walls, chairs and floor of their quadrant, but always extraordinarily attuned to each other's presence. In this wealth of movement around me, literally around me, I am only vaguely aware of what is happening in the last rectangle, occupied by Alice Cummins, practitioner of Body-Mind-Centering®, and collaborators.
As they increase, some collisions are very satisfying: Cummins' presence electrifies the interrelations of Fraser's quartet. Some are more disruptive of the precarious balances created. There appear at least glimpses of every pitfall of improvised performance: competition for attention, imitation as a means of achieving a semblance of unity, a certain aloofness as a vehicle for comedy. But interaction is sometimes hilariously consonant: as Tony Yap delivers a long, focused shamanistic gargle of sorts, Fiona Bryant, in a red dress, with scissors and shoulder pads, climbs on a chair and starts screaming in response.
The key to it all is the extraordinarily heightened presence of the performers, and the accordingly sharpened concentration of the audience. Since the movement cannot be predicted, there is no arc to any gesture. Except for the final 15 minutes, the absolute absence of structure creates an experience without horizon. Much of the joy comes from watching audience members respond with great focus to interaction the ending of which they cannot anticipate: two boys slowly leaning to one side of their chairs as Farmer appears to be attempting to walk over them. In another moment, Cummins shifts across the floor, but ends up thoroughly immersed in picking through my frilly skirt.
Only once it is over do we notice that the space has assumed the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. It has been an exhausting, exhilarating hour. There is simply no melancholy to this experience, no sense of loss. As Martha Graham elaborates, the dance comes from the depths of man's inner nature, and inhabits the dancer; when it leaves, it lodges itself in our memory. In The Little Con, this trajectory is revealed on stage from slow start to exhausted end. The mystery of the choreography, a finished thing which appears out of nowhere and is gone, is something quite different from movement that rises like a roar from the core of the dancer, levitates suspended and then slowly closes onto itself. These have been some of the most intensely focused minutes I have had as a performance audience, not unlike trance, or meditation. Who would have thought that our concentration span could be so long?
The Little Con is a monthly dance improvisation organized by a dedicated collective since 2005. It is hosted by Cecil Street Studio, the home of Melbourne's improvisation community, but has also appeared at Deakin University and elsewhere. Sometimes it is free form, but throughout the year there are special, curated events, such as this one from curator Paul Romano.
The Little Con, curator Paul Romano, performers Emma Bathgate, Brendan O’Connor, Tony Yap, Lucy Farmer, Fiona Bryant, Peter Fraser, Kathleen Doyle, Alexandra Harrison, Jonathan Sinatra, Gretel Taylor, Alice Cummins; Dancehouse, Melbourne, Aug 6, www.thelittlecon.net.au.
ON THE LEAFY FRINGE OF CAMPERDOWN PARK, I.C.A.N.’S (INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART NEWTOWN) NEWEST SHOW ADDS A LAYER OF ANACHRONISM TO THEIR TRADEMARK INCONGRUITY. FILET ÉLECTRONIQUE/ISLAND IS A GENTEEL COLLECTION OF POST-SUBURBAN ARTEFACTS IN THE VERY URBAN FRINGE. A CONTEMPORARY SALON APOCALYPTICISM, OR SOME FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION UNSTUCK IN TIME—WHATEVER… THIS SHOPFRONT STANDS OUT FROM THE BROWN AND IMPERTURBABLE LINE-UP OF DECENT LIFE LIKE MAD MAX IN CRINOLINE.
Emily Morandini’s piece is the filet électronique and has the virtue of a completely self-descriptive name. Round filet lace nets are threaded with copper needlework, punctuated at the ends by batteries and speakers, emitting a treble whine. Yep, networks, right angles, minute interconnected fibres—craft had ’em before mass electronics. Check, check and check. You remember the Hyperbolic Crochet Reef (created by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, http://crochetcoralreef.org) where dainty handicraft recalls raw nature? This is the yang to that yin, a stitched homage to circuitry over coral, courtly handicraft for the post-technological parlour.
Peter Blamey, Island
photo Kusum Normoyle
Peter Blamey, Island
Two octaves below, Peter Blamey’s Island also hums, and occasionally squeals. This originates in a different future, long after the Anthropocene. It’s not needlepoint, or anything else from CRAFT magazine. Blamey liberates himself from the conventions of traditional handicraft by participating in the plastic, evolving genre of repurposing illegally dumped crap off the street.
A bouquet of found circuit boards opens leaf-wise, with machine-drilled pores and copper-etched capillaries. This is one part robotic Ikebana to two spontaneously generated silicon organisms. The surface is dusted with a faint fuzz of copper floss, moving in the air currents, and it squeals as you brush it, like an electric touch-me-not.
Peter Blamey, Island
photo Kusum Normoyle
Peter Blamey, Island
The piece itself is embedded in the flows of that neo-ecology—mineral waste digesting in the urban metabolism—its body scrap accretions of once-were appliances. This assemblage of motherboards and speakers is powered parodically and circuitously: electricity is derived from a solar panel lampshade which wraps around an incandescent light bulb, a ‘detrivore’ feeding off oil in a travesty of photosynthesis. Conductive cilia wave in the ambient radio fields, recycling electromagnetic waste into mindless warbling.
Where the connectivity in Morandini’s piece is punning, verbal and personal, Blamey’s work is direct, physical and inhuman, the waste fields of a million appliances made audible. The sound from those speakers is the unfiltered interference from the ad hoc antennae of the circuit-boards, performed it seems, for ears other than ours: the secret life of circuits, played out on an Earth after us.
Here are two sardonic takes on the DIY resurgence. Post-consumerist transposed into post-consumer in a world where DIY has been associated as often with fertiliser bombs as with handicraft; where survivalism and tree changing vie for fertile land; where going back to the land may lead you to an open-cut pit, or a strip mall, but you decide to stay there and till it yet.
In Samantha Scott’s Man Made Hybrid, potatoes have eyes, actual eyes, and, uhhh… fins. Scott’s delicate and sometimes whimsical assemblages offer wry speculations on the possible ramifications of genetically modifying biology, exploring “the natural imperative of genetic information; the instructions that control how living things grow, develop and carry out life processes and survive (press release).” Scott’s exhibition is part of Craft Victoria’s Craft Cubed Festival 2011 themed HYBRID, offering a month long series of activities including exhibitions, professional development workshops, open studios, a market and an online portal. While you might have missed Adele Varcoe’s iFOLD technique in which she shapes human skin (still attached) into temporary garments, there’s still time to appreciate Tessa Blazey and Alexi Freeman’s Interstellar Gown made from 600 metres of gold plated chain. Man Made Hybrid, Samantha Scott, Aug 23-Sept 3, Heronswood, 105 Latrobe Parade, Dromana, Melbourne; http://craftvic.org.au/craft-cubed/satellite-events/exhibitions/man-made-hybrid; Craft Cubed Festival 2011, various venues across Melbourne, Aug 4-Sept 3; http://craftvic.org.au/craft-cubed
action fashion
public fitting, Mark Titmarsh, Todd Robinson. See Vimeo for full credits
Keeping up the fashion theme is Public Fitting at MOP Projects in Sydney, a collaboration between painter and video artist Mark Titmarsh and former fashion designer now artist Todd Robinson. In a live performance on the opening night, fashion and painting will literally collide in an action painting fashion catwalk free-for-all. The results will be exhibited as garments, videos and paintings exploring the intersection of the artists’ practices. Public Fitting, Mark Titmarsh, Todd Robinson, MOP Projects, Aug 18-Sept Chippendale, Sydney; www.mop.org.au/
Phoography, Max Lyandvert, George Poonkhin Khut & NIDA Production Students
courtesy the artist
Phoography, Max Lyandvert, George Poonkhin Khut & NIDA Production Students
brainwaves, soundwaves
Max Lyandvert, well known for his dark and haunting soundscapes for theatre, is currently artist-in-residence at NIDA courtesy of the Seaborn, Broughton & Walford Foundation. Collaborating with second year Properties, Costume and Production students Lyandvert has dreamt up the sound installation Phonography, which will inhabit the evocative environment of the Paddington Reservoirs with a “forest of hanging, waterlogged garments fed by currents that turn the clothes into speakers (press release).” The sounds of adjoining Oxford Street will also be fed into the caverns to “make it seem as though the audience is hearing the street sounds above from underwater.” The installation will also feature the work of George Poonkhin Khut further developing his investigations into biofeedback audio installations as he captures people’s brainwaves to create a score for musicians to play. (Read about Khut’s Cardiomorphologies here and here) Phonography, August 24-25, 5-7pm, Paddington Reservoir Gardens, Paddington, Sydney
a room of one’s own
In response to the thriving independent theatre scene in Sydney, The New Theatre has instigated The Spare Room initiative presenting the work of four new-ish local companies. The season kicked off earlier in the year with Dirtyland, a new Australian play by Elise Hearst, and the Australian premiere of UK writer Philip Ridley’s Piranha Heights. The final two shows are coming up starting with Katie Pollock’s A Quiet Night in Rangoon, presented by subtlenuance, telling the story of an Australian journalist in Burma in 2007 during the Saffron Revolution. The final work is Lucky, a physical theatre piece poetically exploring the issue of human trafficking, by Dutch writer Ferenc Alexander Zavaros and presented by IPAN International Performing Arts Network. The New Theatre is currently calling for submissions for its 2012 The Spare Room program with a deadline of September 30. The Spare Room: A Quiet Night in Rangoon, subtlenuance, Aug 18-Sept 10; Lucky, IPAN International Performing Arts Network, Oct 6-22; The New Theatre, Newtown, Sydney; www.newtheatre.org.au
The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble (Melbourne production)
photo Morgan Roberts
The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble (Melbourne production)
the end of the world as we know it
La Boite has also been showcasing the Brisbane independent theatre scene through its Indie Series. The final installment is by The Danger Ensemble presenting The Hamlet Apocalypse (to be reviewed in RT105): a group of six actors performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the eve of the end of the world. The Danger Ensemble is made up of artists from diverse performance backgrounds including Butoh, physical theatre and experimental cabaret. Director Steven Mitchell Wright writes: “We have gone down the path that leaves the work the most open, where time is broken and glimpses of truth and experience can be accessed by the audience in a non-literal and anti-theatrical way (director’s notes).” While Mitchell believes the work “will polarise audiences,” the production was very well received at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2010. La Boite Indie, The Hamlet Apocalypse, The Danger Ensemble, Aug 26-Sept 11, La Boite Theatre, Brisbane; www.laboite.com.au; www.dangerensemble.com
Quiet Time workshop with Reckless Sleepers
courtesy the company
Quiet Time workshop with Reckless Sleepers
a bit of shush
CIA Studios in Perth is calling for participants for Quiet Time, a workshop with Mole Wetherell from the UK/Belgium group Reckless Sleepers. Quiet Time will bring together 10 artists from a range of artform areas to explore the “the city as a basis for research and stimulus(media release).” Reckless Sleepers formed in 1988 and often work with a research and residency model to create cross-disciplinary, site-specific works that are “installed rather than presented (company website).” The workshop will take place in December, with applications closing August 29. Participant stipends and interstate travel allowances are available to assist artists to attend the Lab. For more information or to be sent an application form email kate@pvicollective.com; www.ciastudios.com.au/
WHEN UNDERBELLY FESTIVAL DIRECTOR IMOGEN SEMMLER CASUALLY QUIPPED IN RT103, “PEOPLE LIKE GOING OUT TO COCKATOO ISLAND,” I’M NOT SURE SHE REALISED JUST HOW MUCH: AUDIENCES FOR THE FINAL FESTIVAL DAY—THE CULMINATION OF A 16-DAY DEVELOPMENT LAB—FAR EXCEEDED EXPECTATIONS, REACHING 2,200 PEOPLE.
Extra ferries had to be scheduled as the normal service became taxed, people were turned away at the entrance at times as the festival reached capacity and queues grew to Depression era proportions. Throngs of people across a broad demographic seem to be interested in the alternative arts, as long as they’re in a fascinating location.
Of course the downside was that many of the performance works were designed for a limited audience (some one or four at a time) and even the centerpiece, OJO by Strings Attached with a capacity of 500, was fully booked by the time I arrived at 4pm, so I have to admit, I failed the Underbelly challenge. However I tracked down some esteemed colleagues, Teik-Kim Pok and Sarah Miller, who had much better time management skills, to comment on some of these works. For my part, I spent my time queuing (to no avail) and taking in the installation works that inhabited the nooks and crannies of Cockatoo Island.
Case Study
photo Justin Harvey
Case Study
case study, [xuan] spring, pattern machine
The most impressive installation, and perhaps the most intensive process in Underbelly was Case Study in which six artists—Perran Costi, Jesse Cox, Emily McDaniel, Adam Parsons, Damian Martin and Justin Harvey—moved to the island for the 16-day lab, taking with them only a suitcase. If there were any Survivor-style power plays during the development the final installation was a picture of harmonious communal living. A series of makeshift huts and lean-tos were scattered around an old workshop, each with bedding, curtains, found objects and text curios. Some hummed with quiet sound installations and most glowed hauntingly with projected stills and videos. Plant and moss specimens from around the island adorned surfaces like miniature gardens and small assemblages were to be found in nearly every crevice. Exploring issues of inhabitation, colonisation and migration, Case Study offered a wabi-sabi micro-environment of wonderful intricacy.
[Xuan] Spring, Ngoc Nguyen
courtesy the artist
[Xuan] Spring, Ngoc Nguyen
Ngoc Nguyen also worked with ideas of domesticity in her installation, [Xuan] Spring. During the Lab she photographed the interiors of several of the abandoned houses on the island adorned with objects and elements associated with the Vietnamese Spring Festival. For the final installation the photographs were displayed in a small office/workshop, accompanied by rows of spring plants and flowers. The beautiful simplicity and intimacy of the work was reinforced by the presence of family members serving sweets and tea to visitors. Nguyen’s Spring was impressive for its subtle, yet no less integrated, use of the site
Pattern Machine was an intriguing audiovisual environment and performance by James Nichols, Dan MacKinlay, Jean Poole and Sarah Harvie. A giant inflatable wormlike object occupied one end of a vast workshop while video projections adorned the far end, glancing across a magnificent piece of old machinery. As was the case with most things in Underbelly, I didn’t catch the whole performance (I had to run to catch the ferry home), but the 20 minutes I experienced offered a rich soundscape of field recordings—flocking seagulls, machine rumbles—underpinned by sweet synthesiser tones delivered quadrophonically, with some great use of video masking to create projections that worked specifically with the architectural features. Gail Priest
Fetish Frequency, Inflection
photos Dylan Tonkin
Fetish Frequency, Inflection
inflection, all you can stand buffet, awful literature is still literature I guess
The island’s colourful past evokes treasure hunt sensibilities and attempting to live up to this promise of adventure, some of the artists responded with works exploring audience interaction. Inflection, an “interactive theatre game,” asks us to imagine an alternate version of Cockatoo Island. Stumbling into the middle of the story, I meet a troupe of ‘facilitators’ in a low-ceilinged room in the Naval Store, black stockings masking their faces. In the centre is a mannequin torso sitting upright amongst black garbage material surrounded by photos of various sites on the island laid out in an ominous looking ring. Above this is a clue played on video loop, prompting us to carry out one of five major rituals. A few audience members hesitantly step forward to fulfill one of these tasks: “build a lover from these objects.” Unfortunately, given the nature of the event, I have to move on and fail to witness the conclusion of this action, but Fetish Frequency’s haunting mix of audience-driven storytelling and installation building/intervening is something I hope to experience in their next outing.
Next door our Underbelly experience was becoming more rumble-belly as we anticipated a feast of sorts in Butterfries’ All You Can Stand Buffet. Billed as ‘’the disfigured love child of Dante’s Inferno and Sizzler,” we are ushered in by a performer who lays out the ground rules (replete with end-of-days metaphors) for moving through the rooms—each a different buffet ‘course’—the changes signaled by the loud clanging of a steel salad bowl.
Beginning our first course we are surrounded by mounds of strewn rubbish and encouraged to sift through black garbage bags for barely edible items, among them heads of iceberg lettuce left in various states of defoliation by previous audiences. Accompanying this is a diatribe on Third World famine and an exhortation to overcome our privileged First World disgust. This prompted some in my audience, already familiar with the practice of dumpster-diving and the earnest activist tenor of the work, to respond in one-upmanship from then on, to which the Butterfries team struggled to respond. Subsequent courses included being force-fed bread rolls, served minestrone soup out of a cling-wrap lined toilet, a makeshift abattoir with a row of raw chickens impaled on a wall overlooking a blood-soaked floor and a dinner party where two performers’ strained exchange invited my restless audience group to weigh in, escalating the action into a food fight. While Butterfries’ audience-wrangling strategies need bolstering, their efforts to visually reference the aesthetic of disgust is a worthwhile achievement for their first collaborative effort.
I choose to decompress from the gastronomic challenge by visiting the Festival Bar for some mulled wine while taking in one of the more relaxed offerings, Applespiel’s Awful Literature is Still Literature I Guess. At this point, surrounded by towers of books, they regale us with a series of abject confessionals which segue into an ironic promotion of books considered obscure and questionable in literary merit completing the bar’s role as a sensory pit-stop for the traumatised, exhilarated and perplexed among us island-hopping conceptual treasure hunters. Teik-Kim Pok
Whale Chorus, Rhapsody, Paul Blenheim, James Brown, Janie Gibson
photos Josh Morris
Whale Chorus, Rhapsody, Paul Blenheim, James Brown, Janie Gibson
rhapsody, ojo, v
Whale Chorus took the idea of the musical and broke it right across their collective hootenanny kneecaps in Rhapsody. Even at this early stage of development, this short work-in-progress was performed with panache by Matt Prest, Janie Gibson and Paul Blenheim. It was silly, smart, kitsch and funny.
Referencing everything yet nothing I could quite put my finger on, Rhapsody evoked moments of Oklahoma but also Deliverance, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Psycho, not to mention various high school musicals, segueing from popular culture to irreligious cult. The costuming for Paul Blenheim and Matt Prest—red checked shirts and tight black pants—was inspired while Janie Gibson’s deadpan Doris Day provided a great counterpoint to boyish petulance, blokey bravado and dang-crazy angst.
Whale Chorus “aims to borrow techniques used for creating music to create theatre” and the effect of translating musical concepts such as polyphony and dissonance into theatrical manoeuvres leads them into some hilariously unlikely places. Matt Prest’s delivery of the Beatles’ “Taxman,” and Janie Gibson’s attempts to get two reluctant lads to sing the Judy Garland standard “Good Morning” reminded me of classic comedy—think Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy without the pratfalls. Kazoo, celery, song, story and hypnotism were brought together in an absurd narrative to create something utterly idiosyncratic and funny.
OJO, Strings Attached & Younes Bachir, Underbelly
photo Catherine McElhone
OJO, Strings Attached & Younes Bachir, Underbelly
At the other end of the emotional spectrum was OJO created by Strings Attached and Younes Bachir, previously a collaborator with La Fura dels Baus. Brought to Australia by Deborah Leiser-Moore, Artistic Director of Tashmadada (Melbourne), Bachir worked with a large group of highly skilled physical theatre performers as well as emerging practitioners.
Performed at one end of the cavernous Turbine Hall, the work begins before the audience enters the space, with a single performer hoisted high in the air, flailing and spitting words at the gods. On the other side of a large curtain, the audience stumbles across bodies sprawled or curled foetus-like on muddy, wet concrete floors amidst the wreckage and detritus of modern industrial society. The imagery is apocalyptic, the performers intense, edgy and focused. I’m reminded of Nietzche’s dark “primordial unity” that seeks to awaken our Dionysian nature through an evocation of the primal, ritual, extreme physicality and chaos as a means of bringing us to harmony.
Anyone old enough to experience the 1989 production of La Fura dels Baus’ Suz/o/Suz at the Hordern Pavilion will remember the massive spectacle and ritualistic nature of the work: blinding lights, cacophonous noise, water and mud, sex, birth, festival, sacrifice and death, combined with a fantastic physicality and extraordinary aerial work. Audience members ran for their lives as huge machines and implacable performers bore down on them.
OJO worked with similar materials and themes, albeit stripped back, and without elaborate or expensive sets, but the experience was no less intense. One of the most thrilling moments occurred when the performers manually dragged the huge machinery high in the ceiling of the Turbine Hall from one end of the performance area to the other. The horrifying yet compelling momentum of the industrial machine—Blake’s “dark satanic mills”—and its devastating impact on the natural world was powerfully evoked.
Justin Shoulder, V
video stills Sam James
Justin Shoulder, V
From darkness into light, the strangely weird and fantastical creature that is V emerges from an old, sandstone house in the convict courtyard, one of the oldest sites on the island. White gridlines shimmer and pulsate like visible electricity as this urban demon appears swaying from side to side, carrying a large book with the word V on its cover. An apparition, alien or the ancient ancestor-spirit of Cockatoo island—I have no idea—but that doesn’t stand in the way of my enjoyment of this work. An audiovisual spectacle, this is a huge collaborative effort devised and performed by Justin Shoulder, directed and produced by Jeff Stein in collaboration with composer Nick Wales, a founding member of Coda, video and lighting designer Toby Knyvett working with Sydney Bouhaniche, Cheryle Moore of Frumpus fame and that wizard of theatre spectacle, design and contraption-making, Joey Ruigrok. It was a great end to my Underbelly day. Sarah Miller
lab work
With the culmination of activities in one big bonanza there is a danger of losing perspective on the developmental status of many of the works in Underbelly, some of which began a mere 16 days before. However audiences could visit the island in the weeks prior to watch the artists right in the midst of the thorny business of artmaking. I regret that I didn’t take up this opportunity, as I may have been able to make a one-on-one appointment with J Dark in Joan of Arc is Alive and Well and Living on Cockatoo Island by Triage Live Art Collective or have the drive-in experience of Julie Vulcan, Ashley Scott and Friends with Deficits’ Spotlight Bunny.
After a smaller-scale festival in the streets of Chippendale last year, the 2011 Underbelly, thanks to its site and more rigorous programming, reached a whole new scale and level of engagement with audiences and artists. If the event continues on Cockatoo Island, it feels as though it would be best to expand to a two-day final event in order to satisfy its eager audience. GP
Underbelly Arts 2011; Case Study, Perran Costi, artists Jesse Cox, Emily McDaniel, Adam Parsons, Damian Martin, Justin Harvey; (Xuan) Spring, artist Ngoc Nguyen; Pattern Machine, artists James Nichols, Dan MacKinlay, Jean Poole, Sarah Harvie; Fetish Frequency, Inflection, artists Jimmy Dalton, Lucy Parakhina, James Peter Brown, Skye Kunstelj, Aimee Horne and Amelia Evans; Butterfries, All You Can Stand Buffet, artists Damien Dunstan, Jennifer Medway, Kirby Medway, Tessa Musskett; Applespiel, Awful Literature is Still Literature I Guess, artists Simon Binns, Nathan Harrison, Nikki Kennedy, Emma McManus, Joseph Parro, Troy Reid, Rachel Roberts, Mark Rogers; Whale Chorus, Rhapsody, artists Matt Prest, Janie Gibson, Paul Blenheim, James Brown; Strings Attached & Younes Bachir, OJO, Younnes Bachir, artists Alejandro Rolandi, LeeAnne Litton, Dean Cross, Kathryn Puie, Angela Goh, Matt Cornell, Mark Hill, Kate Sherman, Carolyn Eccles, Gideon PG, Robbie Ho, Matt Rochford, Elisa Bryant, Charlie Shelly, Julia Landery, Victoria Waghorn, Cameron Lam, Craig Hull, Leanne Kelly; V, artists Justin Shoulder, Jeff Stein, Toby Knyvett, Sydney Bouhaniche, Nick Wales, Cheryle Moore, Joey Ruigrok; Underbelly artistic director Imogen Semmler, executive director Clare Holland; Cockatoo Island, Sydney; Lab July 3-12, Festival July 16; http://underbellyarts.com.au/
This article first appeared in RT e-dition august 23.
Alakazam, 2010 (detail), Adam Adelpour included in HATCHED National Graduate Show 2011, PICA
courtesy of the artist
Alakazam, 2010 (detail), Adam Adelpour included in HATCHED National Graduate Show 2011, PICA
Will artists tread ever so softly and self-censor under the weight of a growing number of protocols, impending new classification legislation and, not least for the training and education of young artists, the nervous reactions of university ethics committees? This is the Burning Issue in RealTime 104, aptly illustrated on this page by Adam Adelpour’s Alakazam. Adelpour is a student from Sydney College of the Arts [SCA], University of Sydney, one of the young artists selected for this year’s Hatched National Graduate Show at PICA. What at first glance looks like a bomb-cradling terrorist rig turns out to be a bizarre 360-degree surveillance device which the artist boldly activated, ie flashed, in the security-sensitive Sydney Opera House precinct. You can read a detailed account of the device and the action on the artist’s blog: adamadelpour.wordpress.com. The other dimension of our annual arts education feature is a survey of Australian content in university curricula and syllabuses. It’s quite revealing, indicating a passionate desire to bring together students and local artists, to attempt to make national connections and to find Australia’s place in a global art context. The ideal consistently appears to be a desire to bring these three dimensions together, avoiding ghettoisation and imbuing students with a sense of history (not least of recent contemporary art practices) and the greater world to which they as artists will contribute.
SCAN THE LANDSCAPE OF AUSTRALIAN TERTIARY DANCE COURSES FOR EVIDENCE OF “AUSTRALIAN CONTENT” AND IMMEDIATELY WHAT IS REVEALED IS THAT ITS INCLUSION IS FAR LESS ABOUT PRIORITISING A PARTICULAR AMOUNT IN ORDER TO SATISFY A PERCENTAGE OF NATIONAL INTEREST, BUT IS FAR MORE ABOUT THE PARTICULAR VALUES THAT DIFFERENT COURSES ASCRIBE TO AUSTRALIAN DANCE AS AN ARTFORM.
An important priority within curricula, Australian dance content is defined by various combinations of acknowledgment and celebration of Australian dance works; cultivating an understanding of a lineage of dance artists who have contributed to the development of what we see as current Australian contemporary dance; of utilising and maximising the expertise of current dance artists and transferring those benefits to the students; and possibly of patriotic or nationalistic pride.
working from the local
Dr Sally Gardner, Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, says that upon starting their undergraduate degree many dance students “have little knowledge of contemporary dance art either locally or globally, currently or historically.” Given that this is their starting point she asks “why invoke the nation?” suggesting that “perhaps it would be better to think in terms of the local. Making connections with or referring to local dancers has a pragmatic, potentially vocational value.” At Melbourne University’s Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) a strategy to feature the work of Australian dance artists both in performance and in the curriculum has been pursued over the past 10 years. This integrated approach to dance education and training aims for VCA students to become conversant with the work of Australian choreographers and dance companies in a variety of contexts at and beyond the VCA.
A combined pragmatic and referential approach comes from Michael Whaites, Artistic Director of Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts’ (WAAPA) postgraduate pre-professional program LINK. Providing networking and employment opportunities are highlighted goals and the choice of national dance artists and companies is geared towards assisting the graduates from LINK to gain work within the profession: “Australian dance artists are very important…helping the students connect to the landscape and east coast, and helping to familiarise them intimately with some of the current people working in the industry.”
dance artists as teachers
Australian tertiary dance courses value and employ currently practising Australian artists as teachers for their currency of knowledge, their particular artistic practices and the professional networking information and opportunities that can benefit their students. Deakin University’s dance course includes comprehensive representation of local dance artists throughout the many aspects of students’ studies including as teachers, occasional additional visits by guest dancers, unit readings, reference or mention during technique, composition or other workshops and announcements on unit website pages.
The VCA’s current focus on Australian work is described by Associate Professor Jenny Kinder, VCA Dance Undergraduate Coordinator, as “underpinned by the involvement of practising dance artists in curriculum delivery. Participation by practising artists in three of six subjects on offer represents significant exposure to Australian work and practices.”
resource: god bless youtube
At Macquarie University Dr Pauline Manley, Lecturer in Dance Studies, says that Australian dance content is comprehensively included within the Macquarie dance course, “ranging from watching artists on YouTube to setting research tasks to seek out and attend live performances in unfamiliar venues and settings.” The inclusion of Australian content is considered vital in providing students with information about the content and location of what is currently occurring in the Australian dance environment and she praises the ability to access it via the internet: “God bless YouTube and the artists who release their work for the world to see. Thanks to YouTube we can watch Australian contact improvisation, performance artists, improvisations, contemporary dance …”
While Pauline Manley applauds YouTube, Dr Erin Brannigan, Lecturer in Dance at the University of NSW places the onus of releasing more Australian dance information into the wider public domain on the works’ creators. Although documentation of dance exists she says “it is very difficult to obtain. Choreographers and dance companies need to take responsibility for this.”
resource: dance as written word
It is generally agreed that currently there isn’t a broad enough body of written text and reference material regarding Australian dance, although resources in areas such as dance film are increasing. Performing arts journals, magazines and publications such as Brolga, the Writings on Dance archive, RealTime and the RealTimeDance portal are quoted as valuable sources of written material, although in total they are few. Key resources that relate to Australian dance are available in other formats—some in the form of living, practising senior artists. Jenny Kinder makes the point that “the issue is not access to information but whether Australian researchers will capitalise on existing primary sources and documents (such as the National Library’s Oral Histories) to produce the kind of dance texts and documentation that have emerged from the United States, Britain, Europe and more recently Asia.”
networks & shared learning
Another challenge is getting students to access information and material about dance artists and practices that occurred before the digitised age, and not to confuse accessibility of information with ease of access to information or the only available information. However, consideration does need to be given to how the current generation of students consumes information, says Associate Professor Cheryl Stock from Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries and former dancer, choreographer and artistic director. By students sharing information via blogs, YouTube and social networks, she observes that teaching and learning processes have changed to incorporate more dynamic peer-to-peer exchanges of information: “It’s about the conversations that are being held in whichever format they’re occurring. This has many advantages in engaging students and providing access to work that cannot be seen live but it does not replace the experiential. Learning about dance and learning through dancing provide an essential praxis of theory and practice.”
embodied learning
Critically, dance students need to understand that some information can only be accessed by direct interaction with practising artists. Cheryl Stock says that “to acquire deep knowledge of dance, students need to be in the studio often to directly engage with their learning for a more complete understanding of the ideas they access—and most importantly, that information becomes EMBODIED; it is a type of knowledge that is experienced and transferred personally and these kinaesthetic understandings cannot be acquired through digital platforms. Students need to engage with our contemporary artists and their ideas on a number of levels and where at all possible learn directly from them through classes, secondments and choreographic opportunities.”
learning lineage
Acknowledgement of the history and legacy of Australian dance is the aspect of Australian dance content unanimously considered of utmost importance and relevance for today’s dance students. The knowledge of national and international dance practices and histories is symbiotic and provides a perspective of how Australian dance and seminal Australian dance artists developed, progressed and impacted on current generations of Australian dance artists within local and global contexts. Cheryl Stock says that “there is a tendency for many students to think that various (contemporary dance) practices are new. They need to have access to the lineage of dance artists that have contributed to what exists now. And we also need dance scholars to write those histories.”
In 2012 the VCA will introduce a new subject Dance Lineages which will focus on the development of contemporary dance in Australia in order to contextualise the international contemporary dance trends and influences studied. Jenny Kinder underscores the value that it will be “acknowledged through the prism of Australian dance artists and their various overseas encounters”. Macquarie Dance also shares this view and has a research project underway to establish an audio-visual database of Australian dancing from the 1960s to the present day.
While the principle of prioritising Australia’s dance heritage is a shared theme, the selection of artists focused on reflects each course’s specific aesthetic values, geographical location and the individual experiences of staff. The artists highlighted by different tertiary dance courses and the reasons for their inclusion and prioritisation, are therefore important indicators of the particular character, artistic approaches and aesthetics of the course and what it can offer.
thinking globally, dancing locally
On the issue of inclusion of Australian dance content in tertiary dance courses there is an overarching agreement that it is a fundamental necessity for dance students to experience information and dance work that is excellent and which reaches beyond national definitions, histories and borders; but to be able do this their perspective must be informed by knowledge that is local in order to understand and appreciate the global.
As Cheryl Stock comments: “We live and work in a global world but we need to foreground past and current Australian dance practices and histories for an appreciation and understanding of how what is happening now came to be and why. That is, we need to contextualise the information historically and with an understanding of how the different genres have developed. Australian contemporary dance—and indeed all contemporary dance—didn’t just happen.”
additional resources
The Australian National Library’s Australia Dancing (www.australiadancing.org); Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon’s Australia Dances, Creating Australian Dance 1945-1965, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2010 (RT 100); and Erin Brannigan’s Platform Paper for Currency House, Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the 21st Century, 2010. Ausdance National and Routledge’s book on Australian dance with interviews and articles by and with Australian dance artists, academics and critics is due for publication in 2011. The Australian company Contemporary Arts Media’s Artfilms provides DVDs (at individual, educational and other institutional rates) of Bangarra Dance Theatre, Lucy Guerin Co. and Chunky Move (www.artfilms.com.au). Erin Brannigan and RealTime are editing a collection of essays and interviews on specific works by 12 Australian choreographers for publication in 2012 (the choreographers are profiled with articles and video clips in RealTimeDance: www.realtimearts.net/realtimedance). Eds.
FORMER SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE HEAD OF THEATRE AND DANCE, AND SPRING DANCE CURATOR, WENDY MARTIN IS NOW HEAD OF PERFORMANCE AND DANCE AT LONDON’S SOUTHBANK CENTRE WHERE SHE SAYS SHE’S ADJUSTING AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS TO A NEW WAY OF LIFE, INCLUDING ENCOUNTERING MORE DANCE THAN SHE’S EVER SEEN. SHE’S PARTICULARLY PROUD OF THIS HER THIRD SPRING DANCE FOR THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE, A PROGRAM OF DISTINCTIVE INTERNATIONAL WORKS AND, FROM AUSTRALIA, ROS WARBY’S MONUMENTAL AND CHUNKY MOVE’S I LIKE THIS.
dv8: can we talk about this?
Martin describes Lloyd Newson’s new work, Can we talk about this?—with its international premiere in Spring Dance—as fusing dance and verbatim theatre to deal with the issues that arise from the 1989 fatwah placed on Salman Rushdie, the threats to the life of a Danish cartoonist for his representation of Muhammad, and the murder of Theo Van Gogh for his criticisms of Islamic culture. It seems that the work will focus particularly on the oppression of women and children in a work rich in interview-based dialogue and inventive choreography. Martin reveals that the cost of presenting Can we talk about this? “was almost beyond us, but the Opera House made the commitment.” She was intrigued that the work was co-produced (with European partners) by The National Theatre of Great Britain “rather than with London’s Sadlers Wells.” This is further evidence that there are works and audiences that crossover and hybridise, as in the programming in Australia of works by Lucy Guerin in Malthouse and Belvoir subscription seasons. Given its subject matter and, apparently, the manner in which it’s played direct to its audience, Can we talk about this? is bound to be as provocative as it is inventive.
les ballets c de la b: out of context, for pina
Coming close on the heels of the sell-out screening of Wim Wenders’ 3D film tribute to the late Pina Bausch at the Sydney Opera House, comes Alain Platel’s tribute. Like DV8’s Lloyd Newson, says Martin, Platel believes that without Bausch his own work would not exist. Platel was taken by the way that Bausch’s creations would “step out of the everyday” and give so much creative responsibility to her dancers (among whom have been a number of Australians). Platel’s tribute pays homage to Bausch’s unique approach but, says Martin, uses the popular music and dance moves of our own time, as well as Bach, to make the connection with his own work for les ballets C de la B. Jana Perkovic wrote, on seeing For Pina at Sadler’s Wells in 2010: “The piece defies description by virtue of sheer over-accumulation: 90 minutes of startlingly original movement with virtually no repetition, on nine different physiques that, even when amassed into synchronicity, preserve individual differences…Not having any narrative frame allows the audience to experience this decontextualised mass of movement on the level of affect, not cognition, free-associating stage images to deep memories. The result is emotionally penetrating and deliriously enjoyable.” (RT98)
pina: a celebration
Further acknowledgment of the Bausch legacy comes on screen over two days in the form of Anne Linsel’s Pina Bausch, a film, and Linsel and Rainer Hoffman’s documentary about the creation of one of the greatest of the choreographer’s works, Kontakthof. (The program will also include Life in Movement, the documentary about the late Tanja Liedtke.) Speakers in the accompanying discussions about Bausch will include Meryl Tankard, Michael Whaites, Kate Champion, Shaun Parker and Lutz Forester who all performed with Bausch’s company.
Israel Galván
photo Felix Vazquez
Israel Galván
israel galván: la edad de oro
When at the Lyon Biennale de Danse in 2007, I saw a gypsy flamenco ensemble perform, unadorned by frills and garish lighting, it was one of those revelatory experiences that put you in touch again with a form that had come to mean little. Martin has seen three works over the years by Israel Galván, a “flamenco revisionist” who brings together traditional form with contemporary dance. In Rome she witnessed him “dance barefoot, kicking up whirls of white dust while accompanied by a pianist.” She was also intrigued by the way “he blurred the masculine and feminine in his form” and accentuated the shape of his dance by largely performing in profile so that every movement detail could be relished. RealTime contributor Erin Brannigan told me she thought Galván’s performance in this year’s Montepellier Danse the best in the program.
Ros Warby, Monumental
photo Jeff Busby
Ros Warby, Monumental
ros warby: monumental
Although previously enjoyed by Sydney dance audiences courtesy of Performance Space at CarriageWorks in 2009, Martin hopes that Warby’s Spring Dance presentation of Monumental will bring her the much larger audience this truly idiosyncratic Australian dancer deserves. There’s much about Warby to be found in RealTimeDance, including my review of Monumental (RT90). I wrote (and it’s not an easy work to put into words, believe me): “The anti-gravitational appeal of dance is, of course, like our dream of flight and winged selves, but here the embodied connection goes deeper. The audience become birdwatchers who, by way of Warby-Medlin [film]-Mountford [cello] alchemy, suddenly sense not only the dancer’s ‘birdness,’ but also their own, and, as they cast their minds back to Monumental’s opening image, the birdness (and not just of swans) of ballet.” Monumental is visually magical, sometimes funny and has some very interesting things to say about dance…and nature.”
Blazeblue Oneline
photo Byron Perry
Blazeblue Oneline
chunky move: antony hamilton & byron perry’s i like this
Dancers Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry have contributed significantly to the works of Melbourne choreographers, so it’s wonderful to see them step out as a duo with their own creation about the magic of ‘thingness’ as they manipulate themselves and objects about the stage. RealTime reviewer Carl Nilsson-Polias had been impressed with Hamilton’s Blazeblue Online (RT85); he noted “a subtle recurrence of two-dimensional objects, such as cardboard, being given three-dimensional life and movement by the dancers. It is as though the flatness of visual art’s canvas is itself being reconstructed and reconfigured into the dynamic physical nature of dance.” John Bailey wrote of I Like This: “[Perry and Hamilton’s] visual design for the work deserves particular mention, becoming a character almost in itself, with hundreds of perfectly executed changes whose sometimes stroboscopic effect makes lighting operation appear a form of choreography in its own right. It’s self-reflexive dance, certainly, but by incorporating technology in such a sophisticated way it becomes something much more…the result approaches the sublime” (RT89). You can read Sophie Travers’ interview with Antony Hamilton in RT93. For Wendy Martin, I Like This is indicative of the work of a new generation of Australian choreographers, in this case designing, making and controlling an environment before us.
fevered sleep: the forest
UK group Fevered Sleep’s The Forest became part of the Spring Dance program, says Martin, on the recommendation of Brisbane Festival artistic director Noel Jordan. Aimed at young people and families in particular, but not at all exclusively, this maze-like, glass and mirror installation brings together dance, sound and light to create what Martin describes as “interactive dance theatre.”
placing spring dance
The contrast between Melbourne’s Dance Massive and Sydney’s Spring Dance is palpable given the largely national content of the former and the international purview of the latter. Martin is impressed by Dance Massive and sees the two dance events as equally important. Part of her inspiration for Spring Dance came from witnessing large-scale dance events in Germany in 2007-08 “with so much audience and performance engagement, so much conversation—a story going beyond one show—and asking huge audiences to take risks.” A single show at the Opera House might draw 1,500-2,500 ticket sales, she says—unless it’s Akram Kahn pulling 6,000 or so sales. But the 2010 Spring Dance attracted 20,000 people including 13,500 ticket buyers. Martin believes that Spring Dance is a sustainable model for audience development. It’s certainly what Australian dance needs. Of course, should Spring Dance continue now that Wendy Martin has left the Opera House, the event could be what Sydney dance artists also consistently need, greater exposure to local audiences in an international context as enjoyed by the Spring Dance production of Meryl Tankard’s The Oracle in 2009 and Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass in 2010.
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Spring Dance, curator Wendy Martin, Sydney Opera House, Aug 23-Sept 4
LAST YEAR, INDEPENDENT CHOREOGRAPHER DEAN WALSH WAS AWARDED AN AUSTRALIA COUNCIL FELLOWSHIP. THE TIMING COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BETTER. THE AWARD PRACTICALLY COINCIDED WITH WALSH’S 20-YEAR ANNIVERSARY AS A PERFORMANCE MAKER. ACHIEVING PROFESSIONAL LONGEVITY IS NO SMALL FEAT FOR AN INDEPENDENT ARTIST. TO BE OFFICIALLY RECOGNISED FOR IT IS ALL THE SWEETER. AND AS THE FELLOWSHIP ALLOWS WALSH TO FURTHER RESEARCH AND DEVELOP HIS CHOREOGRAPHIC PRACTICE, IT ALSO PROVIDES A TIMELY OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE STOCK.
So, how did it all start? Walsh recalls: “I presented my first piece at Performance Space’s Open Season. That was in June 1991. It was a group piece with eleven dancers. I was performing as well.” Walsh is under no illusions about the quality of the work: “Transcendent Nights, it was called. It was very ‘dancey’. I was just out of dance school. Naïve, you know.” The work didn’t go unnoticed however. Walsh laughs: “Sarah Miller [then director of Performance Space] pulled me aside afterwards and said: Come back with a solo next year. I think you’ve got more to say.” And sure enough, Walsh followed her advice. He became, in fact, something of a regular at Performance Space’s short works nights over the next few years – first at Open Season, then, from 1995, at queer cabaret programs such as cLUB bENT and Taboo Parlour. It was here he excelled with highly physical dance performances, exemplifying the spirit of nineties queer politics. The works were often inspired by Walsh’s personal experiences of homophobia and domestic violence—artistic manifestations of standing up for himself.
Around that time, in addition to his pursuits as a solo artist, Walsh also became a sought after performer in works by leading directors and choreographers such as Nikki Heywood, Nigel Kellaway and Garry Stewart. In 2002 he was awarded a Robert Helpmann Scholarship and left Australia to work with Paul Selwyn Norton and Company in Amsterdam and DV8 Physical Theatre in London. Upon his return three years later, Walsh’s choreographic interest had shifted away from the solo format towards choreographing group works. His first ensemble piece, Back From Front, premiered at Performance Space in 2008. Since then Walsh’s work has undergone a continuous evolution both in content and form.
This brings us to Walsh’s Fellowship and the program of activities he has proposed to undertake in the next two years. Walsh: “One of the leading questions for me is: What is the body of the history of my practice and how can I distil it into a system that I feel has integrity in terms of where I want to take my practice now, which is into a whole new content base, I guess, reflecting on the notion of environment, habitat destruction, genetic memory, our social connection and disconnection to the idea of climate change and major social human change.”
The first major thematic shift in Walsh’s work occurred when transitioning from creating solos to making group pieces. Looking at the long-term impact of wartime experience on soldiers and their families, “Back From Front was kind of like the bigger version of everything my solos were,” says Walsh. It was me going away from my own family to listen to other families and other histories but it was still the older way of working. And it was still an earlier concern in terms of domestic violence and where it comes from.”
Dean Walsh, Fathom
photo Heidrun Löhr
Dean Walsh, Fathom
Now with environmental change and extinction issues increasingly the target of his thematic exploration, Walsh’s focus is currently on research into marine habitats and their bio-diversity. He cites taking up scuba diving in 2008 as the event that kick-started his new found interest. It exposed him, he says, to a previously unknown world and ignited a passion that soon resulted in genuine concern for the future of marine habitats and the survival of marine species, to a point where he seriously considered giving up dance: “I could almost give up art to move into conservation,” he says. And then, after a pause: “But I don’t want to. I’m really interested in how to take my dance practice into this new fascination I have with the need to conserve our marine bio-diversity.”
In addition to the exploration of new thematic and conceptual content, a large section of Walsh’s fellowship is dedicated to the choreographic scoring system he has been developing over the last years. It is called Foreign Language, complete with a “grammar” of its own and rules that distinguish it from any other physio-linguistic systems. Walsh explains: “The system is made up of five primary scores that divide into various sub-scores which then further break down into a series of modulations.” Could we have an example? “One of the primary scores is animality,” he says. “The sub-scores are various vertebrate and invertebrate animals. The cephalopods [octopuses, squids], for example, are among them.” What about the modulations? “The modulations relate to the specific physical and textural qualities of a certain species. In the case of the cephalopods, it’s their alacrity. Apart from a soft cartilage skull and a beak, they practically consist entirely of muscle.”
And how is the system used to choreographic purposes, how does it operate in action? “The various scores, sub-scores and modulations can be fused with each other, creating near-infinite possibilities.” Further complexity is added by the fact that some of the animality scores are anatomically impossible to execute for humans. “Some interesting movement gets produced that way,” says Walsh. An example would be one of the cephalopod modules, which is inspired by the Pacific Red Octopus’ ability to fit through spaces a tenth of their size by executing two complex physiological manoeuvres simultaneously—reducing muscular density while extending forward.
Walsh’s Fellowship is primarily dedicated to choreographic and conceptual research, both experiential and practical as well as theoretical. Apart from engaging in studio-based activities, he also regularly attends seminars, lectures and conferences and consults with marine biologists and conservationists. In order to try out some of his ideas in front of an audience, Walsh further conducts work-in-progress showings and recently presented the first instalment, in a series of what he calls ‘touch-down performances’. Entitled Fathom, the event took place in Track 8 at CarriageWorks. Walsh found the experience invaluable: “It gave me the opportunity to interface with an audience and get their feedback. That definitely upped the ante and got me away from the loneliness in the studio. It also helped me to become clearer. I had to put it out there to understand what it is I’m doing. I’m a physical realiser.”
So far Dean Walsh has completed a quarter of the program he is scheduled to undertake as part of his Fellowship. His passion for the project is palpable and his eloquence in describing its various components impressive. And yet, there is a sense that the ambition and sheer scale of his undertaking has just started to dawn on him. Walsh readily admits that at times he finds it rather overwhelming. Tongue in cheek, he states: “I feel like I have a whole ecology of ideas that will last me 10 or more years. I just can’t scope it all yet and I do feel like, I’m not drowning by any means, it’s absolutely not that. In fact, I’m breathing under water but the water is just so immense, I can’t scope it all.”
DEAN WALSH HOLDS THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL DANCE FELLOWSHIP FOR 2011-2012, HIS ARTISTIC TENACITY REWARDED WITH INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT. IN WALSH’S OWN WORDS, FATHOM IS AN EXPERIMENT AND A SMORGASBORD OF IDEAS: A REFLECTIVE MOMENT IN A TWO-YEAR PROCESS.
Walsh is an artist with important things to say. Dance can have a timid political voice but in Fathom Walsh seeks to connect movement theatre with the wider world and a political hot potato: the health of our natural environment. The relationship is not always comfortable or even clear, but the motivations are intense and passionate.
The black box stage is strung with striped tape, cordoned off like a scene of violence. Hanging hooks hold bags of green liquid horror. Implicit in this pre-set image is the thematic destruction that feeds Fathom: “not only was the bush gone, but the entire creek and swimming hole had been filled in. In its place is street after street and house after identical house: suburbia. No gum trees in sight” (program note).
Sitting to one side is a yellow man in a large blue bucket. He has no face. He fishes as a watery soundscore floats. His fishing pole creates a gentle arc against the lines of striped tape. As he stands his upper back leans, curving like the fishing pole. He dips as sound flutters.
This opening scene is intensely aesthetic: shape, colour and line dominate action. While it does become more alive with movement, what remains resilient in Fathom is image. In a series of episodes that fluctuate in tone, intensity and personality, it is be colour, lighting, costume, screen and apparatus that provide the performative punch. In this way Fathom does not cast itself so much as movement theatre or a reflection of the underwater world, but as a series of aesthetic events.
Walsh sits in a spotlight, his hands cast the colour of lobster. He pulls at the featureless face of the masked fisherman, trying to breathe, gulping for air. He twists and pulls and strips away the yellow face. A nightmare vision, this stretchy striptease is impacting, but we are rushing on with no time to linger on matters of strangulating angst.
Liquid lounge music elicits a more fluid dance. Walsh’s body has a signature written in his open joints, raised chest and extreme flexibility. Blown by undercurrents, his soft release is pleasure felt and pleasure communicated, but this oceanic movement moment is fleeting. He continues to strip away the costume. Fingers wave, wiggling his body into violent convulsions as his skin is lit lobster red again. An umbrella turns man into mollusc. He strips again. Silence and breathing become vocal snorts, rasps, sighs and grunts. Now in black he walks tortured down a white runway. He strips again.
Whale sounds herald a comic turn. As he searches for the lost beasts a baffling simian comedy briefly unfolds. He strips again. Now down to his underwear. Text moves down the screen, making this dense journey lecture-like: sometimes spelling out that which is not apparent, but sometimes too complex to grasp, sometimes interfering.
Dean Walsh, Fathom
photo Heidrun Löhr
Dean Walsh, Fathom
Driving trance music catches Walsh in a net before silence once more heralds a return to comedy. With a netted head atop a lurid green dress he dances a camply distorted ballet. I no longer know where I am. The screen image tells me I am at a beach polluted with plastic shopping bags. He caresses himself and strips again.
Colour again. Spinning bags of slimy sputum drip lines of gunk into artistic shapes on the floor. Underneath Walsh sits whimpering amongst the freshly fetid smell. He wails as he flails and slides to escape the glossy mess. He gasps into a surface made beautifully smooth, slides into glides made possible by oily ground. These lines of putrid green become luminescent. The stage is smeared with the muck of humanity and, from this defiled space, the performer leaves, opening a door of light, to enter a cleaner world.
Fathom is baffling. It is crowded with ideas and images: some patently clear, some obtuse. This must be forgiven in an ‘experiment.’ The aesthetics of light, colour and form are the work’s most vital assets. The choreography, only momentarily liquid, seems to reside outside the rhythms of the environment it seeks to embody, with the visual art emphasis yielding flatness rather than depth. But Fathom, in this incarnation, is definitely the promised smorgasbord of ideas.
Fathom, devisor, choreographer, performer Dean Walsh, advisor Paul Selwyn Norton, lighting Clytie Smith, costumes Rebecca Bethan Jones, sound editor Kingsley Reeve, video Martin Fox; Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, May 19-22
University of Queensland (Australian Drama) students perform Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan
courtesy University of Queensland
University of Queensland (Australian Drama) students perform Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan
AUSTRALIAN CONTENT IN THE CURRICULA AND SYLLABUSES OF COURSES IN AUSTRALIAN THEATRE HAS BEEN CONSIDERABLY ADVANTAGED BY THE AVAILABILITY OF PLAY SCRIPTS (THROUGH CURRENCY PRESS, ESPECIALLY, AND PLAYLAB) AND DISADVANTAGED BY THE ABSENCE OF A NATIONAL THEATRE MAGAZINE—LONG SOMETHING OF A MYSTERY. CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE AND CUTTING EDGE THEATRE HAVE BENEFITED FROM THE PRESENCE OF REALTIME SINCE 1994 (BUT FOR THE MOMENT ONLY ARCHIVED ONLINE 2001-PRESENT). THERE ARE KEY ONLINE SOURCES LIKE AUSSTAGE, SEVERAL SIGNIFICANT BLOGS (BY ALISON CROGGAN AND JAMES WAITES) AND JOURNALS AND, BEYOND THAT, EVERYWHERE I ASKED, A CONSIDERABLE HUNGER AMONG LECTURERS, RESEARCHERS AND STUDENTS FOR A MORE PALPABLE SENSE OF THE PERFORMING ARTS ACROSS THE NATION—IN WORD AND ON SCREEN.
Opportunities to see theatre and contemporary performance, both current and past, on DVD and online look set to improve, and that includes digital broadcasts to regional cinemas, as the Sydney Theatre Company did recently with Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Of course, the Australia Council and various State Government touring schemes have already improved access—a glance at Melbourne’s Arts House current program on our back page is a sure indication of improvement, with its inclusion of a number of Sydney-based artists. The rise of small, innovative live art festivals and the likes of Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar program have yielded cross-border opportunities only dreamt of a decade ago. Accessibility on a variety of platforms is on the increase—so important for regional universities, but often no less so for students in our huge, sprawling cities with the added impediment of escalating ticket prices.
At the same time, it’s the face-to-face, body-to-body engagement between students and practising Australian artist lecturers and guest directors and teachers that is a top priority, of course more so in training than history or theory courses, but even there you will see increasing emphasis not only on seeing the work but also engaging with it, for example as observers, documenters, reporters and trainee dramaturgs (as in Performance Studies at the University of Sydney; see RT105). In both kinds of courses you’ll find opportunities offered for playwriting and group devising, so that students gain some sense of being ‘inside the artist’ as their own capacities and skills evolve.
For our 2011 survey, I’ve approached teachers (where available—it was that time of the year) from a range of schools and departments asking them where Australian work fits in their courses. Inevitably it’s regarded as important in itself but, more critically, in an international context—a mix of treasuring and exploiting the local scene, attempting to gauge a national perspective and finding our place in the global picture—mighty tasks but ones often tackled with verve and invention.
university of wollongong
Staff members (including practitioners Tim Maddock, Chris Ryan and Janys Hayes) in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong told me that students enrolled in both the Bachelor of Performance or in the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Theatre) “work with contemporary Australian performance practitioners to devise performance works, write and perform their own texts, as well as presenting productions by both Australian and international playwrights. There is a strong emphasis on contemporary Australian artists in both the practical and history/theory program. Students are encouraged to see festivals and site-specific performance, by both independent and major theatre companies, as well as live art, contemporary performance and post-dramatic theatre.” However, it is felt that “the lack of available performance and theatre documentation is an issue.” Keeping up with even recent work can be a challenge making it potentially “redundant, unless properly recorded and readily available.
“Our reading lists include a number of titles from the Rodopi Series on Australian theatre and performance, as well as Currency publications on Australian artists and practices. However, publications on playwrights dominate the field and significantly more DVD documentation is required. At present many recordings are limited to either personal collections or theatre company archives, and can be difficult or impossible to access. This impacts on the ability of staff to teach across a broader range of contemporary performance work. We address this issue predominately by engaging guest practitioners who teach strategies of contemporary performance by example. This intersects with the theory program, which studies the history of these artists and provides the opportunity for such artists to screen and discuss examples of their work.” Guest artists who have directed and/or devised work with students since 2007 include Geordie Brookman, Kate Gaul, Carlos Gomes, Regina Heilmann, Deborah Pollard and from Korea, Park Younghee.
university of ballarat
Ross Hall, Lecturer In Acting in the regional University of Ballarat says that its Arts Academy runs two practice-based Degree Programs one focusing on acting, the other on musical theatre. “Most of the art that’s created here is done so under the broad umbrella of pedagogy and intensive performance training. Over the past 10 or so years, we’ve performed Australian content on a fairly regular basis—mainly text-based works, covering many genres from full-length plays to new Australian musicals. We run scene classes on specifically Australian content—again, mainly contemporary plays. We also run devising strands in the early parts of our courses; [these] map developments in Australian drama and musicals [and can explore] pre-existing Australian stories in a dramatic way. Our students devise work that travels out into the community. We’ve taken part in the evolution of new work, co-producing these with freelance writers and artists. We’ve co-produced issue-based community theatre. We’ve commissioned new Australian works, both dramatic plays and musicals. We have visiting artists and current practitioners give lectures and workshops. We engage practicing directors to work on many of our performance projects.”
flinders university
Jonathan Bollen, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama, School of Humanities, Flinders University (and a regular contributor to RealTime), focuses on the fact that “students go on to become the colleagues and spectators of the artists they learn about at university, so it is crucial they learn about who is making work now.” He teaches a course titled Live Arts and Performance that introduces third year students to performance art, post-dramatic theatre and contemporary performance. “It focuses on selected artists and companies within an international field, and traces connections with recent developments and current practice in Australia. It is designed to equip students with the knowledge to navigate international arts festivals and the field of contemporary performance in Australia. The OzAsia Festival in Adelaide provides a focus for the study of intercultural performance in Australia.”
This placement of local performance in an international context is reflected in course structure: first year students focus on three contemporary Australian works in substantial detail; second years “studying the history of modern theatre learn about the New Wave, Australian Performing Group, Nimrod and the Black Theatre movement. At fourth year, I teach topics on Contemporary Australian Drama that explore the production history and dramaturgy of recent works from Australian playwrights, including Wesley Enoch, Jane Harrison, Andrew Bovell, Katherine Thomson, Hannie Rayson, Daniel Keene, Patricia Cornelius, Tom Holloway and Noelle Janaczewska. Australian plays from the 70s to the present are regularly produced as part of the department’s activities.”
Bollen would like to see “more books that focus on the work of particular Australian companies and artists—books that combine documentation of product and process, with analysis and critical reflections. It would be great to have books on Australian Dance Theatre, Bangarra, Back to Back, The Border Project, Chunky Move, Urban Theatre Projects, Version 1.0 and more. Performing the Unnameable (Currency Press with RealTime, 1999, editors Karen Pearlman and Richard Allen) was great when it was published. We need another collection on contemporary performance for the last decade.”
As for magazines and online publications, “RealTime is a crucial resource. I couldn’t teach Live Arts and Performance without it. It is required reading for students. It is the only resource that provides national coverage and international context for contemporary performance in Australia. The other online resources that are crucial for teaching are AusStage and AustLit. I also rely on the websites of companies and artists. The scholarly journals About Performance, Performance Paradigm and Australasian Drama Studies are valuable for in-depth studies, but their coverage is not so extensive.” A vital component of the department’s approach is that “four of the six permanent lecturers in Drama at Flinders are practising artists. Their work as artists forms a core part of their teaching. It is also visible to students in work on productions on campus.” In his reply to my queries, Bollen appended an extensive and impressive list of the websites for artists, companies, festivals and venues in Australia and around the world that are part of the syllabus for his Live Arts and Performance course.
university of queensland
Playwright Stephen Carleton is responsible for Australian Drama at the University of Queensland: “We offer an Australian Drama course that spans the entire 20th and early 21st century from Federation to the present.” The final weeks of the course focus on contemporary practice through a thematic approach, for example “Engagement with the Asia-Pacific Rim” is projected for 2012. “Additionally, we feature the work of Urban Theatre Projects in Sydney and Tracks Dance Theatre in Darwin within the ‘post-national theatre’ rubric of our Contemporary Theatre course…We also offer a third year course in Dramaturgy and Play Writing in which students learn contemporary dramaturgical practices and theory and apply this to each others’ new writing projects.”
“As a practicing playwright and convenor of the Drama Major,” writes Carleton, “I have a substantial investment in the centrality of an Australian focus in our program, and all staff at UQ Drama are committed to encouraging students to place the Australian cultural and industrial theatre experience in an historical and international theatre context. As well, UQ Drama produces Australian works one semester in every four. Most recently that has been work by Van Badham. We encourage students to experiment with the short plays they write in Dramaturgy and Playwriting in terms of form and content.These are frequently produced by the University’s theatre group Underground as part of their annual Bugfest Program.”
As for books, “we set Maryrose Casey’s Creating Frames, about Indigenous theatre practice, alongside broader Australian survey texts such as those by John McCallum and Geoffrey Milne as required reading.” A particular challenge, says Carleton, is the absence of “texts placing contemporary Australian theatre practice within an international context.” However, Carleton claims that “UQ Drama’s emphasis on Theatre Through Time and Space represents the most comprehensive canonical approach to Western European and International theatre (including Chinese, Indian and Pacific theatre traditions) from Antiquity to the Present of any tertiary theatre program in Australia. Placing contemporary Australian theatre practice within this broad spatial and temporal history is a central tenet of our approach.”
However, he adds, “It is incredibly difficult to get information about what’s happening in the regions and the capital cities beyond Sydney and Melbourne. A dedicated national theatre magazine would be a wonderful thing—a specialised theatre magazine that augments RealTime’s focus on multi-form and genred performance, dance, film review and analysis—that would be an excellent resource to have.” He is appreciative of AusStage and AustLit for providing increasing online documentation.
The observations made in Part 1 of this survey add up to a strongly felt need to be able to understand and teach Australian performance on its own terms but within the framework of the national and international perspectives that this country has struggled so long to attain. The work is there, books, journals, archives, new media tools, touring networks, but something’s missing or, better, something’s growing—but how well formed will it be for the performers and performance scholars of today and tomorrow?
Part 2 of this survey will appear in RealTime 105, October-November, and will include observations from Peter Eckersall, Associate Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne; Laura Ginters, Lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney; Clare Grant Lecturer in the School English, Performing Arts and Media the University of New South Wales; and Helena Grehan, Senior Lecturer in the English and Creative Arts program at Murdoch University, Western Australia.
{$slideshow} THE LAST CO-PRODUCTION BETWEEN QUEENSLAND THEATRE COMPANY AND BELL SHAKESPEARE I’D SEEN WAS HEINER MULLER’S ANATOMY TITUS FALL OF ROME: A SHAKESPEARE COMMENTARY WHICH WAS AN IMMENSELY POWERFUL, MEMORABLE AND RELEVANT PIECE OF CONTEMPORARY THEATRE, A BLOODY AND INESCAPABLE DISSECTION BY MICHAEL GOW AND JOHN BELL THROUGH THE LENS OF SHAKESPEARE AND MULLER OF THE COLLUSIVE NATURE OF CONTEMPORARY POWER AND VIOLENCE.
Their latest collaboration, Faustus, albeit providing solid, rambunctious entertainment that scarcely flagged, appeared at the outset to lack the same intensity of focus. There was ample scope, I thought, for this production to put itself more on the line. Instead what at first seemed to be a confusion of eclectic irony and disparate references was ultimately made clear in this new recounting of the legendary Faust, the scholar who sells his soul in exchange for knowledge of the universe and worldly powers.
The western world, especially as it presents the face of modernity, has long been characterised as Faustian, and non-westerners, from the most powerful to the poorest, appear to be ready to make any bargain with the devil to gain access to what is perceived as a cornucopia. This perception is taking us all to hell, or at least to a fiery end to the planet. And, leading us there, climate change sceptic Rupert Murdoch who in recent media appearances eerily resembles John Bell’s seedy portrayal of Mephistophilis as an Ocker small time, seen-it-all gangster. Bell’s was a peculiarly soulless portrayal, I thought, until the penny dropped…Mephistophilis has no soul.
Jonathon Oxlade’s set was living hell. That is to say, it grandly facilitated what in essence was a very racy production. The conceit was that its denizens were performing a show within a show, all for the mystification and damnation of Faustus. It harked back to travelling players, puppet shows, Piscator and the Weimar Republic, and used a plethora of means from documentary film footage (although this might have been updated to the 21st century) to tacky life-size mannequins as multiple framing devices. Musical references ranged from Mahler and Liszt to kraut rock. Part necessity, part Gow’s aesthetic choice, the acting style was hard, straightforward, unsentimental. Nevertheless, individuals shone through: Jason Klarwein as a Brian Ferry Lucifer, or hunched over disguised in a Richard Nixon mask; Vanessa Downing remorseless as Hecate; Catherine Terracini exhibiting the raunchy aplomb of a 1950s movie star as Beelzebub.
In his writer’s notes, Gow indicates that he has based his adaptation primarily on Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (at least, the lines regarded purely as Marlowe’s) and JW Goethe’s treatment of the same theme in his Urfaust that preceded Faust; the Tragedy Parts I and II. Gow points out that Marlowe’s collaborators padded out the drama with farcical knockabout, and Goethe introduced the story of the young girl Gretchen. The Marlowe version presented a series of ‘shows’ or plays within plays, so Gow decided to include the episode of Gretchen as another of these ‘shows.’
Even so, as movingly played by Ben Winspear and Kathryn Marquet, it is the most human episode in what otherwise might have seemed a relentlessly cynical piece, and speaks directly to Gow’s vision of love, love carnal and love exalted in the words of Marlowe’s own, The Passionate Shepherd to his Mistress. Throughout I warmed to Gow’s love of the English language of the period which performed a particularly nostalgic threnody at this juncture for our own lost innocence and experience, of the half-familiar, half remembered words from school poetry text books, addressed to the schoolgirl Gretchen. The revelation of the heat of Gretchen’s adolescent desire was searing and poignant and personal in this production. The outcome of this disproportionate love affair has Gretchen mistakenly poisoning her mother with a drug given to her by Faustus so they can meet at night. Faustus, much to the disgust of Mephistophilis, has genuinely fallen in love with Gretchen, but cannot save her from execution, nor does she want him to, putting her faith instead in the merciful nature of divine, not human, justice.
Writing in the 18th century when the conflict of science and faith was less literally incendiary than in the 16th, Goethe was free as a natural scientist as well as a poet to express his fellow-feeling for Faust’s ambition to unlock the secrets of the universe, and so in the end assigns him a less dastardly fate than the one designated him by Marlowe. For Goethe, the love of a good woman was Faust’s salvation. Faust: the Tragedy Part II, declares that, “The Eternal Feminine leads us on.” Marlowe’s Faustus tries to strike a bargain with God by promising to burn his books, only to be condemned for his double apostasy by God’s silence, and Faustus is dragged screaming to Hell. Gow for the 21st century interrupts the narrative precisely at the point where God is silent, the actors explaining that this has all been theatre, that Heaven and Hell are merely stage props, and condemning Faustus to the freedom of his own conscience as he makes a swift exit through an audience that now stands similarly condemned.
At first I spontaneously cheered a gesture that seemed politically apt in the light of the world-wide revival of rampant religious fundamentalism, and so in accord with Marlowe’s avowed atheism as if he were finally free to speak his mind. Over time, however, Gow’s interruption appeared richer, more resonant. In his Thesis on History, Walter Benjamin explains the power of dialectical thinking as opposed to historicism: “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. When thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock.” In a highly pertinent essay, “Interruption and the Last Part,” Gabriel Josipovici points out that it was the ability to arrest thoughts that Benjamin cherished above all in the theatre of Brecht. Epic theatre, says Benjamin, breaks up the stream of continuity and allows us to see that events could be other than they are. If post modernism, so-called, has made a fetishism of interruption, the task of the modern artist, Josipovici concludes, is to make something that will catch both the power of continuity and at the same time, through interruption, to break its hold over us. On both counts, Michael Gow’s Faustus delivered.
Queensland Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare: Faustus, after Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, adapted and directed by Michael Gow, writer, performers John Bell, Vanessa Downing, Jason Klarwein, Kathryn Marquet, Catherine Terracini, Ben Winspear, designer Jonathon Oxlade, lighting designer Jason Glenwright, composer Phil Slade; Brisbane Powerhouse Theatre, May 30 – June 25,
{$slideshow} IN 2010 GEELONG’S BACK TO BACK THEATRE UNDERTOOK THREE INTERNATIONAL TOURS PERFORMING FOUR SEPARATE WORKS, HOLDING CREATIVE DEVELOPMENTS FOR ANOTHER FOUR ALONG THE WAY. YET ARTISTIC DIRECTOR BRUCE GLADWIN STILL DESCRIBES THE COMPANY AS A SMALL ONE. “IT’S NOT AS IF WE’RE OUT THERE MAKING A SEASON BROCHURE WHERE WE DO EIGHT SHOWS A YEAR. WE SPEND A LOT OF TIME HERE WHEN WE’RE NOT TOURING, MAKING NEW WORK OR DOING A COMMUNITY PROJECT IN GEELONG THAT DOESN’T HAVE A HUGE PROFILE.”
While the company may see itself as small, its immense strides in the Australian performance world can best be understood by contextualising its very existence. When touring abroad, the company has often been asked about the social and political climate that has allowed it to come into being. It may seem an odd question—in our liberal society, the emergence of an artist might seem the simple result of an individual’s desire. But a professional and highly regarded theatre company employing performers with disabilities isn’t the norm the world over. In the minds of those asking these questions, says Gladwin, “people with disabilities don’t exist within the cultural landscape of their own countries.”
In the 1980s Australia underwent a process of de-institutionalisation. Concerted efforts were made to provide people with disabilities stable roles within the wider community, with residential, employment and support options expanded. People with disabilities were afforded the opportunity to be more visibly engaged with other sectors of society. This hasn’t occurred everywhere. “In Austria,” says Gladwin, “until recently, they didn’t have to have a government policy dealing with people with disabilities in aged care—because at the end of World War II there weren’t any people with disabilities left.”
To mainstream audiences in Australia, Back to Back has emerged as a fully-fledged company producing complex and artfully realised works in the space of a few years. But such ‘overnight successes’ rarely occur overnight—the company has been operating since 1987, and its recent entry into the international spotlight is the culmination of decades of development and self-scrutiny. That a suite of productions—Soft, Small Metal Objects, Food Court—have enjoyed unwavering critical acclaim is an outcome of this carefully judged and quietly considered approach to the question of what the company wants to be.
At a festival in Spain many years ago, Gladwin saw a company of performers with disabilities from Portugal producing a farce. “Everyone said ‘you’ve got to see this company,’ and they were great, they were really amazing. But what they were performing was this traditional farce. You couldn’t watch it without thinking that in their own country they are performing this alongside other companies performing this type of material and they’re always going to just be this variation of that.”
what theatre can be
Back to Back isn’t interested in reproducing traditional forms of theatre. Rather, says Gladwin, the company “has always been about forging what we think theatre could be. We create our own stories.” “Theatre’s very empowering,” says ensemble member Scott Price. “Anyone with a disability can act, and people with disabilities need that empowerment.” Price became a full-time member of the company in 2008 and appeared in the disturbing Food Court, which premiered at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2009.
Performance can be empowering, but many people also find the prospect of exposing themselves to public attention a threatening one. “Do they?” asks Price. “I feel very comfortable in my own skin. I have been nervous occasionally but I’m generally really comfortable. Of course before opening night you’ll be shit-scared but as the shows go by I’m fine.” Though only 24, Price is the ensemble’s most vocal interrogator of the politics and ethics of representing disability in a theatrical environment. “Some of the moral and ethical standards I have,” he says, “well, I’m open to a lot of stuff but what I’m not open to is discrimination towards people with disabilities. Some language is pathetic.”
“Scott is the person in the company where if there was some representation of people with disabilities or if someone uses the word ‘retard’ or something, Scott will stand up and make a statement about it,” says Gladwin. “Well, for example, your use of the R-word,” says Price. “I just don’t think we should use that in a show.”
Back to Back is no stranger to controversy; indeed, the company’s works consciously challenge perceptions of disability, often turning the gaze of the audience back on itself. Soft featured a narrative in which a couple debate the termination of a pregnancy after the foetus is diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome, arguing that the child will never be able to secure proper education or decent employment. Food Court—a collaboration with improvisational jazz group The Necks—centred on a pair of bullies victimising a disabled woman, leading her to a gloomy forest and subjecting her to a barrage of physical and emotional abuse. That these scenarios are played out by performers who themselves might face such discrimination adds a profoundly unsettling edge to each production.
ganesh versus the third reich
The company’s next work is Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, appearing in this year’s Melbourne Festival. “In some ways this work is made in response to some of the feedback we had from Food Court,” says Gladwin. “Some of the questions we had were whether the actors were in charge of what they were doing, and who was the author of the work. How comfortable were the actors with what they were doing? In a way, making a work that’s about the making of a work gave us the vehicle to explore that.”
Again, Price has acted as the ethical barometer of the piece. “You know, you’re portraying Nazis and people were actually killed,” he points out. “This is something that should be discussed but, gee whiz.”
The way the company has handled the dilemma of representation is to incorporate these questions into the production itself. The work features two strands: one is an epic hero’s journey—the Hindu god Ganesh travelling through Nazi Germany to reclaim the mystical symbol of the swastika appropriated by Hitler. The other explores the frame of a theatre company attempting to explore the politics of such cultural appropriation by appropriating cultural symbols itself: “the actual makers of the work in moral and ethical conflict with each other over the making of the piece,” says Gladwin.
It’s impossible to say, yet, what the final performance will be. It’s an ambitious undertaking—a number of scenes are performed in German, and Ganesh features the largest amount of text the company has ever taken on. The work is both a costume drama and a post-dramatic exploration of theatremaking. But Back to Back’s mandate is one of risk-taking, and the incorporation of unexpected elements occurs not just throughout development but during productions themselves.
ensemble and authority
Back to Back is driven by its ensemble. In response to those who questioned the authority of its performers in Food Court, one anecdote may suffice. During the development of that production, one of its devisers and performers, Rita Halabarec, insisted on the inclusion of several monologues that others weren’t so sold on. “There was a lot of conflict between Rita and I in the making of that work, in terms of the editing of it,” says Gladwin. “What went in and what went out.
“She would exercise her authority as a writer in the performance. There were two points at which she would deliver a monologue that wasn’t in the script. It was an issue for us because all the language was projected as well as spoken. So after realising that we couldn’t stop her, we built a palette of phrases that we thought she was likely to say and the AV operator would have to look at a screen and try to click on what was said. I kind of liked that, and came to really love what she offered. It went against my judgement but in the end…I mean, we’ve got The Necks there who are these improvising jazz impresarios and she’s doing the same thing.”
Malthouse Theatre & Melbourne Festival: Back to Back Theatre, Ganesh versus the Third Reich, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Sept 29-Oct 9; www.malthousetheatre.com.au; Melbourne Festival, Oct 6-22
FOR SOME TIME AUSTRALIAN THEATRE HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO A SIMMERING YET PERSISTENT ANXIETY SURROUNDING THE FUTURE OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. THE ARGUMENT HAS BEEN REHASHED AGAIN AND AGAIN—THAT AN EMPHASIS ON COLLABORATIVE DEVISED WORKS, NON-TEXT-BASED PERFORMANCE AND CROSS-DISCIPLINARY HYBRIDITY DEVALUES THE ART AND CRAFT OF GOOD OL’ FASHIONED THEATRE WRITING. BUT FOR A GLISTERING MOMENT IN MELBOURNE RECENTLY, ALL DEBATE SEEMED QUELLED AS A RATHER ASTONISHING NUMBER OF NEW AUSTRALIAN WORKS PREMIERED ACROSS THE CITY. YOU COULD WITNESS A DIFFERENT PRODUCTION BY A LOCAL WRITER EVERY NIGHT OF THE WEEK AND STILL BE LEFT WITH MORE UNSEEN.
mka: for playwrights
One company heralding a writer’s renaissance is MKA, a fledgling enterprise whose emergence was anything but simple. Originally based in a converted warehouse apartment in Richmond, MKA’s inaugural season was delayed after the local council ordered the closure of the venue due to complaints from neighbours. An interim space was quickly found in the CBD where a series of 25 play readings introduced Melburnians to the company’s precis—theatremaking that focuses on the development and presentation of original works that put writing first. A third venue in Prahran was host to MKA’s first season proper, comprising four plays of radically different tone and genre, while no less than the Melbourne Theatre Company has come on board to present another short series of readings produced by the group.
The four productions that made up this primer were of varying success. Nathaniel Moncrieff’s Sleepyhead proved a less-than-stellar opener, in part due to missteps in the writing. Positioning itself as an entry in the Australian Gothic genre, it both gestured towards familiar tropes and well-worn themes while not quite grasping the innate ambivalences which underscore the gothic.
A pair of sisters live in a rural shack with a drunk dad grieving the loss of their mother. His benign admonitions, intended to protect them from the harsh realities of life, force them to seek out other ways of escaping this stifling existence, from fantasy and a patchwork spirituality to a dangerous encounter with a stranger who may or may not be a serial killer. Along the way, the ghost of their mother frequently drops by to ratchet up their sense of guilt a notch, while the recurring disappearance of local girls adds a sinister foreboding to proceedings.
Once these elements are assembled however, it’s not quite clear how they are to interact, or what we can really take from them. The standards of the genre are all there: the imperilled young girl, the monstrous male, the fusing of psychology and environment, the return of the repressed, the descent into hysteria. Yet it’s a passive engagement with these notions that eventually plays out, neither problematising their historical meanings nor tapping into their enduring appeal.
Of a radically different order is MKA’s follow-up, 22 Short Plays, which is so self-mocking as to amount to an ideal snapshot of postmodern theory in theatrical form. Delivering precisely what it promises—22 tiny comic vignettes, often a mere minute or two in length, ‘Plays’ may be a misnomer; there’s little approaching character or plot here. But as scenes that quickly establish a recognisable theatrical mode before immediately dismantling it, the production works. The undergraduate atmosphere doesn’t really detract, indeed seeming entirely appropriate to a production that steadfastly refuses to take anything—least of all itself—with any seriousness. There’s no subtext here, but there’s almost no sur-text either; scenes are over before they have the chance to develop into something that might approach a critical comment on, well, anything. It’s very funny and deliberately pointless.
Matt Young, The Horror Face
photo Sarah Walker
Matt Young, The Horror Face
Somewhere between these two works is The Horror Face, a triptych of shorter works by MKA general manager Glyn Roberts. Though set in a dystopian future of clones and corporate control, the work doesn’t sit comfortably in strict science fiction mode. The scientists and company drones of each scenario are linked by the deadly spirit of a spectral lion; the significance of this is left teasingly open. Another return of the repressed, certainly, but is it the animal nature of the subjugated human or the vanquished spectre of nature itself? The other theme that connects the suite is that of the philosophical poverty of self-help and motivational speaking; again, there’s little direct statement made but plenty upon which to ruminate. The production itself suffered from some awkward staging, directing attention away from the writing’s more contemplative aspects, but it certainly came closer to matching MKA’s stated brief.
If The Horror Face hinted at the company’s promise, the final entry in its first season made good that vow. J.A.T.O. by Croatian writer Vedrana Klepica married marvellous design and strong performances brimming with intriguing possibility. A three-piece band arrive in Zagreb a tangle of mid-tour conflict and disappointment; a pair of half-hearted security guards are given the absurd task of protecting a politician’s decoy; a lonely woman drowning her sorrows searches for a man to fill her evening. Hovering around all of this is an imminent act of terrorism, though its exact nature is never quite certain.
Setting the action in an expansive sandpit makes for some wonderful moments of theatre; in one particularly effective scene a trickle of sand stands in for blood, and the liquidity of the stuff at times suggests that the entire production is occurring on a slowly shifting sea. There’s also the playfulness of sand itself and this is nothing if not a playful work. Politics and poetry weave their way through the writing, but the ever-present artifice of playmaking prevents the potential for polemic or a naïve form of realism. It’s proof that astute writing isn’t incompatible with the form of post-dramatic theatre and is an encouraging cap for MKA’s first official turn.
Yael Stone, A Golem Story, writer Lally Katz
photo Pia Johnson
Yael Stone, A Golem Story, writer Lally Katz
malthouse: a golem story
It would be remiss to discuss theatrical writing in Melbourne of late without mention of Lally Katz’s sterling A Golem Story at Malthouse Theatre. Katz has been one of the leading lights in playwriting for a decade, but Golem is a departure from her usual mode. It’s a work of restraint and austerity, invoking the uncanny rather than the fantastic. Based on the Jewish fable of the Rabbi of Prague, the writer has stayed unexpectedly true to her source.
The legend of the golem is a fascinating contradiction—steeped in history and tradition, it is also a quintessentially modern figure, a powerful repository of contemporary concerns. In the most well known of golem stories, it is a man created from mud by a Jewish mystic in order to defend his people from violent outsiders. As such, the golem has been harnessed by storytellers for different ends, as a symbol of both hope and solidarity in times of duress and, by less sympathetic revisionists as a kind of secret weapon that deserves suspicion. That ambiguous duality is well represented in Katz’ retelling, where the golem’s meaning is never confirmed.
Katz’ script opens with a brilliantly spare piece of scene setting as a young woman confronts a man:
AHAVA. Is this Prague?
RABBI. Yes. It is Prague.
AHAVA. What year is it?
RABBI. It is 1580.
AHAVA. Am I Jewish?
RABBI. Yes.
AHAVA. And you are the Rabbi?
RABBI. Yes.
To me Ahava seems to be Katz herself, setting forth to engage with a Jewish heritage to which she is in some ways still a stranger. But what results, especially under Michael Kantor’s direction, is not a work of meta-theatrical self-reference such as the playwright’s Goodbye Vaudeville, Charlie Mudd or Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano. A Golem Story is a solemn exploration of the role of the sacred in the modern world, in which Katz and Kantor attempt not to represent the spiritual experience but to reproduce it as immediate experience. Anna Cordingley’s design is a superbly judged mediation of the earthy and the transcendent; the live songs accomplish something similar, as well as reminding the viewer of the connection between voice and the invisible foundations of life (indeed, the word ‘animate’ is from a Latin root that signifies both ‘soul’ and ‘breath,’ as if the two cannot be divorced).
While Katz’ script is a compelling one on paper, the Malthouse production illustrates that a play’s meaning likewise cannot be shorn from its performance, its breath. The art of playwriting doesn’t truly seem in danger of disappearing any time soon, but it takes a lot more than a playwright to make a piece of theatre that truly lives, however brief its time on earth.
MKA: Sleepyhead, writer Nathaniel Moncrieff, director Yvonne Virsik, set & lighting design David Samuel, May 10-28; 22 Short Plays, writer David Finnigan, director Tobias Manderson-Galvin, May 31-June 18; The Horror Face, writer Glyn Roberts, director Felix Ching Ching Ho, June 23-July 9; J.A.T.O., writer Vedrana Klepica, dramaturg Declan Greene, director Tanya Dickson; MKA Theatre, July 14-30; Malthouse: A Golem Story, writer Lally Katz, director Michael Kantor, performers Nicholas DeRossos, Joshua Gordon, Mark Jones, Michel Laloum, Brian Lipson, Dan Spielman, Greg Stone, Yael Stone set & costumes Anna Cordingley, lighting Paul Jackson, musical direction Mark Jones; CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, June 10-July 2
Eden Falk, Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Who’s the Best?
TWO PRODUCTIONS WITH COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERFORMATIVE IDIOMS FOCUS ON THE PREVALENT ETHOS OF SELF-CENTREDNESS IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY WITH SATIRICAL VIGOUR AND RAW HUMOUR. NEOLIBERALISM’S NEO-DARWINIST RALLYING CALL, GORDON GECKO’S “GREED IS GOOD” (WALL STREET, 1987), REMAINS LARGELY UNDISCREDITED DESPITE THE LESSONS OF THE GFC, SO EMBEDDED IS THE ETHOS OF SELFISHNESS IN EVERYTHING FROM TV ADVERTISEMENTS WHERE PEOPLE PINCH FOOD, BOYFRIENDS AND CARS FROM FAMILY OR FRIENDS, TO REALITY TV’S CRUDE AND CRUEL ELEVATION OF SOLE SURVIVAL OVER COOPERATION, TO THE PERSONAL PRONOUN-ISM OF SELFHOOD INITIATED BY MYSPACE AND CONFIRMED BY MYBUS, MYSCHOOL, IPHONE AND THEIR SUNDRY IMITATORS.
stc next stage: post, who’s the best?
I was seduced and wowed by Post’s infectiously delirious Who’s the Best?, commissioned by Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2 Next Stages program. Once again Post raise daggy amateurism to sublime artform—and with more professional verve than ever (see RT101). This experiment to determine which of the three collaborators and friends is the best performer employs a range of tests from Dolly quizzes and Enneagram tests to talent assessments and rating who’s the ‘hottest.’ These are constantly complicated or sidetracked by hilariously mind bending battles of the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on first” variety over the semantics of labelling that frame the tests or even incidental everyday expressions. These are adroitly woven through the script, recurring as running gags and providing an immersive, accelerating pulse to the work.
The performers’ casual delivery (always played directly to the audience while they freely insult each other) yields intimacy and immediacy on a stage which wickedly threatens to subvert the show as curtains and lighting go about their own business regardless—inevitably thwarting attempts to be the ‘best.’ Trio member and co-devisor Natalie Rose, who has recently had a child, is replaced for the premiere season by a wigged Eden Falk who slips easily into the Post mode while bringing his own wide-eyed innocence to Who’s the Best? alongside the well-honed comic personae of Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr. What adds bite and fun to the show is the sense that the performers are playing themselves with quite a few home truths aimed at demolishing self-centredness despite the final, chanted declaration “we are the best!”
John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business
photo Heidrun Löhr
John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business
belvoir: the business
Belvoir’s production of Jonathan Gavin’s bitterly funny The Business is set in the 1980s, the very period in which the ‘greed is good’ ethos was getting into its public stride—and we still march to its insistent step in 2011. The world of The Business feels quite like home.
Grossly self-obsessed behaviour is central to Gavin’s bitter-black comedy of bad manners and inheritance snatching, with director Cristabel Sved and costume designer Stephen Curtis wickedly ramping up the rude behaviour and appalling dress sense of the characters to the edge of grotesquerie, but somehow without losing the sense of these people as real, thwarted and, at times, oddly innocent and certainly pathetic—such is their tunnel-vision of the world.
Gavin and Sved took their cue for The Business from Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s grim, sometimes comic play Vassa Zheleznova, which premiered in 1911 and was later a favourite of Stalin who saw it many times, presumably enjoying the agonies of a bourgeois family in their act of self-destruction (and enforced changes to the play in 1935 to suit his tastes). Gavin’s play is based on Gorky’s; it is not an adaptation. But in both there is a shared, strong focus on the female characters.
In Gorky’s original, Vassa, wife to a shipping agent, Zheleznova, is relieved when her husband dies at the end of Act 1 as opposed to the wrenching, protracted and off-stage decline in Gavin’s play which ups the suspense and complications of the mother and her disaffected daughter’s machinations to secure the inheritance the household patriarch would have denied them. Zheleznova’s death is also a relief because the charge of raping a 12-year-old servant girl will now not go to court. Vassa battles on alone, corralling daughters and servants, bribing dockworkers and police and bickering with her estranged socialist daughter (torn between motherhood and the life of a revolutionary) over possession of the latter’s child. The pressure is such that Vassa dies at the play’s end, an exhausted manipulator. Gorky’s empathy for her is limited, but he makes it clear that as well as being a nasty bourgeois she is to varying degrees a victim, though always a fighter.
The Business’ 1980s family is immigrant in origin (no coffee, just a steady flow of tea), wealthy, the adult Australian-raised offspring and their spouses child-like and spoilt. The runaway daughter Anna (Kate Box) returns home, apparently more principled than the rest but, like her mother, Van (Sarah Peirse) embittered by her father’s mistreatment and ready to conspire with Van to seize the inheritance from the ne’er-do-well siblings who would promptly sell-off the family business.
The plays by Gorky and Gavin share the same spirited assault on the bourgeoisie—but what at first seems grimly frantic and comic slips into dispirited horror. Gorky’s Vassa demands that her husband suicide (he dies without resort to that but there is no grieving); Gavin’s Ronald (Van’s crippled second son; Thomas Henning) kills his wife’s lover Gary (Russell Kiefel) and the family dutifully manages the cover-up. Not least because the principal mother-daughter relationship is more nuanced and the two women win out, The Business comes off as more complex than Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova. The Business might represent a victory for women but not necessarily for integrity or compassion, as if to say the legacy of the 80s is a greedy, self-serving culture, whose children live in luxury and surly disaffection, emasculated by their parents who completely control the business. In this world Van, unlike Vassa, must live on, the legacy doubtless intended for a daughter who will become like her mother, or already has.
If The Business is not strong on 80s Australian politics and culture (Belvoir’s Wild Duck, RT102, similarly kept its distance from contemporary social realities) the specificities of time and place are largely left to design (Victoria Lamb)—an aptly tackily furnished, expensive modernist home with Californian bungalow exposed stone walls, a lounge room replete with board games for children who will never grow up, and a sunny porch that becomes a site for unexpected violence. Costumes (Stephen Curtis) and hairstyling are comically acute, viciously accentuating character traits and some of the fashion follies of the period. Van’s power-dressed shoulders and daughter Anna’s great height pushed up by heels and hairstyle immediately suggest competing forces. The casual wear and pronounced body shapes of the other brattish siblings, Simon (John Leary) and Natalie (Samantha Young), amplify their laziness while the hunching, lank-haired, bare-chested wild-child Ronald (Henning) lurches about like a purposeless Iggy Popp. A persistent soundtrack of 80s pop ranging from the execrable to the arty further compounds the period sense. The family lives inside this bubble. The business is not loved—it’s simply what it means in terms of survival or sustained leisure.
Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business
photo Heidrun Löhr
Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business
The one aspect of the family business that is focused on is a legal suit against it for the death of a worker who refused to wear a protective mask (“What is OH&S anyway?”). Van simply doesn’t want the company to accept responsibility—the victim was, after all, a chronic smoker. This is the world of The Business—a selfish society that doesn’t care enough for itself let alone others.
Inevitably, a limited range of concerns and character traits generates grotesques, utterly without empathy for the dying father (who clearly showed none to them) and locked in a bitter fight for an inheritance that Van has worked so hard for but that others simply feel they deserve. Emotions run to extremes but in Van we can see the fluctuating degrees of frustration, anger, near defeat and the need for reconciliation with Anna, even if it entails compromise. Van shows some compassion for the adulterous daughter-in-law Jennifer (Jody Kennedy)—even, as in Gorky’s original, working with her in the garden. The rest is misunderstanding, confusion, blindness and occasional insights that can’t be explored—Jennifer: “We’re all unhappy; none of us know how to love anything.” The best she can sadly come up with is: “I’m a human mix tape.” Van herself can barely live up to what she expects of her children: “These young people. ‘Duty,’ ‘consideration’—foreign concepts. I keep hoping one day they’ll grow up.” Her relationship with her husband is just as muddy: “So what? Maybe he was violent and drunk and yes he cheated on me, but it’s men like this who made this country what it is.”
What makes The Business potent is its emotional cruelty presented in the guise of comedy, sometimes bordering on farce, rich in gags (the business over a dead parrot, the nouveau riche ‘luxury’ of croissants stuffed with Fruit Loops), in explosive tensions and, not least, suspense (who will get the inheritance?)—and then shock. Director Cristabel Sved and her cast are endlessly inventive, keeping these monsters believable. If you were hoping for empathy and compassion and felt short changed then The Business was not for you—like Gorky’s original, this is tough social satire, even if Gavin is a tad more forgiving. And sometimes tougher: a communal sing-along in the Gorky is replaced with the dissolute Simon and Natalie’s faithful rendering of a ‘Tab Cola’ jingle, followed by Simon’s “Want a root?” It’s that kind of play, that kind of world. In the current political climate we’re hardly in a position to deny it.
Performances in The Business were uniformly excellent, underpinned by a strong sense of ensemble. Sarah Peirse’s Van rarely allows her bitterness to defeat her purpose or her anger to overrule the requisite moments of compassion or opportunism. Peirse plays out Van’s considerable contradictions without doubt or hesitancy. [Appraisal of the other performances can be found in the full review.] In working from Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, Jonathan Gavin has created a play that is his own, one finely realised by his collaborators and, sadly (if wickedly funny), a play for and of our times.
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Post, Who’s the Best?, creator-performers Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Eden Falk, devisor Natalie Rose, lighting Matthew Marshall, consultants Emma Saunders, Hallie Shellam, Clare Grant; Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Next stage 2011, June 17-July 2; Belvoir: The Business, writer Jonathan Gavin, based on Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, director Cristabel Sved, performers Kate Box, Grant Dodwell, Thomas Henning, Jody Kennedy, Russell Kiefel, John Leary, Sarah Pierse, Samantha Young, set design Victoria Lamb, costumes Stephen Curtis, lighting Verity Hampson, composer/sound Max Lyandvert; Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, April 27-May 29
Because of illness, the writer’s reviews of Belvoir’s The Seagull and PACT’s Bully Beef Stew will appear in RealTime 105, October-November.
LOGGING ON TO BUY TICKETS TO FESTIVAL A/D WERF, I AM INVITED TO PERUSE THE PROGRAM ACCORDING TO TIMETABLE, PRICE AND GENRE. THE TIMETABLE INDICATES THAT THE FESTIVAL IS ON FROM MAY 17 TO 26 IN UTRECHT (ABOUT AN HOUR OUT FROM AMSTERDAM) AND THE PRICES SEEM TO RANGE FROM €2.50-20 (AUD$4.60-26) PER TICKET—SO FAR, SO GOOD. HOWEVER, IT IS THE GENRE MENU THAT TRULY ASTOUNDS, LISTING THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS: “TEXT(THEATRE), VISUAL ARTS/INSTALLATION, DANCE(THEATRE), FILM-/VISUAL THEATRE, PHYSICAL THEATRE, LECTURE PERFORMANCE, SITE-SPECIFIC THEATRE, MUSIC (THEATRE), PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMANCE/INSTALLATION.” NOT JUST GENRES BUT SUB-GENRES OF THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE—THIS MIGHT JUST BE MY KIND OF FESTIVAL!
Of course, the exciting thing about festivals is that even when accompanied by such rigorous and exhaustive taxonomies, the work itself often falls between and across categories. In doing so, it rewrites the classification system for the next festival, sometimes even the next generation. On the basis of this year’s showing, I’d suggest that Festival a/d Werf consider a new category called “machinic performance.”
laurent liefooghe, woonmachine
One of my favourite works functions as both an installation in its own right and as the set for another performance (more on which later). Laurent Liefooghe’s Woonmachine (Living machine) first appears to me as a small glass island stranded in a sea of concrete—a glimpse of fragility in a heavy-duty, post-industrial space. Inside the installation there is what looks like a tiny motel room, complete with bed, armchair, shower, kitchen and table. When you step inside, you can hear a series of noises, conversations and instructions. If you choose to stand and listen, as I did, you can hear “living tak[ing] place without inhabitants” (program). Or, you can choose to obey the instructions and sit on the bed, pull up the duvet and thus become a performer yourself. Over the course of 37 minutes, an entire day and night pass, the lights changing their colour and the walls their opacity. The overall effect is deeply unheimlich, commonly translated as “uncanny” but also, appropriately in this instance, “unhomely.” This is indeed an “unhome”: not quite life-size, not quite life-like, but near enough to unsettle. The program states that it can be read as both a “modernist glass house and a black box” but it also seems like a postmodernist merging of Apple and Ikea, where both your books and your being have been reduced to a “pod.”
james beckett, blinds
Situated in a similar space to Woonmachine, both literally and conceptually, is James Beckett’s Blinds. Within the same converted warehouse, Beckett has created a tiny cinema of 16 seats. Up the front, a black roller door rises to reveal a white venetian blind. This blind then rises to reveal another white blind, which—after a pause—reveals yet another just like it. This continues, at varying paces, for approximately 30 minutes and 50 blinds, though it is hard to keep track of either. During this time I find myself marvelling at the different shades of white, cream, pearl and alabaster, the different widths of the slats, and the fact that none of the blinds ever tangle, snag or lift in a lopsided fan. More significantly, I think of Malevich’s minimalism and the older theatrical tradition of the reveal, whereby the curtains peel back and we finally see. In the case of Blinds, I keep expecting to see a mirror, which would reflect our own desire to see back at us, but Beckett refuses us even this, choosing instead to force us to reflect on reflection itself, in every sense of the word.
kris verdonck
The relationship between machine, performer and spectator also comes into play in Kris Verdonck’s work. I miss the “live” version of Verdonck’s Actor#1 but later see him in conversation with his collaborator dramaturg Marianne van Kerkhoven and Melbourne academic Peter Eckersall (the festival coincided with the Performance Studies international conference at Utrecht University). Both the work and the discussion are wide-ranging, drawing on the vocabularies of theatre, visual art and architecture. In one work, Dancer#1 (2003), an L-shaped steel beam spins and lurches as it attempts to recover its balance, but since it never can it begins to read as a dance of death—completely improbable given it’s a machine (http://vimeo.com/5436267). In another work, In [www.margaritaproduction.be/_ENG/KRIS_VERDONCK/IN/FILM.html] (2003), a human performer is immersed in a sensory deprivation tank for an hour—at first glance she looks like a robot, but then she blinks and we hear the amplified sounds of her breath and heartbeat. In I/II/III/IIII [www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNo4xeizMf0] (2007), dancers are suspended like marionettes in a life-size mobile; though they seek to maintain unity in their choreography, the tiny physical differences between them eventually send them into ever so slightly different spirals. Each of these works, as well as the more theatrical END [www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbtwrPjuc0U] (2008), is mesmerising and the sooner someone brings them to Australia, the better.
sanja mitrovic, daydream house
Enter sandman, or sandwoman as the case may be in Sanja Mitrovic’s Daydream House, which is set in Liefooghe’s Woonmachine, lending the installation yet another layer of meaning and vice versa. Mitrovic is an elegant hostess, sweeping about in a long black dress offering wine, food and entertainment. The show starts with her peeling and chopping carrots, cucumbers and celery in silence before finally saying, “Boring, uh?” She lists a series of vaguely depressing statistics about how many hours we spend during our lifetimes preparing meals, watching television etc. “But,” she exclaims, “they are such deliciously unproductive hours!” She has a brief conversation about her day with an invisible interlocutor before speech disappears and the segment is repeated as a physical phrase. She then steps out of the house and tells us the story of Chekhov’s mother, who lost the family home twice over. These events apparently inspired The Cherry Orchard and Mitrovic recites a passage from the play’s final act, the phrase “What these walls have seen!” taking on a new complexion. This might be the end, but instead the performer drags out the furniture piece by piece, herding some spectators into the room while others remain outside looking in. She sits on a couch and speaks into a microphone, telling us of life in Belgrade in 1999—of what it is to sit in the dark, or the day for that matter, waiting for a bomb to drop. “Even fireworks get boring,” she says, and “everyone moves away.” Subtle and understated, Daydream House brings together numerous cultural inheritances from Chekhov to cinéma vérité to installation art. Not so much a narrative as a mood, it left me profoundly nostalgic for a place I never knew.
the economics of performance
Such theoretical musings on the mechanics of performance are cut short when confronted by the economics of performance. Not long after I arrive home, I receive an email imploring me to sign a petition against the Dutch government’s drastic budget cuts. The recently elected right-wing coalition plans to cut €200 million—approximately 25% of current expenditure—from the arts budget by 2013. While the “top institutions” (museums, opera and ballet) will survive relatively unscathed, 21 production houses working in contemporary visual and performing arts are facing closure, including Utrecht’s Huis a/d Werf. It is hard to imagine the past few decades of theatre, performance and dance without the Dutch influence and it would be an immense shame to see it disappear now. They have not only helped to pioneer contemporary performance, they have helped to make and remake its very categories.
ON JULY 6, IN RADIO NATIONAL’S AUSTRALIA TALKS, THE QUESTION UNDER DISCUSSION WAS WHETHER THE VISUAL ARTS SHOULD BE CLASSIFIED THE SAME WAY AS FILMS AND VIDEO GAMES. THE TOPICALITY OF THIS THEME COMES IN THE WAKE OF A SENATE COMMITTEE INQUIRY, WHICH HAS RECOMMENDED THAT THE VISUAL ARTS SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE NATIONAL CLASSIFICATION SCHEME, WITH A DISSENTING REPORT FROM GOVERNMENT MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE PREFERRING TO AWAIT THE OUTCOME OF A CONCURRENT AUSTRALIAN LAW REFORM COMMISSION REVIEW OF THE SCHEME.
As one of its recommendations, the Senate Committee proposed a self-assessment scheme under which breaches of the classification code would be met with sanctions. More importantly it recommended the appointment of community advisory panels with the authority to advise and guide the National Classification Board in its deliberations. In recommending this, the chairperson of the Senate Committee, the Tasmanian Liberal Party senator Guy Barnett, indicated that decisions of the Board should reflect community standards and attitudes of the day.
In his introduction to Australia Talks, Paul Barclay asked the following questions: How would this affect Australian artists and galleries? Could it restrict artistic freedom? Is it appropriate for art to reflect community standards and attitudes? Not surprisingly, given the focus of the Senate Inquiry, the conversation focused on sexualised imagery of children and the photographic work of Bill Henson. In 2008, the Henson debate reawakened and questioned the long-standing claim that artistic freedom excuses behaviours that may be unacceptable in other realms. This claim, often referred to as the aesthetic alibi, asserts a special case for art that might otherwise be unlawful if part of everyday life.
the aesthetic alibi under fire
Martin Jay described the aesthetic alibi as a “special case of freedom of speech,” one that provides dispensation to otherwise offensive material if it takes place “within the protective shield of an aesthetic frame” (Jay, 1998). The aesthetic alibi has given rise to legislative defences that protect works of artistic merit which would otherwise be deemed illegal (for reasons of obscenity, pornographic content or racial and religious vilification) and is implicitly invoked when contributors to public debate argue for the sanctity of a work on the basis that it is ‘art.’ Bill Henson actually sought classification of his work—it was after all available for viewing on the internet and a postcard which would have brought it into the realm of the classification system—receiving a “Parental Guidance” rating. Nonetheless, the ensuing controversy around the Henson photographs of children reflected prevailing community attitudes and responses to risk and all too often unsubstantiated claims took precedence over critical debate around aesthetics and ethics. The current proposal for community advisory panels raises the question that, where the ethics of practice are negotiated to reflect community standards and attitudes, artistic freedom and the aesthetic alibi come under fire.
The Senate Committee Inquiry and the Australian Law Reform Commission review of the National Classification Scheme question the aesthetic alibi and the assumption that art should have “special” dispensation. The Senate Committee Inquiry argues that artistic merit is not a defence, particularly when it comes to child pornography. While the exploitation of children holds centrestage, the recommendations go beyond this specific question to focus on the distribution and public viewing of art that is deemed to be outside or at the edge of accepted community standards. In essence the Inquiry is concerned with broader issues of censorship. However, the discussion around classification needs to be put in a broader context of the ethical regulation of art both in the public realm and now, more specifically, in the academy. Increasing regulation of the creative arts impacts on not only what we are able to view and experience, but more specifically on what artists can actually do. Thus a pressing question for artists working across the disciplines is: how does ethical regulation affect the creative process?
artists & protocols & ethics
The Australia Council responded to the debate around Bill Henson’s work by introducing its Protocols for Working with Children in Art (2009), linking them directly to the funding of artistic activity. In short, non-compliance or failure to sign up to or act in the spirit of the protocols may result in the denial or withdrawal of funding. Less well known is the impact of ethical regulation of art in the academy. As a result of the 1990s Dawkins’ educational reforms, creative arts education was integrated into the university sector. In the university context, art was reframed as research and artists became researchers. Under this rubric artists, like all researchers in the academy, are answerable to the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (NHMRC et al, 2007) and its equivalent for research involving animals, the Australian Code of Practice for the Care and Use of Animals for Scientific Purposes (NHMRC, 2004). With a focus on researcher integrity, justice and beneficence, the decision-making processes of university ethics committees tend towards risk aversion rather than management of risk.
risk aversion & self-censorship
The risk-averse environment inside and outside of the academy has had two major consequences:either risky art projects may not be funded or else (in the case of art in the university) denied approval. More worryingly, as Robert Nelson observed on air, artists self-censor and steer away from projects that are likely to create bother. Thus the impact of ethical regulation, including codes of practice and ethical protocols, have shifted attention away from the circulation of the work among audiences and have refocused it on the production of the artwork itself. When art or art as research is in conflict with established protocols, artistic freedom and the aesthetic alibi are no longer a valid defence.
at the boundaries of art & life
The view that there is something unique about artistic activity that sets it apart from ‘everyday life’ can no longer be taken for granted. Many contemporary art practices sit precariously on the boundary of art and life, and it is these areas of artistic practice that are particularly vulnerable to assertions of unethical conduct within the educational and professional sector. Common themes include the use of animals in art; concerns relating to artworks that utilise surveillance techniques and appear to impinge on personal freedom and/or privacy; instances of self-harm on the part of artists; and, as already mentioned, creative practices that involve children. In 1975 for example, the Australian artist Ivan Durrant draped a cow carcass across the entry of the National Gallery of Victoria and was filmed shooting a cow in front of the Monash Gallery of Art. In 2000 at the Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark, Marco Evaristti challenged viewers to activate food blenders containing goldfish, resulting in animal cruelty charges against the Museum Director. Melbourne’s 2010 Next Wave Festival contained a work by the Australian artist Bennett Miller, Dachshund UN, consisting of 47 dachshunds representing member states of the United Nations, a work that also provoked debate around perceived animal cruelty. SymbioticA has collaborated with the Australian artist Stelarc to grow an ear from cells (Zurr and Catts, 2004). When exhibited, the National Gallery of Victoria, in response to ethical concerns, displayed a notice assuring visitors that no human tissue was used.
The work of renowned French artist Sophie Calle directly engages with the blurred boundaries of the public and private self. In Suite Vénitienne (1980), Calle observed a stranger, following him across Europe and filming his movements. In another work, shown at the Venice Biennale 2007, she displayed an email from an ex-boyfriend, making it the central motif of the work accompanied by over 50 interpretations of the email text, some of which purported to analyse its author. When Marina Abramovic visited Melbourne as part of the 1998 Melbourne International Arts Festival she presented a work which required the audience to be physically restrained within a holding cell of the Old Melbourne Goal. In a separate work Abramovic invited an audience to take up knives and other weapons against her—incurring actual physical harm. Vito Acconci’s Claim (1971) challenged audiences to approach the artist, who was fiercely guarding a stairwell entry, and physically threatening anyone who approached. The Australian artist Mike Parr has long maintained a practice of self-mutilation, burning his skin and sewing his lips together. Bill Henson’s focus on children in the process of artistic creation, and the controversy it produced, can be seen as part of a continuum of artistic activities which challenge conventional and popular concerns about potential harm to self and others.
ethical constraint vs artistic freedom
Contemporary artists and those in the academy who are both influenced by and aspire to emulate many of these avant-garde practices are faced with a contradiction. While individual freedom and unrestrained creativity are at the heart of art training, the legal and institutional frameworks within the profession and educational institutions are likely to be just as concerned with risk management and compliance. The Statement on Ethical Conduct specifies that all research involving humans must be conducted in accord with the following principles: the research must have merit and integrity, be designed and conducted according the principle of beneficence (maximise benefits, minimise risks to participants) and be in accord with principles of justice and demonstrate respect for human beings and animals. Research involving human subjects and animals is submitted to a university ethics committee before a researcher is given the authority to proceed with a project. These committees may require changes to a project’s methodology or reject it altogether if they feel it conflicts with ethical protocols. The notion of the aesthetic alibi is not considered a valid rationale for an art practice that tests these protocols.
A recent survey undertaken at the University of Melbourne suggests a level of anxiety on the part of artists-as-researchers. From the responses, particularly from amongst practice-led researchers, it emerged that researchers believe that the ethics protocols, processes and procedures in universities operate as a silent regulator of conduct and a subtle determinant of content in creative arts research. One respondent expressed concern that the actual training of artists might lose its open inquiry should ethics processes determine modes of inquiry: “The training of a professional artist within academe, even as it includes research training must also acknowledge the serendipitous, convulsive, errant and imperious actions of the imagination in its moments of discovery.” Further, it was revealed that some students self-censored merely because they thought their project would not get through the ethics process: “The mere mention of these considerations [the ethics guidelines] is often enough for the student to self censor.” From these observations it could be argued that through its very stringent processes of ethical regulation, the university ethics procedure introduces limitations that work against ‘cutting edge’ research and mitigates experimentation at the heart of practice.
A 2003 study by Throsby and Hollister found that 91% of visual artists had undertaken some formal training and that 67% identified this as being their most important training and formative influence on their artistic practice. It is not surprising then that there is concern that what happens in the academy may flow through into and impact on the nature of practice once these are professional practicing artists. This in combination with the development of artistic protocols and classification offers a fundamental challenge to artistic freedom and the artistic alibi.
colliding benefits
Many artist academics hold the conviction that art should maintain its social critical role at the ‘edge’ and continue to test and trouble society’s ethical and moral boundaries, a role that stands in conflict with the fundamental precept of beneficence that underpins the Statement on Ethical Conduct. Research protocols could then be seen to be in tension with the fundamental tenet of avant-garde art, a tenet still held dear by many contemporary artists: art acts as a provocation; it operates as the conscience of a society, it produces discomfort and brings its audience into crisis (Bolt et al, 2010). For artists this discomfort and crisis represents precisely art’s benefit, both to the participants and to the wider community, while for an ethics committee such discomfort may be deemed an unacceptable risk. Here, two notions of beneficence collide. A comparable conflict can be observed more broadly as the government moves to limit the protections available to artists in a range of legislation, such as the anti-terrorism laws, representing a further fundamental challenge to the aesthetic alibi.
transgression for the good
The realm of the aesthetic is now meeting that of the ethical, not only in the academy but increasingly in the art world with no considered examination of the implications of this accord. Jacques Rancière (2009; 2010) asserts a distinction between aesthetic practice and ethical practice, and proposes that an ethical practice demands that individuals be treated according to the dominant ethos of the community in which they live. Consequently, the avant-gardism of artistic activity and its challenge to dominant social mores could be considered to be in opposition to ethical regulation. Susan Best encapsulated this tension when she referred to art “being seen as transgressive and lawless rather than being governed by the pursuit of the good” (Best, 2004). In his discussion of the animosity that art can create in a community, Leo Steinberg observes that the “animistic charge of artworks—the vitality imputed to them by the receiver” is what sets art apart (Steinberg, 1986). This vitality, this discomfort and crisis is precisely art’s benefit, both to the participants and to the wider community. The danger however, as Steinberg cautions, is that this discomfort might also allow iconoclasm to find fertile soil.
art circumscribed
A legacy of avant-garde conceptions of art as a necessary challenge to the status quo runs through contemporary practice and theory, perhaps nowhere moreso than in the early experimental stages of artists’ practices. Hence, many contemporary artists and art students pursue practices intended to be in direct tension with society’s norms. These art practices involve activities that may not be condoned in everyday contexts. In the past the concept of the aesthetic alibi, the suggestion that the imaginaries of art are inappropriate targets of generic legislative sanction, has been seen to be inviolate. Increasingly, as we outline here, it is not just the law that seeks to circumscribe artistic activity, but the ethical codes of practice within which art education institutions operate and the professional protocols for artists’ conduct. The combination of these various interventions could in some environments and risk-averse institutions lead to the stifling of creative development. What is called for is an environment that encourages a situated ethics of practice, one that responds to the particularities of each individual artistic activity and interpersonal negotiation, rather than regulating artistic activity through the external imposition of codes and protocols.
additional resources
Best, Sue (2004), Editorial, ANZJA, Vol 4 No 2, Vol 5 No 1; Bolt, B, Vincs, R, Alsop, R, Sierra, M, and Kett, G, (2010) Research Ethics and the Creative Arts, Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne Research Office; Jay, M, (1998), “The Aesthetic Alibi” in Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; Rancière, J (2009), “The aesthetic dimension: aesthetics, politics, knowledge,” Critical Inquiry, Vol 36 No 1; Rancière, J (2010), “The aesthetic heterotopia,” Philosophy Today, 54; Throsby, D and Hollister, V (2003), Don’t Give Up Your Day Job, An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia. Sydney: Australia Council; Steinberg, L (1986), “Art and Science: Do they need to be yoked?”, Daedalus, Vol 115 No 3, Art and Science (Summer 1986); Zurr, I and Catts, O (2004), “The ethical claims of bio-art.” ANZJA, Vol 4 No 2, Vol 5 No 1
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR LISA FRENCH HAS BEEN TEACHING A COURSE IN AUSTRALIAN FILM AT RMIT FOR 10 YEARS, AS PART OF THE CINEMA STUDIES MAJOR IN THE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA. WHILE THE COURSE ALWAYS LOOKS AT AUSTRALIAN CINEMA HISTORY, THE LOCAL FILM INDUSTRY AND THE CONCEPT OF A NATIONAL CINEMA, ITS STRUCTURE AND THEMES CHANGE FROM YEAR TO YEAR, TO KEEP IT FRESH AND INTERESTING, NOT ONLY FOR THE STUDENTS BUT FOR FRENCH HERSELF.
Australian Cinema is a 12-week course taught to undergraduates as part of the major or as an elective, with usually around 100 students. Films are selected in relation to the story the course is telling in any particular year, but are drawn from all periods of Australian cinema history and include shorts, features, docos, animations and experimental films.
an indigenous dimension
Whereas last year’s course looked at the themes, resonances and deep storylines throughout Australian culture that built Australian national cinema, this year there will be a stronger focus on Indigenous filmmaking, which will also make the course more contemporary. It’s been designed around films that are made by, or connect with, issues or representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, providing an integrated look at the artistic practice of Australian Indigenous filmmakers, examining how Aboriginal traditions have been cinematically or visually translated by filmmakers through innovative, imaginative and culturally specific approaches; films by non-Aboriginal filmmakers are examined in relation to how they contribute to the representational history and debates. “I’ve been able to hire a young Indigenous academic, filmmaker and activist, Simon Rose, to work with me on this course,” Lisa French explains, “and his ideas are different to mine. He’s particularly interested in humour as a critical aspect of Indigenous filmmaking and we’ll be screening films to illustrate that, such as Stone Bros and Bran Nue Dae.”
The course is built around a two-hour screening, a lecture and a one hour tutorial, with some of this time spent at ACMI; “the mediatheque at ACMI has such a rich resource of Indigenous material that it will be invaluable,” says French. Most of the students are doing a Bachelor of Communication, mostly majoring in Media. “The students are spoilt because they see the films at Hoyts, on 35mm; in a cinema, not on DVD,’ she explains, “although of course they do watch lots of other films on DVD, or through other sources, even YouTube.”
She also has a large number of exchange students; “this is fantastic, as they see our cinema completely differently. They think Muriel’s Wedding is a tragedy; with its elements of cancer and suicide they don’t think it is at all funny.”
australia beyond the mainstream
Margot Nash has just embarked on a new course in Arts and Social Sciences at UTS (University of Technology Sydney), part of a sub-major open to students from anywhere in the faculty, made up of three strands: Reading Australia; Past and Places; and Australian Film. “When it came to designing the course I felt quite daunted at first, but coming to it as a filmmaker rather than a film historian, I felt I wanted to approach it not through the accepted film canon, but rather through an underground, oppositional film history, a non-mainstream film history.”
So while the course provides the study of key moments in Australia’s film history such as the revival of the Australian feature film industry in the 1970s, it also looks at the new wave of avant garde, documentary and feminist film practice in the 70s and 80s and the latest wave of Indigenous and transnational filmmakers in the 90s through to the present. There will be a particular focus on independent and oppositional film practice through the study of recurring themes and issues such as Crime and Punishment, Indigenous stories, Migration, Working Lives, Alternative Lives and Women Make Waves.
This year’s course was over 13 three-hour sessions, although Nash is hoping to increase this to four-hour sessions next year, allowing for the screening of more complete films. This year films that were shown in their entirety included Wrong Side of the Road (1983), with one of the filmmakers, Ned Lander, in attendance, and Rocking’ the Foundations (1986), with producer-director Pat Fiske, screened in the session on activist documentary. But the course started with clips from The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and the 2004 three-part Film Australia History of Australian Film from 1896 to 1940, all of which gave students some understanding of the early years of the industry.
“The students had no idea about any of this. They only knew about the big mainstream films and not even much about them. It was a revelation for them,” Margot Nash says.
At the completion of this subject, students are expected to be able to explain the importance of a pivotal figure or figures in Australia’s film history, critique a film produced at a key moment which challenged ideas and conventions and reimagined Australia in some way, or create an imaginative and critical response to the imaginary produced in a recurring key theme or issue. Their responses came in the form of blogs, essays or films: “There were some really creative responses to the films in the strand, and they had reached such an understanding of the richness and diversity there,” Nash said. “One girl embroidered an evening bag as a tribute to the McDonagh Sisters and their witty, worldly silent features from the 20s, filling it with copies of contemporary reviews of their films.”
documentaries: resurgence & diversity
Associate Professor Dugald Williamson at the University of New England (UNE) School of Arts teaches Documentary studies, with a particular emphasis on Australian documentary. He is co-author, with Trish FitzSimons and Pat Laughren, of Australian Documentary: History, Practices and Genres (Cambridge University Press, 2011), a most timely and substantial look at documentary in Australia. He recalls that “when we did ‘market research’ for the book, two or three years ago, at least 29 higher education institutions in Australia had some practical and/or theoretical work on documentary, though the word ‘documentary’ wasn’t necessarily always present in course/subject titles. This range included some 70 individual subjects (units), across both undergraduate and postgraduate level.” As he says, “the diversity of offerings suggested a critical mass in recognition of the relevance of documentary for several kinds of educational purpose— production education and training, media skills and literacies in a changing technological environment, discipline knowledge of media/communications/screen and interdisciplinary interests including history, cultural studies, ethnography etc.”
Williamson believes there’s a resurgent interest in documentary, partly because of the development of infotainment, “but I find that students are often also interested in the discussions (occurring in industry and academia) about whether and how doco can engage with real people and wider situations not just constructed for the show. This goes to students’ own experience of media and what they value. It’s important and rewarding to see what students’ own conceptions of documentary are and to offer ways of widening these, exposing them to a variety of forms and voices with which they may not already be familiar—independent work, experimental, animated and digital doco, as well as the many appealing forms of observational and essay documentary.”
As he says, Australian documentary in its diverse forms has had a role comparable to other arts in interpreting and influencing national culture: “Thanks to our heritage institutions there’s a rich archive of such work, giving a window onto history, engaging with the changing ‘imagined community,’ while documentary continues to evolve and show different perspectives, such as the Indigenous retelling in First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia (2008; Blackfella Films, directors Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole).”
He believes that using documentary in higher education “provides the opportunity to look at how it ties into a range of disciplinary knowledges and social purposes, especially as resources increase online. Studying or making docos can help students see there have been changing forms of independent and community filmmaking as well as mainstream industry and institutions, so there are multiple points of access to making/using media.”
resource riches
The already rich and growing digital resources available to students online are obviously important in these courses and include Australianscreen Online (ASO, http://aso.gov.au/), the ABC’s A Place to Think and Screenrights’ EnhanceTV, while Dugald Williamson says his students have also been using Channel 4 and BBC sites—”it’s amazing what they find.”
ASO, operated by the National Film and Sound Archive, is a promotional and educational resource providing worldwide online access to information about the Australian film and television industry. Audio-visual material is sourced from the NFSA’s archives as well as those of its collection partners, the National Archives of Australia, public broadcasters ABC and SBS, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies—all the major audio-visual collections in Australia.
ASO contains information about and excerpts from a wide selection of Australian production from the early days to the present, in a digital resource which encourages the exploration of Australia’s screen heritage. The collection currently has almost 1,500 titles covering a wide range of formats and genres, from professional productions (feature films, television programs, shorts and advertisements) to factual programmes (documentaries, newsreels, corporate films and other historical footage) and non-commercial content (home movies). The website also has a separate section that draws together Indigenous content from the general format categories and profiles of Australian filmmakers in its “People” section. Information available for each of the audio-visual titles in the collection includes a list of the main credits and other production information, synopsis, curator’s notes, filmmaker comments and up to three three-minute clips from the original material. In some cases, as with advertisements and newsreels, items can be viewed in their entirety directly from the website. For other titles there are links to information about how to access a copy of the complete film.
Targeted at a wide and diverse audience including primary and secondary schools, tertiary researchers and students, screen industry practitioners, screen organisations and the general public, ASO receives around 90,000 visits per month, of which around 25% come from outside Australia. Around a third are from the education sector.
film research app
Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM), who have been making their well-respected study guides for over 20 years, have now launched what they believe to be a world first, an interactive film study guide app to be distributed initially through the iTunes App Store; this interactive study guide incorporates clips, animation and web functions. It was launched last month with two major productions, the Jim Loach Australian-UK co-production Oranges and Sunshine (2010) and the documentary Kapyong (Dennis K Smith, 2011).
hidden treasures
Of course, there is much valuable material that is not yet available as a digital resource. I was editor of Filmnews from the late 1970s to the mid 90s; over the same period, Cinema Papers was also going strong. Both publications have a wealth of interviews, production stories, reviews and debates on much of the local filmmaking and filmmakers of the period, as well as articles on the issues, often contentious and hotly fought over, that were important, to do with government policy and practice and the policies and performance of the various institutions within the film community. And there are other publications, both earlier and later, whose valuable contents are rarely accessed now; as online resources they could provide much invaluable support to the students looking at Australian film in various courses. Let’s hope they can soon become available.
additional film resources
AFTRS film journal, Lumina, now in its 7th edition (it can be purchased through www.aftrs.edu.au/explore/lumina.aspx); Dreaming in Motion, Celebrating Australian Indigenous Filmmakers (edited and produced by RealTime for the Australian Film Commission, 2007; the PDF of the book can be downloaded from www.screenaustralia.gov.au/documents/SA_publications/DreaminginMotion.pdf); RealTime has online Archive Highlights on Australian animation and Indigenous film can be found at; ATOM’s Metro Magazine with its enormous archive can be accessed at www.metromagazine.com.au; and there’s the OzDox site www.ozdox.org providing articles, interviews and news focused on Australian documentaries. Eds
OSCAR REDDING AND JONATHAN AUF DER HEIDE ARE ADAMANT. THE ONLY SOCIAL VALUE OF THEIR WORK IS AS A USEFUL CORRECTIVE. “AS FAR AS MAINSTREAM CONTENT GOES,” REDDING SAYS, “IT SEEMS THAT THERE’S A LOT OF THOUGHT GIVEN TO PRESENTING MATERIAL WHICH ISN’T OFFENSIVE. BUT I’D RATHER STAB MYSELF IN THE COCK WITH A SHARP FORK THAN SIT THROUGH ANOTHER PLAY BY JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH OR TONY MCNAMARA.”
Fresh from displaying his unstabbed member in Simon Stone’s production of Baal (RT103, p35), which made rather more headlines for the nudity of its cast than for its engagement with Brecht or the mastery of its stagecraft, Redding is playing down the suggestion that there is anything more to Cop Hard than bad accents and vulva jokes. He insists the 13-part web series he has co-produced with auf der Heide and starring a line-up of some of Australia’s most talented and psychologically unhinged young actors is actually less distasteful than a lot of what passes for entertainment in some other, more conservative circles.
“There’s actually a very large group of people who are fundamentally offended by this kind of ‘inoffensive’ theatre,” he continues. “Theatre, film and television that acts as some kind of counselling session, so that an audience can switch off or walk away from what they have witnessed with the comforting knowledge that they are living to the best of their ability and there’s no need for greater understanding or change, is offensive to a lot of people. So maybe producing an idiotic series like Cop Hard, where penises are allowed to float freely, kids are shot in the head and girlfriends make out with mothers, goes a little way to redressing the balance.”
While less vitriolic than his co-conspirator, auf der Heide nevertheless agrees. “I think we’re just producing work that we would want to see and wish there was more of,” he says. “We’re taking this opportunity to provoke our audience and have fun doing so.”
While Cop Hard is certainly provocative, it is arguable that the less perverse among us may find its producers’ sense of fun somewhat baffling. The series tells the story—and I use the world loosely—of mustachioed American detective Larry Hard who finds himself on the trail of a cop-killing clown after a number of his partners are murdered. In the meantime, he sleeps with everyone from a one-legged prostitute to the department’s resident shrink, watches approvingly as his parents copulate on the table during Christmas dinner and shows off his presumably fabled nipple to a group of cowboys sitting around a campfire. It is the last thing one would have expected from the pair whose last collaboration was Van Diemen’s Land (2009), the deadly serious feature film about Australia’s cannibalistic convict, Alexander Pearce, which was warmly received by critics even as it failed to make much of a showing at the box office.
“I felt that we told the story of Alexander Pearce the way it needed to be told,” says auf der Heide, who co-wrote and directed Van Diemen’s Land. “But just because I felt that the style we chose for that film was the best way to go doesn’t mean that I solely want to make contemplative art house films. Cop Hard was a reaction to that and probably an exaggerated one.”
“When you’re working on something like Van Diemen’s Land there’s such a serious nature to the story that the seriousness becomes a side effect of the way you approach the work,” Redding says. “We certainly had a great time making Van Diemen’s Land—a lot of good whiskey was put down in the evenings—but there was no escaping the challenge we faced and how hard we had to work to bring truth to the world and the story being told. Cop Hard seemed like a great opportunity to have a good laugh at ourselves.”
Consisting of 13 three- to seven-minute episodes, at least half of which bear no connection whatsoever to the series’ overarching narrative, the result is not only a pitch-perfect parody of 1970s police procedurals—Spike Jonze’s video for the Beastie Boys “Sabotage”, with its bad stick-on moustaches and I-have-come-to-clean-zee-pool swagger, is its closest relative—but also a masterpiece of ‘non-sequitural’ absurdity.
“Yeah, the series does seem to grab its influences from all over the shop,” Redding says. “One minute it’s Hill Street Blues or Dirty Harry,” auf der Heide continues, “and then it’s something from left field like Twin Peaks. It’s also a journey into a kind of American culture without boundaries, where ego and self-righteousness are without limits, much like Larry himself.”
“But the show digs its heels into Australian culture as well,” he says. “Our entertainment is so saturated by US content that I honestly believe Australians don’t like hearing their own accents on cinema screens. An Australian show shot in Melbourne with American accents is a great way to give the finger to the Americanisation of our culture.” “Although at the end of the day,” Redding adds, “it isn’t really making any cultural comment at all. Although cloaked in the stars and stripes, it’s much more preoccupied with provocation, using very familiar archetypes of pop culture and fucking with our expectations.”
While the pair is quick to dismiss any suggestion that the series might have some deeper meaning, or any thematic connection to their previous work, these dismissals nevertheless strike one as slightly disingenuous. If nothing else, Alexander Pearce and Larry Hard share a fairly obvious fascination with flesh and all things carnal. This obsession is one shared by many of the theatrical productions with which Redding and a number of the pair’s other collaborators have been involved with, as is the series’ depiction of sexuality and its fluid interpretation of masculinity. If James Bond is a man that men want to be and women want to be with, Larry Hard is a man that men want to be with, too.
In one particularly memorable scene, Larry goes undercover in prison where he has violent sex with a talkative inmate in order to uncover his next clue. The inmate in question is played by Thomas M Wright, who not only appeared in Van Diemen’s Land but also alongside Redding in Baal, as the pansexual titular character. Both Wright and Mark Winter, who plays Larry in Cop Hard, are Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm alumni.
Redding nevertheless believes that the similarities have little to do with a genuine thematic preoccupation and more to do with the nature of collaboration and the creative environment that these groups are working in. “It’s chicken-and-the-egg-type stuff,” he says. Auf der Heide is a little less circumspect. “I haven’t had any involvement with any of those theatre productions, but there’s definitely similarity in all those works and what was going on with Cop Hard,” he says. “But it’s probably just the result of a bunch of like-minded people banding together and fighting the good fight against conservative entertainment.”
“That said,” he adds, correcting me, “I don’t think Larry Hard and Alexander Pearce could be any more different. Pearce never drives the story of Van Diemen’s Land. I wanted him to be a victim of circumstance. Larry, on the other hand, has free rein to do whatever he wants. He drives the story to unpredictable places because he can do anything without consequence.”
As for the consequences of releasing the series online, with the audience free to donate via PayPal if they like what they see, the pair has found the break from feature film distribution enlightening. “We’d been financially crippled making Van Diemen’s Land,” auf der Heide says. “We wanted to cut out the middle-men—the distributors and exhibitors—by giving something directly to the audience.”
“We loved the freedom of doing a web series where you don’t have to cater for a mass demographic or satisfy a third party. With Cop Hard we could take risks because our aim was to purely indulge a niche audience who we know would love it. The donation system is working well and hopefully, as the show grows in popularity, it will cover its costs. Which is something we’ll never be able to say about Van Diemen’s Land.”
“We’re getting a lot random views out of places like Mexico, Brazil and Turkey,” Redding says, “though most of the interest is coming out of the States. A project like this will always start by finding its feet in and around the friends you have and any industry connections who might be interested, but your core fan base is always going to come from somewhere else. That’s the great thing about the web. As a distribution platform, it isn’t really the future anymore. It’s the present.”
NOTE: Footballer-turned-filmmaker Charles C Custer, the series’ US-based director, was hunting numerous species of animal at the time of this interview and was unavailable for comment. On the basis of his unprofessional, borderline-offensive interviews in other publications, this strikes the author as no real loss.
ALL TOO OFTEN IN AUSTRALIA DOCUMENTARY IS FORCED INTO THE STRAITJACKET OF BROADCASTER NEEDS, SLIMMED DOWN TO TV HALF-HOURS BEREFT OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION. YET THE SOLD-OUT SESSIONS FOR DOCUMENTARY FEATURES AT FILM FESTIVALS AROUND THE COUNTRY INDICATE A HUNGER FOR MORE IN OUR SCREEN CULTURE—A HUNGER DAVID ROKACH IS LOOKING TO SATISFY THIS OCTOBER WITH THE INAUGURAL ANTENNA INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL.
“When I came to Australia I realised there was no documentary festival,” comments Rokach, an Israeli film and philosophy graduate who relocated to Sydney in 2008. “So I decided to create one. I saw the impact that Doc-Aviv had not just on the development of new audiences for documentary but also on the quality of the films being produced,” he adds, referring to five years of experience he clocked up working for Israel’s Doc-Aviv International Documentary Festival.
While Rokach acknowledges the international presence of local films like Molly and Mobarak (2003), Forbidden Lies (2007) and the recent Shut Up Little Man (2011), he believes there is a need in Australia for “more financial support for documentary filmmakers interested in developing work that is more cinematic and challenging, and whose approach intends to work beyond the frames of broadcasting.” Alongside support for production is the need for a film culture that can screen and appreciate challenging documentary work—which is where Antenna comes in.
“Antenna’s main objectives are to promote and support documentary film culture in Australia, providing screenings of documentaries that most likely will not be released in local cinemas,” explains Rokach. “The program will reflect what’s happening in the contemporary documentary cinema in Australia and around the world.”
For the inaugural festival, Rokach and his co-director Alejandra Canales, along with Julia Scott Stevenson, have assembled an ambitious program comprising more than two-dozen titles from nations as diverse as Russia, Mexico, Sweden and Japan. Rokach says that the long list of themes covered includes “politics, the environment, gender issues, music and art,” with an emphasis on films with “a very strong directorial approach.”
The festival’s breadth is evident in the range of sample titles RealTime was able to preview. Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood) reconstructs Kesey’s legendary road trip across the US with his “merry pranksters” on a psychedelic bus in 1964, drawing on the many hours of colour footage shot by Kesey and others during the journey. Narration is provided by Kesey and the other pranksters via interviews from various periods, although some audio parts are reconstructed by actors from transcripts. Through these images from the time and the assemblage of audio testimony, Magic Trip pulls apart the legend from the inside, laying bare all the wonder, experimentation, naivety and foolishness of a crucial moment in modern American culture.
El Sicario, Room 164
At the other end of the spectrum, El Sicario, Room 164 (director Gianfranco Rosi) heads south of the border to contemporary Mexico, where the brutal slaughter of the Mexican drug wars is recounted in unsettling detail by a former “sicario”—one of the elite killers and torturers of the “cartel” that presides over Mexico’s cross-border drug trade. Hooded to protect his identity, the former hit man recounts a litany of horrors in a hotel room where he claims to have once tortured a victim. The power and reach of the organisation he describes is truly terrifying, involving the highest levels of the Mexican government, military and police force, as well as the US police and FBI. Rosi’s film is a model of simplicity that holds viewers in the grip of a claustrophobic horror, made all too real by the regular headlines detailing mass killings in Mexico’s border towns.
Into Eternity (director Michael Madsen) is a very different kind of horror film, taking us into the murky world of Onkalo, a vast underground city dug five kilometres into the Earth’s crust and designed to hold Finland’s nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years. The sheer scale and hubris behind the world’s first “permanent solution” to the nuclear waste issue is dissected with a cool, clinical tone that throws the utter irrationality of our ‘civilisation’ into sharp relief. Director Michael Madsen will be a guest at this year’s festival.
Alongside a strong international program are several Australian features and short documentaries, including an intriguing new 15-minute work from Dennis Tupicoff entitled The First Interview. Featuring a narration by the legendary Agnès Varda, this short brings to life an interview from 1886 between the Parisian photographer Nadar and the French scientist Chevreul.
Antenna will also feature a screening targeted specifically at high school students, a student film competition and various panels. There will be cash prizes for the best international, Australian and student titles. Clearly this is an event underpinned by an ambitious vision looking to carve a permanent place for Antenna in Australia’s festival calendar. Rokach says his team is already working on next year’s program, although he believes “we need to strengthen and grow in Sydney before we initiate a presence in other capital cities.”
It remains to be seen if Rokach and his team can realise their aspirations over the longer-term, but the 2011 program suggests a promising start. Since the demise of Real: Life on Film, Australia has been without a dedicated documentary festival, and the increasing conservatism of our broadcasters and film distributors means an event like Antenna is sorely needed (SBS is to be commended for participating as a major sponsor of the festival). For local documentarians it will be a chance to engage with global currents, be inspired and measure their work against the best other countries have to offer. For Sydney audiences it’s an opportunity to become immersed in all the wonder, joy, horror and provocation the best documentaries can offer.
Antenna International Documentary Festival, directors David Rokach, Alejandra Canales, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney, Oct 5-9, www.antennafestival.org
Bruce Ramus, Light Hearts, Light in Winter Festival
photo Jason South
Bruce Ramus, Light Hearts, Light in Winter Festival
NOW IN ITS FOURTH YEAR, MELBOURNE’S ROBYN ARCHER-DIRECTED ANNUAL LIGHT IN WINTER FESTIVAL HELD AT FEDERATION SQUARE HAS GROWN INTO A MULTI-FACETED EVENT IN WHICH LARGE-SCALE PUBLIC ART COMMISSIONS SHARE THE STAGE WITH A PLETHORA OF COMMUNITY-BASED INITIATIVES. FOLLOWING THE WORLD PREMIERE OF RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER’S SOLAR EQUATION IN 2010 (RT97, P23), THE CENTRAL WORK THIS YEAR WAS LIGHT HEARTS BY FELLOW CANADIAN, NOW MELBOURNE RESIDENT, BRUCE RAMUS.
Ramus is best known for his pioneering work as a lighting director for leading rock bands, including a 15-year stint with U2. More recently, he has turned his talents to urban design projects, including art installations. Light Hearts is a 13-metre-high pyramid-shaped platform, festooned with more than 2,000 bulbs, video screens and multi-hued strip lights. But its most notable feature is its open invitation to other artists and members of the public to contribute to the work. I spoke to Bruce Ramus a few days after Light Hearts opened.
How did you begin working with light?
My mum was an amateur actress, so I spent a lot of my youth hanging around community theatres and just kind of watching that process of how light affects how I feel about what I’m watching. The process is, I think, really visceral, really in our bodies. That’s where we really get it…it’s not something that happens cerebrally.
It seems to me that there was a big change in the music industry through the early and mid-90s with the integration of video into the stadium rock event in tours like the Rolling Stones’ Wheels of Steel and U2’s Zoo TV.
For me, certainly, the tour was Zoo TV. Prior to that, video had been a peripheral part of large-scale rock concerts. It largely sat on the outskirts of the stage. Zoo TV is when we took the screens and the imagery and moved it all to the centre of the stage. We made five large video walls and had about 200 televisions dotted around the set in groups of twos and threes, making one large, albeit fractured, canvas. The whole idea was a media barrage.
What difference did it make to your role as the lighting director with so much ambient light coming off a large bank of screens?
It allowed the lighting system to do less, so that I could turn it off and let the screens run. I learned to lay back and let the video do the work. And that was really beautiful, because when I did join in, it had a much stronger effect. As it is in any medium, the less you use it, the more powerful it is.
It would have been a few years after ZooTV, I guess, that LED started to become a viable video format?
In 1996, we wanted to develop a new type of video system. At the time, there existed a red and a light green LED, like we see on little power switches on our amps and our microwaves. So we asked Saco in Montreal if they could build blue and a full spectrum green LEDs, which they did. We then took that to Innovative Designs in Belgium and they made the prototype module which became the first ever LED video screen. Then we toured it in 1996-97 on the PopMart tour, which was the largest video screen yet built. It was about 70 metres wide and about 25 metres tall.
On that tour we did 130 shows for over two years, all outdoors. And I watched every audience walk out of there slack-jawed and stunned. Which was not my experience on Zoo TV, where they were vibrant, engaged. It really made me think about why this was happening. I noticed myself that I was watching the screen more than the band. So, there was a problem there.
Since then I have learned that when there is a higher resolution, there’s very little gap in the pixels, so the brain of the viewer does nothing to understand the image. The image just floods in. It’s a very passive experience. But when you start to separate the pixels, the brain automatically has to make up the gap. So it becomes a much more active experience for the viewer. Where on PopMart it was a bit like a music video. You know, we’re cutting to this, cutting to that on the beat, on the guitar solo, you see the strings of the guitar…no energy, a bit numbing.
Light Hearts, Light in Winter Festival
photo Fred Kroh
Light Hearts, Light in Winter Festival
Walking through Light Hearts just now I was struck by a strong sense of ritual. That seems like a connection for me to the rock shows, which are a ritual event for a lot of people.
That’s great. Yeah, you get it. The ritual for me is indeed a part of how I design anything…in terms of the history of theatre and how that began as a ritual of transformation. For me, those ceremonies and rituals are why we attend these events, because we all somewhere believe that there’s a potential, however small, for personal transformation. So, that’s how I began thinking about this.
I was asked to come up with an idea to unify the festival. I did want to build a framework for activities and for people to gather in the day, so that it just wasn’t something that sat there and came alive at night and had no role in the day. And so I started to consider a structure and immediately the pyramid came to mind.
You know, the word ‘pyramid’ has many translations, but the one that resonated for me was from the Greek ‘pyra,’ as in pyre, meaning a measurement of fire or light. And then I started to look deeper into why the pyramids were built, the great pyramids in Egypt, and found a lot of consensus on the building of them as an energetic healing symbol. This just kept deepening my connection to this shape and this structure. And a further aim was to make it light-hearted so that anybody could come and respond to this. Anyone could come and build a lantern or tie a piece of fabric on it or, there are so many ways to address it.
Every Saturday we build lanterns with children. It’s just fantastic to see. And then you start to see the other side of light, the light in the child’s eyes when they get to create something, leave their mark on an urban landscape, become part of something bigger.
How would you compare the work here with the way in which an audience participates in a rock event?
In a large stadium or in any show, you know, the audience is very controlled. They aren’t necessarily aware of that, but as the ones who push the buttons with the lights and the video, we have a level of influence on where everyone looks, how they will feel at any given time. With this, it’s much less controlled and it feels really interesting to have that…You know I’ve contacted artists like the Yarn Bombers. Today, I’ve spoken with a graffiti artist who’s coming tomorrow to begin painting some of the bits. And I don’t really know what they are doing and I’m just letting that happen.
How does that work for you? Because as a lighting director you’ve usually got to be really in control.
Yeah, it’s true. There are elements of this that I have controlled quite tightly. There is a lighting system installed on the pyramid, and we programmed it so it has a set of scenes or cues that it runs every night. And it runs through those from 5pm to midnight and then goes into its resting state, its breathing state, which is just one breathing cue that goes to 6am. So that part of it is quite strictly controlled. But then there is this whole interactive element to it. And the one thing that I’m finding more and more important in all of my installations is this interactive element. People do it with their bodies. It’s not something that you have to think about necessarily. You just go in, you can do something with your hands and put it on the structure. That was really important for me, to be able to let control go, give it to the people who wish to engage with it and let them do what they wish.
It will be interesting to see how people just appropriate the space themselves.
Yeah and I’ve seen that happen at night, when there’s no set agenda. The jazz festival was on and there were about 25 young people and they were all dancing around the bottom level of the pyramid…holding hands and swinging and running around the central core…magic. I just loved to see it.
Federation Square’s The Light in Winter, Melbourne, June 2-July 3
THIS ARTICLE CONTINUES TO EXAMINE THE CHARACTER OF NOTABLE FILMS FROM AUSTRALIA’S RECENT HORROR BOOM. PART ONE, IN REALTIME 103, FOCUSED ON SAW, WOLF CREEK, BLACK WATER AND INSIDIOUS. HERE I TURN TO OTHER FILMS THAT VARIOUSLY ENGAGE WITH AUSTRALIAN CHARACTER, LANDSCAPE, ACCENT AND MUSIC WHILE COMMITTING TO OR SUBVERTING GENRE FORMULA, OR BOTH.
undead
Like Saw creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the Spierig brothers are a young filmmaking duo whose hard work and hands-on commitment to the horror genre has paid off in terms of international success. Brisbane twins Michael and Peter Spierig, graduates in graphic design and film respectively, made about 20 short films together before pooling their savings to make Undead (2003).
Their interestingly flawed first feature displays visual flair, an eye for detail and an obvious love of genre film. The plot is generalised horror/sci-fi—a pastiche of spoof, zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, Western and heroic fantasy. The setting, however, sleepy fishing town Berkeley, is unabashedly Australian. Much attention is devoted to the creation of bucolic local colour. “Welcome to Berkeley,” reads a sign, “Come drop a line.” Protagonist René (Felicity Mason) has recently won the “Miss Catch of the Day” beauty pageant. There are shots of kids fishing, a local cricket match, agricultural life. The local fruit shop bears the legend, “Elvis Parsley’s Grapelands. Berkeley Fruit—Fit For the King.”
The local colour is extended to colourful locals, with a distinct ocker element that’s particularly embodied in the character of Harrison, a cop. This is amusingly juxtaposed with the film’s paranormal subject matter: “When I was a kid, we fuckin’ respected our parents,” Harrison barks, “we didn’t eat ‘em!” René, with whom the audience identifies, is the only character to escape caricature.
Daybreakers
courtesy Lionsgate Films
Daybreakers
daybreakers
Like Undead, Daybreakers (2009), the Spierigs’ more sophisticated (and bigger-budget) follow-up is visually adept, beginning with its introductory montage that sets the scene for a bleakly futuristic scenario. The brothers have once more turned to genre horror with a vampire film, but this one turns the tables: in the wake of an international plague, vampires have become the majority, the norm, while humans are a dwindling minority hunted down and harvested for their blood.
The vampires’ world is portrayed with elements of sci-fi noir à la Blade Runner (1982). The 1940s costume styling, moody lighting and cool blue tones contrast with the daytime world of the human survivors, whose warmth has a correspondingly bright, colour scheme that is recognisably Australian. Despite the cool stylisation, there’s some expertly timed gore, as when a vampire soldier testing a blood substitute explodes spectacularly. The film’s ultimate thrust is heroic, however, with a phoenix used to symbolise the resurgence of the human race.
Apart from Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe (playing an ethical vampire and human resistance fighter respectively) the cast is made up of well-known Antipodeans: Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan, Vince Colosimo, Isabel Lucas, Jay Laga’aia. But it seems that one of the vampire plague’s side effects is the acquisition of an American accent, for all that we appear to be on Australian territory. As Michael Spierig explained at a Popcorn Taxi Screening (www.popcorntaxi.tv/events/past/daybreakers-with-the-spierig-brothers/) this is the result of perceived financial necessity, where recouping a large budget means appealing to a ‘universal’ audience. Arguably, the film’s confused national identity makes its fantasy less convincing, especially to a local audience.
dying breed
Jody Dwyer’s 2008 film Dying Breed cannot be said to suffer from any such lack. Any discussion of recent Australian horror is incomplete without mention of this film, which bends over backwards to incorporate Australian history and Australian signifiers. As we follow four protagonists into the Tasmanian wilderness, we encounter spectacular scenery, Australian convict and cannibal history, meat pies (these last two not unrelated) and the tiger itself. Further Australian horror credentials are established with the casting of Saw’s Leigh Whannell and Wolf Creek’s Nathan Phillips in lead roles.
Despite the pronounced Aussie flavouring, the film follows the tenets of a certain American horror sub-genre which can roughly be described as ‘don’t mess with the locals,’ where holidaying urbanised outsiders fall prey to an insular, inbred community, as in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and the recent Resurrection County (2008). Such films often feature two young heterosexual couples driving into a natural location that is unfamiliar to them. In Dying Breed, Irish zoology student Nina (Mirrah Foulkes) is accompanied by Australian boyfriend Matt (Whannell), Matt’s crass mate Jack (Phillips) and the latter’s girlfriend Rebecca (Melanie Vallejo) in the search for the Tasmanian tiger that Nina’s sister was involved in at the time of her mysterious death. In keeping with the formula, the group encounters a ‘quaint’ community with a suspicious attitude towards outsiders. Over the course of the film, this will escalate into a bloodbath. Gender roles in this sub-genre are usually traditionally defined, with women tending towards hysteria while men take action.
Thus, Dying Breed follows a conventional overarching narrative, but remains enthusiastically Australian in its particulars. Though appearing appropriately dark and gothic, the wilderness is not imbued with menace in itself—the real threat resides in the community it harbours. The film’s horror comes out of this community’s adherence to tradition (a constantly reiterated theme) to family customs rooted in Tasmania’s dark history. Shackles and convict portraits are displayed in the primitive pub where the travellers find themselves. This community, we are about to discover, is descended from escaped convict-turned-cannibal Alexander Pearce, known as the “Pieman.” “The pies have hung on,” explains publican Harvey (Bille Brown) as the tourists dig into the local delicacy, “it’s important to us, tradition.”
Towards the end of the film, a clear analogy is drawn between the elusive Tasmanian Tiger and Pearce’s descendants: “Things have to stay hidden—to survive,” Harvey explains.
The Loved Ones
courtesy of Koch Media
The Loved Ones
the loved ones
Writer-director Sean Byrne’s first feature, The Loved Ones (2009), feels as authentically Australian as Dying Breed, but for different reasons. Despite its many American cinematic influences, notably Misery (1990), Carrie (1976) and Dazed and Confused (1993), Byrne’s approach to characterisation, his use of landscape and soundtrack all contribute to a sense of Australian identity. The film starts off in teen territory with a rejection in the lead-up to a country high-school dance. Recently bereaved Brent (Xavier Samuel) turns down quiet girl Lola’s invitation to the event. The latter, aided by her father, exacts a sadistic and prolonged revenge.
The exaggerated characters of Lola (Robin McLeavy) and ‘Daddy’ (John Brumpton) are reminiscent of the ‘quirky’ strain of well-known 90s Australian films: Strictly Ballroom (1992), Love Serenade (1996) and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994). McLeavy’s impressive portrayal of Lola has affinities with Muriel in Muriel’s Wedding (1994): childishness, a girlish obsession with romance and weddings, outsider status and an exaggerated manner that’s endearing in Muriel; grotesque in Lola. The use of Kasey Chambers’ plaintive ditty “Am I Not Pretty Enough” as Lola’s theme is another Australian association. Underlining the motifs of adolescent unrequited love and the feminine fear of not measuring up physically, the song is played three times over the course of the film.
In her final scene, a bloodied Lola makes her steady, murderous way along a deserted road, singing Chambers’ song. Centre screen, she’s framed by the landscape, which accentuates her alienation and monstrosity. This image is an inversion of the similarly memorable scene from Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005) where an injured Kristy attempts to escape along a deserted outback road. It’s one of The Loved Ones’ emblematic moments, encapsulating key narrative themes of loneliness, loss, warped femininity, violence and obsession.
enter the audience
While the Spierig brothers move into potential blockbuster territory with a 3D remake of The Dark Crystal (1982), two new Australian horror films are breaking ground by involving audiences in the filmmaking process via the internet. The Tunnel (2011) raised its modest 135K budget by pre-selling each of the film’s frames over the internet and on completion was released for free online. Upcoming office horror film Redd Inc. created a large online community by encouraging internet submissions of material—from performances to artwork—for inclusion onscreen. Interestingly, these two films also signal a shift away from the natural landscape towards an urbanised Australian horror, though it seems a safe bet that our open spaces will always have their place in the darker Australian cinematic consciousness.
TOOMELAH IS A SPECK ON THE MAP BETWEEN MOREE AND GOONDIWINDI IN NORTH-WESTERN NEW SOUTH WALES. A FORMER MISSION, ITS HISTORY REFLECTS THAT OF AUSTRALIAN BLACK/WHITE RELATIONS IN EERIE SYNECDOCHE: POLICIES OF ASSIMILATION, CHURCH INTERVENTION AND THE STOLEN GENERATION; RECOGNITION OF LEGAL RIGHTS, CULTURAL AMNESIA AND THE SOCIAL CORROSION WROUGHT BY DRUGS AND ALCOHOL; POLITICAL APATHY AND INEPTITUDE, INTERRUPTED SERVICES AND DECAYING INFRASTRUCTURE.
Toomelah came to national attention in 1987 when it was visited by Marcus Einfield, then President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, to see first-hand its appalling living conditions, then again in 2008 when its District Nurse resigned, exhausted by 20 years of bearing witness to endemic neglect and abuse. It’s also where director Ivan Sen’s (Beneath Clouds, 2002, Dreamland, 2010) mother grew up. His third feature is a quietly gripping portrait of the community and paean to childhood. The film opens with a young boy, Daniel (Daniel Connors), waking to an empty house—and fridge. His mother spends her days in a haze of marijuana smoke, while his grandmother sits quietly in the sun, alone with her memories. Free to fend for himself, Daniel wags school, dreaming of becoming the boxer that his father (Michael Connors) was before alcohol claimed him, or a ‘gangsta’ like Linden (Christopher Edwards), the local dope dealer and default father-figure to Daniel.
The film unfolds gently, what plot there is arising from the sluggish rhythms of daily life in the settlement. Daniel’s Great-Aunt Cindy returns for a visit, decades after having been stolen from her family; Daniel valiantly pretends he doesn’t care whether 10-year-old Tanitia (Danieka Connors) likes him or not, while nursing a grudge against another child, Tupac; and Linden struggles to maintain control of the local drug trade when Bruce (Dean Daley-Jones) is released from prison and returns to town.
Daniel Connors, Ivan Sen, Toomelah
Connors is excellent as the mischievous Daniel, a wide-eyed observer in an adult world, discovering its limits with thoughtful curiosity. It is at times a brutal world however, and Sen is unflinching in his depiction of the community’s degraded circumstances—some may be turned off immediately by some extremely coarse language—while simultaneously showing tremendous compassion towards his subjects: the elderly, burdened with a history of dispossession and cultural destruction; their addiction-ravaged offspring; and the new generation who seemingly face a bleak future of stunted opportunities and more of the same.
Sen wrote the film after visiting for several months, his observations of daily life and transcriptions of local conversation providing the raw grist for his script. Despite the spectacular natural beauty of the surrounding country, monumental landscape shots are few and far between; Sen instead shoots his script using a handheld Panasonic 3700 in a rough and ready naturalistic style that suits the material. In this respect, the film employs techniques Sen explored in his experimental second feature film, Dreamland, allowing the story to develop to some extent as the film was shot. Although he doesn’t strive for the kind of visual poetry achieved in Beneath Clouds, Toomelah brims with unobtrusively observed visual detail: black and white photos of people in traditional garb hanging on the school library wall; late afternoon sunshine cutting across kids playing footy in the dusk; a broken exercise bike lying discarded amongst rusted car bodies.
Some may feel the film’s technical limitations detract from its overall impact, however the benefits gleaned outweigh the advantages of a full production unit. Sen’s approach is personal and direct, allowing a level of community engagement that would otherwise have been impossible. Most roles are played by local non-professional actors, their efforts bringing an immense sense of authenticity to the film. That said, the acting, although generally effective, occasionally sags, a fact not helped by Sen cramming historical information into dialogue, to the detriment of the film’s otherwise mesmerising realism. Also, at 106 minutes, it goes for a quarter hour longer than necessary, its pleasing messiness sprawling into flab.
Ivan Sen has remarked that the film should “not be seen as political finger pointing”, and indeed it stands on its artistic merits. However, once the reality represented in Toomelah is accepted, politics must inevitably intrude. “What are you going to do with yourself?” Daniel is asked. “I dunno—what can I do?” is the ingenuous reply. Answering such a question is impossible for Daniel without having any perception of the realities of his circumstance—it is to Sen and the people of Toomelah’s credit that the beginnings of such an understanding might be gleaned from this wonderfully ragged film.
Toomelah was screened at 2011 Cannes International Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard Official Selection and at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival. Australian cinema release date to be announced.
Toomelah, writer, director, Ivan Sen, producer David Jowsey/Bunya Productions, www.toomelahthemovie.com
RUMOUR HAS IT THAT AVANT-GARDE CINEMA CONTINUES TO THRIVE AROUND THE WORLD, BUT LOCALLY ONE MIGHT SUPPOSE THAT THE MEDIUM WAS AS DEAD AS VAUDEVILLE. SO THE AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL HAS THE APPEAL OF A CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE PRESENT—CONDUCTED, FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW, AT THE BACK DOOR WAREHOUSE IN DEEPEST PRESTON, OUT ON THE FABLED 86 TRAM LINE FAR BEYOND THE BOHO HANGOUTS OF HIGH STREET, NEAR THE DECAYING INDUSTRIAL PRECINCT WHERE PHILIP BROPHY SHOT HIS DYSTOPIAN NORTHERN VOID (2007; RT 78, P27).
Best to be honest: here in Australia—at least, for those of us who aren’t regularly able to scoot off to specialist events overseas—it is hard to get more than the faintest first-hand impression of the state of play in the experimental film arena. That’s one reason AIEFF deserves celebration, even if this year’s eclectic program felt more assembled than curated and even if 90% of the “films” were screened, in accordance with their makers’ wishes, on video.
While for the individual viewer this matters or doesn’t, from a strict artisanal perspective the two media remain as distinct as pottery and robotics: one lesson to be taken from the AIEFF program is that film, at this budgetary level, is still easily the superior format for artists concerned with what are imprecisely termed the “material” qualities of light and colour. This could be observed even in works as fragile and ephemeral as Irene Proebsting’s Super-8 Harmonic Ghosts—where faintly Gothic images brush against each other like dry, blown leaves—or as unabashedly decorative and “girly” as Jodie Mack’s 16mm Posthaste Perennial Pattern. It was good to see Tony Woods, the most persistent Super-8 filmmaker in Melbourne, return with Colour, Glass and Chrome, which, as ever, seeks out redemptive beauty in fragments of the mundane: in this case, the play of light on shards of glass found in a rubbish skip.
Film transmutes, it’s still tempting to suppose, whereas video only records. In fact, festival entries in both media showed alternate impulses to demystify and remystify the image, a dialectic also evident in the two prevailing approaches to sound design: on the one hand, the crunches and rustles of ‘raw’ or deliberately distorted sound, the aural equivalent to queasy, handheld camerawork; on the other, gloopy electronica akin to passing through a New Age carwash, intended to put you in a receptive trance.
Overlapping with this was the old battle between the representational and the abstract—between the moving image as a document and the screen as an open field where unforeseen forms can emerge. On the ‘abstract’ side were fireworks displays such as Simon Payne’s Vice Versa Et Cetera and Paul O’Donoghue’s Phasing Waves—both on video, the latter oddly culturally specific in its nostalgic deployment of clunky 1980s technology. At the other end of the spectrum, Erica Scourti’s Woman Nature Alone is a performance piece not a million miles removed from the hijinks of a ‘twee’ comedian like Josie Long, with Scourti herself enacting a half-hearted charade of communing with the environment: romping across parkland, hugging trees and eventually dropping off to sleep.
The aim might be to satirise outworn romantic postures, including a need to occupy the spotlight—but Scourti, like Long, does not escape the perils of studied cuteness. By contrast, Charles Fairbanks pointedly erases himself from Wrestling With My Father, a conceptual one-shot that really works. Fairbanks Snr is filmed head-on as he (apparently) watches his son fight it out in the ring; a burly fellow in a cap, he sits with his legs wide apart, drums his fingers during lulls, and shifts back and forth on the bench to follow every detail of the unseen action. Fairbanks’ equally successful The Men is a close-up essay on a related subject, with a mini-camera attached to a wrestler as he grapples with a bearded opponent; the fragmentary images are redolent of eroticism as much as combat.
Implicitly, such ventures put quotation marks around the notion of the personal, an unavoidable problem for artists without the alibi of commercial cynicism: how far are captured images to be understood as mirrors of consciousness, as opposed to raw material manipulated from a more-or-less ironic distance? AIEFF had its share of ‘diary’ works reliant on the idea of the camera operator as a semi-domesticated flaneur—gazing out an apartment window at dawn or wandering idly round the city, offering spiritual sympathy to beggars, watching trains go by. Taking a couple of steps back, an alternate option is to dedicate yourself to re-processing old home movies, with the passage of time as part of the point, as Mike Leggett does in his beautiful Bosun’s Chair. Or you can simply borrow from the communal archive: the ultimate example of this tactic, Bob Cotton’s ZeitEYE flashes across the history of modern graphics from Futurism to the Wii, with fleeting captions suggesting a media arts version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
Speaking to many of these issues, Steven Ball’s Personal Electronics is a study in paranoia composed of deranged clips lifted from video-sharing sites: the sources are mainly American, though the wry bemusement implied by these juxtapositions is British to the core. A figure slumped on a couch twitches violently, like an extra from Paranormal Activity (2008); a woman lectures us in voiceover on the esoteric import of a purple shaft of light which seems to emanate from a parked car. Acknowledging that some will perceive this “directed energy weapons ray” as visual noise, she instantly rejects the possibility: “These are very clearly lasers…Lens flares are not so concentrated, for one thing, they’re more diffuse.” In context, it’s a parody of hermeneutics: the artist striving to impose significance on ‘found’ material, the viewer labouring to decode that intention from the other side. Madness awaits us all, as we struggle to make meaning from what we see.
2011 Australian International Experimental Film Festival, The BAck doOR, Melbourne, April 29-May 1
Untitled, 2010, sound generated digital still, Riley Post, ANU graduate
DARREN TOFTS ONCE DESCRIBED THE PREHISTORY OF TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF CULTURE AS “EVERYWHERE FELT BUT NOWHERE SEEN IN THE TELEMATIC LANDSCAPE OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY.” AS WE MOVE INTO THE SECOND DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY, THE AFFECTS THAT TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS PRIVILEGED IN CULTURE AND ART IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY—INTERACTIVITY, INTERACTION, IMMERSION—APPEAR NOW TO US AS COMMONPLACE AND THEIR USE IN ART AND MEDIA TAKEN FOR GRANTED. IT IS EASY THEN TO FORGET JUST HOW VIBRANT THE MEDIA ARTS SCENE HAS BEEN IN AUSTRALIA SINCE THE 1980s. MEDIA ARTISTS’ ENGAGEMENT WITH THE TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS OF THAT TIME CAN, LIKE A KIND OF FORGOTTEN PREHISTORY, ALSO BE SAID NOW TO BE EVERYWHERE FELT BUT NOWHERE SEEN (WELL, RARELY).
The restructuring of the Australia Council boards in 2005, which included the replacement of the New Media Arts board with the Inter-Arts Office and the transfer of funding for a significant portion of media arts practice to the Visual Arts Board (VAB) and the Music Board, was meant to reflect the subsumption (or is it sublimation?) of media arts practices to the mainstream. According to the Media Arts Scoping Study produced in 2006, these changes did not reflect a failure by media arts to consolidate itself as a set of stand-alone practices. Rather, it was testament to the success of these artists that what was once a discrete field was now something that arts practitioners from all fields were incorporating into their practices.
Similarly, media arts as an academic discipline seems to be settling back into more established disciplines—Fine Art, Media and Communications, Design, Creative Arts and Science and Technology—no longer a monstrous hybrid struggling to find its place in the gallery or the museum. Again, whether this is indicative of subsumption or sublimation is hard to tell. Certainly, in a post-Bradley Review tertiary education environment, university managements prefer disciplines that are recognisable and established (not to mention attractive to the mainstream).
One sure outcome (for this writer at least) is that it makes the whole question of the Australianness of the media arts curriculum quite difficult to answer. Of the 10 academics that I spoke to, only two, Kathy Cleland (The University of Sydney) and Darren Tofts (Swinburne University), placed a pointed emphasis on Australian media art in their curriculum. Interestingly, both of the subjects that they teach approach media arts from a predominantly theoretical perspective and use Australian media artists as case studies. Tofts’ interest in the historical trajectory of media arts in Australia is evident in his response to the question of the importance of using Australian examples:
“In focusing on Australian artists there is an immediate context for students to ground media art practices; but more importantly it is valuable for students to be aware of the crucial contribution Australian artists have made and continue to make to the international media arts scene. For instance, cyberfeminism as an international formation, movement, arts practice and concept is impossible to think of outside the contributions made by VNS Matrix, as well as the subsequent, individual arts practices of its founding members (Francesca da Rimini, Josephine Starrs); or for that matter the crucial, pro-active curatorial/critical work and advocacy of Julianne Pierce and Virginia Barratt.”
Brogan Bunt and Lucas Ihlein (University of Wollongong) pointed out that their main engagement with local context is through regular guest lectures. “We have recently had artists like Wade Marynowsky, Deborah Kelly, Louise Curham, Lucas Abela, Mike Leggett and Lynette Wallworth give lectures to our students. We try to incorporate at least two guest lectures by local practitioners in each Media Arts studio subject each session. We also have strong commitment to contributing to local Media Arts culture. Apart from dialogue with local Wollongong artist run spaces (Project Contemporary Art Space, 5 Crown Lane, and so on), we have also been building links to relevant festivals/events/groups in the Sydney metropolitan area.”
Other practitioner academics such as Ross Harley (COFA, UNSW), Martine Corompt (RMIT), Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA) and Troy Innocent (Monash University) all commented that while they would use Australian examples where appropriate and available, the necessary resources were not always available to make that possible. As Zurr noted: “…our programme focuses on art and science and furthermore, predominantly on art and the life sciences. Therefore, our teaching is focused on artists (Australian or non-Australian) who engage in working with life, living materials and biotechnology (rather than generally media art or art and technology). There is a growing number of artists within Australia who are working within this field but publication wise—the majority of books (scholarly or not) magazines, journals etc are produced overseas without emphasis on the ‘Australian’ aspects.”
The question of access to resources certainly recurred in many of the responses. The accessibility of the artworks themselves and the scarcity of critical responses to the art, as well as the lack of documentation and poor archiving of media artworks have presented challenges to academics working in the field.
Kathy Cleland noted that as a result of her experience as a curator over the last 10 years, she has a lot of documentation of Australian media art works which she uses in her course. She also pointed out, however, that there are not that many books specifically focusing on Australian new media art (Darren Tofts’ Interzone: Media Arts in Australia is one of the exceptions) and that “books published internationally don’t tend to mention many Australian artists with the exception of Stelarc who is in everything!”
Darren Tofts pointed to John Conomos’ Mutant Media which examines the convergence of media arts, film and video art as a key text. “Stephen Jones’ recent Synthetics is also an important contribution to the field, evidencing the robust longevity of Australia’s contribution to the international scene.” Both Cleland and Tofts pointed to RealTime as “invaluable” with Tofts’ noting that “the Australian media arts scene is unthinkable beyond the support and stewardship of Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter.” All of the respondents agreed that more online magazine/journal resources focused on media arts would be welcome.
Norie Neumark, in her role as Director of the new Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University argued that “it would be useful to have more and varied material and critical analysis of Australian media arts, including online resources, DVDs and CDs. However it is also vital to see Australian media artists included in broader publications, both about contemporary Australian art and about international media and contemporary art. In my own recent publication, my co-editors and I were particularly keen to include Australian media artists in a routine way in an international publication.” (Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo van Leeuwen eds,Voice: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media. MIT Press 2010; reviewed in RT103)
As Martine Corompt noted, the difficulty of accessing artworks continues to plague media arts: “I used to have a great collection of early interactive works, on CD and floppy disk, but of course they are all unplayable now due to changes in operating systems. Even some of my own old work also can’t be played.” The platform-specific nature of many media artworks is compounded by the difficulties they present to collections managers and archivists. This is not, of course, specific to Australian media artworks. However, more needs to be done to preserve what is left if the impact of Australian artists is to continue to influence the local curriculum. Paul Thomas (COFA and Curtin University) has been instrumental in drawing attention to this pressing issue through his involvement in the Media Arts Scoping Study (MASS) and the National Organisation of Media Arts Database (NOMAD). Similarly, the ARC funded research project, Reconsidering Australian Media Art History in an International Context, led by Ross Harley, Anna Munster, Sean Cubitt, Michele Barker, Paul Thomas, Darren Tofts and Oliver Grau aims to create a foundational online resource which will “provide future artists and curators with a cohesive overview of Australian media arts’ recent milestones and developments, crucial to making significantly innovative new work.” (See http://bit.ly/pu9f6z)
As a discrete discipline, the sound arts continue to have only a tenuous hold in academia. Their public profile, in contrast, is maintained by a robust (and youthful) underground of practitioners (see Julian Knowles, “Sound art and the extended university,” RT80). As Knowles points out, “it is clear that, despite its fragility, the contemporary sound and experimental music performance scene is significantly intertwined with the small network of university departments who embrace this area of practice and that the best students have developed into exceptional practitioners through this informal collaborative network.” It is in this context that he argues for the importance of the practitioner/teacher in universities: “Staff who work at these institutions, though now small in numbers, are often highly active as practitioners in the field with substantial profiles. They are also active as organisers of events and festivals that provide both a modest infrastructure for established and emerging practitioners and an opportunity for students to immerse themselves in the exceptionally rich and diverse sound culture in Australia.”
This probably explains why all of those whom I tried to interview for this article were unavailable. But the point is well made and supported by Norie Neumark: “The role of the Australian artist who is also an educator is crucial. In the current climate, where creative practice as research has been recognised through ERA [the Excellence in Research for Australia initiative], artist educators are particularly well placed to contribute both to the research environment and to provide direct inspiration and models to students. And working with students, from undergraduate to postgraduate, is energising and stimulating for the artist educators themselves. I see artist educators as vital in bringing theory and practice together in a vibrant way, both in their own teaching and in collaboration with others.”
Australian media arts may not be as discretely visible inside and outside the academy as they seemed to be during the 1990s but there is room for cautious optimism about its future. The new centre at La Trobe is particularly promising and the work being done to preserve a history of Australian media arts is invaluable. But vigilance is required to ensure that the sublimation of media arts practices to the mainstream does not result in their subjugation.
Starrs & Cmielewski, Incompatible Elements at Moving Image Centre, MIC Toi Rerehiko, Auckland
AS GOVERNMENTS RELUCTANTLY ADMIT TO THE EXISTENCE OF A CLIMATE CRISIS BUT DO LITTLE ABOUT IT, MANY MEDIA ARTISTS ARE RESPONDING TO THE EVIDENCE OF THE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER THAT IS CLEARLY ALREADY HAPPENING. JOSEPHINE STARRS AND LEON CMIELEWSKI’S PROJECT INCOMPATIBLE ELEMENTS (2010-2011) PRESENTS THE INTENSE VISUALITY OF REGIONS OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC THAT HAVE BEEN HIT BY EXTREME WEATHER. WHILE HUMAN ACTIVITY IS ABSENT IN THE DIGITAL SATELLITE-SCAPES, THE HUMAN MIGRATION FORCED BY WEATHER EVENTS IS IMPLIED IN THE POETRY, LYRICS AND ORATORY THAT INSCRIBE THE VIDEO WORKS.
The work’s fusion of text and topographical landscape presents a challenge to the separated or incompatible categories of ‘nature,’ ‘environment’ and ‘culture.’ Incompatible Elements was first exhibited at Performance Space in Sydney in 2010 followed by MIC Toi Rerehiko in Auckland in March 2011.
An ‘incompatible element’ is a term in geochemisty used to describe mineral properties in rare earth and in the oil industry. ‘The elements’ also refers to weather forces producing effects that are becoming more and more incompatible with human life. Starrs and Cmielewski tell stories on behalf of future “climate refugees” as part of their ongoing concern with migration stories. They used data maps in earlier work such as the interactive screen-based work Seeker (2008) to reveal the politics of forced migration due to conflict over resources such as diamonds, titanium and oil. Incompatible Elements also recognises the largely unquantified human migration resulting from climate change—of people often seen as incompatible with national immigration policies. As philosopher Bruno Latour urges, the artists recognise that ecological issues include the social, political and cultural as opposed to perpetuating the Modernist ‘human/nature’ divide.
The four video landscapes presented at MIC are composited satellite images of the flooded planes of the Ganges, the former dust bowl of Australia’s Murray-Darling basin, the dry banks of the Coorong in South Australia and the erosion of Mount Taranaki in New Zealand. Accompanying light boxes provide the micrographic complement to the remote satellite pictures as detailed photographs of the dry earth. The artists present the polar extremes of drought and deluge: the predicted and increasingly manifesting extremes of weather-induced disaster in regions of Australasia. By encouraging us to examine their finely stitched topographical images closely in the defamiliarised context, even the normally detached gaze of the Google-Earth browser is politicised.
In Incompatible Elements, the leisurely paced pan of the fly-over satellite map is incrementally modified by lines of text that grow out of features of the landscape itself. After a while, streams or fields become words that slowly creep into the frame, inviting comparison to the relentless anthropogenic expansion across the Earth. The sources of the animated words include the environmentalist poetry of Australian Judith Wright, her line “And the River was Dust” curls out of the Murray-Darling basin’s tributary streams while the lyric “days like these” from the John Lennon song “Nobody told me” emerges from the watery arteries of the Ganges. A phrase in the Ngarringjerri language, “A Living Body,” creeps out of the dusty banks of the Coorong and “Puwai Rangi-Papa,” the words of a Maori elder encircle Mount Taranaki.
Starrs and Cmielewski direct attention to Maori and Aboriginal people and the fate of migrants through their use of their language. The perspective of the satellite drifting through space is often described as an omniscient view of a detached observer, but this perspective is also a familiar way of charting territory in traditional aboriginal cultures. Theorist Lisa Parks notes that Aboriginal people have incorporated “satellite dreaming” into their symbolic narratives of cultural identity in artwork and in independent television programming. Both indigenous citizens and migrants occupy a border zone where they are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. Maori are traditionally ‘people of the land’, often living in coastal regions, while migrants living in temporary structures are prone to weather-borne disaster.
For the MIC version of Incompatible Elements Starrs and Cmielewski added a video element to the suite of works called Puwai Rangi-Papa. This phrase was translated for the artists as “waters of the radiant sun and earth mother” by Taranaki kaumatua (elder) Dr Te Huirangi e Waikerepuru. Te Huirangi introduced this term to the artists on their SCANZ digital art residency that began at the Owae marae (meeting house) on the West coast of New Zealand in January 2011. Taranaki locals themselves suggested to the artists that they make a work around the erosion of the dramatic peak of Mount Taranaki. The ‘Fuji’ shaped mountain dominates the geography and weather system of New Zealand’s North Island. Rock fall and erosion have increased since violent storms have intensified on the west coast to the extent that local inhabitants are now threatened with the loss of their homes. Analysing aerial photographs of water and soil shifts on Taranaki and its waterways, scientists estimate that more than 14 million cubic metres of the mountain have collapsed since the late 1990s. Huge rock falls and debris have caused blockages in waterways, along with floods that send more boulders down the river, widening the banks. The soundtrack of Puwai Rangi-Papa includes the tumbling of stones that keeps residents who live on the edge of Taranaki awake at night. In Maori terms the ‘mauri’ (life-force) of the mountain is being eroded by the changing climate along with its iconic physical form.
The video images for Puwai Rangi-Papa are created from four Land Information New Zealand satellite images that are seamlessly brought together. The viewing position tracks around the uncannily perfect circle of the satellite map of the mountain and after several minutes the words “Puwai Rangi-Papa” emerge from the fields around Taranaki’s perimeter. According to the artists, this is nature and culture “collapsing into each other.” Using the ubiquitous format of Google Earth and GPS applications on iPhones and cars that has changed our relationship to maps in only a few years, Starrs and Cmielewski are trying to slow down the way we view this satellite imagery to give pause for reflection on the implications of a landscape transfigured by weather.
Many pakeha (white) artists in Aotearoa-New Zealand avoid the use of Maori concepts as the conceptual underpinnings of their work because of the sensitivity around the appropriateness for citizens who are not tangata whenua (people of the land). However when permission is granted by an elder of the region for a story to be told and te reo (Maori language) to be used, the artists are provided with a place from which to transmit important messages across cultures. If settler cultures can shift from conceiving landscape or weatherscape as inert matter ‘to-be-looked-at’ to living bodies encompassed in Maori terms such as ‘mauri’ then we come closer to ecological reconciliation. Puwai Rangi-Papa could signal an important shift in articulating a reconfigured political ecology where Western environmentalism and indigenous cosmologies might join in restoration and care of the land.
An artwork like Incompatible Elements is not propaganda or politics, yet the artists are unwilling to leave socio-political questions to designated experts. The cumulative effect of Incompatible Elements is not alarmist, rather human responsibility is implicated in the large-scale geo-physical changes to our world that the artists represent. The work encourages reflection on the impact of cumulative weather events that are difficult to conceptualise as statistical data or scientific warnings.
Incompatible Elements, MIC I Toi Rerehiko, Auckland, New Zealand, March 4-25
Australian media arts watchers will be interested to know that “MIC Toi Rerehiko promotes a dynamic and growing culture of interdisciplinary media-arts practice in Auckland and New Zealand, supporting an environment of innovation, in which fusion of art and technology is developed and nurtured. Based in the heart of Auckland, MIC Toi Rerehiko has a new art gallery on Karangahape Road, and a live performance/screening venue at Galatos. We exhibit a continuous program of international and New Zealand artists working across contemporary film, video, digital media, installation, music and live performance.” www.mic.org.nz. Eds.
THE LAVAL VIRTUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION ON VIRTUAL REALITY AND CONVERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN FRANCE, IS ONE OF EUROPE’S LARGEST GATHERINGS OF VIRTUAL REALITY AND NEW TECHNOLOGY ENTHUSIASTS. THIS YEAR, OF THE 85 EXHIBITS PRESENTED AROUND 30% WERE FROM PLACES OTHER THAN FRANCE, INCLUDING AFRICA, JAPAN AND NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA. THIS GLOBAL SPREAD DELIVERED AN ECLECTIC MIX OF INTERNATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL EXHIBITS.
I had never been to such an extensive industry convention before, especially one with a dedicated stream on virtual art. Not knowing what to expect, I armed myself with a detailed presentation, designed for those who could not speak English (lots of big images) and one that contextualised the Australian media art scene in more detail than I would present at home.
It was with great surprise then I discovered that all conference delegates had to present and were mostly conversant in English (also my second language) and that Australia’s contribution to media arts internationally was well known and understood by many present at the event.
Setting the context for the conference was renowned media arts theorist Erkki Huhtamo, Professor of Media History and Theory at UCLA. In his keynote titled “Hand Screens, Wrist Watches and iPads: an Archaeology of Wearable Media,” Huthamo asked the numerous artists, technologists and engineers at the conference to reflect for a moment on the history of mobile and immersive media.
This reflection illuminated a fascinating history of wearable and portable media devices, with objects such as pocket watches, cameras and hand-held personal fans seen as precursors to modern day hand-helds. In particular, fans were not only used for cooling, but also as symbols of social status and as print mediums for portable artwork and maps.
With evolving genres such as Device Art (think Bitman by Ryota Kuwakubo and Maywa Denki, 1998), this convergence of technology, art and design can be seen as an extension of those historical origins of portable media. By understanding the origins and symbolic meanings of these devices, Huhtamo suggested, contemporary artists and technologists are in a much better position to tap into their cultural legacy, and therefore be more successful in deploying them artistically and commercially.
Commercialisation was certainly the main driver for most exhibitors at Laval. The three projects I look at in this article—IFace 3D, Haption Exoskeleton and Invoked Computing—were all commercial with no particular focus on media arts, but like many of the exhibitors at Laval, were keen to harness the creative energy of users, including artists, for their inventions.
iface 3D— digitizer (france)
DigitEYEzer exhibited their recently released smartphone application iFace 3D, the first 3D face scanner available for mobile phones. With iFace 3D, users create 3D, lifelike models of themselves or their friends or anything close at hand, by shooting moving images on their phones and sending them to a 3D reconstruction server online. After a few minutes the user is then sent back the 3D model, ready for printing or publishing on the net. These 3D representations can be downloaded into virtual games or sculpted into physical 3D models with 3D printers. Staff at the booth displayed an arresting 3D generated, colour sculpture of their Sales and Marketing Manager, Didier Sy-Cholet, something that’s possible for all users to do once they have their own scanned data (and access to a 3D printer).
The interest in photo-realistic self-representation in virtual games and social media is certainly there, so it will be interesting to see how artistic engagement with this application evolves. I wonder for instance, how Australian augmented reality projects such as Warren Armstrong’s (Un)seen Sculptures (2011) or Thea Bauman’s Digital Culture Fund project Metaverse Makeovers (2011) might engage audiences with these new tools in times to come.
Haption, Exoskeleton Demonstration Booth, Laval Virtual 2011
photo Jean-Charles
Haption, Exoskeleton Demonstration Booth, Laval Virtual 2011
haption exoskeleton (france)
Haption’s force-feedback exoskeleton was one of the more intriguing exhibits to play with at Laval. Established in 2001, the company develops high performance haptic [touch-based] instruments and programs involving force-feedback in virtual reality, for both industrial and academic purposes.
Stepping into the exoskeleton at the booth, I felt a bit like Ellen Ripley from Aliens (without the sweat and the attitude), but instead of killing an acid-spitting critter, I had to put a virtual peg in a virtual hole.
The feedback system in the exoskeleton was fantastic, as it provided force-feedback on all six degrees of freedom (translations and rotations), which is essential for a realistic interaction with 3D objects. I was so mesmerised by the actual physical feedback that I never got the peg near the hole.
In terms of haptic feedback systems and Australian arts practice, I could imagine artists such as Keith Armstrong (Intimate Transactions, 2008), Jonathan Duckworth (Embracelet, 2007), Margie Medlin (Personal Space, 2007) or Stelarc (Exoskeleton, 1998) having great fun exploring the force-feedback systems linked to virtual space.
A recent haptic focused ARC Linkage grant supported by the Australia Council, bringing together artist Paul Brown, Dr Ben Horan from Deakin University’s School of Engineering and Saeid Nahavandi, Director of Deakin’s Centre for Intelligent Systems Research, could also be situated in this context. The three-year grant aims to help visually challenged people ‘see’ artworks through haptic vibrations; force-feedback systems such as these could add a dynamic new dimension to future projects.
nvoked Computing, Laval Virtual 2011
photo Jean-Charles
nvoked Computing, Laval Virtual 2011
invoked computing (japan)
One of the most innovative and, to my mind, potentially game-changing projects to emerge at Laval this year was Invoked Computing. Developed by Alexis Zerroug (France/Japan), Alvaro Cassinelli (Uruguay/France/Japan) and Masatoshi Ishikawa (Japan) through the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, the project explores a “ubiquitous intelligence” capable of recognising specific human actions and projecting sound and images onto objects linked to these actions.
The example shown at Laval involved taking a banana and bringing it closer to the ear, with the gesture triggering directional microphones and parametric speakers hidden in the room. These devices then made the banana function like a phone. Not only would the banana ring, but you could talk using the banana as a handset. The developers also used a pizza box with projected images that could follow the box around in space.
The potential for these tools in performance and installation based work is mindboggling. Imagine having any object in a space able to project sound or images and interact with those around it. What could PVI Collective (Transumer, 2010) do with this technology if they deployed it in public spaces? Or Back To Back Theatre (Small Metal Objects, 2005) with accidental audiences at train stations?
Not surprisingly Invoked Computing received the Grand Prix du Jury for Laval 2011.
australian developments
In Australia there is huge scope for artists working in virtual reality and converging technologies to continue their internationally recognised practice. Recently, with funding through the Digital Culture Fund, some fantastic live, digital projects were realised with work such as the Roller Derby extravaganza Bloodbath by Bump Projects (2010; RT100) and Adriaan Stellingwerff’s Windy and Winding (2010), a virtual balloon travel application for smartphones.
In September this year at ISEA in Istanbul, the Australian Centre for Virtual Arts is curating a major program of Australian virtual artists, titled Terra Virtualis. In addition, an Australian exhibition on robotics curated by Kathy Cleland and an exhibition titled The World is everything that is the case, curated by Sean Cubitt, Vince Dziekan and Paul Thomas will also be flying the flag.
But the most significant development for experimental art in Australian in 2011 is the recently announced Creative Australia fund, a $10 million initiative from the Federal Government.
This funding is targeted to support individual artists through the creation and presentation of significant new work and fellowships and will be rolled out by the Australia Council over the next five years.
All the Council’s artform boards will be delivering on this initiative, with the knowledge that digital culture and the potential of the national broadband network will no doubt be key considerations of many applications. We are all looking forward to seeing the outcomes of such a significant investment in contemporary Australian arts practice.
SUZON FUKS IS A BRISBANE-BASED MEDIA ARTIST, CHOREOGRAPHER AND DIRECTOR WHO EXPLORES THE INTEGRATION AND INTERACTION OF DANCE AND MOVING IMAGE THROUGH PERFORMANCE, SCREEN, INSTALLATION AND ONLINE WORK. SHE IS CURRENTLY AN AUSTRALIA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENT. FUKS DESCRIBES HER NEW WORK, WATERWHEEL, AS “AN ONLINE SPACE WHERE YOU CAN INTERACT, SHARE, PERFORM AND DEBATE ABOUT WATER AS A TOPIC AND METAPHOR, WITH PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD OR RIGHT NEXT DOOR! IT IS COST-FREE, ACCESSIBLE WITH JUST A CLICK, AND OPEN TO EVERYONE OF ALL AGES. IT FOSTERS CREATIVITY, COLLABORATION AND INTER-CULTURAL-GENERATIONAL EXCHANGE.” I ASKED FUKS ABOUT HER MOTIVATION AND AMBITIONS FOR THE WORK.
What is it about water that drove you to create Waterwheel?
I come from a country in Europe where it rains a lot and I wasn’t aware of water scarcity at all. Living in India for three years changed my perception about access to water. I had to wake up on time to fill my vessels from a tap in the street that ran only twice a day for half an hour. I had to boil it and keep it in a specific place in the house. So I built my life and time around this access to water.
When I moved to Brisbane it was a beautiful ‘garden city.’ During the drought of 2005 I worked most of the year overseas and coming back, I could see from the plane window everything was brown. Sad! It looked like a dying body. At that time I went for a walk at Wivenhoe Dam. A very striking image remains in my mind. A dried out fish caught in a small bush on the edge of the reservoir. The water level had gone down so much that the fish had been caught there, died and dried out.
I became more interested in the politics of water. I started questioning how in developed countries we have access to things and information and take so much for granted. Water is becoming a commodity. I observed that most water infrastructures are made by men, but in developing countries the collection and handling of water is usually a matter for women.
In 2008 I helped organise a networked performance with five cities around the world. We were talking about the drought in Brisbane and a group of artists in Curitiba were saying that in Brazil governments are fighting over the Guarani, one of the world’s biggest and most abundant aquifers, to own part of it for the future. It was interesting for me to see that, through the internet, people can share different perspectives on water.I’d like to share this growing awareness, and find ways to deal with water issues.
In what ways do you see water as a tangible element of your art?
Artistically, I’m interested in the contrasts and extremes of water: transparency, opacity, stillness, turbulence, the violence of water and its patterns. To me, the patterns in water hold secrets. Things are entangled there: the fluidity, stripes and rhythms make links between graphic, choreographic, musical and cinematic forms. If we could decode the patterns, we could find a writing somehow and an understanding between these disciplines.
I’m constantly collecting water samples in video and audio. With Igneous I have done two shows with actual water: Liquid Skin and Mirage (both in 2006). And before that, in 2004, Thanatonauts and Body In Question, used water in their video-scenography. I know that artists have been using water for a long time and the interest is increasing. It seems to me like a requiem for water. Before it dies.
In my memory, public water had a different presence in cities than it does now. Fountains were places of social gathering and where to get fresh water when walking from place to place. Now they are being covered. All that is left are signs saying: there once was a spring. So I thought it would be interesting to have a repository, not only of artistic works but about water in general, in order to keep a trace of our stories, cosmogonies and lifestyles, because water, cultures and cities are changing.
Did Queensland’s recent flooding influence the work?
The flood felt like a state of war. There was nothing that could be done to stop it, and it was violent. Water is not always transparent, reflecting the blue sky, but can be really dirty, smelly and sticky. The mainstream media were really making people scared, repeatedly showing the most dramatic images and playing the most dramatic commentary. Meanwhile, on social media people were infiltrating like water, in a constructive way, giving helpful tips. The water issue made discussions deeper.
Waterwheel interface
Are you a ‘water person’?
Definitely. I’m not an excellent swimmer, but I go swimming every day if I can. It’s my way of keeping fit. I find baths and water spaces relaxing and rejuvenating. When visiting a new country, I’m interested to know about water rituals and customs, and which places they have for them. It’s a way for me to better understand the place and meet people.
What can we expect when we enter the Waterwheel site?
The main thing on the Waterwheel homepage is a wheel made up of concentric rings that represents the latest 40 uploads. Anyone can log-in and upload, access and comment on that media, and message other users. From there they can go to the “Fountains” map and the “Tap.”
Users, individually or with a “Crew,” can use the Tap for a performance or presentation with webcams, media from Waterwheel, drawing tools and text chat, all on one web page. What’s very new is that any media item placed on the Tap can be moved, resized, flipped and layered over other media. Audience can engage with each other and the Crew by simply clicking on a link without having to install anything. Years of research in networked performance allowed me to see the pros and cons of, and determine the best tools, from those I found in various online platforms I used.
There are many levels on which to engage with the site and the project. Whether you’re initiating a project individually or collaborating with others or contributing to an existing one or simply spectating. A curator could get in contact with an artist, or scientists and activists in contact with their colleagues. It’s a new mode for expression, exhibition or festival.
Who are you working with on Waterwheel?
In the first year of my Australia Council fellowship I presented the Waterwheel concept in various circumstances, conferences and in sharing sessions with peers and colleagues onsite and online. I got lots of feedback, which helped to evolve the concept and I received grants from Arts Queensland and Brisbane City Council to extend the project and the team.
Waterwheel is a really collaborative project. My main partner in building up the site is Inkahoots, a Brisbane-based studio of graphic designers, programmers and a copywriter. Artists around the world are helping with the testing of the Tap. In terms of getting feedback in order to advance the project, I asked a forum of peers to come at certain times to give oral as well as written responses.
My co-artistic director of Igneous, James Cunningham, is an external eye for the experimentation on the Tap and its integration into an on-site installation performance that will happen during residencies in October and December at the Judith Wright Centre. For that event there is an entire team: dramaturg (Doug Leonard), performer (Sofia Woods), set designer (Rozina Suliman), interactive system designer (Nathen Street), production manager/lighting designer (Felicity Organ-Moore), IT technician (Will Davis), PR person and someone taking on a new role linking ‘crew’ members online and onsite.
I’ve been networking for a long time and via the internet with fellow performers in Canada, USA, Brazil, Europe, Lebanon, Indonesia, India, New Zealand and South America. For the launch of Waterwheel on August 22, I hope that this network will present a short program of performances and presentations.
You have written that water will also be metaphorical in the work: In what way?
I tried to make the whole Waterwheel project using water vocabulary because of the theme and the parallel between this vocabulary and the Internet. The words waterwheel, fountain, tap, crew, dock also give an idea to people, to the audience, of how to use the site. Users can also take a metaphorical interpretation of water for the content of the media they upload—like a dance inspired by water’s qualities or a video of sand rippling down dunes like liquid.
Above all what do you hope to achieve with Waterwheel?
I hope to raise awareness about water issues and works, that people will generate new avenues, new works and new ways of presenting and performing, finding their own style within the venue and the tools that Waterwheel offers. I’d like the project to foster sharing and creativity, cross-cultural conversation, intergenerational exchange and debate and help people who have controversial projects, ideas, or are in conflict, to make issues more public and facilitate decision-making and practical action.
How do you feel about living so intensively with a work about water?
Every day I see the relation and relevance with the work and what is happening in the world. Like the transformative aspect of water I am trying to be open and flexible and adjusting to what is happening. It’s intense because it has lots of different aspects, it’s beautiful and sometimes it’s really terrible. The tsunami in Japan and the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown has affected my way of apprehending the world. Knowing that we are not reaching the tipping-point but are totally in it is terrifying, but at the same time, interesting to see how we can react to that in a human and positive way.
Waterwheel: http://water-wheel.net/, launching August 22. Deadline for proposals for launch August 12
Percussion students, Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University
SENIOR LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE LINDA KOUVARAS REMEMBERS “A RATHER LEAN COUPLE OF DECADES” WHERE BOOKS ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA WERE THIN ON THE GROUND. A RESURGENCE OF INTEREST HAS RECENTLY GRACED LIBRARY SHELVES WITH BOOKS BY DAVID BENNETT (SOUNDING POSTMODERNISM, AUSTRALIAN MUSIC CENTRE, 2008), GORDON KERRY (NEW CLASSICAL MUSIC, UNSW, 2009), GAIL PRIEST (EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC, UNSW PRESS, 2009) AND SALLY MACARTHUR (TOWARDS A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY FEMINIST POLITICS OF MUSIC, ASHGATE, 2010), WITH WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS PROJECTED FOR THE NEAR FUTURE.
Though many of those interviewed for this RealTime arts education edition identified a now healthier music book publishing industry, the same was not said of critical writing in journals, magazines and newspapers. The perceived critical vacuum in Australian musical life is seen to negatively impact on the teaching of Australian music in tertiary courses, the vibrancy of Australian musical cultures and students’ preparedness for their careers.
a critical deficit
Executive Director of Performing Arts at Monash University Peter Tregear explains how critical writing feeds into teaching: “As a teacher you don’t just want to show that music exists, you want to show how it exists in context. You want to show students a score, a recording and responses to the music.”
It is not just in the classroom that this scarcity of music writing is felt, but in the lives of practising musicians and sound artists. “Art-making thrives on verbal reflection and magazines/journals provide an essential forum for this,” Kouvaras asserts. Griffith University Lecturer Vanessa Tomlinson believes the value of critical reflection extends from local scenes to the wider musical world, warning of global negligence in the state of Australian music writing.
Forums do exist for critical writing on music in Australia, though a plurality of voices is needed as part of a reflective musical culture. Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide Stephen Whittington regards RealTime as “the only forum for serious critical discussion of contemporary music in Australia,” while Tomlinson regards it as “one of only a few places where people can actually critically engage with an artform.” With a focus on jazz and improvised music, Extempore initially appeared in five print editions providing reviews and feature articles. Material is still published online (www.extempore.com.au), but its print presence will be an annual print anthology from 2012, according to its website. The Music Council of Australia’s quarterly magazine Music Forum publishes album reviews and longer pieces, particularly about music education (www.musicforum.org.au). The Australian Music Centre publishes news, articles and reviews in its online magazine Resonate (www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/resonate) and its bi-annual Resonate Journal. Despite the efforts of these platforms, much of the responsibility for publishing concert reviews still falls on newspapers, something that, according to Tomlinson, they “are not doing in any way, shape or form.”
Newspapers publish both reviews and features on music, though they are rarely sufficiently in-depth to include in a tertiary reader. A comprehensive review would follow a piece through a performance, the musical life of a country and the history of Western art music, with an ear to its otherness within these very categories. This is a tall order, but it is also a formula Tregear reads behind the success of The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. “You can see how his articles easily spin out into books. Can you imagine a book of Clive O’Connell’s reviews [for The Age]?” he quips, before qualifying: “Now reviewers will say that the papers don’t give them the space to publish more in-depth reviews, and this is true, but it is a vicious circle. The paper thinks music is marginal and irrelevant and [reviewers] write as though it is marginal and irrelevant.”
Public disinterest in art music also forms part of this circle. Whittington, who writes for Adelaide’s The Advertiser, notes that “even when you do write something controversial, as I do from time to time, it is difficult to elicit a response [from readers].”
While the length of columns on the internet is not an issue, the lack of financial incentive and the disparate nature of the blogosphere may explain why this medium is yet to reinvigorate public musical opinion. Tomlinson points out the vast incongruity between the rhetoric of the information age and the dearth of public reflection about music in Australia, a phenomenon that may be explained by Whittington’s remark that cultural flows over the internet tend to be circular. We then have to look to the leadership of publishers, broadcasters, concert organisers and educators to break the cultural deadlock. Amongst concert organisers and broadcasters there have been some promising signs: ABC Classic FM’s continuing commitment to contemporary Australian classical composers and concerts, the East Coast’s growing New Music Network and Perth’s Tura Music, building audiences and helping with the challenges of touring. Educators also acknowledge a commitment to broadening students’ worldviews, striking various balances between local and global content.
ensuring a global perspective
Andy Arthurs, Professor at Queensland University of Technology, agrees that tertiary courses should broaden students’ cultural frames of reference “so you are not following your own little bread crumb route to wherever you want to go next.” Coupled with the melting pot of a campus environment, online media enhances students’ understanding of their global context, of which Australian music forms only a part. “Sometimes the most interesting things happening in the world will be happening in Australia,” Whittington claims. “Sometimes they will be in Shanghai or Sao Paolo.” Likewise, Arthurs finds the distinction between the local and the global to be of little relevance to the contemporary working musician: “I had a conversation a few years ago with some colleagues in Malmö in Sweden and it became apparent that they didn’t really talk about Swedish music. They said ‘we just make music and hope that the rest of the world likes it.’ A little less introspection would probably be a good thing.”
providing local context
Though a global perspective is essential for any aspiring musician, contemporary Australian composers are held up as role models for having locally negotiated similar professional and cultural terrain. Arthurs will teach about relatively younger composers such as Robert Davidson and Matthew Hindson. Tregear believes Elena Kats-Chernin “relates to contemporary culture in a way that hard-edged Australian versions of Darmstadt stuff from the 1960s and 70s didn’t then and certainly don’t now.” Likewise, Whittington will “only very occasionally refer to the older generation, Richard Meale or Peter Sculthorpe,” instead teaching about “composers of [the students’] own generation—like Damien Ricketson and Matthew Shlomowitz.” [Ricketson is currently a lecturer in composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and directs Ensemble Offspring whose recent concert, featuring a piece by Matthew Shlomowitz, is reviewed here, Eds.]
The Australian Music Centre is generally accepted to be an indispensable resource for accessing the music of past and present Australian composers. Tomlinson, a former professional associate of the AMC, understands that “whenever there is an agreed upon dearth of information [the AMC] is generally proactive in producing resources.” With an increasing amount of material available online through the AMC (www.australianmusiccentre.com.au) and the Australian Sound Design Project (www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au), and over 17 years of critical material available through the RealTime archive since 1994 (accessible online 2001-present), there has never been a better time to bring contemporary Australian music into lecture halls. Often the resource is standing right in front of the students in the form of the lecturer. All interviewees advocated teachers bringing their creative practice into the classroom, including their passion as scholars and critics.
no practising in the lecture hall
The common requirement for teachers at universities to have PhDs can deprive students of the valuable experience of being taught by a practising musician, argues Arthurs. He claims that if he wrote down 50 of the most interesting musicians in Australia, few of them would be in universities. Snug inside the academy, a professional environment hostile to expensive one-on-one music tuition and proselytising teachers does not promise an edifying educational experience.
To Alistair Noble, Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University, a university culture that devalues pedagogical traditions, including the relationship between instrumental or composition teachers and students regardless of professional qualifications, threatens the quality of both musical and general arts education. “One of the major influences on my thinking was not even in the music department,” Noble reminisces from his armchair, “but was a medieval studies lecturer. It was in those medieval studies classes that I saw first hand what a political engagement could mean in terms of academic study. I remember in that class having guest lecturers from Oxford or Cambridge or somewhere, these die-hard Marxists talking about Byzantine farming methods. There is definitely an attitude now that the idea of passing on a tradition is inappropriate. It does happen, but one isn’t very vocal about it.” Whether helped or hindered by an institution, students will seek out collaborators, mentors and role models wherever they can find them, resulting in ephemeral live music scenes.
Percussion students, Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University
from the local to the global
Outside the lecture hall, or contiguous with it if institutions are functioning properly, students find their musical identity through a complex interplay of local and global influences. In Brisbane, Vanessa Tomlinson finds that “students are most influenced by what they see in the city around them. At the moment that would mean Joel Stern, Lawrence English, Topology, my own work with Clocked Out, and the Viney-Grinberg duo. They are most interested in what they hear live.”
Just as they engage with their immediate surroundings, students will consider themselves in relation to global musical trends. Tomlinson also identifies “probably about three groups of young composers who are working really hard to establish their musical identities in Brisbane and contextualise that within a historical framework—be it European Modernism or contemporary New York minimalism.” Arthurs reinforces this interplay between the local and the global: “musicians in Brisbane, generally, do not interact much with musicians from Sydney or Melbourne. They do need to contextualise their practice, but they do that in relation to music from New York or Hamburg just as well as they could with Perth or Melbourne.”
writing yourself into a music career
In professionally navigating local and global boundaries, critical literacy is again vital. Vanessa Tomlinson explains that “because we have this fairly strong funding system, compared to the US and Asia, but not Europe, a lot of the responsibility for getting music out there falls on the musicians themselves. You have to publicise your gig, get it online, you virtually have to do your own critical writing. This is one of the big responsibilities of education, to train up critical thinkers so that we can have more independent, freelance writing…It is easy to slip into an educational system that is purely skill-based, that makes performers and sends them out into the world. The world is not there to receive them. So critical thinking is not just about reading obscure philosophical texts, it is also about understanding how to engage with the world. The question is ‘how does and can art function in the world in relation to other art forms, philosophy or ecology?’”
With books and online resources on Australian music growing in number, the paucity of music criticism currently stands out as one of the greatest hindrances to the inclusion of Australian works in music education. Critical writing provides vital teaching material, forming a bridge between the ‘outside’ world and the academy. It is the glue of otherwise disparate and alienated music scenes. It should be part of the professional toolbox of every musician, ready to deconstruct their detractors and justify their own glorious existence.
THE SMALL 3RRR PERFORMANCE SPACE IS AT ONCE A BROADCASTING STUDIO, A CONCERT HALL AND AN INSTALLATION SITE. EACH FUNCTION ENTRAINS A DIFFERENT SET OF CONVENTIONS AFFECTING THE WAY AUDIENCES APPROACH THE MUSIC AND SOUND ART PRESENTED THERE. THROUGH DAVID CHESWORTH’S OCEANOGRAPHY/PERON STATION INSTALLATION AND THE LIQUID ARCHITECTURE CLOSING CONCERT, EACH OF THESE SETS OF CONVENTIONS WERE CHALLENGED BY A PROGRAM THAT ASKED “WHO’S AFRAID OF LAUGHING?,” “WHO’S AFRAID OF THE DARK?” AND, FINALLY, “WHO’S AFRAID OF LISTENING?”
For the Oceanography/Peron Station installation, Chesworth moved away from the large-scale site-specific installations of his and Sonia Lieber’s Wax Sound Media to produce an intimate listening environment in the 3RRR performance space. The dim room invited the audience to apprehend the eight-channel works acousmatically, or on their sonic merit. The striking juxtaposition of synthesised and field-recorded sonic environment provided the listener with a fresh auditory perspective on both sound sets while provoking their curiosity about the works’ extra-musical associations.
Oceanography is an almost completely synthesised soundscape that Chesworth describes as suggesting an “underwater eco-system.” High, diatonic tones shimmer above humming chordal currents, frissons of static, pealing motifs and a sound like a squeaky shopping trolley (an object common to many marine environments). The characteristically dream-like timbral palette and steady but understated pulse, similar to Sigur Ros’ 2004 work Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do for Merce Cunningham’s dance piece Split Sides, gave the work a theatrical quality well beyond bean-bag- bound listeners’ immediate surroundings.
After the synthesised sounds of Oceanography, the strictly field-recorded bird and insect calls of Peron Station sounded strikingly artificial. The call of the Chiming Wedge-Bill resembles the metallic tinkling of digital artifact in a badly encoded MP3. The White-Winged Fairywren twitters like a tiny super-charged Leslie speaker. Beetle stridulations coalesce in what sounds like a granulated shopping cart. Only the recordings of blowholes and the odd crow betrayed the natural origin of their unearthly sounds.
The installation works developed an engrossing sonic dialogue, although the empty stage and lonely piano pushed against a wall were reminders of the kind of show you were not attending. The performative element of sound art formed the subtext of the Liquid Architecture concert featuring James Rushford and Joe Talia, Lukas Simonis and Dave Brown, Pascal Battus and Marc Behrens.
Paris-based sound artist Pascal Battus explored the sounding properties of styrofoam trays, cassette deck motors, foil, cardboard, plastic cups and other everyday materials in an intimate table-top setting. Battus’ brow knotted in earnest concentration as he strove to find the sweet spot of each object. Sometimes the truly experimental procedure of grinding a piece of acetate against a spinning disc would open up unexpected and remarkable sonic terrain. At other times a muted flatulence would announce the disagreement of two objects coerced into sonic co-operation. The suspense, surprise or disappointment of each experiment was intensely comic, the latter submitted to with a small, decisive nod by the sonic researcher.
Marc Behrens lent a satirical air to his quadraphonic diffusion of characteristic industrial sounds including doors, chains and static. Dressed in a long grey coat with his face aglow from his red laptop screen, Behrens variously stood on, leant against, or lay upon the stool that most laptop performers would slump down on for a performance’s duration. Behrens triggered samples with heroic gestures and concluded the performance with four stiff bows to the audience, who were garishly lit by two red spotlights from under Behrens’ musical pulpit.
While sound artists must be aware of their own performance conventions, I would not want them to sidestep their obligation to provide interesting sounds. As Chesworth’s installation demonstrated, much of the interest of a sound lies not only in its isolated presentation and performative contextualisation, but in its relationship to other sounds. With the exception of certain thin textures consisting of two squealing pieces of styrofoam, Battus’ series of sonic experiments did not provide a sense of the interconnectedness. Despite their brilliant, high fidelity amplification, Behrens’ industrial sounds did not move beyond their own stereotype. Dave Brown and Lukas Simonis’ prepared guitar improvisation set, on the other hand, displayed an almost furious attention to soundscape construction, at least in the short-term interactions of the two guitarists with their armoury of kitchen utensils. Using a pre-recorded tape recording as a compositional tool, Rushford and Talia’s set presented longer-range, episodic changes in texture.
Joe Talia, Liquid Architecture
photo Sebastian Avila
Joe Talia, Liquid Architecture
Though their concert blacks and almost complete lack of lighting initially seemed out of place in a concert exploring the expanded possibilities of concert performance, Rushford and Talia’s subdued presentation resonated with their tense, horror-themed set. A reel-to-reel tape with foley effects and snatches of dialogue from The Evil Dead II provided the underlying structure of the performance. Rushford’s extended viola techniques and Talia’s processed ride cymbal contributed timbral washes and insidious scratching sounds between gasps and creaking doors. Sometimes the texture reduced to a deep rumble, while at other times careening, echoing tones from the viola produced an ear-splitting cacophony. Sometimes, long moments of silence passed in horror-movie suspense, punctuated by a breathy voice asking “are you all right?”
This question seemed to probe the discomfort we can have about unexpected silence in a performance situation, particularly when there is little to look at. What one usually realises, in the awkwardness of the moment, is not the fullness of Cagean silence, but that silence is profoundly changed in relation to the sounds that precede it. This is particularly evident in radio, where the relationship between sound and silence is even more carefully orchestrated than in a concert setting. For instance, as the Rushford/Talia set was broadcast on 3RRR, we were asked to make some crowd noise when the performance space became live. The “on air” sign was greeted with cheers, before which everyone was sitting quietly, conversing in hushed whispers. The sudden intrusion of ‘crowd noise’ in an almost pitch black performance space was absurd, just as a few coughs and creaking seats would have seemed out of place on a ‘live’ radio broadcast.
It is because of the mutual influence of silence and sound, rather than in spite of it, that the presentation of sound art needs to be taken into consideration. The darkness of an acousmatic performance, such as David Chesworth’s installation or Rushford and Talia’s set, encourages the audience’s focus on the reciprocity between sounds, while any visual element is capable of changing the listener’s experience of that relationship, such as Battus’ focused gaze as he tries—and fails—to bring a tin cup and a small motor into consonance.
Liquid Architecture 12, Festival of Sound Arts, Oceanography and Peron Station, composer David Chesworth, 3RRR, June 27-29; concert, Marc Behrens, Pascal Battus, Lukas Simonis, Dave Brown, James Rushford and Joe Talia, 3RRR, Melbourne, June 30
FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS, THE SYDNEY LEG OF LIQUID ARCHITECTURE HAS BEEN PRODUCED IN ASSOCIATION WITH ABC CLASSIC FM WITH ONE OR TWO CONCERTS BROADCAST THAT SAME NIGHT ON NEW MUSIC UP LATE. THE BROADCAST ASPECT SETS A CHALLENGE: HOW TO SATISFY BOTH CONCERT AUDIENCE AND HOME LISTENER. CURIOUSLY, THE ARTISTS PROGRAMMED IN CONCERT 2 ALL USED STRONG VISUAL ELEMENTS IN THEIR PERFORMANCES.
Pia van Gelder is very handy with a soldering iron, creating a variety of homemade electronic instruments—her audio-visual harp in this performance resembles a harp in shape only. Van Gelder dons white gloves with wired up electrical circuits in the fingertips. As she touches a combination of ‘strings’ or electrical componentry an audio signal is converted into a video signal. The resulting sound is a familiar dark buzz and hum with sharp on/offs, deep drones and rude eructations: electricity doing what it does when it’s being interfered with. The visuals range between bands of static-filled colour reminiscent of liquorice all-sorts and a kind of baroque wallpaper. While the audio element was engaging, it was a symbiotic composition—the radio listeners missed out on a vital aspect.
Marc Behrens’ piece was perhaps a better experience for the remote listener than for the live audience. In response to the oft-heard criticism that playing music from a laptop is not performative, Behrens augments his surround-sound set with a series of overly dramatic gestures and actions including some inexplicable play with a stool, none of which have any clear relationship to the sound being made. Whether they are in earnest or parody is also ambiguous. I asked Behrens about his performance and he said that he is inspired by the renowned Italian designer Bruno Munari’s explorations into interactive sculpture and the composer and intermedia artist Jerry Hunt. The reality however is that Behrens’ actions do not appear integral to his soundmaking, seeming rather like an unnecessary and distracting decoration. If performative provocation is the intention that’s fine, but surely listening is the point here? The audio I could focus on was finely detailed and dramatically spatialised.
Pascal Battus, Liquid Architecture
photo Sebastian Avila
Pascal Battus, Liquid Architecture
Pascal Battus is more shaman than showman, extracting the essences of sound from a range of materials applied to the spinning gizzards of old Walkmans. The results are rewarding for the deep listener as each object is coaxed to emit its own subtle combination of rings, brrrrs and fricatives. Battus’ concentration is fascinating, like a watchmaker working in fine detail; however, having but two hands he can only make a maximum of two sound gestures at a time. Consequently, his piece becomes a series of similarly composed sonic moments as he works methodically through all the objects on his table. While the detail of each sound set would have been engaging, I am curious as to how the homogenous episodic structure held for radio listeners. However the final cymbal grinding with a dazzling array of harmonics was well worth waiting for.
Battus also presented a series of one-on-one ‘sound massages’ the following day. With eyes closed you sit opposite the artist while he performs a mini concert around your head: tiny scrapes, crackles and rustles define a complex sphere of listening. The manipulation of spatialisation is amazing, resulting in a feeling of deep intimacy with both Battus and the sounds themselves. It’s so simple yet so incredible I don’t know why we don’t do it all the time!
The sound massage was a little taster of a more innovative way of engaging with focused listening than the concert for radio format and made me crave more. In its current mode, Liquid Architecture in Sydney does seem to lack an engagement with, or support from, the local experimental scene. Perhaps this is due to its contracted size which limits local involvement and/or choice of venue: the exposure offered by ABC Classic FM is significant, but it seems audiences are not so keen on the live recording format and the formal setting of Eugene Goossens Hall, despite its great sound potential. Maybe Liquid Architecture is what it is—a touring concert (or two) but it’s hard not to long for an expanded program with associated events across a range of spaces (which I acknowledge means time, money and people’s energies). It will be interesting to see how the thematic focus of Liquid Architecture 13, Antarctic Convergence, curated by Philip Samartzis and Lawrence English, will shape next year’s event.
Liquid Architecture 12 Sydney, Concert 2, Pia van Gelder, Pascal Battus, Marc Behrens, Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Ultimo Centre, July 2; Sound Massage, Pascal Battus, Bon Marche Building, UTS, July 3; national artistic director Nat Bates, Sydney co-producers Thomas Knox Arnold and ABC Classic FM; www.liquidarchitecture.org.au
FOR MOST OF US, ANTARCTICA IS A PLACE OF THE MIND. FOR CT MADIGAN, A MEMBER OF THE 1911 AUSTRALASIAN ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION, IT WAS A VERY REAL PLACE WHERE SOUTH AUSTRALIA AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE BECAME DISTANT MEMORIES. A CENTURY LATER, AS A RECIPIENT OF AN AUSTRALIAN ANTARCTIC ARTS FELLOWSHIP, MADIGAN’S GRANDDAUGHTER, HARPIST ALICE GILES USES MUSIC TO REIMAGINE HER GRANDFATHER’S VOYAGE, BREAK THROUGH OUR FROZEN CONCEPTION OF THE PLACE AND LET THE STRANGENESS OF THE LANDSCAPE SEEP INTO HER OWN PERFORMANCE PRACTICE.
In his diaries, Madigan wrote of the importance of music and writing on a continent with so little of both. Records, songbooks and letters from home did not just sustain familiar memories, but testified to lives that persisted despite being obscured by distance. Writing about his fiancée Wynnis, Madigan confessed it “hard to find anything that I do not know by heart in her letters.” Just as static memories became dynamic when traces of life were found between the familiar lines of a letter, the Antarctic environment, long-supposed silent and monolithic, proved all too real for the early explorers. When Madigan’s close friends Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis died on an ill-fated sledging expedition, he grieved the loss of “fellow sympathy and confidences only known in the Antarctic.”
Since the real of Antarctica does not affect us in the same way today, it is not surprising that the heroic age of Antarctic exploration persists as our privileged image of the place. Today scientists are shunted around Antarctica in temperature-controlled bubbles and the category of ‘explorer’ has all but disappeared. However, thanks to an increasing interest in artistic ‘exploration’ of the continent, this monochromatic and silent image is giving way to digital clarity and surround-sound clamour as cinematographers, sound artists—and harpists—rediscover the continent with hand-held recording devices. ANU’s Antarctica: Music, Sound and Cultural Connections Conference showcased some of these processes of exploration, including Alice Giles’ Alice in Antarctica concert.
Alice in Antarctica reveals Australian composers’ dated understanding of the place as an object composed of shimmering surfaces and characteristic scenes (mainly involving penguins). It then asks, through a rapprochement between the natural environment and the harp, how the Antarctic environment might be understood on a personal level and affect musical practice.
Armed with a small lever harp and a full sized electroacoustic harp, Alice Giles arrived in Antarctica with a program, like a series of letters known by heart, of works composed about a continent largely unknown to Australian composers. Joshua McHugh’s “Billions of Penguins” for solo harp consisted of a series of vignettes characterised by waddling penguin rhythms. Jim Cotter’s “On Not Dancing with Penguins” expressed frustration at not being able to accompany Giles to Antarctica and painted the Antarctic landscape through repeated rising and cascading figures.
Larry Sitsky’s “Fantasias 16 and 17” for solo harp avoided musical depictions of the landscape, instead transplanting abstract music to both natural and artificial Antarctic environments. Fantasia 16 for lever harp was performed and filmed outdoors, while Fantasia 17 was performed indoors, utilising sound processing on the electroacoustic harp to suggest the natural scale of the continent. Martin Wesley-Smith’s “Aurora Wynnis” also avoided depicting landscapes, drawing on Madigan’s writings and the music he listened to while in Antarctica to develop a nostalgic picture of Madigan’s own nostalgia for home. Giles asserts that “more composers need to be going to Antarctica to bring back their expressions—we have been a consistent presence as a nation in Antarctica for 100 years and yet we have barely any musical expression of or from the continent.”
Perhaps it is not even in the music, but in the performer that the musical effects of Antarctica are to be found. As Giles wrote on her blog, a modern day explorer’s notebook, “[t]his is how I hope the Antarctic Adventure affects my playing: rather than the idea of programatic [sic] pieces to perform or compose, my world is concerned with how to express beauty from the heart. The perfection of nature I saw yesterday, not mechanical, ever changing, but uncompromisingly clear, leads me to seek perfection of expression and sound in every note with serenity.”
A musical presence in Antarctica is not only important for musicians, but for others who travel to the continent. Giles believes that “[m]ost people who travel to Antarctica—from ‘tradies’ to scientists—have a strong emotional response, but they have no vehicle to share and discuss this. Drawing historical reference into a contemporary program with an emotional but abstract musical thread seems to give this a universal expression.”
One of the most arresting compositions from Alice Giles’ journey is the video of her lever harp standing alone on the beach at Davis Station. The wind passing by the strings produces a constantly changing tone while the ice slushes on the shore and an elephant seal goes for a dip. It is a magical, minimal meeting between the elements and music, as if you had introduced two animals to each other for the first time to see if they would get along and they started singing to each other.
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Alice in Antarctica, harp, voice, electronics Alice Giles, voice Tegan Peemoeller, Llewellyn Hall, ANU School of Music, June 26
RealTime issue #104 Aug-Sept 2011 pg. 46
Ensemble Offspring, Professor Bad Trip
photo Oliver Miller
Ensemble Offspring, Professor Bad Trip
DOOF DOOF DOOF DOOF, nnSe nnSe nnSe nnSe…IN THE ABSENCE OF POPULAR MUSIC’S MOST UBIQUITOUS QUALITY, METRIC BEAT, ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING’S LATEST CLASSICAL PROGRAM, PROFESSOR BAD TRIP, DREW PARALLELS WITH ITS PALTRY YOUNGER SIBLING, POP, USING ASSOCIATIONS OF TIMBRE. SUPERSATURATED AND DISTORTED ELECTRIC GUITARS, BASS AND DRUM-KIT DROVE MUSICAL FRAGMENTS ALONG, NEVER AIMING TO ARRIVE ANYWHERE, JUST TRIPPING.
Ensemble Offspring regulars teamed with guests Zane Banks on electric guitar, Dave Symes on bass, Ngaire de Korte on oboe, Rob Llewellyn on bassoon and Alex Bieri on trumpet to explore the divide and crossovers between classical and popular music. None of the works in the program were derivative of popular music but, instead, asserted classical music’s currency. Each showed that classical music can attune to the modern world while simultaneously transcending the form’s perceived limitations. In a packed Bay 20 at CarriageWorks the audience took a trip to the future of classical music. Our psychoactive tendencies were polled in an audience survey that asked us to name our hallucinogen of choice: Peyote, mushrooms, LSD or nutmeg.
Early in the program “Study for String Instrument #2” by fan of allspice and composer Simon Steen-Andersen raised the whammy pedal onto a classical pedestal. The pedal’s sound-modifications are unusually scored for a separate player from the string instrumentalist. It was performed by the fantastically frenzied Geoff Gartner on cello with ‘whammy assistant’ Adrian Bertram. Gartner played mad glissandi; he bowed the edge of the cello rather than the strings while tapping the instrument’s body to produce wild effects. I heard battling space gerbils, while Ensemble Offspring’s Damien Ricketson called the study’s ludicrously exaggerated language “a grotesque caricature of itself.”
Australian Matthew Shlomowitz’s “Joy Time Ride for Ives” parodied art music’s relationship with the musical cliché. Schlomowitz challenges the prevalent aesthetic in classical music that once a musical idea or motif is overused it’s no longer artistically classy. Instead he makes cliché the focus of this composition, exercising snippets of rock beat on drum-kit and recurring flourishes through the upper woodwinds. The repeated fragments are attention grabbing and a little jolting. It’s a relief to hear a familiar passage but you feel luxuriantly trashy enjoying something that’s been sounded so many times before. Cliché winSe nnSe nnSe.
The central works of the evening though were the three “Lessons” of Fausto Romitelli’s “Professor Bad Trip.” Inspired by the mescaline-fuelled poetry of Henri Michaux and the mind-bending drawings of Gianluca Lerici, aka Professor Bad Trip, Romitelli’s exploration of psychedelia is hallucinatory. In the broadest sense, hallucination is perception in the absence of stimulus—it’s the invention of something greater than what is really there. Each “Lesson” does just that. It breathes. It heaves. The music expands and contracts in such extraordinary plays with time that it’s as though universes are born and die with each surging sound. Time actually alters when you’re listening to this music.
“Ever since I was born, I have been immersed in digitalised images, synthetic sounds, artefacts,” the late Romitelli had explained. “Artificial, distorted, filtered—this is the nature of man today.” With this acceptance of the modern racket Romitelli’s sound world draws careful inspiration from disparate sources: from Ligeti to rock, electro and techno. He considered sound to be “a material into which one plunges in order to forge its physical and perceptive characteristics: grain, thickness, porosity, luminosity, density and elasticity.” Romitelli’s music is sculpture of sound, instrumental synthesis, transformation of spectral morphology. It’s in constant drift towards unsustainable densities, distortions and interferences. When I was able to escape the waves of immersion in his music for long enough to reflect, the phrase “an acoustic Aphex Twin” kept surfacing.
Video projections repositioned the audience’s attention out of the music and back onto the musicians. It assured we stay present, but was unnecessary for the majority of the time as the musicians were doing such a good job of transmitting the music that their bodies became superfluous to the art in action. Occasionally the filming caught a facial expression of concentration or communication that would otherwise have been invisible and this invited us deeper into their practice. It also reminded us to change our focus—in seeing someone new, we heard something new. Comedian Bill Bailey describes his experiences on acid as spending hours noticing ever more detail in the few things positioned beside him. He says while darting his head about, “Oh that’s quite interesting, that’s quite interesting, yes, that’s quite interesting.” Visuals, here, revealed the momentarily invisible points of interest.
As I left with an uncanny desire to bake spiced cookies, I thanked these musicians for creating a space for this music to be heard, inhaled, versed, warped, wet, born, aired…Who needs drugs anyway? Just as Ensemble Offspring had assured us in its pre-concert hype, I’ve been changed by this music. New music isn’t what it used to be.
Ensemble Offspring, Professor Bad Trip: Mind Altering Classical Music, conductor Roland Peelman, flute Lamorna Nightingale, clarinet Jason Noble, oboe Ngaire de Korte, bassoon Rob Llewellyn, trumpet Alex Bieri, keyboards Zubin Kanga, percussion Claire Edwardes, violin James Cuddeford and Veronique Serret, viola James Eccles, cello Geoffrey Gartner, double and electric bass Dave Symes, electric guitar Zane Banks, electronics Adrian Bertram, sound Bob Scott, lighting Neil Simpson, video Sean Bacon, Bay 20, CarriageWorks, Sydney, June 18
Chris Abrahams, Mike Majkowski, James Waples, Roil, the NOW now
IN PART TWO OF THIS SURVEY OF EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND SOUND HAPPENINGS IN SYDNEY, I TAKE IN TWO REGULAR EVENTS THAT SEEMINGLY SIT AT EITHER END OF THE CURATORIAL SPECTRUM: THE PURE SPONTANEOUS MUSIC PURSUITS OF THE NOW NOW SERIES, ONE OF THE LONGEST RUNNING GIGS; AND THE GLORIOUSLY HETEROGENEOUS SOUND SERIES WHICH STARTED IN 2010. WHILE THESE GIG SERIES HAVE QUITE DIFFERENT APPROACHES, THERE IS A STRONG SENSE OF COMMUNION BETWEEN THEM AND IT IS THIS CROSS-FERTILISATION THAT IS CURRENTLY MAKING THE SYDNEY SCENE ALL THE MORE VIBRANT.
the NOW now
The NOW now series is probably well known to readers but to recap, it was started by Clayton Thomas and Clare Cooper in 2001 under the moniker “If you like improvised music, we like you,” from which the first NOW now festival evolved in 2002. The unruly name persisted until the co-founders re-located to Berlin in 2007 and the festival and series became collectively run, both under the same title. The current curatorial team is Sam Pettigrew, Rishin Singh and Laura Altman.
The NOW now series has had many a home since it started at the now defunct Space 3 Gallery in Redfern. Currently events occur monthly and sometimes fortnightly (as they did originally) at Serial Space and a range of other places around the inner-city. Number 6 in the series took place in 402, one of the live-in warehouse spaces in Hibernian House, Surry Hills, featuring a baby grand piano. While occasionally the curation allows a slightly broader sweep of music styles, this evening offered a line-up of pure, unadulterated improv.
First up was Erebis (sitar and double bass) vs Reuben Lewis (trumpet) from Canberra. Lewis is conventionally clad while Erebis dresses up in yukata and plastic Elvis wig, but their music is not quite so flamboyant, offering a version of minimalist free jazz. On the whole they focus on rhythmic and harmonic exploration and only in their fourth piece does it feel like they are starting to approach newer territories by introducing unpredictable timbres.
Unpredictable timbres is what it’s all about for Dale Gorfinkel and Arek Gulbenkoglu from Melbourne. Gorfinkel has a serious sense of play placing objects on his vibraphone and exploiting their rattles and frictions. By casually coaxing materials into action he makes a complex multilayered soundscape with occasional haunting tones from the vibe keys. Gulbenkoglu is a perfect companion on snare drum and objects, using more minimal methods, yet adding just the right rattle of pine cone on snare, metallic ring of egg whisk on rim and tiny chopper effect of a small fan held close to microphone. Their battle of Styrofoam sounds was a particular highlight in a set that felt truly exploratory.
Ivan Lysiak offered a brief piece of guitar feedback. There’s a sense of egolessness as Lysiak lets the signal flow, manipulating its cycles with small changes of proximity between the guitar and the small amp placed on top of an ironing board. It’s not a nice sound, more a nasal whine than a deep, dark massaging drone, but it develops more textures the longer he plays. He goes where the sound goes and then he stops, turning off the amp and holding still, as we do for a breathless minute of ‘silence.’
Roil is Chris Abrahams on piano, Mike Majkowski on double bass and James Waples on drums. Abrahams’ repetitive melodic figures wind around Majkowksi’s angular bass lines, while Waples disperses timbral shimmers that draw it all together. With an instrumental line-up similar to The Necks in which Abrahams also plays, it’s hard not to listen for similarities, but instead of the slow build of the former this combination of characters suggests a journey across constantly shifting territories. One player finds a zone and the others look for ways to meet him there. After a while another wanders off again and the quest continues. This tangible sense of the musicians travelling into the unknown together illustrates the NOW now ethos at its best.
Matthew Syres, Joe Cummins, Dirk Kruithof, Forenzics, Sound Series #15, photo Lucien Alperstein
sound series
Sound Series, curated by Romy Caen, held monthly at Hardware Gallery in Enmore, started in March 2010 and has quickly become a highlight of the alternative music scene. What is distinctive about Sound Series is its eclectism with four to six acts per night ranging from alternative rock/pop to electronica, improv and noise.
Sound Series 15 kicked off with Textile Audio, aka Eve Klein, an electronic composer and mezzo soprano. In the intimacy of the small gallery, her operatic performance is, as she describes it, a little in your face, but her sense of quiet assurance eases the awkward context a little. Klein has a fine voice and creates some intriguing electronic accompaniments, but for my taste (which I admit doesn’t run to opera), Textile Audio doesn’t disrupt the classical conventions quite enough, however many in the crowd were spellbound by her virtuosity.
Next up was Secrets, from New Zealand making some great bouncy pop beats, with almost catchy melodies delivered in a kind of slacker vocal style hidden deep in the reverby mix. With livelier vocals you could imagine these songs being pop hits—people were almost dancing—and Secrets’ performative presence, a mixture of nervousness and reckless abandon, is rather endearing.
Forenzics have been around since 2005 but I hadn’t heard them play. With Matthew Syres on guitar and way too many effects pedals, Dirk Kruithof on lead guitar, Joe Cummins on trumpet and Kaos pad and Alex Slater on drums they play loose yet utterly cohesive improv inflected with jazz, rock, drone and psychedelia. Joe Cummin’s trumpet loops and soaring melodies are a particular highlight creating a smoky, sensual atmosphere and the rhythmic interplay, pushing against the metre with loping rubatos, gives the sound an intriguing elasticity. It occurred to me that music is best when it picks you up and takes you somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go, and Forenzics did just that.
The final set was by Sydney veterans Toydeath who, if you haven’t seen them play in the last 15 years, dress like creepy children’s TV show characters and create music purely from electronic toys ‘defiled’ with audio outputs so they can be amplified. A particular highlight is their cover of Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” featuring a hee-hawing donkey and the track with lead vocals by a scripture quoting Jesus doll (yes such a thing exists!). Back from a recent US tour, they presented a slick show that had the crowd on their feet.
I ask Romy Caen about her approach to curating these very successful nights and she answers, “There’s a broad community in Sydney which I think is loosely connected through the idea of experimentation but comprises really varied practices and genres. Instead of specifically seeking experimental performers Sound Series tends to dip into this pool of people.” These resulting ‘hybrid’ gigs often bring large and new audiences. Caen suggests that maybe this is because “Sound Series inhabits a strange realm between mainstream and underground events,” strongly influenced by the venue—a commercial gallery rather than a hard to find industrial space (and sometimes the drinks are free.) While this eclectism is not necessarily to the liking of some purists, Sound Series is doing a great job creating an exciting atmosphere around experimentation across a range of musical styles.
My final report on Sydney sounds and scenes will look at ¼ inch, psh.live plus more.
The NOW now, Series #6, Erebis vs Reuben Lewis, Dale Gorfinkel & Arek Gulbenkoglu, Ivan Lysiak, Roil, curators Sam Pettigrew, Rishin Singh, Laura Altman, 402 Hibernian House, July 26; www.thenownow.net; Sound Series #15, Textile Audio, Secrets, Forenzics, Toydeath, curator Romy Caen, Hardware Gallery, July 23, http://tiny.cc/aox79 Lucien Alperstein’s exhibition Water and Music featuring photos taken during previous Sound Series events was exhibited at Hardware Gallery July 5-23
HOURGLASS IS AN IMMERSIVE LIVE PERFORMANCE AND NEW MEDIA INSTALLATION THAT EXPLORES THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME. IT IS AN EVOLVING COLLABORATIVE WORK FEATURING A TEAM OF AUSTRALIAN AND MEXICAN ARTISTS INCLUDING NICOLE CANHAM (WHIRLY, CLARINET, TAROGATO), SARAH KAUR (VIDEO), IVAN PUIG (TECHNOLOGY ARTIST) AND CARLOS LOPEZ CHARLES (COMPOSER), WHO WERE BROUGHT TOGETHER BY A PUNCTUM IN-HABIT INTERNATIONAL GRANT TO DEVELOP THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW WORK.
Canham and Kaur had worked together previously, exploring the relationship between image projection and music performance, and Canham had also visited Mexico with the help of a Churchill Fellowship. The four artists initially spent an intensive period at CMMAS (Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts) developing their concepts and working relationships, then a period of virtual collaboration and, finally, a week in Bendigo to workshop their ideas, resulting in a performance encapsulating some of their thoughts and experiments. We experienced a 25-minute sampler of a projected hour-long work involving the four artists and Rodrigo Sigal (composer), Drew Crawford (composer), Jose Luis Garcia Nava (new media artist) and Javier Alvarez (composer). It featured works specially written for Hourglass, but also earlier works adapted for the performance. The final version will probably consist entirely of works specially written for the project.
The aim was to create an immersive space that accommodates electroacoustic music, video, installation and a live performer, breaking away from the often formal presentation of new music. Layered black chiffon separated the audience from performer and installations, also acting as a multi-layered screen for video projection; the 3D rhythm generated by images slightly offset by the screens was enhanced by movement due to the airconditioning system. However, the audience was confined to a quarter of the space, restricting the immersive character of the visuals, while a 10-speaker system engulfed us.
Within this space we were presented with a series of musical vignettes centred on the passing of time or feelings generated by it, imagining the space as the inside of an hourglass (grains of sand fall from the ceiling at the end of the performance).
The program began with Into the Hourglass, an improvisation developed by Canham and Charles for whirly and electronics. The tonal range of a whirly is limited but it was intriguing to see how the sounds were created. The computer manipulation was subtle and lingered after the instrument stopped. Kaur’s multi-projection of watery ripples was our first introduction to the black chiffon screen in this short, atmospheric mood piece.
Hourglass
photo Sarah Kaur
Hourglass
Not Alone for clarinet and live processing by Carlos Lopez Charles was really a musical duet in three dimensions. Canham’s clarinet fragments were picked up and manipulated by Charles using live digital processing (Max/MSP). The echoes, mimicking techniques he used as a rock guitarist in the 80s/90s, were expertly moved around the immersive speaker system. As the piece progressed, the clarinet took on a more delicate tone, resulting in a subtle dialogue between clarinet and computer-generated echo. Kaur’s visuals featured random abstract shapes which may have felt more appropriate had their rhythm echoed the looping character of the music.
Next came a short performance by Ivan Puig’s glass bottle contraption (a miniature reference to his beautiful light and sound glass machine, “Mandalas for a Modern Life”), which was both too brief and difficult to see because of its size and positioning. The projected text—“Is it wise, the way the clock turns?”—reminded us of the premise for Hourglass. Puig’s complex machines have a wonderful character of their own and it was a pity his creative contribution was relatively minor here because of the short time he had in Australia. Hopefully the full version rectifies this.
Rodrigo Sigal’s “Vida Lunar” for clarinet and tape was the most substantial piece on the program. Adapted from a piece written for alto flute, all the components came together here: Canham’s extended clarinet techniques, Charles’ immersive diffusion of the complex electronic score and Kaur’s vintage monochrome family photos floating throughout the space.
Paula Matthusen’s “Before the Weather Changes” for sampled tarogato and electronics introduced us to the haunting sounds of the tarogato, a Hungarian folk woodwind recently adopted by Canham for development of a contemporary repertoire. This meditative piece was designed to include a live interactive video, a moving starscape by Jose Luis Garcia Nava, possibly created in “Processing,” but in this performance a video record from a previous performance was screened.
The program finished with Australian composer Drew Crawford’s “Time Flies When You’re Having Fun” for tarogato and tape, which turned out to be a three-minute sketch for a longer piece being developed for Hourglass. Featuring live and looped tarogato and some recorded percussion, it created a playful mood, but didn’t have time to develop. The best part was Kaur’s poetic video manipulation of images of a flock of birds.
Many in the audience were enthralled by Hourglass, but I felt a little hesitant. I sometimes feel sympathy for Francisco Lopez who blindfolds his audience, removing distractions from the listener. Hourglass went to the other extreme, not only immersing the audience in sound, but ensuring they kept their eyes open. Before the performance Canham said “we were less interested in utilising new technologies or looking into ground-breaking techniques as we were in exploring the poetic, the beautiful and narrative ways our art forms could interact.” This worked best in Rodrigo Sigal’s piece where all the elements came together and would have been even better had the audience been free to move around and feel the work—as planned for the future.
Punctum’s Hourglass, artists Nicole Canham, Sarah Kaur, Ivan Puig, Carlos Lopez Charles and guests, Old Fire Station, Bendigo, May 28-29
WHEN ACTRESS AND DIRECTOR JO KENNEDY INTRODUCED DUTCH COMPOSER SIMEON TEN HOLT’S CANTO OSTINATO (1979) TO MELBOURNE COMPOSER ELIZABETH DRAKE IN EARLY 2009, SHE SET IN TRAIN A MUSICAL LOVE AFFAIR THAT SAW AN EXPLOSION OF PERFORMANCES IN ADELAIDE, PERTH AND NEWCASTLE. DRAKE RECENTLY JOINED FORCES WITH RENOWNED AUSTRALIAN PIANISTS LISA MOORE, CAROLINE ALMONTE AND EMILY GREEN-ARMYTAGE AT IWAKI AUDITORIUM FOR CANTO OSTINATO’S MELBOURNE PREMIERE. CAREFULLY CRAFTING THE WORK’S LONG-RANGE STRUCTURE AND MOMENTARY ARTICULATION, THE ENSEMBLE PROVIDED A CONSTANTLY EVOLVING DURATIONAL LISTENING EXPERIENCE.
Concentric staging lent Iwaki Auditorium a charged atmosphere, with the pianists eyeing each other off like gunfighters around their four grand pianos. The performers’ intense concentration was echoed by the audience, seated in the round like townsfolk gathered to witness a bloody ordeal. Finally, Lisa Moore started the limping five-pulse rhythm that drove the piece forward in one form or another for the next hour and a half. The other pianists contributed complementary ostinati: an insistent, dissonant peal; a swaying melody in the middle register; a loping bass line; until the developing harmony filled the auditorium. Sometimes the texture thinned to a solo line, or five parts raced along like a cartoon chase scene, before bursting into a rocking sea shanty theme. The performance’s success as a musical journey hinged on the close attention paid by both composer and performers to the boundaries of improvisation and determinacy in the work’s construction.
The score is divided into short rhythmic cells that the performers may repeat as many times as they wish and with their own articulation, before coming together for through-composed bridge passages. Ten Holt’s score is ingeniously put together, with five interlocking piano parts capable of producing a wide range of musical effects. Previously a composer of atonal and extended tonal music, ten Holt was “mystified when this music started pouring out in the form it took—entirely tonal and gradually evolving texturally, gesturally and harmonically.” Canto Ostinato’s romantic harmonic idiom might also come as a surprise to fans of minimalist composition, distinguishing it from the pale tonality of its immediate predecessor, Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians” (1976). Caught between modernist complexity, romantic melodicism and minimalist duration, the performers challenged themselves to keep the sophisticated musical machine moving while leaving space for the unexpected to occur.
To Drake, the experience of listening to minimalist music is captured in Henri Bergson’s description of sitting by a river in Duration and Simultaneity (1922): “When we are seated on the bank of the river, the flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life’s deeps are for us three separate things or only one, as we choose.”
Like Bergson’s river, boat and internal monologue, Elizabeth Drake wants the listener to hear Canto Ostinato as a unity of disparate elements. She does not leave this synthesis up to the listener, carefully analysing the score and shaping the performance in order to provide the conditions under which the performers may interact. Drake brought her experience composing for film and theatre to the work, storyboarding each section to take advantage of terraced dynamics, extended crescendi and transpositions. The next step was to integrate articulation into the dramatic outlines of the score.
In developing articulation, the performers found themselves confronted with the problem of trying to repeat musical novelty. “We would be playing as though saying ‘this is what this is about now. It’s about this Db to this C,’” Drake remembers. “But if you introduce an idea, you can only repeat it once. You can introduce it, then you can repeat it. But the purpose of repetition is not to introduce material, it is to keep going until something unexpected happens.”
Caught between the possibilities of an evenly articulated but ultimately boring duration piece and an overbearing repetition of musical emphases, the performers looked to interaction to keep the performance interesting. “We had the directive that we could abandon the plan,” remarks Drake. “You can let things open out if you have a very strong structure and a strong sense of interaction. The stronger the structure, the stronger the plan, the better the performers know what to listen for, the further you move away from just reciting a dictionary of possibilities. You can make a new composition.”
The performers’ detailed knowledge of the score came across in their smooth and gripping performance. Beneath their covert nods and the dazzling, ever-changing surface of the music, part-swapping proceeded seamlessly, page turns were managed with military precision and the performers could focus on letting moments of singular beauty appear.
Canto Ostinato, composer Simeon ten Holt, performers Lisa Moore, Caroline Almonte, Emily Green-Armytage, Elizabeth Drake, IWAKI Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre, Melbourne, May 13
Dept. of Crippling Self-Doubt, short film still, Robert Harding, Graduate, RMIT College of Design and Social Context
courtesy the artist
Dept. of Crippling Self-Doubt, short film still, Robert Harding, Graduate, RMIT College of Design and Social Context
WHEN MORE THAN 1200 PEOPLE PACKED INTO THE MELBOURNE TOWN HALL FOR A KEYNOTE LECTURE AT A WORLD CONGRESS ON ART HISTORY (CIHA) IN 2008, EVEN CONVENER JAYNIE ANDERSON OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE WAS SURPRISED AT “THE STRENGTH OF PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR ART HISTORY IN MELBOURNE.” HER THEME, “CROSSING CULTURES: CONFLICT, MIGRATION, CONVERGENCE,” STRUCK A CHORD AND THE DIVERSE PAPERS DELIVERED ON AUSTRALIAN ART UNDER THIS CROSS-CULTURAL RUBRIC ATTRACTED THE INTEREST OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WHO APPROACHED ANDERSON TO COMPILE A BOOK IN THIS VEIN. THIS OCTOBER WILL SEE THE PUBLICATION OF WHAT PROMISES TO BE A GROUNDBREAKING NEW TEXT, THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO AUSTRALIAN ART.
Such publications, says Anderson, reflect growing international interest in “radical new ways of looking at what’s happening south of the equator.” For students picking up the book from the library shelf its lateral essays exploring the intercultural connections of Australian art will present a distinct departure from reigning texts such as McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art (2006). At the same time, the way Australian art positions itself in relation to the rest of the world has always been a phenomenon of shifting sands as the tensions over tradition and contemporaneity, and local versus global, are frequently taken up for revision. For today’s students of the visual arts navigating the pluralistic currents of the university curriculum, which vary from institution to institution, must at times prove a giddying experience. As horizons broaden, does this necessarily imply that Australian content becomes narrowed? How adequately are Australian artists represented in the university curriculum at present?
australianness an issue?
“In the last decade or so, ‘Australian’ as a category has become less important to students,” observes Martyn Jolly, Head of Photography and Media Arts at the Australian National University’s School of Art in Canberra and a practising photographer and writer. “When I was a student, Australian identity was a big issue. I think that contemporary students at art school are less concerned with Australianness as an issue. Photography has always been globalised but it is now moreso than it was 10 or 20 years ago.”
While “concerns with what it means to be Australian as a particular topic” might be receding, Jolly argues that “for myself personally and staff generally, there is an emphasis on maintaining Australian photographic history and particularly the issues that Australian photography talks about.” This continues to be achieved through studio lectures on Australian photographic history and a “heavy emphasis” on Australian and Asian Art in the Art Theory program as well as initiatives like regular gallery visits, exposing students to the growing body of books on Australian photography and a vibrant visiting artists program. As Jolly notes, “scholarship on Australian photography is going on still and shows dealing with Australian photography are still happening, like the recent Judy Annear-curated Photography & Place at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. So you’ve just got to include all of that in the curriculum.”
learning from the local
The declining interest in national identity is less of a concern for arts writer and academic Jacqueline Millner, Lecturer in Theoretical Enquiry at Sydney College of the Arts and formerly at the University of Western Sydney, than the implication for students of the prevailing sense “that the local practice is not as compelling or significant as some of the international examples,” which can translate into missed learning opportunities. To counter this, Millner suggests that from the foundational level and onwards students would benefit from greater exposure to local examples. “I’m a firm believer that you should work with what is at hand to begin with because I do think there is a strong pedagogical benefit to actually being able to see and experience the works you’re talking about without relying on reproductions for instance, and for honours and postgraduate students in particular to have access to the artists themselves. I think in general there is not enough attention paid to local practice and that is, not exclusively but at least partly, a result of residual cultural cringe.”
Millner’s philosophy hinges upon “the need to be attentive to what’s happening on the ground around you” and is further reflected in her book, Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Contemporary Australian Art (Artspace, 2010; reviewed RT98, p50) which draws upon a decade of arts writing practice. By placing analyses of artists who might be overlooked by mainstream art histories, predominantly but not solely women artists, alongside more well-known Australian practitioners like Fiona Hall and Patricia Piccinini, Millner reveals there is great scope for more expansive definitions of “Australian art.” Asked to comment on the gender mix of Australian content generally presented at a tertiary level, Millner points out “the curriculum tends to be more skewed toward male practitioners. This is something that I address, perhaps not even consciously, through my subjects which tend to be dominated by examples from female practitioners.”
indigenous art: beyond euro-centrism
In identifying shifts in student attitudes towards Australian art, the case of Indigenous art presents a clear exception with a number of academics citing steady growth in this area. According to Jaynie Anderson, “14 years ago we didn’t get a huge amount of interest in Indigenous courses but we do now.” Senior Lecturer in Art History and expert in Indigenous art at the University of Queensland, Sally Butler, agrees that the increased attention paid to Indigenous art is “helping people to look beyond Euro-centric ideas of art,” however, it does remain “a little marginalised.” Students of Indigenous art courses become “hooked for life,” says Butler, but overall there’s still some “resistance to the idea of stepping outside the comfort zone of a Euro-American tradition.” In a 2006 Artlink article, Sylvia Kleinert observes course categories can also prove misleading. Artists such as Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt and Lin Onus, for example, “have consistently refused to be marginalised by their ethnicity, demanding instead to be included within the broader, more inclusive category of Australian art.”
Structures to move to (conversations on work), Chloe Hughes (UNSW), 17 min HD video & sound work, winner of the Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize presented at this year’s HATCHED Graduate Show
not just in a name
At the University of Queensland, Butler also points out that “there’s far more local content than is necessarily perceivable just from the names of the courses.” She confirms that among students “there’s certainly less interest in a kind of national canon of Australian art.” Yet as the university has cultivated an expertise in Australian art, established at the expense of other areas like early European modern art, for example, “Australian case studies and examples are embedded widely across everything we teach,” Butler explains. In addition to two specific Australian art courses, for instance, “Studies in Photography would actually include 50% Australian art content, Asia Pacific Art includes 50% Australian art, International Contemporary Art includes 50% contemporary Australian art.” Add to this regular visits to local galleries and “students do go away with a very good understanding of practitioners and exhibition activity in Australia.”
Likewise, Anderson argues the University of Melbourne offers many courses with an Australian component; however, “we wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘Australian’ in the title. We’re living in a global age so if you isolate and ghettoise Australian content that’s not good. Rather, we will integrate it at all levels and at the postgraduate research level especially there is a vibrant research culture into Australian art topics.”
This quiet repackaging of university visual arts courses that paradoxically strive to engage with local content while not overtly branding it “Australian” might not appear problematic to some but for Jolly, as a practising artist who does see himself as making work “in an Australian context first and foremost,” the situation appears to resonate on a more personal level. “I gave a talk at the National Gallery of Victoria recently about the 1980s tableaux vivants and it did make me think about how in the 80s we would have called ourselves Australian photographers and we were making work about Australia.”
connecting the local with the global
Directing students to points in art history where South Australian artists are recognised for their active role in global movements, such as the connections between Adelaide artists of the 1940s and 50s with Surrealism and Adelaide’s role in the development of post-object art, is one strategy Jude Adams has adopted at the South Australian School of Art (part of UniSA) where the cultural cringe is compounded by the regional versus eastern seaboard opposition. A lecturer whose courses include Australian Art: Image, Issues and Identity, Adams observes that studio based courses may be “less reflective” of local practices and can unwittingly “reinforce the cultural cringe.” That said, artists’ talks are a compulsory part of the BVA program and usually feature Australian artists. Adams is proactive in wearing down “ingrained attitudes,” emphasising to students that knowledge of Australian art benefits studio practice by “providing a context, a genealogy that helps us to know where we came from.” Adams suggests a perceived student prejudice against Australian art might also be a reaction against history (similar to that identified with Australian history in the secondary school syllabus) while the contemporary can seem more relevant. Within the university, however, “there are so few courses and so few staff, there’s really not much chance to introduce more Australian content.”
the local, a world lived in
It’s this pendulum effect which makes quantifying Australian art content in university curricula such a delicate task as increases in one area imply decreases in others. Certainly, the internationalisation of visual arts courses, and the more recent flourishing of cross-cultural approaches as exemplified by the upcoming Cambridge Companion, represent healthy counterpoints to geographical and cultural insularity. At the same time, most educators agree it would be a mistake to swing too far from local practices, although attitudes towards methods of implementation vary. Embedding local examples with international content appears a logical and pragmatic strategy, but in practice this can be effective only when students are actively challenged to engage deeply with a breadth of local examples and not simply overlook them. A goal all good teachers will aspire to, Jaynie Anderson argues, whether experts in Australian art or not. “Any real art historian will be able to relate their specialisations to the part of the world they live in, the culture they work in,” she says, “otherwise they won’t be successful.”
AUSTRALIAN CONCEPTUAL ART PIONEER PETER KENNEDY’S WORK WAS THE SUBJECT OF A RECENT MAJOR EXHIBITION AT THE INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART, BRISBANE. LIGHT YEARS 1970-1 PRESENTED WORKS FROM THREE SOLO SHOWS OF INSTALLATION, LIGHT, PERFORMANCE AND SOUND WORK THE ARTIST MOUNTED IN 1970 AND 1971. KENNEDY BEGAN TO EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITIES OF MINIMALIST ART WORK WHILST WORKING AS A SIGN DESIGNER AT CLAUDE NEON, CHANNELLING HIS INDUSTRIAL EXPERIENCE INTO A SERIES OF WORKS EXPLORING THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF THE MASS-PRODUCED MEDIUM OF NEON TUBES IN THE GALLERY SETTING.
Neon Light Installations (1970/2011) is one of Kennedy’s key early light works and one of the best-known early instances of Australian light art. Kennedy first presented the work in February, 1970, at the Sydney incarnation of the ground-breaking contemporary art space, Gallery A. In the spacious concrete IMA cavern in Brisbane, the straight lengths of coloured neon, intensified by reflective housings, occupied not just the vertical surfaces of the walls, but the corners, ceiling-lines and gleaming horizontal expanse of the floor. What is illuminated is not the material per se, but its effects, drawing our attention to the nature of light as a temporal and spatial presence. Pouring itself around the room’s contours—literally escaping framing conventions—this work treats all interior surfaces as a single, distributed compositional material, one that registers both the interplay of overlapping beams and incidental reflections, and the movement of spectators’ bodies throughout the gallery space: light describing a room.
This contingency is taken further with Luminal Sequences, from Kennedy’s second and final show at Gallery A Sydney, in March 1971, which played on the subjectivity of time through the integration of documentation into subsequent iterations of the artwork. In this work, past and present, the actual and the depicted, absence and presence are brought together in a work featuring neon lights on timers, spotlights and slide projectors. The projections, featuring images of the gallery space, the light work itself and spectators engaging with it, are what shifts the work into a critical postmodernist terrain. This kind of art practice has a long history, as the IMA’s attendant screening of trailblazer László Moholy-Nagy’s Lightplay Black-White-Grey (1930) showed, but with the incorporation of viewers into the ongoing expression of the work and the series of effects this generates, inter alia, about the relations between perceiving bodies, the artwork and documentation, marks the point where high modernist abstraction gives way to conceptualism.
Concurrent with the second Gallery A show in 1971, Kennedy staged another exhibition at Inhibodress, the infamous alternative space he ran with artist Mike Parr (who featured prominently in Let the Healing Begin, the IMA exhibition immediately prior to Kennedy’s). But the Fierce Blackman was a John Cage-inspired sound-performance piece embracing chance operations in subject matter, tones, duration and dynamics. At the heart of this piece was a looped tape recording of Kennedy repeatedly intoning the (randomly chosen) mantra “but the fierce blackman” over a PA, accompanied by a television tuned to static, which intercepted moments of radio signals from passing taxis and a whirring electric fan. In the original performance, the artist appeared at half-hour intervals to intervene with further recitals of the phrase live through the PA. Installed as a documentation piece, while still menacing—owing to the powerful echoes of the artist’s distorted vocals throughout the space—the work appeared to lose some of its ostensive intensity, coming across more as a sound art piece than the exploration of “interference variables” the artist described. Restaging it as a live performance work, rather than reproducing it as an installation, might have accessed more of the work’s heated multiplicity.
In other works, the restaging took advantage of later developments of the works, such as the nesting of the neon tubes of Neon Light Installations in tangles of soft wood wool, which invited a dialectic between rigid containment and diffuse modulation, between synthetic and organic, gas and glass and between the optical and haptical address of the work. At their best, Kennedy’s works produce effects that are powerfully distinct from their material forms; it’s not only electrons being excited to a higher quantum state, but an entire spectrum of visible and invisible forces that are harnessed as his subject.
Peter Kennedy: Light Years 1970-1, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, May 7-June 25; Artificial Light Films, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. A joint project with OtherFilm, May 26; Let the Healing Begin, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, March 5-April 30
“A great festival is one that exposes participants and audience to new directions and ideas and the 2011 Totally Huge New Music Festival promises to do just that with an impressive program of Australian and international work.” (Tura website) The program will include concerts, installations, surround sound presentations, live broadcasts, workshops artist talks and more. Special guest for this year’s festival is New York composer and turntablist Marina Rosenfeld renowned for her ongoing performance, Sheer Frost Orchestra: a graphically noted score performed by 17 females using nail polish bottles to activate electric guitars. Rosenfeld will also be the keynote speaker of the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference focused around the theme of Immanence. Other artists in town for the festival include from Australia, Speak Percussion, Decibel Ensemble, Etica Ensemble, Pollen Trio, Sonia Leber/ David Chesworth, Philip Samartzis, Anthony Pateras and Ross Bolleter along with guests Mark Gasser (UK) and from Japan FourColor, minamo and moskitoo. Various venues across Perth, September 15-25. www.tura.com.au/totally-huge-music-festival/events
atyp, sweet bird andsoforth
The Australian Theatre for Young People will present the world premiere of German playwright Laura Naumann’s play Sweet Bird andsoforth. Translated by Benjamin Winspear (RT62), and directed by Laura Scrivano, the play begins at a farewell party on the edge of town; but while the group is trapped in an isolated suburban wasteland, their Gen Y dreams transcend location. Billed as an “original, unexpected and blackly comic story of a group of friends caught between adolescence and adulthood,” the play won Naumann the Munich Prize for Young German-Language Drama (press release). Australian Theatre for Young People, Sydney, Sweet Bird andsoforth, Aug 18-Sept 10; www.atyp.com.au
land, sea and sky, goma
It might be one box on the Census (coming soon, August 9) but Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are very different from each other, to the point where the latter is sometimes called “Australia’s other Indigenous culture” (press release). Over the next four months, Queensland’s major arts organisations at the Cultural Centre, South Bank in Brisbane, are joining forces to present The Torres Strait Islands: A Celebration, showcasing the diversity and vibrancy of historical and contemporary arts and culture of Torres Strait Islander Australians. The program encompasses an exhibition, Awakening: Stories from the Torres Strait at the Queensland Museum, Strait Home at the State Library and Land, Sea and Sky: Contemporary Art of the Torres Strait Islands, at the Gallery of Modern Art. The last is the largest and possibly most significant exhibition to date of contemporary art by Torres Strait Islander artists anywhere in the world and it includes dance objects, prints, film, video, textiles, ceramics and installations drawn from the Queensland Art Gallery’s extensive collection of works by Torres Strait Islander artists as well as key loans and commissioned works. Artists include Dennis Nona and Destiny Deacon. Land, Sea and Sky: Contemporary Art of the Torres Strait Islands, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; http://qag.qld.gov.au
under the radar, brisbane festival
Returning to the Brisbane Festival is Under the Radar providing a platform for artists to “frolic with risk and experiment with artforms” (website). There are over 30 events including A Three Hotel City, a collaboration between poet Marissa Allen and RealTime writer Joel Stern exploring contemporary society in decline while Motherboard Productions re-imagine Jean Cocteau’s classic La Voix Humaine through text, dance and multimedia. Rebecca Cunningham (co-director of the Exist-ence festival, see RT101, p42) will be collecting one million samples of DNA in her durational performance One and Israel’s Tami Dance Company will remount their acclaimed PeepDance with six Australian dancers performing unique pieces to the same music inside seven peep cells. There’s also a strong music program including House Proud, an immersive percussion performance exploring the sounds of a home by composer Anna van Veldhuisen and designer Ben Landau; Macrophonics combining sound, video and movement through sensor-based gestural controllers, featuring Julian Knowles, Donna Hewitt, Wade Marynowsky and Tim Bruniges, with choreography by Avril Huddy, and two experimental sound nights curated by Dan Lewis & Andrew Tuttle. Under the Radar, Brisbane Festival, Sept 3-24; www.brisbanefestival.com.au/
play, short play publications
An enterprising new venture from Short Play Publications in Melbourne is Play, a stylish volume of Australian contemporary video art comprising both video collection and accompanying booklet. Curator/producer Rachel Feery and Editor Mark Hewitt have assembled 14 video works from artists who are bound together by their exploration of “play” and playfulness; the booklet contains essays by emerging arts writers reflecting on concepts in the collection. Artists in the compilation include: Brown Council, Hit&Miss, Rachel Feery + Lisa Stewart, Timothy P Kerr, Jane Korman, Alanna + Matthew Lorenzon, Riki-Metisse Marlow, Ms & Mr, Hannah Raisin, Safari Team, Sam Smith, Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart, Michael Vale and Jemima Wyman. Short Play will release an annual DVD publication of contemporary video works. www.shortplaypublications.com.au
go graphic at the opera house
The second of Sydney Opera House’s GRAPHIC festivals will include a wide range of works by leading graphic artists, international and local, as well as featuring performances, animation and music, with many of the works world exclusives, Australian premieres and specially commissioned works. The festival’s special guest is the renowned comic artist Robert Crumb, whose epic The Book of Genesis Illustrated was published in 2009—a surprising subject for the artist and a work rendered with respectful fidelity if with his inevitable, relishable idiosyncrasies. Crumb will also DJ a session of his old 78rpm favourites. Melbourne composer Gotye will present An Animated Album Preview, featuring his songs with animations by Australian artists. Shaun Tan’s Oscar-winning The Lost Thing will be screened with the original score performed live; the 2006 anime classic Tekkon Kinkreet (directed by Michael Arias and animated by Studio 4°C) will be accompanied by live music from the UK’s PLAID (WARP) supported by FourPlay and Synergy Percussion; and there’ll be a performance and talk by Masaya Matsuura creator of Playstation game Parappa the Rapper. Something special comes in the form of works by China’s best emerging animators and there’ll be talks, masterclasses, the Best of the Independent Games Festival exhibition and a $20,000 prize for the winner of the animation competition. GRAPHIC is co-curated by Jordan Verzar and Virginia Hyam. Sadly, in news just in, Robert Crumb has cancelled his visit thanks to some nasty and censorious editorialising on the part of the Sunday Telegraph.GRAPHIC, Sydney Opera House, Aug 20-21, http://graphic.sydneyoperahouse.com
new arts fellowship: talent & courage
The Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships provide unrestricted grants to individual artists, arts workers. There are two criteria for selection of grant recipients: outstanding talent; and exceptional courage. Recipients might include painters, sculptors, curators, dancers, choreographers, playwrights, actors, dramaturges, producers, musicians, composers, conductors, multi artform practitioners, writers and thought leaders. Grants will go to those practitioners in the first five to ten years of their professional practice, or equivalent, and those who have a demonstrated capacity to develop and extend their practice. Application is through nomination and grants of $80,000 per year will be awarded for two years. The Sidney Myer Fund does not require specific outcomes from the grant. Sydney Myer Creative Fellowships, www.myerfoundation.org.au
FREE RANGE AT METRO ARTS HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS A FOUR-WEEK LONG CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT BOOT CAMP, AND THE METRO TEAM’S RESOLVE TO NURTURE PROCESS OVER PRODUCT MAKES IT A UNIQUE AND CRUCIAL INCUBATOR OF PERFORMANCE IN BRISBANE. IF THE AIM IS TO FOSTER NEW WORKS OUTSIDE DISTINCT ARTFORM PARAMETERS, FREE RANGE 2011 ALSO PROVIDED OPPORTUNITIES FOR AUDIENCES TO GAIN INSIGHTS INTO THE PROCESSES OF FAMILIAR, WELL-LOVED ARTISTS WHO HAVE BEEN WORKING INDEPENDENTLY ALONG THESE LINES FOR, WELL, A LONG TIME, IN ADDITION TO NEW AND EMERGING ARTISTS.
While ‘beautiful’ aesthetics were mainly on call (even the whimsical comedy of Neridah Waters trying to convince us she was ‘Dodgy’), I was drawn to works that were raw and seemed to emerge out of the corner of a frenetic eye, out of relatively unexplored emotional areas of the human psyche. These unexpected works weren’t age-related nor seeking to brand themselves. Circus artists Skye Gellmann and Ivan Smith in Something with Sabotage spelled out the nature of “attention seeking ego-driven self-indulgence (a performance).” On the surface, and this was true of the enthusiastic audience response to this piece of theatre larrikinism—they were a pair of likely lads. The show itself was hung on the bones of the tale of “Sinbad the Sailor and the Old Man of the Sea” from the Arabian Nights with Smith impersonating Sinbad as one of the great epic heroes “like Rambo and Rocky.” Gellmann, as the anti-hero and the old man basically perched on his head and shoulders strangling his performance. In the first act the audience was intimately on stage with the performers facing an alternative audience of balloon heads in the seats and gratefully escaping the attentions of the old man. However, there was a steely idea behind all this, as Gellmann notes, “Do I always feel the gaze (as a performer) even when I’m alone in the room? Does my shadow mock and reflection judge me?”
After an interval, when we were required to return through a different door, the second act conventionally distanced the audience and performers but witnessed the two performers in a meltdown deconstruction of the previous act, incorporating bizarre and disturbing imagery of male relations. Smith performed an immaculate juggling act in reverse that lost six balls while retaining one singing like a canary on his shoulder, while Gellmann, upside down, nude and utterly transfixing, like a creature from an Heironymous Bosch painting, inscribed hieroglyphics with his body around the walls of the theatre. More sabotage.
Artist’s Gamble with Time A portrait of Clint (An Expanded Portrait of Everyone)
When I met visual and installation artist David M Thomas he went for the chin by quoting Morrissey: “I don’t perform. Seals perform.” He stressed that his hybrid work, Artists Gamble with Time/ Portrait of Clint, An expanded portrait of Everyone was an enactment not a representation, putting it, of course, into the live art category; but nomenclature doesn’t go far enough to describe a work that was so refreshing and resonantly witty, seamlessly playing off elements of performance, music, photography, painting, installation and video like a form of free style jazz, “in order to explore the construction and maintenance of one’s self.”
Continuous video of a man and a woman constructing and deconstructing abstract, geometric assemblages of coloured blocks of wood evidenced the ecstasy of creative play as opposed to fetishism of the object. Plywood cut-outs evoking the abstract art of the early 20th century painter and poet Jean (Hans) Arp were surfaces for kinetic, op-art projections in vibrant pastels. Arp represented opposition at the time to the proscription of abstract art by both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. He sat on the editorial board of Abstraction-Creation which made the statement in Cahiers no. 2, 1933: “…free thought is being fiercely contested, in many ways, on all levels, in some countries more successfully than in others, but everywhere.”
There was a mini stage above which hung, like a stalactite or nest of night creatures, what turned out to be a ridiculously tall black wig with Gothic connotations when worn by Archie Moore, an urban Indigenous artist and lead singer in Egg Vein, accompanied by Thomas in a leather jump suit on guitar. Unfortunately what I interpreted from the look as ‘horror country’ lyrics about life on the Darling Downs were indecipherable due to sound quality. These seemingly diverse elements framed and commented on what was not so much a portrait but an evocation that amounted to an abstract, almost sculptural assemblage through consciously distancing effects—Clint conceived of as an absence. A second film featured young people speaking fragments of Doyle and Thomas’ email dialogues Godard-style direct to camera within clever re-arrangements of the Arp shapes and projections mirroring the play with blocks. In case you’re thinking all this sounds like a spoof, it was—of 80s video clips, for one—but it wonderfully caught the essence of art as process, a ‘doing,’ and Thomas’ notion that all art is performance art. Loved it.
The Process Project involved Margi Brown Ash, Nikki Heywood and Brian Lucas in a year-long colloquy and exploration of performance hybridity from their perspectives as mature artists and from meetings with a community landscape designer, a restaurateur and a Buddhist terminal care worker. In a summary report on their experiences to a Free Range audience, they created an elegant three-fold schemata of the artistic journey given vivid immediacy by the shapes of Lucas’ sand mandalas and embodied by the journeyman, the villager and a desperate wanderer negotiating the wasteland. It was striking that art and life skills (techne) shared in common with others in the community seemed to be equally compounded by grace, as the Greeks would have it, not just productive efficiency. In an age when the arts are marginalised and grace is considered an option the economy cannot afford, theirs provided a civilised and reassuring conclusion.
This mutual involvement also enabled Brown Ash, as a self-admitted “senior artist” shortly turning 60, to re-imagine (with long time collaborator Leah Mercer) her life as an artist, wife and mother in it for the long haul in Home presented by The Nest 4 Change. Brown Ash it was who famously announced at the presentation of The Process Project that “IF I should ever die…” she would prefer to do so under Buddhist palliative care. Brown Ash has always been a performer who constantly surprises you with her strengths, and is also a skilled art therapist and counsellor. Superficially, Home resembled a form of drama therapy, but it was soon clear that this was no unexamined life. We were caught up in the headlong rush of Brown Ash’s artfully fragmented myth and storytelling—dashing back and forth from teenage years to young womanhood to middle-age; spinning out into the cosmos on the wings of the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris; capturing members of the audience as her surrogates in different times and places as she roamed round the space with fierce, prowling energy. She was everyone’s bohemian mother (or the one you wanted), feeding you tea and biscuits—and home truths—with an unsentimental pellucidity that reminded me of the English poet Stevie Smith. Spawner of unusual progeny, one of whom went to Palestine to learn Arabic and another who went to Israel to learn Hebrew, Brown Ash’s new work is similarly prodigious in scope and potential. It was not intimate theatre but epic theatre about intimacy.
Free Range 2011: Something with Sabotage, Ivan Smith, Skye Gellmann; Home, Margi Brown Ash, Travis Ash, Bev Jensen, Leah Mercer; Artists Gamble with Time/ Portrait of Clint, an expanded portrait of Everyone, David M Thomas, Archie Moore, Suzanne Howard; The Process Project, Margi Brown Ash, Nikki Heywood, Brian Lucas’ Metro Arts Brisbane June 3-28
SCENARIO, DIRECTED BY THE ARTIST DENNIS DEL FAVERO, IS A 360-DEGREE, 3D INTERACTIVE CINEMATIC STORY, THE RESULT OF AN EXTENSIVE COLLABORATIVE PROJECT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES. IT PREMIERED AT THE 2011 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL ATTRACTING MEDIA ATTENTION BOTH FOR ITS CINEMATIC INNOVATION AND EERIE ATMOSPHERICS.
Edward Scheer, who teaches at the Faculty of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW, has followed the evolution of the project and written a companion study. I spoke with Scheer, who believes that Scenario marks a new level of interdisciplinary research in innovative technology. Its more profound value, however, is as a poetic text that taps into archetypal human experience.
an eye as avatar
Scenario opens with a shadowy underworld that beckons the audience to enter and engage with its humanoid inhabitants. In Scheer’s words: “You walk into a 360-degree environment and you see some eyes staring at you. A voice tells you to choose an eye and the eye becomes your avatar. Then a humanoid figure jumps on top of the eye and leads you through a series of underground spaces—spaces of abandonment, one suspects of criminality. You are told that you have to find the body parts of a humanoid child and that these parts have to be returned to the child. One is therefore introduced to a scene of horror but in a gentle way. You are also implicated in the restitution of this violent act.”
The fact that the spectator is not just a voyeur immediately suggests an unusual cinematic experience. Scheer observes that in conventional cinema one is passive in a “cinematic machine that grinds on regardless of your subjective investment.” In contrast, this work opens an interesting ethical space. Scenario has a tracking device which picks up the spectator’s motion. Ultimately, if the body parts are successfully returned to the child, the child is free to walk away. However, if the parts are not returned, an apocalypse descends, ash falls from the sky and there’s a blackout. There are two endings then, each contingent on the active spectator’s participation.
Scheer believes that the unique way Scenario brings together interactive narrative, aesthetics and the use of 3D makes it a world first, one situated within the broader achievements of iCinema itself: an ARC-funded project to look at new software, screening environments, narrative possibilities and spectatorship experiences. The research centre has created the 360-degree Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment (AVIE), unique in itself. Over the last ten years some quite remarkable works of new media interactive art, such as Eavesdrop (2004) and There is still time…Brother (2007), have been produced there pushing the boundaries of disciplines and separations between art practices.
Scenario
photo courtesy of iCinema
Scenario
performative media
The question of whether Scenario’s immersive environment fits comfortably within a film festival program leads Scheer to ponder if cinema is actually the right model for such an experimental and interdisciplinary approach. “The cinema-goer is not going to have the same kind of experience that they will be used to. Theatre-goers might be more familiar with the kinds of calling forth of one’s own subjective experience to respond to the material.”
Where then should Scenario be positioned? Scheer calls it “performative media” as it is setting up a mediated space. The humanoid behaviours are modelled on live actors—achieved through the use of motion capture to establish a library of behaviours. There is also the way the spectators have been animated through their involvement in the media. This genealogy resembles media art and crossover performance art. While such a genre reminds cinema of its own performative roots, it remains uncertain if it will have commercial possibilities in the cinema. It has in other fields—the iCinema project has been taken up, for example, by Chinese mining industries.
collaboration as research trajectory
Scheer became involved in the Scenario project several years ago when Dennis Del Favero talked about it in the context of their mutual admiration of the work of Samuel Beckett. “When Dennis told me that Scenario was based on Beckett’s Quadrat, I started turning up to the early iterations of the work.” After giving some feedback, Scheer was formally invited to be the official scribe. It has been a two-year project working with the team with an eye to reporting on compositional and dramaturgical processes, examining its precursors and providing a reading of the work as Scheer sees it.
Scheer describes the collaboration as “a kind of open source dramaturgical project.” The computer scientists rendered the images with Dennis Del Favero. The playwright and screenwriter Stephen Sewell provided the text which changed as the project evolved. Visual designers gave cues to the visual world as it was being formed. These people were sharing their ideas with the computer scientists. “It was a fascinating set of exchanges with Dennis directing but doing so with tremendous generosity. The depth and complexity evolved through these discussions, properly interdisciplinary.”
If the scale of this interdisciplinary collaborative process suggests a new trajectory in the creative research process in the arts, Scheer would point to new media art as a leader simply because of the increasing scope of digital systems requiring a multiplicity of skills to create a meaningful experience for audiences. However, he suspects that a similar modality of collaboration is influencing the way academics engage with artists who traditionally have worked very much alone with their own imagination. Scheer cites his own research on Mike Parr, with whom he has long been in conversation in order to make the artist’s output available to a wider audience. Perhaps it is not just that artworks are changing but the way the academy is engaging with artists. Instead of sitting back and making critical judgements about the value of an art work, academics are now talking with artists, trying the develop a conversation around the work and from that process the reading emerges.
the limits of representation
In his attraction to Scenario Scheer was mindful of the work of Antonin Artaud on whom he wrote his PhD and still someone he considers a massively inspirational force in contemporary aesthetics. “Artaud worked in all of the media of his time and was acutely aware of the confluence of creative forms across different media and the performative, transformative power latent within them.” He believes that Del Favero is clearly engaged in a similar aesthetic, trying to break through to very essential experiences such as trauma, which cannot be encoded within representational media. That which eludes representation was the concern of the “theatre of cruelty.” “What other forms are available that can pursue experiences otherwise fundamentally lost?”
a folktale
Underlying the experience of trauma is something perhaps even more elemental, namely the experience of confinement. I ask Scheer if Scenario stands as a 21st century folktale about the urge to find freedom from one’s received confines. He believes so as it picks up on those universal experiences of loss and abandonment as well as the sense of containment and release. Scenario’s intertext is the Josef Fritzl case, which provides an elusive subtext to some of the work’s narrative. “This was an experience of depravity but also one of containment —seven children confined for 24 years in a cellar beneath the house in Amstetten in Austria. Imagine waiting for 24 years to be released.” Scenario not only tracks the endless experience of confinement but in a form that takes the shape of a folktale.
Scheer considers the tale an ur-story by which he means that the drama is not something happening for the first time; rather, we have seen it all before. He is not alone in thinking this way. Elfriede Jelinek, Austria’s Nobel Prize winning writer sees the Fritzl case as a typical performance of Austria, something that requires no rehearsal because male violence against women is an everyday performance. Scenario taps into that story, “not as something to fetishise but as an archetypal experience that leaks out of the four walls of the basement in Amstetten to be picked up here, perhaps ultimately as an atmosphere of threat, menace, loss and possible recuperation.”
Scenario
photo courtesy of iCinema
Scenario
containment & release
Such an atmosphere is played out as a spatial dialectic, akin to Gaston Bachelard’s “poetics of space.” The spectator experiences the phenomenology of restriction and containment: corridors, tunnels, basements, cracks in the ceiling through which you see the rain coming down, an inner city alleyway. The final scene reveals a frozen lake in a forest and there is a more expansive sense of space. In one version this space closes down. In the ‘happy ending’ version, it opens out and the gigantic figure of the child rediscovers its motility, moving out of the space of confinement towards the space of the forest. “The phenomenology of this for the spectator is very evident in that we experience expansiveness as opposed to restriction, freedom not isolation. Seeing this giant figure moving gives us a sense of hope.” This is important to a reading of so dark a work. At least in one version, the work is ultimately quite hopeful in tracking the relations between self and other.
Jae Hoon Lee, Ha Jo Doe, 2010, digitally collaged photography
courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland
Jae Hoon Lee, Ha Jo Doe, 2010, digitally collaged photography
PUTTING ON MY GLASSES, THE LARGE-SCALE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF JAE HOON LEE COMES INTO FOCUS AND I NEED TO STRIDE BACKWARDS IN ORDER TO TAKE IT ALL IN. REMINISCENT OF A GATEWAY TO AN ANCIENT TEMPLE, THE OVERSIZED IMAGES TITLED HA JO DAE 2 AND TREKKING 2 MARK THE ENTRANCE TO UNGUIDED TOURS: THE 2011 ANNE LANDA AWARD FOR VIDEO AND NEW MEDIA ARTS EXHIBITION AT THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
jae hoon lee, ha joe dae 2, trekking 2 and levitation
To the left appears a landscape of ocean and rocky outcrops. Looking as if they have been constructed chunk-by-chunk, these formations rise from the sea; patterns of indistinguishable similarity emerge, then deviate. To the right, Trekking 2 features a path repeatedly zigzagging, cutting into the sheer, barren mountainside. Someone passing by comments: “God, you wouldn’t want to run off that road.” Spectators stop, pondering where in the world this incredible hillside track might be; until they twig. Or perhaps some of them don’t. Uncannily similar furrows of snow appearing in the crevices are in fact identical. By means of a digital cut-n-paste remix, Trekking 2 takes what is already an awe-inspiring landscape one step further.
Fittingly, Jae Hoon Lee’s Levitation sits between these two digital image giants. The constant ding of a small, tinny yet reverberant bell heralds the exhibition’s entry point. The resonant Buddhist’s bell sound accompanies beautiful textures (in deep ambers, rich chocolates and jade greens) of moss-adorned bricks on screen, slowly rising upwards. Having passed over the threshold, I begin my journey through New Zealander Justin Paton’s curation of award contenders, titled Unguided tours.
Charlie Sofo, 2010-11, mixed materials digital videos
courtesy of the artist and the Art Gallery of NSW
Charlie Sofo, 2010-11, mixed materials digital videos
charlie sofo, fields 2010-2011
In contrast to Lee’s meditative landscapes, Charlie Sofo’s Fields 2010-2011 is a solid reality check; familiar to all who have ever ventured into the Australian suburbs. Over the past year or so, Sofo has enlivened his potentially boring everyday journeys by gathering like objects. An array of videos, slideshows, as well as the items themselves are clinically displayed: small pebbles collected by way of getting stuck in the grooves of the artist’s shoes, chips of coloured paint, a Google map indicating where condoms and/or condom wrappers have been discarded around Melbourne’s suburbs of Brunswick and Northcote and a box of pastel-coloured cards, each announcing yet another venue (presumably somewhere the artist frequented) has closed down. The premise of Fields 2010-2011 is to attempt to assist the audience in “looking anew at what’s already there.” For one audience member, a small component of Sofo’s work becomes incredibly significant: a video of various neighbourhood cats contains a fleeting image of what she thinks might have been her own cat, who recently passed away. In asking his audience to view tiny scraps of the everyday in a new light, Sofo offers us a way to invest meaning in our banal daily treks.
Arlo Mountford, The lament, 2010-2011, two channel digital animation with 5.1 surround sound
courtesy of the artist and the Art Gallery of NSW
Arlo Mountford, The lament, 2010-2011, two channel digital animation with 5.1 surround sound
arlo mountford, the lament
Stepping away from the doldrums of familiar life, we are back in the surreal once again. Arlo Mountford’s The Lament is another large-scale digital work—a painting virtually brought to life. This is a fairytale remix of sorts. Taking the two versions of Watteau’s L’embarquement pour Cythere (Embarkation for Cythera) stitched together, the creator then bestows upon this work the breath of life. Taking the time to sit and observe as a peaceful scene unfolds, what becomes noticeable is actually the large degree of activity taking place. Lovers kiss, birds twitter away, a dog rushes around (the spatialised audio space) barking excitedly, waves lap at the shores, couples—flanked by chubby flying cupids—either embark or disembark from the wooden boat, which then encircles the island, partially cloaked by drifting digital mists. For me, this work provides brief solace before returning to hectic city life.
rachel khedoori, untitled
From one natural setting to another, Rachel Khedoori’s Untitled presents a panorama unfolding from the middle, an old technique used in moving imagery, yet Khedoori’s work does not concentrate on this trick. Instead, the symmetry and smoothness of movement help to draw focus towards the endlessness of a lush bush-scape, peeling outwards forever. A group of kids gather to watch, emitting a collective “whoa…”
David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Outlands 2011, projected real time 3D environment utilising the Unreal Engine; additional sound Rosy Parlane, Michael Morley and Danny Butt
courtesy of the artist and the Art Gallery of NSW
David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The Outlands 2011, projected real time 3D environment utilising the Unreal Engine; additional sound Rosy Parlane, Michael Morley and Danny Butt
david haines and joyce hinterding, the outlands
I follow the kids and their parents into The outlands, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s game environment, knowing it’s going to be a while before I get my turn. As I enter the space, The outlands creaks with sounds from the shadowy vegetation, created by New Zealanders Rosy Parlane, Michael Morley and Danny Butt. With only two controller “sticks” (joysticks with large dead twigs attached), diplomatically sharing these between a large group of kids calls for other forms of interaction. Without hesitation, some of them crouch down in front of the floor to ceiling projection, pretending to be prowling animals and then slowly swaying from side to side as if aboard a vessel traversing this imaginary landscape. Hovering above a blue-tinged black swamp, surrounded by low-lying branches and deadwood, we fly towards the towering rock formations. The kids were happy to improvise their own interactivity but I wanted to demand much more from the winner of the $25,000 acquisitive Anne Landa Award for 2011. What I desired was a greater degree of immersion (in both this work and also in the overall scope of the exhibition), with fewer works presented as if they were paintings or photographs, merely shifted into the video realm.
Ian Burns, 15 hours v4, 2010, found object, kinetic sculpture, live video and audio
courtesy of the artist and the Art Gallery of NSW
Ian Burns, 15 hours v4, 2010, found object, kinetic sculpture, live video and audio
ian burns, various
While at first glance it didn’t look like much—just a random bunch of old junk cable-tied and taped together—the pièce de résistance of Unguided tours was the work of Ian Burns though I’ll admit it did take me some time to comprehend what was actually going on. Commencing with Well Read, homage to the road trip and car culture, your eye wanders these sculptures of second-hand odds and ends, eventually settling on two analogue TV screens strapped to the front. Switching between different camera angles, a car drives along open roads, blue sky above. The driver, a peroxide blonde Ken doll, bobs along as the wheels of the car spin…on what turns out to be a seven-inch of Time Bandits’ “Endless Road.” These unremarkable objects are cleverly pieced together to create an illusion found regularly on our screens.
With each of his works in the exhibition (including From orbit displayed in the gallery’s entrance), Burns takes the lid off various movie-like scenes of travel we believe in and commit to so wholeheartedly, exposing the underbelly of smoke and mirrors. Standing in the passageway between Makin’ tracks and 15 hours v4 (an endless view from an aeroplane window over the plane’s wing), I overhear a 20-something comment as he passes by that “it’s just shit really, I don’t get it.” The combination of this remark and Burns’ works illuminates the real crux of Unguided tours. While there may be a general preconception that the digital realm is all about instant gratification, these works require a time commitment. Their messages are not immediate.
From familiar digital suburban-scapes through to pristine pixel wilderness, while none of these works demands attention, you are only granted insight if you take the time to contemplate. This is the same headspace one enters when travelling solo through unfamiliar countries and cultures: precisely what each of these artists must have done at some point, in order to produce these offerings. But while the “touring” aspect of the exhibition works, I am less convinced by the “unguided” framing since, regardless of whether or not a conventional narrative is present, many of the works still portray a semi-predictable journey, one that is predetermined by the digital tools they employ. Nevertheless, this concern is of far less importance than the feeling that I depart with—I have been reinvigorated, as if returning from a holiday, and I haven’t even left town.
Unguided tours: Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts, 2011, Art Gallery of NSW, May 5-July 10; www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
This article first appeared in our July 26 e-dition.
LAST YEAR’S TINY STADIUMS FESTIVAL FEATURED A SITE-SPECIFIC WORK OF NOTE. APPLESPIEL, A COLLECTIVE OF FORMER UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG STUDENTS, TOOK UP RESIDENCE IN SYDNEY’S ERSKINEVILLE TOWN HALL AND, OVER THE COURSE OF 12 DAYS, TRANSFORMED A COLOURFUL CARDBOARD MINIATURE OF THE SUBURB’S MAIN STREET INTO A STRANGE NEW VERSION OF ITSELF. INVITING AUDIENCE MEMBERS TO PLAY THE ROLE OF HANDS-ON URBAN PLANNERS AND ENGINEERS, THE COLLECTIVE PLANTED MONEY TREES OUTSIDE THE CAFE, BROKE GROUND ON A NEW AQUARIUM AND CUT THE RIBBON ON THE BATCAVE, A BATMAN-THEMED MUSEUM.
I was reminded of Applespiel’s Erskineville recently when I visited Within and Without’s Manila. A collaboration between the Philippines’ Anino Shadowplay Collective and local artists Valerie Berry, Deborah Pollard and Paschal Daantos Berry, Within and Without is a hybrid work of performance and installation art that is laudable for its ambition if not always for its achievement. More than a mere city street, it features a sprawling miniature cityscape constructed not from coloured card but recycled detritus: cardboard boxes, unloved toys, curious knick-knacks and old tangled fairy lights, the lot held together with masking and gaffer tape.
While I have spent a little time in Erskineville, I have never been to Manila. My impressions of the city were formed by Alex Garland’s 1998 novel The Tesseract, which paints it as a sprawling nightmare slum and John Safran’s TV series Race Relations, where the show’s host famously had himself crucified on what were pretty flimsy thematic and narrative grounds. In Within and Without, Manila is presented as a city defined by its own ongoing, contested construction: the US rebuilding of Manila post-WWII, the Ayala family’s construction of the affluent Makati district and Imelda Marcos’ Martial Law-era beautification projects are all mentioned during the show. The most devastated allied city after Warsaw, Manila is here imagined as one that has not only grown out of the debris, but has actually been constructed from it.
Within and Without
photo Heidrun Löhr
Within and Without
For all the aptness of this metaphor, however, there otherwise remains a disconnect in the piece between its form and content. As you are shown around the cardboard city by a performer-cum-guide—you see only parts of the installation during any given performance and would need to attend maybe two or three times in order to experience the whole thing—this disconnect becomes ever more apparent. From the arts-and-crafts construction of the city to the wide-eyed, forced-grin delivery of the tour guides, the form is instantly reminiscent of children’s television programming. The content however covers everything from WWII and the ensuing dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos to tours of the city’s gay and red-light districts—“I am sure we can find you a nice ladyboy here, ma’am-sir!”—and is decidedly more complex than either the cardboard city, or the piecemeal exposure available to it on any one visit, would suggest.
While occasionally charming, this disconnect between form and content doesn’t really seem to reveal anything about either. While providing a more or less arbitrary framework for us to learn about Manila, the cardboard-and-egg carton city does not appear to reflect or reveal anything about the flesh-and-blood one, which itself seems like a strange choice of subject for anyone looking to more fully exhaust the possibilities of this form. It is a poor critic who presumes to tell an artist that they could improve their work by doing something entirely different. But Applespiel’s Erskineville keeps coming to mind. It seems to me that a Playschool-ish approach is perfectly suited to the creation of a wholly imagined city, or an amalgamation or reinvention of an already existing one, and that such miniaturisation is a perfect way to get people thinking about urban planning, spaces for living in or the relationship between geography and community. As a way of getting people to think about what the program notes call “the horrors of history” it seems indirect and ineffective. We are left to ask ourselves one of two questions: “Why Manila?” or “Why in miniature?”
Garland’s The Tesseract provided such a striking representation of the city—I cannot, obviously, speak to its accuracy—because it employed a narrative form that was well-suited to its author’s idea of the place: a temporally dynamic postmodern structure for a spatially dynamic postcolonial city. It is arguable that the aforementioned disconnect between Within and Without’s form and content itself mirrors the manifold divisions inherent in what the artists, in their aforementioned program notes, describe as “the way we collectively see [the city]:” the divisions that exist between East and West, Christianity and Islam, rural and urban, rich and poor. Tellingly, two of the words the artists choose to describe the city are “schizophrenic” and “chaotic.”
Which is why the soundscape that opens the performance, taking place before we have even seen the cardboard city, is more effective than what follows it. Entering a dimly-lit space and asked to don the blindfolds they have been given in the foyer, the audience are treated to a densely layered sound design that includes everything from barking dogs and construction work to loud-mouthed hawkers and a discordant dirge of car horns. The key word here is ‘layered.’ Where the rest of the work is characterised by its own internal divisions, this opening sequence gets somewhat closer to approximating the messy, communal and continuous process that is the construction, not only of a city like Manila, or even an inner-city suburb like Erskineville, but of any space in which we must live. In doing so, it gets somewhat closer to actually approximating what a history is, too. It gives us a palimpsest.
Performance Space and Blacktown Arts Centre: Within and Without, artists Paschal Daantos Berry, Deborah Pollard, Valerie Berry, Anino Shadowplay Collective (Datu Arellano, Andrew Cruz, Don Maralit Salubayba), guest artists David Buckley, Kenneth Moraleda, Melanie Palomares, lighting designer Jack Horton; Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, June 23-July 2
This article was first published as part of the July 26 e-dition.
My father’s a painter so I grew up with art and the smell of oils still takes me back to my childhood. First and foremost though I’ve always been a big reader, which led me to enroll in a BA at the University of Sydney where I majored in English and wrote an honours thesis on the maverick boy poet and hoaxer Thomas Chatterton. I also took some postgraduate studies in journalism and among the climate controlled towers of UTS found my niche in print features and arts writing. Some early gigs such as a catalogue essay for a painter friend snowballed into bigger things, eventually leading to features for The Age and other papers to articles and essays in magazines and journals including Meanjin and the Griffith Review. My interests are broad but the visual arts are a longtime passion and common thread running through much of my work. I find myself mostly drawn to writing about photomedia, installation and conceptually driven practices.
Exposé
My desire to write comes mainly from curiosity, I think. Journalism opened my eyes to the importance of writing within a social context and why giving a voice to real, everyday people matters. When it comes to visual arts writing specifically, I’m most interested in how writing introduces a pause, interrupting the passive consumption of images, objects and ideas and instead feeding a sustained contemplation which, in order to be shaped into a text, requires reflection and interpretation. Art writing can’t be rushed, it gestates over time and represents a subversive gesture in this speedy capitalist culture where time is money. I enjoy how good artworks reveal something new each time I revisit them, leaving the process somewhat open-ended.
Freelance writings assignments can be relatively short in length so I like to counterbalance this by immersing myself in bigger topics over longer periods of time. Sometimes they turn into stories, sometimes they don’t. I’m currently researching the influence of Surrealism on the development of the psychogeographical novel, from André Breton’s Nadja to the elegiac meanderings of WG Sebald. I’m enjoying the indeterminate nature of these stories. In my own work I always strive for clarity yet curiously I often start with a point of confusion—something perplexing which somehow the process of writing works to unravel and resolve.
As an undergraduate in South Australia, I studied Political Science and History and have made a 30-year career in educational administration — “herding cats”. More recently I completed a masters degree in art history and had a brief taste of teaching in that field. After 5.00pm, I’ve always been an arts addict. I write about both art and music but I’m neither an artist nor a musician. My life is split between three worlds — art, music and education. Every interstate or overseas trip is a cultural (as well as socio-political) excursion.
Exposé
I began writing about art in 1992 for Adelaide-based visual art magazine Broadsheet, published by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, and regularly wrote exhibition reviews and artists’ profiles for Broadsheet for many years. From the outset, I always tried to write from the position of the engaged viewer, rather than the expert, and to re-present the spectacle to the reader. I also regularly write catalogue essays for artists and in the 1990s contributed to other art magazines such as Art Monthly Australia.
I was first invited to write for Real Time in 1995—a piece on an Adelaide contemporary music ensemble—and, for Real Time, I have written much more about music than art. In covering musical performances or in writing CD reviews, I try to write as an engaged listener.
Since the art and music I cover is typically new and often groundbreaking, I try to convey the concept to readers in a way that allows them to get a feel for the work, form their own view and take from it whatever inspiration they can. I try to leave my tastes and assumptions at home and act as an informative conduit rather than an evaluative judge. In a globalising and rapidly changing art/music world, it’s important to write sympathetically as well as analytically. I immerse myself in the work to find its poetics, its maker’s spirit, and often feel I’m entering a new world of ideas each time. I feel privileged to be able to write about the work that I do, given the effort that artists, curators, composers and musicians put into it and the impact it can have on audiences. The work might only be seen or heard by a few people, so the text that describes it must document it well to ensure that it fulfils its potential and endures.
It might be one box on the Census (coming soon, August 9) but Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are very different from each other, to the point where the latter is sometimes called “Australia’s other Indigenous culture” (press release). Over the next four months, Queensland’s major arts organisations at the Cultural Centre, South Bank in Brisbane, are joining forces to present The Torres Strait Islands: A Celebration, showcasing the diversity and vibrancy of historical and contemporary arts and culture of Torres Strait Islander Australians. The program encompasses an exhibition, Awakening: Stories from the Torres Strait at the Queensland Museum, Strait Home at the State Library and Land, Sea and Sky: Contemporary Art of the Torres Strait Islands, at the Gallery of Modern Art. The last is the largest and possibly most significant exhibition to date of contemporary art by Torres Strait Islander artists anywhere in the world and it includes dance objects, prints, film, video, textiles, ceramics and installations drawn from the Queensland Art Gallery’s extensive collection of works by Torres Strait Islander artists as well as key loans and commissioned works. The artists include Dennis Nona (RT69) and Destiny Deacon (RT66). Land, Sea and Sky: Contemporary Art of the Torres Strait Islands, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; http://qag.qld.gov.au
Worldhood
photo Chris Herzfeld
Worldhood
premieres aplenty
Two weeks ago (July 12) we mentioned Lisa Griffiths and Craig Bary’s new work Side to One, which premieres at the Adelaide Festival Centre on July 27. Next month the venue will play host to another world premiere, Worldhood, a collaboration between choreographer Garry Stewart (see his profile in RealTime Dance) and Adelaide artist Thom Buchanan. While dancers from the Australian Dance Theatre and the Adelaide College of the Arts move, Buchanan will create dramatic charcoal drawings live on stage: “his frenetic mark-making, fuelled by hundreds of visual decisions per minute, recalls artists like Frank Auerbach, Alberto Giacometti and Cy Twombly” (RT67). Later in August, the Centre will also present the Australian premiere of Gabrielle Nankivell’s solo performance I Left My Shoes on Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain. Nankivell has spent the past decade working with some of Europe’s groundbreaking choreographers; on this occasion she is collaborating with composer Luke Smiles and Bluebottle, whose striking designs have been featured in the work of Jenny Kemp (RT99), Balletlab (RT93) and Michelle Heaven (Dance Massive), among many others. The show is part of A Mini Festival of New Performances, copresented with Mobile States and features four shows in five days including Vivaria by Sam James (reviewed in RT97, artist interview in RT91), En Route by One Step At a Time Like This (RT94, back when they were still bettybooke) and The Harry Harlow Project by Insite Arts (RT95). Worldhood, Aug 10-13, I Left My Shoes on Warm Concrete and Stood in the Rain, Aug 24-27, part of A Mini Festival of New Performances, Aug 23-28, Adelaide Festival Centre, www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au
Fuse, STRUT Dance
photo Eva Fernandez
Fuse, STRUT Dance
motion and emotion
There’s more dance on offer over in the west, where PICA is presenting STRUT Dance (see all of our previous reviews of STRUT in the RealTime Dance Archive), as part of its performance program. (In May they presented My Darling Patricia’s Africa RT94 and this month they presented Team Mess’s This Is It.) Directed by Jonathan Buckels (RT86), Fuse is a full-length dance work based on the relationship between two people: “through the cycle from strangers, to friends, towards cohorts, through dependents and on to parasites. Love can give you the chance to change almost any facet of yourself in order to fit the needs of the object of your desire. But if your love is reciprocal, shouldn’t they also change for you? Will this create positive perpetual motion, or a destructive vicious circle? Can those within the relationship tell which of these paths they are on?” (website). Buckels and Rhiannon Newtown (RT94) will be dancing the answer. STRUT Dance, Fuse, Aug 26-Sept 3, PICA, www.pica.org.au
Sweet Bird andsoforth
photo Grant Sparkes-Carroll
Sweet Bird andsoforth
sweet bird of youth
The Australian Theatre for Young People will present the world premiere of German playwright Laura Naumann’s play Sweet Bird andsoforth. Translated by Benjamin Winspear (RT62), and directed by Laura Scrivano, the play starts with a farewell party on the edge of town; but while the group is trapped in an isolated suburban wasteland, their Gen Y dreams transcend any location. Billed as an “original, unexpected and blackly comic story of a group of friends caught between adolescence and adulthood,” the play won Naumann the Munich Prize for Young German-Language Drama (press release). Australian Theatre for Young People, Sweet Bird andsoforth, Aug 18-Sept 10; www.atyp.com.au
Thrashing Without Looking
photo Heidrun Löhr
Thrashing Without Looking
performance goggles
If you missed Aphids’ work Thrashing Without Looking at LiveWorks, Performance Space, then you might like to get to Melbourne soonish. Divided into two groups the audience watch, create, perform and control their environment in this experiential work. Video goggles are provided to the first group who watch and interact directly with a series of bold transformative images unfolding live in front of them as the second group help create the imagery. Fiona McGregor wrote: “It provoked all sorts of thoughts about the modes of disembodied communication we engage in now—televisual, internet—how trust and agency are still called upon and how intense and liberating is the sense of touch. There were moments of alienation, boredom, confusion, anticipation, humour and the ending was surprisingly tender. I didn’t want to leave” (RT101). Aphids, Thrashing Without Looking, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 3-7; http://aphids.net
Eden Falk, Emily Browning and Rachael Blake, Sleeping Beauty
FOR ALL THE HOOPLA THAT HAS GREETED IT, BOTH AT CANNES AND THE RECENT SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL, NOVELIST JULIA LEIGH’S DIRECTORIAL DEBUT IS A STRANGELY LIFELESS AFFAIR. MARKETED AS AN EROTIC REIMAGINING OF THE CLASSIC FAIRY TALE AND BEARING A STAMP OF APPROVAL FROM LEIGH’S CINEMATIC MENTOR JANE CAMPION, SLEEPING BEAUTY MIGHT HAVE BEEN MESMERISING. UNFORTUNATELY IT PERTURBS MORE THAN IT ENGAGES, ELLIPTICALLY GESTURING TOWARDS A SIGNIFICANCE THAT IT STEADFASTLY REFUSES TO REPRESENT.
The somnambulist of the title is Lucy (Emily Browning), a 20-something university student. Juggling various casual jobs as a waitress, photocopy clerk and participant in medical experiments, she breaks up her brittle routine by picking up businessmen in bars or visiting her bookish friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie), an alcoholic misfit with whom she shares some measure of platonic intimacy, the pair united in mocking a comfortable middle class existence from which they seem excluded.
Behind in the rent in her shared house, Lucy answers an advertisement for a position requiring “mutual trust and discretion” from Clara, an imperiously coiffed madam (Rachael Blake). Initially, wearing little but her knickers, she is required to provide silver service to three extremely wealthy old men (Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood and Hugh Keays-Byrne), but is soon offered a ‘promotion’: to lie naked in a drugged sleep while each man does what he will with her. Lucy glibly accepts, blithely asserting that “my vagina is not a temple” to Clara’s oddly prudish assurances that no sex will ensue.
Leigh has said that she strove to create a “tip of the iceberg” feel to the film and indeed, at times it seems to consist entirely of immaculately gleaming surface. Shot in Sydney, the film is bereft of any clear indicators of place, what action there is unfolding within anonymous public spaces or bland, depersonalised private ones. Although many scenes are inflected with unmistakably local touches, for all intents and purposes it could be set anywhere in the western world, Leigh striving to hit an allegorical note unmoored from historical reality.
The script draws heavily from literary touchstones, the tender but impotent nostalgia of the first old man self-consciously echoing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores and Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, both cited by Leigh as important influences. However, her heroine’s determined complicity also recalls Angela Carter’s supernatural version of the tale “The Lady of the House of Love.” Like Carter’s vampiric protagonist, Lucy is wilfully passive, “indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming.” In this sense she might be considered what Carter referred to as a “Sadeian Woman,” Leigh using her character’s self-destructiveness as a means of tracing the logic of sexual and economic exploitation. It’s hardly accidental that once she obtains her first payment Lucy burns the money.
Rachael Blake, Emily Browning and Peter Carroll, Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty is a visually sumptuous and technically assured film. Julia Leigh has benefited from the strong support of an experienced team, including production direction by Annie Beauchamp (Disgrace, Praise), editing by Nick Meyers (Balibo, The Bank) and exquisite cinematography by Geoffrey Simpson (Romulus, My Father, Shine). Their talents combine to lend the film, particularly the scenes in the lavish mansion in which Lucy’s slumberous encounters occur, a plush but austere beauty.
Leigh’s penchant for immaculately composed shots, held well beyond the requirements of narrative, conjures a mood of brooding watchfulness reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s brilliant Hidden (RT75). In that film the director meticulously crafted an air of patient stillness, the implacable, unseen camera reversing the historical power dynamic of French colonialism with eventually devastating results. Sleeping Beauty is similarly deliberate, the camera being as unwavering on the withered bodies of the men as on Browning’s naked form. Although it may be at times uncomfortable to watch, Leigh seems willing to only go so far—her depiction of the sole instance of outright physical abuse (a cigarette burn) is constructed to obscure what it simultaneously depicts, an approach characteristic of the rest.
It may be because of this that Sleeping Beauty frustrates. The enigmatic aura that Julia Leigh carefully nurtures is both painfully affected and needlessly obscure, squandering an intriguing scenario by lapsing into cryptic torpor. Worse, at the screening I attended, a number of moments weighted with an otherwise overbearing seriousness elicited, presumably unintended, laughter. Although not without its pleasures—the performances, particularly that of Browning, are excellent—it is difficult to be seduced by Sleeping Beauty, the film aiming to make a much greater impact than it seems capable of delivering.
Sleeping Beauty, writer-director Julia Leigh, actors Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie, Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood, Hugh Keays-Byrne, cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson, editor Nick Meyers, production design Annie Beauchamp, sound design Sam Petty, composer Ben Frost; Magic Films, 2011; www.sleepingbeautyfilm.com/
METRO ARTS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A HOME FOR INDEPENDENT PRODUCTIONS IN BRISBANE, BUT SINCE LIZ BURCHAM’S APPOINTMENT AS CEO IN 2006, THIS POSITION HAS BEEN BOTH CEMENTED AND STRENGTHENED. BY PROVIDING FUNDING SUPPORT AND PAYING ACTORS DURING REHEARSALS (AFTER WHICH IT’S INTO COOPERATIVE SHARING ARRANGEMENTS), BURCHAM HAS TRANSFORMED METRO INDEPENDENTS INTO A VITAL AND COHESIVE PART OF THE CITY’S PERFORMANCE SCENE. BUT WHY KEEP THE FAITH?
In an interview with Katherine Lyall-Watson, Brisbane icon Eugene Gilfedder lays out a manifesto: “Independent theatre chooses YOU. It says, come to me, do as I say, work many long hours without wages, get wound up with nerves—you’ll love it. Independent theatre is the HEART and I’ve been honoured to have had so many wonderful people who have been likewise CHOSEN.”
dead cargo
But as an audience you don’t necessarily have to love it. In fact, the first production for the year, Dead Cargo by Tim Dashwood and Nigel Poulton, aroused emotions in me ranging from boredom, disappointment, utter confusion, outrage, repulsion and homicidal feelings towards the protagonists that they also apparently harboured for each other, accompanied by a savage glee that I was experiencing all these emotions. This had the taste of the real thing. It also proved an extraordinary introduction to Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, which he developed in mid-20th century Russia, and which Nigel Poulton now teaches in 21st century Brisbane.
There was one simple action. Three clowns performed riffs on that good old standard prop, the suitcase, fighting for possession until the most recently arrived (and most innocent?) spontaneously gives it away because someone “needs it more,” and then gets himself killed into the bargain for breaking the rules of this closed society. The most absurdly inspired piece of clowning took place at this point as Deb Sampson put one foot in a bucket of water in order to avoid leaving her watery domain to commit the murder. Otherwise, time (itself something of an obsession) was spent in non-stop demonstrations of an infinite capacity to talk past each other.
In my opinion, this aspect of the work was an unintentional red herring. Dashwood and Poulton might have been better off learning from the new existential comedy of British playwright Will Eno rather than flagging the Absurdist theatre of the mid-20th century. In any event, promoting Dead Cargo as contemporary absurd theatre was a bit of a misnomer. Surely—and on the evidence of this production—Meyerhold was closer in time to Expressionism and to the concepts of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Certainly I was most moved by the stylised recounting by each of the performers at different times of a refugee’s flashback childhood memory involving soldiers “with angry eyes,” a seeming massacre, and their subsequent lonely fall into an abyss of cultural displacement. This was passionately conveyed by the actors and coupled with Jason Glenwright’s lighting and Phil Slade’s sound design, Dead Cargo revealed itself in the end to be a very thoughtful and powerful production.
Eugene Gilfedder and Finn Gilfedder-Cooney, Empire Burning
photo Stephen Henry
Eugene Gilfedder and Finn Gilfedder-Cooney, Empire Burning
empire burning
Eugene Gilfedder’s The Fiveways was the bright gem in the 2009 Brisbane Festival (RT87). His latest offering, Empire Burning, has even more profound scope as political allegory with multiple overtones conveyed in the heightened language of a blank verse that was marvellously contemporary and played seamlessly to its audience. I periodically found myself closing my eyes just to relish the words. This was also a tribute to a cast consisting of some of Brisbane’s finest actors who took on the text as their own. This was a theatre of ideas that was as visceral as it was cerebral, requiring us to mentally jump with the alacrity of Gilfedder’s own agile facility to gather worlds.
The piece originated in 2005 when Gilfedder was reading about the influence of the Roman playwright Seneca on the age of Shakespeare (think the graphic violence of Timon of Athens) and at the same time brooding about the so-called war on terror abroad (think Abu Ghraib) as well as attacks on democracy and civil liberties at home. Seneca was also a renowned philosopher and tutor to the young Nero who was named emperor in 54AD and, as legend has it, fiddled while Rome burned. This all became enmeshed in an intense poetic fantasy about an ur-empire in decline rather than keeping to strict historical parallels. This is clear when “we none of us know / What people these are that come through the flames.” The captured terrorist (Dan Crestani) is inarticulate, cannot speak the language…there is nothing to designate him as other than Other. These self-immolating strangers hint at a mysterious interpenetration of the human and supernatural worlds, a mood further enhanced by Geoff Squires’ lighting and Freddy Komp’s projections. Gilfedder recreates something of the feel of classical tragedy with these mysterious epiphanies and symbolic revelations of the divine, however strongly parodic their final delivery in this piece.
There was much to praise in the performances: Gilfedder portraying Seneca as a warm and decent man (especially evident in early scenes with his son), a humanist and democrat increasingly baffled and ultimately overwhelmed by the madness of his times; the cold choice of madness itself a valid response to the times embraced with beautifully modulated nonchalance and fierce humour by Finn Gilfedder-Cooney as Nero; the saturnine ease and contemporary chutzpah of all the conspiring senators; and the power-hungry, domineering Agrippina, mother of Nero, played with flamboyant abandon by Nikki-J Price. This was a work of gripping energy and relevance that has the legs for a lot more miles.
Dead Cargo, director Nigel Poulton, writers Tim Dashwood, Nigel Poulton, performers Nigel Poulton, Tim Dashwood, Belinda Raisin, Deb Sampson, sound design Phil Slade, lighting Jason Glenwright, Metro Arts, Brisbane March 9-26; Empire Burning, writer, director Eugene Gilfedder, performers Finn Gilfedder-Cooney, Eugene Gilfedder, Nikki-J Price, Dan Crestani, Damien Cassidy, Steven Tandy, Sasha Janowicz, Michael Futcher, sound design John Rodgers, Ken Eadie, lighting Geoff Squires, costumes Jess Staunton, visuals/projections Freddy Kemp; Metro Arts, Brisbane May 13
YOU ENTER A DARK CORRIDOR ALONE. IT’S AN ALL ENVELOPING DARKNESS THAT SEEMS TO SUCK THE BREATH FROM YOU, BUT BY SLIDING YOUR HAND ALONG THE WALL YOU CAN NAVIGATE TOWARDS THE SMALL LIGHT THAT EVENTUALLY APPEARS IN THE DISTANCE—A PEEPHOLE. PEERING IN YOU SEE A SMALL SCREEN DISPLAYING INFRARED CCTV FOOTAGE OF A ROOM. SOMEONE IS ALREADY IN THE ROOM OVER IN THE CORNER WITH THEIR BACK TO YOU. YOU WONDER, “WHO IS THAT LOOKING INTO THAT PEEPHOLE?”
Some people recognise themselves faster than others and this moment of realisation is almost enough in itself. Looking at yourself looking at yourself—seeing one ‘you’ who is thinking about how it is seeing this other ‘you’—creates a phenomenological mirror of infinity that leaves you gasping. But there is more to Alex Davies’ The Black Box Sessions. You are here to see a show that will be performed in this room, just for you.
Annabel Lines, The Black Box Sessions
photo Alex Davies
Annabel Lines, The Black Box Sessions
I peeped at three acts randomly selected from the 30 performances by Australian and international performers. The lovely, leggy Annabel Lines escaped gracefully from a sack to hula-hoop for me; Didi Bruckmayr revealed his fully tattooed corpus in a rough striptease; and Patrick Huber tried to tell me, in his rambling way, about what a great actor he is. The performances are not always astounding and some are looser and more haphazard than others. The most successful moments occur when actions reinforce the sense of the darkened space and the performance is directed specifically to you. But even when the illusion is faltering, the sense that the action is taking place just behind you is hard to shake, heightened by the well-spatialised audio. The compulsion to look behind is strong, but when faced with the void you turn back to the screen for the mediated comfort of yourself and your performer.
The Black Box sessions continues Davies’ explorations into mixed reality environments first successfully realised in his installation Dislocation (2005, see RT70 and RT88). In this earlier work the room is visible in both the virtual/screen and real worlds, and the apparitions don’t tend to do much that is out of the ordinary. They are looking at the work as you are with the occasional anomaly of a barking guard dog or an argument. This mundanity creates a kind of ruptured reality. In The Black Box Sessions, the disorientation created by the utter darkness—the inability to match the screen view with the physical space—and the overlaid construction of the peep show creates a much stronger sense of entering a consensual fantasy. This is reinforced by Davies’ extension of the peepshow premise out in the foyer where a monitor placed on the gallery attendant’s desk shows CCTV footage of the waiting room (with you in it) and the adjoining dressing room with the performers undertaking their pre-show preparations. It’s a nice touch though easy to miss if you don’t have to wait too long to enter the corridor.
Like all Davies’ works, The Black Box Sessions is impressive from a technical perspective as the real-time video interaction is seamless and its complex machinations completely invisible. Davies’ playful attention to detail really invites you into this fantasy world. However this finessing reinforces the central wonder—first established in Dislocation and iterated here—of the perceptual and conceptual mind-bending that occurs as you try to reconcile your position in this world, being simultaneously inside and outside yourself. You will never look at yourself in the same way again.
Alex Davies, The Black Box Sessions, performers Celia Curtis, Annabel Lines, Chas Glover, Las Venus, Patrick Huber, Didi Bruckmayr, Roland Penzinger, Justin Shoulder, Matthew Stegh, Scott Sinclare; UTS Gallery, Sydney, May 31-July 15
Like the Performance Space in Sydney several years ago, Performance Space 122 in New York is experiencing growing pains. But whereas its namesake chose relocation, PS122 chose renovation. In the meantime, however, it will be a bit like a government in exile, presenting performances in London as well as co-presenting work with Crossing the Line, an innovative interdisciplinary festival in New York. The new building comes not long after PS122’s 30th anniversary, adding to the sense of a shift from being a mere venue or organisation to something of an institution. Indeed, the list of participants at the anniversary party reads like a roll-call for the avant-garde: The Wooster Group, Split Britches, Mabou Mines, Philip Glass, Big Dance Theater, Elevator Repair Service etc. It will be interesting to see how artistic director Vallejo Gantner balances this inheritance with the need for innovation and experimentation. For more information, see Claudia La Rocco’s article in the New York Times. PS122, www.ps122.org
The Carousel, Soda_Jerk
video still courtesy the artists
The Carousel, Soda_Jerk
remix: the remake
You’ve seen the sequel (RT83), now see the director’s cut! The Sydney-bred, Berlin-based sisters of Soda_Jerk (Dominique and Dan Angeloro) will be premiering Pixel Pirate 2: The Director’s Cut (2011) at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival on July 22. Billed as a work that “reimagines the role of cinema, the function of entertainment and lays down the gauntlet for all who want to uphold traditional notions of image and sound” (website), it will appear alongside four short films by Tony Lawrence, including Goldtop Mountain, Girl on Fire, Monsignor Blood and From Water. Both Soda_Jerk and Lawrence will be in attendance for a Q&A afterwards. Soda_Jerk will also appear at the Fremantle Arts Centre where they will be debuting The Carousel, a “dark and compelling presentation that is part lecture, part video performance…Navigating their way through an elaborate matrix of film samples, the artists will unearth a hidden history of cinema that traces the capacity for recorded media to seemingly reanimate the dead” (website). Soda_Jerk, The Carousel, Fremantle Arts Centre, July 21, www.fac.org.au; Soda_Jerk vs Tony Lawrence, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, July 22, www.revelationfilmfest.org
Ian de Gruchy, Gertrude Hotel
photo Bernie Phelan
Ian de Gruchy, Gertrude Hotel
the real fitzroyalty
There will be a similar combination of the live and the mediatised at this year’s Gertrude Street Projection Festival, on from July 22 to 31 (keep an eye out for Kate Warren’s review in our September 5 e-dition). On the evening of July 27, you can go to the Atherton Gardens Estate to hear Stories Around the Fire: The Hidden History of Aboriginal Fitzroy, which features “the memories, cultural knowledge and stories of our real Fitzroyalty: the Traditional Owners, Elders and respected Aboriginal community members of Fitzroy” (website). Later in the week, there is a walking tour of the site, where you can learn more about the locations and the artists, including Olaf Meyer (RT76, RT86, RT86), Ian de Gruchy (RT64), Kit Webster (whose projections were seen at Dance Massive), Arika Waulu, Yandell Walton (RT85), Nick Azidis, Lindsay Cox, Salote Tawale, Rowena Martinich and Greg Giannis. On the final Friday there is Sensory Overload, a night of music and projected art at the Workers Club. Gertrude Projection Festival 2011, July 22-31; www.thegertrudeassociation.com
I Wish I Knew
full of film
Still in Melbourne, and still on screens, it’s time for the Melbourne International Film Festival. The opening night features The Fairy, a Belgium-French-Canadian-Australia collaboration which “pays homage to Chaplin, Keaton and Jacques Tati [with] a few added contemporary socio-political twists” (press release). Other highlights include the world premiere of Fred Schepisi’s (RT87) The Eye of the Storm, which is based on the Patrick White novel and features Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling. Other Australian films include David Bradbury’s (RT71) documentary about Paul Cox (RT48, RT50, RT51) On Borrowed Time, Michael Rymer’s Face to Face and Jon Hewitt’s X. International films worth investigating include Alexei Balabanov’s (RT92) A Stoker and Jia Zhang-ke’s I Wish I Knew (see Dan Edwards’ appraisal of his work in our Contemporary Chinese Cinema archive highlight) as well as Dreileben, a triple-bill of 90-minute movies made by German writer-directors Christian Petzold (RT79), Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler. Dreileben is part of a new program called Prime Time, which focuses on works made for television by directors best know for their cinema—an interesting and important idea in an era when Martin Scorsese is directing episodes of Boardwalk Empire for HBO. Primetime will also premiere the first two episodes of the ABC TV series The Slap, based on Christos Tsiolkas’ novel. Melbourne International Film Festival, July 21-August 7; www.miff.com.au
Side to One
photo Chris Herzfeld
Side to One
side to one
Last seen in Tanja Liedtke’s construct (RT83), Lisa Griffiths (RT49) is about to debut her own work Side to One. Choreographed in collaboration with ADT regular Craig Bary (who also danced for Liedtke, see RT61), the piece “follows two individuals destined to connect, attracted like magnets they are never static but constantly evolving” (website). Side to One will premiere in Adelaide, at the Festival Centre, before travelling north to Parramatta Riverside, where it will form part of a season of dance, alongside Martin Del Amo and Ahil Ratnamohan’s Mountains Never Meet (read Gail Priest’s interview with Del Amo in RT103). Side to One, Adelaide Festival Centre, July 27-30, www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au; Parramatta Riverside, Aug 10-13, www.riversideparramatta.com.au
John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business
photo Heidrun Löhr
John Leary, Samantha Young, Jody Kennedy, Thomas Henning, The Business
NEOLIBERALISM’S NEO-DARWINIST RALLYING CALL, GORDON GECKO’S “GREED IS GOOD” (WALL STREET, 1987), REMAINS LARGELY UNDISCREDITED DESPITE THE LESSONS OF THE GFC, SO EMBEDDED IS THE ETHOS OF SELFISHNESS IN EVERYTHING FROM TV ADVERTISEMENTS WHERE PEOPLE PINCH FOOD, BOYFRIENDS AND CARS FROM FAMILY OR FRIENDS, TO REALITY TV’S CRUDE AND CRUEL ELEVATION OF SOLE SURVIVAL OVER COOPERATION, TO THE PERSONAL PRONOUN-ISM OF SELFHOOD INITIATED BY MYSPACE AND CONFIRMED BY MYBUS, MYSCHOOL, IPHONE AND THEIR SUNDRY IMITATORS.
The corresponding failure of public empathy over issues like asylum-seeking (save at the safe distance offered by donating to charities subsequent to natural disasters) and the reinvigoration of 19th century-style philanthropy (as the gap between wealth and poverty again radically widens) provides the depressing context for Belvoir’s production of Jonathan Gavin’s bitterly funny The Business. It’s set in the 1980s, the very period in which the ‘greed is good’ ethos was getting into its public stride—and we still march to its insistent step in 2011. The world of The Business feels quite like home.
Grossly self-obsessed behaviour is central to Gavin’s bitter-black comedy of bad manners and inheritance snatching, with director Cristabel Sved and costume designer Stephen Curtis wickedly ramping up the rude behaviour and appalling dress sense of the characters to the edge of grotesquerie, but somehow without losing the sense of these people as real, thwarted and, at times, oddly innocent and certainly pathetic—such is their tunnel-vision of the world.
Gavin and Sved took their cue for The Business from Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s grim, sometimes comic play, Vassa Zheleznova, which premiered in 1911 and was later a favourite of Stalin who saw it many times, presumably enjoying the agonies of a bourgeois family in their act of self-destruction (and enforcing changes to the play in 1935 to suit his tastes). Gavin’s play is based on Gorky’s; it is not an adaptation. But in both there is a shared, strong focus on the female characters.
In Gorky’s original, Vassa, wife to a shipping agent, Zheleznova, is relieved when her husband dies—at the end on Act 1 as opposed to the wrenching, protracted and off-stage decline in Gavin’s play which ups the suspense and complications of the mother and her disaffected daughter’s machinations to secure the inheritance the household patriarch would have denied them. Zheleznova’s death is also a relief because the charge of raping a 12-year-old servant girl will now not go to court. Vassa battles on alone, corralling daughters and servants, bribing dockworkers and police and bickering with her estranged socialist daughter (torn between motherhood and the life of a revolutionary) over possession of the latter’s child. The pressure is such that Vassa dies at the play’s end, an exhausted manipulator. Gorky’s empathy for her is limited, but he makes it clear that as well as being a nasty bourgeois she is to varying degrees a victim, though never without fight.
Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business
photo Heidrun Löhr
Kate Box in reflection and Thomas Henning, The Business
The Business’ 1980s family is immigrant in origin (no coffee, just a steady flow of tea), wealthy, the adult Australian-raised offspring and their spouses child-like and spoilt. The runaway daughter Anna (Kate Box) returns home, apparently more principled than the rest but, like her mother, Van (Sarah Pierse) embittered by her father’s mistreatment and ready to conspire with Van to seize the inheritance from the ne’er-do-well siblings who would promptly sell-off the family business. As with Belvoir’s Wild Duck (RT102), the social and political context inherent in the original play has no substantial contemporary equivalent in The Business, which seems a pity given the rich complexity and contradictions of 1980s Australian politics. Although this is frustrating it certainly amplifies the sheer vacuity of an emerging materialist life-style culture—save for its business (unlike Vassa’s, only vaguely indicated) this family lives in a closed circuit of vituperation, envy and a refusal to forgive.
The plays by Gorky and Gavin share the same spirited assault on the bourgeoisie—but what at first seems grimly frantic and comic slips into dispirited horror. Gorky’s Vassa demands that her husband suicide (he dies without resort to that but there is no grieving); Gavin’s Ronald (Van’s crippled second son; Thomas Henning) kills his wife’s lover Gary (Russell Kiefel) and the family dutifully manages the cover-up. Not least because the principal mother-daughter relationship is more nuanced and the two women win out, The Business comes off as more complex than Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova (incidentally The Business appears to borrow some of its plot from the even grimmer Egor Bulychev where a wealthy father is dying, initiating a struggle for his property).
The Business might represent a victory for women but not necessarily for integrity or compassion, as if to say the legacy of the 80s is a greedy, self-serving, culture, whose children live in luxury and surly disaffection, emasculated by their parents who completely control the business. In this world Van must live on, the legacy doubtless intended for a daughter who will become like her mother, or already has.
If The Business is not strong on 80s politics and culture, the specificities of time and place are largely left to design (Victoria Lamb)—an aptly tackily furnished, expensive modernist home with Californian bungalow open stone walls, a lounge room replete with board games for children who will never grow up, and a sunny porch that becomes a site for unexpected violence. Costumes (Stephen Curtis) and hairstyling are comically acute, viciously accentuating character traits and some of the fashion follies of the period. Van’s power-dressed shoulders and daughter Anna’s great height pushed up by heels and hairstyle immediately suggest competing forces. The casual wear and pronounced body shapes of the other brattish siblings, Simon (John Leary) and Natalie (Samantha Young), amplify their laziness while the arch-backed, lank-haired, bare-chested wild-child Ronald (Henning) lurches about like a purposeless Iggy Popp. A persistent soundtrack of 80s pop ranging from the execrable to the arty further compounds the period sense. The family lives inside this bubble. The business is not loved—it’s simply what it means in terms of survival or sustained leisure.
The one aspect of the family business that is focused on is a legal suit against it for the death of a worker who refused to wear a protective mask (“What is OH&S anyway?”). Van simply doesn’t want the company to accept responsibility—the victim was, after all, a chronic smoker. This is the world of The Business—a selfish society that doesn’t care enough for itself let alone others. Simon puts it in context, his: “I started buying art works from the coons across the river. I give then 10 bucks for a dot painting then I can sell it for two hundred. Hello. People buy that shit. And the guys I buy from are not gonna sue me for negligence or cry to Four Corners because the ventilators in the workshop stop running.”
Sarah Peirse, The Business
photo Heidrun Löhr
Sarah Peirse, The Business
Inevitably, a limited range of concerns and character traits generates grotesques, utterly without empathy for the dying father (who clearly showed none to them) and locked in a bitter fight for an inheritance that Van has worked so hard for but that others simply feel they deserve. Emotions run to extremes but in Van we can see the fluctuating degrees of frustration, anger, near defeat and the need for reconciliation with Anna, even if it entails compromise. Van shows some compassion for the adulterous daughter-in-law Jennifer (Jody Kennedy)—even, as in Gorky’s original, working with her in the garden. The rest is misunderstanding, confusion, blindness and occasional insights that can’t be explored—Jennifer: “We’re all unhappy; none of us know how to love anything.” The best she can sadly come up with is: “I’m a human mix tape.” Van herself can barely live up to what she expects of her children: “These young people. ‘Duty,’ ‘consideration’—foreign concepts. I keep hoping one day they’ll grow up.” Her relationship with her husband is just as muddy: “So what? Maybe he was violent and drunk and yes he cheated on me, but it’s men like this who made this country what it is.”
What makes The Business potent is its emotional cruelty presented in the guise of comedy, sometimes bordering on farce, rich in gags (the business over a dead parrot, the nouveau riche ‘luxury’ of croissants stuffed with Fruit Loops), in explosive tensions and, not least, suspense (who will get the inheritance?)—and then shock. Director Cristabel Sved and her cast are endlessly inventive, keeping these monsters believable. If you were hoping for empathy and compassion and felt short changed then The Business was not for you—like Gorky’s original, this is tough social satire, even if Gavin is a tad more forgiving. And sometimes tougher: a communal sing-along in the Gorky is replaced with the dissolute Simon and Natalie’s faithful rendering of a ‘Tab cola’ jingle, followed by Simon’s “Want a root?” It’s that kind of play, that kind of world. In the current political climate we’re hardly in a position to deny it.
Performances in The Business were uniformly excellent, underpinned by a strong sense of ensemble. Sarah Pierse’s Van rarely allows her bitterness to defeat her purpose or her anger to overrule the requisite moments of compassion or opportunity. Pierse plays out Van’s considerable contradictions without doubt. Kate Box as the returning prodigal with a purpose is all elegance and bottled restraint almost ready to act but when she does so it is with reason as well as anger. Jody Kennedy as Jennifer is slatternly but engagingly sensitive; Grant Dodwell as the company manager is gentle and fair—if an ignored moral compass; Russell Kiefel is strong as Gary the apparently easy-going but embittered brother of Van’s dying husband; John Leary and Samantha Young are an horrendous couple, the ultimate uncaring brats, bravely played with physical and vocal verve; and Thomas Henning is the crippled Ronald who believes himself unloved—and he is, the best his mother can do to cover the murder of Gary is to have the boy committed to a psychiatric clinic. Henning’s Ronald is physically confined to his staggering gait but, when not pathetically self-aware, always on the edge of exceeding his emotional borders. In working from Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, Jonathan Gavin has created a play that is his own, one finely realised by his collaborators and, sadly, a play for and of our times.
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Belvoir: The Business, writer Jonathan Gavin, based on Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, director Cristabel Sved, performers Kate Box, Grant Dodwell, Thomas Henning, Jody Kennedy, Russell Kiefel, John Leary, Sarah Pierse, Samantha Young, set design Victoria Lamb, costumes Stephen Curtis, lighting Verity Hampson, composer/sound Max Lyandvert; Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, April 27-May 29; www.belvoir.com.au
ALL PLEASANT BREAK-UPS ARE ALIKE; EACH UNPLEASANT BREAK-UP IS UNPLEASANT IN ITS OWN WAY. WHICH IS WHY THE ONE AT THE HEART OF SARAH ENRIGHT AND SIMON CORFIELD’S TRAPTURE IS SUCH A CURIOUS THING: BY ATTEMPTING TO COVER THE UNPLEASANT BREAK-UP FROM EVERY CONCEIVABLE ANGLE—TO GIVE US, IN A SENSE, THE UR-BREAK-UP—THE PRODUCTION DOESN’T GET TO THE ESSENCE OF THE MESSY SEPARATION SO MUCH AS MERELY PRESENT US WITH A GENERALISED SURVEY OF ITS MOST COMMON AND PREDICTABLE FORMS. THE RESULT IS A PAGEANT OF MILLS & BOON METAPHORS LITERALISED AS STAGE GROTESQUERIES: AN AT TIMES HILARIOUS, BUT ALWAYS SUPERFICIAL, BREAKDOWN OF THE BREAK-UP.
The evening begins with an embrace. Enright, her mouth taped up and her wide, slightly unhinged-looking eyes meeting yours, takes your ticket, asks with a silent gesture if you would like a hug, and then takes you in her arms. The Old Fitzroy’s little theatre has been done up to resemble one of those plastic-draped rooms in otherwise empty warehouses where psychopaths wine and dine their victims before hacking them to pieces. This, as we will soon learn, is appropriate: of all the things to which Enright and Corfield compare the break-up, the most notable are disembowelment and related acts of torture. The central conceit of the piece is to realise emotional violence as physical violence.
This is, of course, something we do every day when we equate the two in language. A pleasant break-up is what you get when both parties choose to “end the relationship.” An unpleasant one is what you get when the metaphors start creeping in: when the man “emotionally raped me” or the woman “tore my heart out.” Men become “pigs” and women “bitches.” One party claims the other can “eat my shit.” For Pat Benatar love is a “battlefield.” Kramer Vs Kramer and The War of the Roses—Danny De Vito’s, not William Shakespeare’s—incorporate this idea of conflict into their titles. And Trapture seeks to give each of the above its time in literalism’s spotlight.
The show begins with Enright and Corfield dressed for a fancy date, making their way to a couch at the far side of the stage. She blindfolds him—he thinks it’s foreplay—before taking out a suitcase, throwing a few things into it and leaving him sitting there. When he finally realises what has happened, things really begin to fall apart: Enright re-emerges, dressed in surgical garb and gives her former partner a sex-change operation. Sporting a Koskian prosthetic and killer heels, Corfield waves his new vagina around in the faces of those in the front row. The performers climb into the audience, invading personal space. Masks emerge. Corfield becomes a pig and Enright a dog, the former forcing the latter to eat his shit and smearing it across her mouth. They throw bedpans of urine at one another.
Sarah Enright and Simon Corfield
photo courtesy of the artists
Sarah Enright and Simon Corfield
In the production’s most graphic and unsettling scene, Corfield dons a clown mask and rapes Enright. She gets her revenge by sticking her hand into his chest and tearing out a cow’s heart. It’s an image straight out of The Simpsons episode “New Kid on the Block” and it is difficult for anyone familiar with that episode to take its recreation here very seriously. Indeed, I found myself marvelling less at the literalisation of the metaphor—which, as The Simpsons’ writers understood only too well, is not so much profound as hilarious—than at the fact that the actor had been wearing a bloody bovine organ strapped to his chest for the duration of the performance. Enright cooks the heart on a portable hotplate and feeds it to him. She eats a slice, too. An unholy communion.
All of this is rendered in a visual style reminiscent of visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney. Indeed, if Barney were to direct Artaud’s Jet of Blood, he might come up with something like Trapture. Only he wouldn’t. Barney’s use of metaphor is elaborate where Trapture’s is simplistic, providing his work with its deep, architectonic structures which are almost impenetrable. In contrast, Trapture’s structure is not even really that of a break-up, but rather a shopping list. And it’s a shopping list that, in the end, doesn’t really amount to much: referring back to a non-specific idea of a break-up—to the words we use to describe them—even the impact of the rape is lessened.
Shocking stage images, it seems to me, are becoming increasingly less shocking. I would argue that Sydney hasn’t seen a genuinely cutting one since Kosky put Robyn Nevin in Abu Ghraib for The Women of Troy (2008). As with Simon Stone’s Baal at the Sydney Theatre Company, which seems pitched to offend only a certain strata of the audience (namely the aging subscriber base), Trapture seems to suffer from putting too much stock in the inherent force of its images. That force is lessened the more it’s relied upon. It becomes increasingly difficult to care about, to invest in such images, which have less and less to do with the emotional content of an idea and more and more to do with their capacity to inspire walk-outs. Pass the heart.
Sands Through the Hourglass in association with Tamarama Rock Surfers, Trapture, director Shannon Murphy, conceived & performed by Sarah Enright and Simon Corfield, live sound design Basil Hogios; Old Fitzroy Theatre, Sydney, April 21-May 14. Trapture by Sands Through the House Glass won Best Show Sydney Fringe 2010.
HOT ON THE HEELS OF IMPERIAL PANDA COMES TINY STADIUMS—ANOTHER SYDNEY-BASED, SELF-PRODUCED FESTIVAL THROUGH WHICH EMERGING ARTISTS GAIN BOTH EXPERIENCE AND EXPOSURE. THE TWO FESTIVALS SHARE MORE THAN A DIY SENSIBILITY AND A FONDNESS FOR QUIRKY NAMES, THEY ALSO SHARE SOME CURATORIAL TALENT—MISH GRIGOR CURRENTLY SERVES ON BOTH ORGANISING COMMITTEES AND ZOE COOMBS MARR AND EDDIE SHARP HAVE DONE SO PREVIOUSLY. SO IT’S NOT SURPRISING THAT, LIKE IMPERIAL PANDA, TINY STADIUMS PROVIDES A DIVERSE PROGRAM THAT COMBINES LIVE ART IN A VARIETY OF LOCATIONS AS WELL AS SOME MORE THEATRICAL OFFERINGS, INCLUDING A GOOD OLD FASHIONED DOUBLE BILL AT PACT THEATRE.
First on the program is Applespiel’s Executive Stress/Corporate Retreat, which, as you might suspect from its title, is a satirical take on every self-improving, team-building, life-affirming exercise you’ve ever had the misfortune to endure. The show starts with an invitation from a young man in a snappy suit to enrol in the elite club. Several audience members head to the desk while I hang back, until I remember that I am reviewing the piece so I’d better participate. Unfortunately the elite club closes just as I reach the desk—hesitation then rejection, that’s a double fail. Having been photographed and name-tagged, the elite club members now circulate with “ice breaker” exercises, asking the non-elite about our allergies, holidays and siblings. Ice broken, we then do another survey, where the performer poses a question and we stand on one side of the foyer or the other, depending on whether we like tennis, have a father with a drinking problem etc. Finally, we enter the theatre and as we take our seats—elite club at the front, mere mortals at the back—we see several performers in black suits sprinting back and forth across the stage.
The rest of the show basically consists of Applespiel running a corporate workshop, demonstrating an exercise and then directing the elite team to do it on stage. These efforts are then scored and the results displayed in a sort of league table, which is projected onto a large screen upstage. The exercises include mock job interviews, in which participants are asked not only about their strengths and weaknesses but also about which food they most resemble. “An egg” is the recommended answer, for its ability to work solo and in combination with a variety of other ingredients, its balance of protein and fat, not to mention its facility for segueing from one cuisine to another. Do not say “banana” as they are “the first to go missing in a crisis.” Participants are also taught an obscene rhyme in order to remember how to tie the perfect Windsor Knot and led through a strange series of actions to find their totem animal. Last but not least, they close their eyes and vote on each other’s performance.
There are some amusing moments and the premise has real potential, but it isn’t completely fulfilled here. On the night I attend, the elite club members are oddly acquiescent, to the point where I was dying for someone to throw a spanner in the works. But the closest anyone got was when one participant refused to grade the others’ performances, instead giving them all a thumbs up. While this may be due to the nature of this particular ‘team,’ I suspect the problem is structural for the rules of workplace and audience participation are basically the same: as audience members we’re aware that we have entered into a contract, that the performers are depending on us and we don’t want to let them down. These are of course exactly the thoughts of hapless employees as they are conned into doing just one more hour of overtime. Thus, even as Applespiel seek to mock the mindless supplicants of the corporate world, they implicitly rely on their audience to behave similarly. There is much more to be mined here and I was reminded of Jon McKenzie’s book Perform or Else! (Routledge, 2001), an elegant exploration of how corporate, technical and theatrical notions of performance intersect. With this in mind, I look forward to undertaking another “performance review” of Applespiel soon.
Nat Randall, Cheer Up Kid
photo Michael Myers
Nat Randall, Cheer Up Kid
While Executive Stress employs a cast of thousands, Cheer Up Kid is the work of just one writer and performer—Natalie Randall. She runs on stage wearing a white t-shirt, black pants and the broad grin of a child who has finally coerced the family into sitting down for a living room show. She briefly outlines the structure of the show, noting however that she is “completely unreliable, with no sense of consistency or consequence.” These words are repeated at the beginning of each section, so that we hear the same phrase recited by different characters, in different accents. In the second section, Randall plays a weird and bad-tempered child, who is prone to swallowing whole bottles of Vitamin C tablets, exaggerating her achievements at the school swimming carnival (winning that little known race, the 300 metres), getting swooped by magpies and secretly eyeing off the twice-cooked pork belly while being made to order the chicken schnitzel. In the third section, Randall plays an American agony aunt who slugs back a bottle of Passion Pop while dispensing advice on air, and in the fourth she plays a lonely Englishman scared his parents might die before he does.
Randall has a warm and generous stage presence, and I really enjoyed her performance in Some Film Museums I Have Known, but here she is let down by the writing, which is somewhat underdone. The characters are interesting as individuals but the connection between them, beyond their origin and juxtaposition, is not necessarily clear. Nevertheless the show, and with it the night, comes to a satisfying end when Randall slices up a “pool cake” (a classic from the Women’s Weekly cookbook) and passes it around—a gesture of generosity and hospitality that seems to encapsulate the theatrical act itself.
Tiny Stadiums Festival: Applespiel, Executive Stress/Corporate Retreat, devisor-performers Simon Binns, Nathan Harrison, Nicole Kennedy, Emma McManus, Joseph Parro, Troy Reid, Rachel Roberts, Mark Rogers; Cheer Up Kid, devisor-performer Nat Randall; PACT, Sydney, May 2-15
Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombs Marr, Eden Falk, Who’s the Best?
photo Heidrun Lohr
Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombs Marr, Eden Falk, Who’s the Best?
who’s the best?—post is
You’ve only got until July 2 to be seduced and wowed by Post’s infectiously delirious Who’s the Best?, commissioned by Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2 Next Stages program. Once again Post raise daggy amateurism to a sublime artform—and with more professional verve than ever (see the review of Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour in RT101). This experiment to determine which of the three collaborators and friends is the best performer employs a range of tests from psychological profiling to assessing who’s the ‘hottest.’ These are constantly complicated or sidetracked by hilariously mind bending battles of the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on first” variety over the semantics of category labels and terminology. They’re adroitly woven through the script, recurring as running gags and providing an immersive pulse to the work. The performers’ casual delivery (always played directly to the audience while they freely insult each other) yields intimacy and immediacy on a stage which wickedly threatens to subvert the show as curtains and lighting go about their own business regardless. Trio member and co-devisor Natalie Rose, who has recently had a child, is replaced for the premiere season by a wigged Eden Falk who slips easily into the Post mode while bringing his own wide-eyed comic innocence to Who’s the Best? alongside Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr. Post, Who’s the Best?, Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Next stage 2011, June 17-July 2, www.sydneytheatre.com.au
Elma Kris, Waangenga Blanco, Daniel Riley McKinley, Belong
photo Jason Capobianco
Elma Kris, Waangenga Blanco, Daniel Riley McKinley, Belong
new works in naidoc week
Next week is NAIDOC week and there are two exciting premieres to look forward to. In Sydney, the PACT Centre for Emerging Artists is presenting Bully Beef Stew, its first ever fully professional commission. Coming out of its Incubate initiative, a performance laboratory for emerging Indigenous artists, Bully Beef Stew features three young Aboriginal men—Sonny Dallas Law, Colin Kinchela and Bjorn Stewart—working with director Andrea James (former artistic director of Melbourne Workers Theatre) and choreographer Kirk Page. Billed as a “fearless theatrical exploration of Aboriginal manhood,” the piece draws on the personal experiences of the performers as well as their fathers and other men in their lives, past and present (press release).
Further north, Stephen and David Page will be premiering ID as part of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s double bill Belong. (Check out the Stephen Page archive in RealTimeDance.) This new work “draws upon Page’s personal experiences of observing contemporary Indigenous people tracing their bloodlines, reconnecting with their traditional heritage and living modern lives in a challenging urban society” (press release). The second new work of the evening, About, comes from emerging choreographer Elma Kris. The rise of Kris, Daniel Riley McKinley (RT98) and Vicki Van Hout (RT104) makes this an exciting time for contemporary Indigenous dance. The double bill will tour nationally. Bully Beef Stew, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, June 29-July 9; www.pact.net.au; Bangarra Dance Theatre, Belong—ID and About, QPAC, July 1-9, then touring to Sydney, July 20-Aug 20, Perth, Aug 25-28, Canberra, Sept 2-3, Wollongong, Sept 8-10, Melbourne, Sept 15-24; www.qpac.com.au, www.bangarra.com.au
The Lost Thing
image courtesy of the artist
The Lost Thing
the lost thing found at the powerhouse
Still in Queensland, and just in time for the school holidays, the Brisbane Powerhouse presents Shaun Tan: The Art of the Story, a free exhibition showcasing the art of the Academy Award winner and children’s illustrator. On display will be limited edition prints of illustrations from his books The Rabbits, The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival (we reviewed Red Leap theatre’s adaptation of The Arrival in RT94). The exhibition also features the film version of The Lost Thing, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Short Animation as well as last year’s Yoram Gross Animation Award at the Sydney Film Festival (RT98). Shaun Tan: The Art of Story; June 28-July 10; www.brisbanepowerhouse.org
underbelly
In the wake of Imperial Panda (reviewed in our last e-dition) and Tiny Stadiums (reviewed in this one), comes another Sydney-based arts festival—Underbelly (see the interview with director Imogen Semmler in RT103). Previously staged at CarriageWorks (RT80) and Queen St Studios and surrounds in Chippendale, this year the festival heads to Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. The festival proper is on for only one day, on Saturday July 16, but a 10-day preliminary program, The Lab, allows audiences to visit during the development period so they can watch the art unfold that’s been developing for several weeks. If you’re feeling particularly participatory, you can attend an Open Project session and contribute to the development of an anthropological experiment Case Study, Butterfries’ haunted-house inspired The All You Can Stand Buffet and Dan Koop’s The Stream/The Boat/The Shore/The Bridge, a human-scale board game in which the audience are the players. Underbelly Arts Festival, July 3-12, www.underbellyarts.com.au
Dave Brown (aka candlesnuffer), Liquid Architecture
photo courtesy of the artist
Dave Brown (aka candlesnuffer), Liquid Architecture
sound flows
For more than a decade, the Liquid Architecture: National Festival of Sound Art has showcased the best of the world of sound art (see our Archive Highlight).This year’s program includes artists Marc Behrens (Germany) who is bringing with him sounds from China and the Amazon rainforest, Pascal Battus (France) who shapes his instruments to match his body gestures and insists on offering the occasional “sound massage” and Lukas Simonis (Netherlands), who in collaboration with Melbourne’s Dave Brown, will display his mastery of guitar improvisation. They are joined by Australians Pia van Gelder, with her own electrical inventions, plus Jon Rose and his ‘Team Music’ live interactive netball game. The festival has already kicked off in Melbourne where it continues until July 2 with concerts running simultaneously in Perth (June 27-28), Bendigo (June 29) and Brisbane (July 1). Arriving in Sydney on July 2, Liquid Archtecture will feature two free concerts at the Eugene Goossens Hall in the ABC’s Ultimo Centre, Sydney (no booking required) and Battus’ Sound Massages on July 3. If you can’t be there in person, you can hear the performance broadcast that night on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late. Liquid Architecture: National Festival of Sound Art, June 27-July 3; www.liquidarchitecture.org.au; www.abc.net.au/classic/newmusic
Show and Tell
scenes from the arab spring
Since last year’s Arab Film Festival, there have been revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, a civil war in Libya, uprisings in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, major protests in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and Oman and minor protests in Kuwait, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. In other words, it’s a time of incredible change. Now in its 10th year (see our reviews from 2007 and 2010), this year’s Arab Film Festival presents 22 “front-line stories” from around the region, many of which have been presented at recent festivals in Cannes, Dubai, Berlin and Sundance. Highlights include Sarkhat Namla (The Cry of an Ant), the first feature film to address the Egyptian Revolution this year; Stray Bullet, which features Lebanese actress Nadine Labaki in her first role since the internationally acclaimed Caramel; and Into the Belly of the Whale, where we follow a man trapped in the supply tunnels under the border zone between Israel and Egypt. Local films include Mary, a story of neighbourly espionage in Western Sydney, and Show and Tell which examines the link between object and memory of recently arrived refugees in Sydney. There’s also a forum on July 1 titled Revolution, Romance, Realities, which will address “how new media has facilitated a critical mass movement, amplifying everyday voices, transmitting images globally” (press release). Speakers include Dr Paula Abood, Randa Abdel Fattah, Farid Farid and Sameh Abdel Aziz. The festival will then tour to state capitals. 2011 Arab Film Festival, Sydney June 30-July 3, Melbourne July 8-10, Canberra July 14-17, Adelaide July 23-24, Brisbane July 30-31; www.arabfilmfestival.com.au
life after death in venice
In our most recent print edition, we interviewed Anna Teresa Scheer about the work of Christoph Schlingensief (RT103). Schlingensief died of cancer in August 2010 at the age of 49, but a few months prior curator Susanne Gaensheimer had approached him to design the German Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Instead of abandoning the project completely, or attempting to realise it exactly as the artist had imagined, Gaensheimer chose a middle path, presenting Schlingensief’s plans in book form ahead of the event and then using the event itself to show a selection of his works, without attempting a retrospective. She was rewarded for her efforts on June 4, when the German Pavilion was presented with the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. You can see the announcement on the Biennale’s YouTube channel, read an interview with Gaesheimer in Deutsche Welle and an interview with Schlingensief’s widow Aino Laberenz in Der Spigel. For footage of the pavilion itself, see Vernissage, the official website Deutscher Pavilion and Schlingensief’s own personal website.
Vernon Ah Kee, Ideas of Barak 2011 Brisbane, Queensland charcoal on canvas, video installation, Felton Bequest 2011
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MARKED ITS 150TH BIRTHDAY IN MAY. IN ADDITION TO THE OCCASION’S DOMINANT NARRATIVE CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA’S OLDEST PUBLIC ART GALLERY, THE NGV ALSO USED ITS MILESTONE TO ENGAGE WITH AND FACILITATE BROADER REMEMBRANCE OF ONE OF VICTORIA’S MOST IMPORTANT ARTISTIC AND HISTORICAL FIGURES—WILLIAM BARAK. THROUGH A SERIES OF COMMISSIONS AT NGV’S IAN POTTER CENTRE, THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF THE WURUNDJERI LEADER HAS BEEN PROMINENTLY RE-PRESENTED AND RE-IMAGINED.
Barak’s life (c1824-1903) encompassed a period of intense change and trauma for his people. As a boy he was present at the signing of the 1835 Treaty between members of the Kulin people and John Batman, and as ngurungaeta (clan leader), Barak was a skilled diplomat and politician. He would famously walk from Coranderrk (near Healesville) to Melbourne to negotiate and fight for the rights and living conditions of his people—devastated and immeasurably changed after Batman’s treaty (see Bruce Pascoe, How It Starts, First Australians, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008). His legacy as an artist is also vitally important; towards the end of his life Barak produced a number of intricate works on paper that documented the traditions of the Wurundjeri people, ensuring that knowledge of this culture would be preserved and continued for future generations.
Despite the influence and impressive reputation of this Aboriginal leader, the cultural memory of Barak amongst Melbournians and Victorians remains limited. I first learnt about him at the NGV seeing his paintings on display in the Indigenous Galleries. Three new commissions on display by contemporary artists Vernon Ah Kee, Brook Andrew and Jonathan Jones represent an important opportunity to further ingrain the name and story of Barak into the national consciousness and cultural memory.
Brook Andrew, born Australia 1970, Marks and Witness: A Lined Crossing in Tribute to William Barak, 2011 Melbourne, Victoria
vinyl wall drawing, neon
Felton Bequest 2011
image courtesy of the artist and NGV Australia
Brook Andrew, born Australia 1970, Marks and Witness: A Lined Crossing in Tribute to William Barak, 2011 Melbourne, Victoria
vinyl wall drawing, neon
Felton Bequest 2011
brook andrew
Brook Andrew’s commission Marks and Witness: A Lined Crossing in Tribute to William Barak is a site-specific work installed in the Ian Potter Centre’s atrium. The recurrent Wiradjuri designs and neon stretch up multiple levels, offering an overwhelming and dizzying entrance to a space which is already monumental in its architecture. Like previous works such as Jumping Castle War Memorial (2010), there is an ironic tension in Andrew’s commission. Contrasting the connotations of formality and permanence in the memorialising process with an ironic and playful interpretation, it eschews the representational mode, offering instead an immersive and experiential form of memorial. It also possesses a sense of the ephemeral, a spectacle that may not be on display indefinitely, thus drawing attention to the relative lack of formal and prominent sites of remembrance dedicated to Indigenous histories and heroes.
Jonathan Jones, Untitled (muyan)
2011 Sydney, New South Wales
light emitting diodes (LEDs), glass, aluminum
Felton Bequest 2011
jonathan jones
While some historical narratives emphasise the individualistic nature of heroism, Barak’s legacy as leader and artist is fundamentally entwined with the culture of his community. Joy Murphy Wandin, a senior Wurundjeri woman and descendent of Barak, explains the role of the ngurungaeta as those who “take on the responsibility for the entire community” (cited in Pascoe). Thus Barak’s paintings of Wurundjeri ceremonies are not just works by an individual artist, they also reveal the communal practices and celebrations of his people and Jonathan Jones’ commission Untitled (muyan) is inspired by and suggestive of this tradition.
Jones’ piece is composed of five LED illuminated glass light-boxes installed in a large stairwell of the gallery. Arranged into two groupings, it symbolises the two fires seen in Barak’s paintings, one for the Wurundjeri and another for visitors and guests. The white LED lights of the installation will annually turn yellow in August, signifying the blooming of the muyan (wattle), the time of year that Barak had predicted for his own death. Imbuing his piece with this temporality, Jones evokes a subtle sense of ritual and offers a visual cue to viewers, a possible catalyst for further visits and commemoration.
vernon ah kee
When presenting and documenting history, modes of representation and sources of information—history books, museum exhibits, documentary films—are generally positioned through the lens of authority and expertise. Vernon Ah Kee’s work Ideas of Barak is perhaps the most dense of the three commissions in terms of the level of historical information and context provided, however it resists didacticism by acknowledging the complexities and contradictions inherent in historical representation.
The piece consists of three components: a charcoal portrait of William Barak; a single channel video of the artist exploring and discussing Barak’s life and country; and a five channel video featuring a variety of individuals speaking about their personal ideas of Barak. Rather than offering a singular narrative, Ideas of Barak is constructed around fragments, impressions, imaginings, contradictions, musings, opinions and convergences. Some of the individuals acknowledge not knowing a great deal about Barak’s life—they are neither historians nor experts—yet each makes a personal and present-day connection with this figure. The artwork acknowledges that individuals do not need an encyclopaedic knowledge of history in order to be moved by its narratives and figures, and to play a role in their remembrance. While history might attempt to create linear narratives, memory often encompasses the fragments, fantasies and imaginations of individuals and cultures.
beyond the gallery
Last year, property developers Grocon announced plans to build an apartment building featuring a 32-storey portrait of Barak on its façade (see the plans and an article from The Age), meaning that Melbourne may well find itself with a prominent and permanent public memorial to this Aboriginal hero. However, we must not assume that any single act of remembrance, no matter how visible, marks an end to the memory-work. Cultural memory is an ever shifting and evolving realm, and the NGV’s commissions will hopefully be but one level of an ongoing, multi-layered dialogue that continues to foreground the legacy of William Barak in the consciousness of the Australian public.
The Barak Commissions: Brook Andrew, Marks and Witness: A Lined Crossing in Tribute to William Barak; Jonathan Jones, Untitled (muyan); Vernon Ah Kee, Ideas of Barak; The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, www.ngv.vic.gov.au
This article first appeared in the June 28 e-dition.
Naples 2011, Donna Marcus, found aluminium (detail), NOW and WHEN: Australian Urbanism
courtesy the artist and dianne tanzer gallery + projects
Naples 2011, Donna Marcus, found aluminium (detail), NOW and WHEN: Australian Urbanism
“We are called on to be the architects of the future, not its victims,” Buckminster Fuller once insisted. His words are an apt reminder of the rising public passion now for the re-casting of cities to improve access, health and the environment. Alternatively, we could become the artists of the future. There’s plenty of evidence in this, The Future City edition of RealTime, where we report on artists, often in collaboration with the public and working in public spaces, altering our perception of the city, recasting it as gallery and performance arena, communal meeting place and green environment. Our stories range from a gardening project in an art school (Tending) to re-workings of the city (Right to the City) and pragmatic and fantastical cities of the future (NOW and WHEN). Dancers re-cast Perth (Tongues of Stone). An artist and the community transform a city centre south of Sydney with video works and a performative installation (The Begin-Again). Performers place their audience inside a cardboard Manila in Sydney’s West in Within & Without (p2). An artist creates a site-listening guide to greater Brisbane. Visiting Irish/UK artists Desperate Optimists show their film Tiong Bahru in which Singaporean locals enact the tensions and pleasures of their lives. In Birmingham UK, artists in the Fierce festival inventively take on the city. On this page, Gold Coast artist Donna Marcus, in an adjunct exhibition to NOW and WHEN, reflects on the architectural layering and historical aura of Naples using found aluminium cook-ware. And, in the first of our Burning Issue features, you can read how the late German theatre provocateur Christoph Schlingensief made cities politically performative.
The Oceanic City, Arup, team members Alanna Howe, Alexander Hesp
image FloodSlicer
The Oceanic City, Arup, team members Alanna Howe, Alexander Hesp
NOW AND WHEN: AUSTRALIAN URBANISM IS NOT YOUR TYPICAL EXHIBITION FARE. RATHER IT’S ARCHITECTURE AS POETRY, COMBINING THREE-DIMENSIONAL MOVING IMAGE, SOUND AND INSTALLATION. AS A CONVERSATIONAL CATALYST, A 16-MINUTE FILM HOUSED WITHIN THE EXHIBITION, DESCRIBES THE URBAN DENSITY AND ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY FACING AUSTRALIA, AND HOW THESE MAY INFORM HYPOTHETICAL (IF NOT HYPERREAL) VISIONS OF URBAN EXISTENCE 50 YEARS FROM NOW, AND BEYOND.
NOW and WHEN is creatively directed by John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec, realised in 3D by Floodslicer and commissioned by Janet Holmes à Court. Launching at last year’s prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale, the show attracted an impressive 93,000 attendees. The Gold Coast is Australia’s sixth fastest growing city. It is also a metropolis that, in voraciously re-imagining its urban character, also serves to delete whatever is left of its architectural heritage. This is where Now and When makes its Australian debut.
Entering Gold Coast City Gallery, the venue for the show, I immediately feel transported into an otherworldly environment. The cavernous, infinity-like darkness of the space is startling. I find myself transfixed by the way-finding lines that slash across the black-coated walls and onto the floor and glow blaze-orange under ultraviolet lighting. Like traffic cones, they direct me to a stack of hollowed-out orange cubes. Fashioned into a dense cluster, not unlike a downtown city, these cubes tower at varied heights and remind me of the skeletal histories of past buildings, or templates of a future metropolis. Or perhaps they represent the void between people who reside in high-rises, disengaged from the bustling congregation of the ground below. A great screen commands the middle of the space, and 3D glasses (made especially for the show) vine down from the ceiling. I take my place in a scatter of stools and prepare for the eye-ride.
Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia, NOW
photo John Gollings
Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia, NOW
now
The short film starts with prototypical photographs of contemporary Australian landscapes, as documented by John Gollings. Here, vastly deserted mining craters of the western outback are contrasted with the high density eastern cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Surfers Paradise. Ninety three percent of Australia’s population is crammed onto the whiskers of the coastline, or the upward heave of concrete and lights. At the same time, it’s alarming to see colossal craters drilled into Newman and Kalgoorlie to become cityscapes in the distant future.
when
WHEN features 17 immersive, at times overwhelming, multi-dimensional explorations of future cityscapes. Selected from a nationwide competition, various designers and architects aimed to challenge conventions, and liberate themselves from notions of ‘safe’ design.
Multiplicity, John Wardle Architects and
Stefano Boscutti, WHEN
image FoodSlicer
Multiplicity, John Wardle Architects and
Stefano Boscutti, WHEN
At the recent Excellence in Architecture forum, Michael Harrison from City of Sydney asked: “Are cities a kind of grand accident, or can human will be exercised effectively so that city form is a true expression of our highest aspirations?” Aspiration is indeed what comes to mind when viewing snippets of an idealistic, harmonious future. Among the highlights: In Multiplicity (John Wardle Architects and Stefano Boscuitti) Melbourne does not expand further inland, rather it grows up and down. Airspace is utilised to intersect a ‘floating city’ with the existing ‘underground’ metropolis. Featured on this edition’s cover, Mould City (Colony Collective, Melbourne School of Design) explores what Rijavec calls “metropolitan Darwinism,” re-conditioning mould to turn it from a decaying organism into an active harnessing source. The ongoing migration problem in Australia is resolved through gigantic residential biomimetic water-pods in The Ocean City (Arup).
3D
Recently, film critic Robert Ebert chastised 3D films as a waste of filmic experience and an excuse to hike up movie prices. However, I believe that in the circle of architecture, 3D is king. This show portrayed architecture as having the ability to visually stimulate, augment and enchant, to convince audiences they are, for a moment, immersed in another dimension. Urban planners will use this new form of 3D to translate concepts and multifaceted visual narratives, and flattened drawings and models will come to life as environments and encounters.
sound & interactivity
The show’s soundtrack, engineered by T4K, enhances this suspension of disbelief. The score for NOW sounds foreboding, sometimes urgent—often the bass rumbles at my feet, leaving my stool slightly vibrating. I am later told by a gallery staff member that the positioning of the sound system just behind the audience was an intentional request by the Creative Directors. In contrast, WHEN is meditatively ambient, heightening the utopian imagery of a fearless and environment-friendly future city. I stay for repeated viewings, and notice that while a few visitors complain of the sound being too loud, a group of children appears to relish this environment. Their shoulders jump slightly at the sharp, cacophonous parts and they harmoniously ‘whoosh’ around the swirl-sounding scenery of Saturation City (McGauran). Children also seem to sit very close to the projection screens—not so different from watching television up close—but without the restraints of two-dimensional TV screens. This multi-layered experience means they too can be part of the action. The kids start clawing their hands in the air and like cats about to scratch, they ‘catch’ the enormous jelly-fish-like hydro-turbines of The Ocean City and duck down as the glass-like, multi-polar structures of Survival and Resilience pierce the air (BKK Architects, Village Well, Charter Keck Cramer and Daniel Piker).
side-shows
Displayed alongside the film is Then and Now: The Surfers Paradise Re-photography Project, a comparative 2D photographic study of Surfers Paradise from 1973 to present day 2011. I am astounded to see just how much this city is alien to its vintage evidence. As John Gollings laments (Sara Hicks, “A 3D Revolution in Architectural Photography”, ABC Radio 2011), “The problem is there is not a single building left in the photographs that I shot and they’ve moved the road alignments…I want people to understand what’s been lost and what’s been gained by these direct comparisons.” Out on the foyer, Revisiting the City—Naples by Donna Marcus sees an assemblage of aluminium kitchenware depicting the civic uniformity of grid cities. (See Editorial page.)
the 3D book
NOW and WHEN is a blockbuster exhibition supported by a limited edition 3D book, a short documentary and two mini-exhibitions as well as forums and workshops. However, unlike traditional shows seen at much larger, institutional galleries—whereby pre-digested mainstream works from overseas ‘star’ artists are imported—NOW and WHEN is proudly an Australian production, one of fierce creative foresight and technological vigour. And while the urban fabric explored is uniquely Australian, the issues it raises are felt globally.
To encapsulate the experience, the book comes with complimentary 3D paper glasses bringing to life the NOW pages. Like the film, the pages are split between the insipid mining fields and the luminous, dusk-shot city lights. When a colleague perused the 3D sections she shrieked, “This book is giving me vertigo!” She shut the book, thus flattening the pointy skyscrapers that, for a moment, seem to dart off the paper.
And this is inherently what exhibitions should be about, eliciting reaction and pushing boundaries. As an avid exhibition-goer, I feel that NOW and WHEN is one of the most striking shows I have seen in a long while. Someone asked me, “What is an architectural showcase doing in a contemporary art gallery?” There is a saying that an artist can create a square wheel, but an architect must make theirs round. Through NOW and WHEN architects become artists by harnessing creative inceptions to build cities and streetscapes that supersede realistic notions and constraints. This entertaining and spectacular program achieves its aim to create instant impact, to make those wheels square and to leave an impression long after the glasses are taken off.
NOW and WHEN originally appeared in the Australian Pavilion, Venice for the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2010, and is now showing at the Seoul Museum of Art, from April 25-June 26. Versions of the exhibition will appear at Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design, Sydney, July 2-Sept 25 and Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Aug 20-Sept 18.
Australian Institute of Architects, NOW and WHEN: Australian Urbanism, creative directors John Gollings, Ivan Rijavec, 3D visualisation Floodslicer; Gold Coast City Art Gallery, March 26-May 1, www.architecture.com.au
Vince Lemon, Mavis Noakes, Old Man River, video still, Angelica Mesiti, The Begin-Again
AS WE INCREASINGLY ADDRESS THE PLIGHT OF THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT, OUR CONCERNS EXTEND TO CITIES, NOT JUST THEIR POTENTIAL FOR GREENING BUT AS SITES OF HUMAN CO-OPERATION AND CULTURAL SHARING. ONE SUCH VENTURE IS THE C3 WEST PROJECT, A COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE, PENRITH REGIONAL GALLERY AND THE LEWERS BEQUEST, CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE AND COMMERCIAL PARTNERS.
C3 West has extended south to Hurstville with The Begin-Again. Angelica Mesiti, a video, performance and installation artist based in Sydney and Paris, worked intensively with locals to create four video works and a performative installation that could be enjoyed over two nights as you wandered the city centre.
Just outside the railway station on Memorial Square a large screen shows respected senior citizen Vince Lemon sveltely delivering “Old Man River” with an affectingly pronounced Australian accent. Down the main street in a small park by the Bus Exchange, we watch another video projection, intriguingly juxtaposing a driving percussion soundtrack with images of young children in various historical guises joyfully re-constructing the first local railway line and then innocently kicking it apart (a comment it seems on current public transport issues). Despite being dimly projected, the work is enthusiastically received by a large gathering of families.
Kwang Leung, Parking Lot Dragon, Angela Mesiti, The Begin-Again
Kwang Leung, Parking Lot Dragon, Angela Mesiti, The Begin-Again
Down a nearby lane we encounter another screen, this time featuring local ballroom dancers waltzing against a classic TV studio city skyline design. The video is beautifully edited, conveying the charm and confidence of the dancers—another kind of free-floating innocence. Suddenly out of the first night crowd, a popular featured dance pair glide before the screen and execute some deft turns to great applause. Around the corner on an otherwise bland brick wall, Lucinda Liu elegantly performs Water Sleeves, a traditional Chinese dance often shot in medium close-up with orange-red textures to capture the nuances of expression and gesture. At the top of the ramp, there’s something quite different, Parking Lot Dragon—four revving, glammed-up cars (smoke machines sensibly providing the mock exhaust fumes), vividly lit from below and darkly sparkling as their sound systems rumble. Darting and looping between them comes a richly fluorescent day-glo Chinese dragon (mythological but also a local sports mascot) whose increasingly sinuous moves are brilliantly executed.
The Begin-Again is not an epic event, but an intimate one built out of protracted collaboration with locals who become onscreen or live performers. Urban Theatre Projects has long engaged communities in Sydney’s West through an impressive range of performative means, while here The Begin-Again brings together the cinematic inclinations of a visual artist with local issues and passions.
Leo Mak, Tiong Bahru, Civic Life, Singapore, Desperate Optimists (Christine Molloy & Joe Lawlor)
photo Samantha Tio
Leo Mak, Tiong Bahru, Civic Life, Singapore, Desperate Optimists (Christine Molloy & Joe Lawlor)
The UK-Irish pair, Desperate Optimists (Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy), have taken their widely admired Civic Life project to Singapore, creating Tiong Bahru, a seductive 20-minute 35mm cinemascope film (shot by leading Singaporean cinematographer Daniel Low) featuring citizens as performers in a subtle, un-melodramatic account of the everyday tensions and pleasures in their lives. Tiong Bahru Estate, one of the oldest housing estates in Singapore and well known for its architecture and the excellent food of its hawker centre, provides the film’s focus. With the support of 150 locals, the film centres on the lives of four individuals across the course of a day, each faced with the challenge of change. An older woman treasures her home and community, but is pressured to move elsewhere to live with her family. A young man inherits his father’s coffee shop but invites paternal opposition in wanting to transform it into a tapas bar. A difficult teenager adjusts to a new foster mother. And a young schoolgirl struggling with her homework completes it as a story, realised on screen, of a group of children wondering what they should do when they find an abandoned baby in the food centre’s garden.
The film is accompanied by 19 short films made by locals and a booklet with excellent essays about living in Singapore. Desperate Optimists are visiting Australia with screenings of Tiong Bahru and other works in the Civic Life series in Melbourne at ACMI, in the Sydney Film Festival, at Performance Space and a workshop with ICE in Sydney’s West (see websites for dates and times).
Valerie Berry, Within & Without, Performance Space and Blacktown Arts Centre
photo Datu Arellano
Valerie Berry, Within & Without, Performance Space and Blacktown Arts Centre
Also in Sydney’s West is the Blacktown Arts Centre where, thanks to the inventive creators of The Folding Wife (RT79, p35), you could soon find yourself in Manila: “Audiences [will be] immersed in a physical reproduction of the city…made entirely out of recycled cardboard boxes, shadowplay and surround-sound environments” (press release). Within & Without is the creation of Paschal Daantos Berry and Deborah Pollard in collaboration with Valerie Berry and the Anino Shadowplay Collective from the Philippines. The group’s aim is to explore “how capital cities—through their architecture, mythologies and histories—represent and personify the cultural identity of a nation.” But don’t expect a literal approach to the topic from these performance magicians.
C3 West Projects and Within & Without are just two of a growing number of creative ventures that explore our relationship with cities, suburbs and communities. Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Minto:Live was another fascinating example and more will doubtless emerge as the pressures of urban life demand to be addressed through discussion, planning and the engagement offered by art. RT
The Begin-Again, A C3 West Project, MCA and Hurstville City Council, artist Angelica Mesiti, Hurstville, Sydney April 1-2; Civic Life, Tiong Bahru, various venues Melbourne and Sydney; http://civiclifetiongbahru.com/; www.desperateoptimists.com; Blacktown Arts Centre and Performance Space, Within & Without, installation from June 24, 10am-5pm Tues-Sat, performances June 22-July 2, www.artscentre.blacktown.nsw.gov.au
LIVE ART. COLLISION. HYPERLOCAL. SUPERNOW. THESE FOUR CHALLENGES DROVE THE RECENT FIERCE FESTIVAL, A DENSE PROGRAM OF IDEAS THAT INFILTRATED THE CITY OF BIRMINGHAM FOR FIVE DAYS IN MARCH. NEW ARTISTIC DIRECTORS LAURA MCDERMOTT AND HARUN MORRISON’S VISION FOR FIERCE WAS DEEPLY AFFECTING, MOSTLY FOR ITS CLOSE AND CAREFUL CONSIDERATION OF THE FESTIVAL’S RELATIONSHIP TO BIRMINGHAM AS A CITY.
From religion to war, museums to football, architecture, food and micro-local journeys, the program took my hand and gently introduced a place both dirty and profound. A city that—in the words of Andy Field (co-director of the remarkable Forest Fringe)—wears its urban development scars much closer to the surface than other ‘rebranded’ English cities.
March 2011 marked the first Fierce since 2008 and the first without Mark Ball at the helm (Ball is now Artistic Director of the London International Festival of Theatre—LIFT). Like many of their peers around the country, McDermott and Morrison are alumni of Battersea Arts Centre’s extraordinary posse of producers, who establish key collaborations with emerging artists within BAC’s bosom, then go on to present their work in a range of other contexts.
I arrived in Birmingham after a 23-hour flight, one and a half-hour tube ride and two-hour cross-country train. Unshowered, confused and with my eyelids starting to fold inside out, I shared my disorientation on Twitter and immediately received a cheery “Ew! And welcome, see you soon!” from whoever manages Fierce’s account. It was the cheeky first step in unexpected intimacy with the festival’s program and the city of Birmingham itself.
The next morning, eyelids in place, I followed a series of bright yellow ribbons and yellow A4 posters towards the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for Lundahl and Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room. With “headphone art” becoming increasingly ubiquitous and sometimes just plain lazy, it was exciting to encounter the thorough and considered practice of this research-driven performance art duo. Six of us were led through the museum, observing the typical 19th century oil paintings, apricot walls and creaky polished wood floors. Upstairs, we were each given Sannheiser headphones fitted with a tiny MP3 player, and blindfolded. Robbed of sight for the work’s duration, we were led through the gallery while an audio narrative reimagined our journey as one through forests, castles, small tunnels and finally, a long winding staircase at the top of a castle overlooking a hill. A series of imaginative Catherine Wheels followed, as choreography, instruction and technology combined with the intimacy of a stranger’s gentle hand to lead us on a beautiful physical and imaginative journey. The work’s lyric storytelling managed to completely reinvigorate my relationship with this kind of institution. Blindfolds off and headphones returned, I wandered towards the Museum’s exit viewing its paintings and artefacts anew, with an increased physical agency within what is usually perceived as a space of formality and restriction. Symphony of a Missing Room has also been performed in Sweden and Brussels, each new iteration folding a ‘museum’ of previous imagery into the new site-specific work. It’s the kind of sophisticated and innovative live art for which established institutions should be clamouring.
Leaving the Museum, I wandered through Birmingham’s infamous ‘Bull Ring,’ an absurdly large retail complex hit hard with the Bedazzler. I ducked into Moor Street Train Station and found a wooden box: Quarantine’s The Soldier’s Song. As someone staunchly anti-war, this was an important work for me. Disappearing inside the box, I was greeted by a lone microphone and TV screen with six karaoke songs and six profiles of male and female British soldiers currently serving in Afghanistan. Warrant Officer Shaun Kelvin (North Wales) and I sang “Sweet Home Alabama” together—the whole thing. It was fun and silly, poignant and breathtakingly unique—when had I ever before associated troops in Afghanistan with giggling joy? Soldiers sing and dance and laugh and feel awkward too; why had I never considered that before? Through Warrant Officer Kelvin’s booming baritone and my squeaky soprano, the political became intensely and unforgettably personal.
On to the ‘dirty end’ of Birmingham and a talk by performance artist Eitan Buchalter at the Fierce Festival Hub, VIVID. Buchalter’s practice reframes human behaviour through a performance context, offering reflective space within the flow of crowds who are restricted in choice. During the lead-up to Fierce, Buchalter had observed VIVID’s proximity to St Andrew’s Stadium and that on football days thousands of people overflowed the footpath passing the gallery. In Veer, he set up barriers that channelled crowds away from the street, through an empty gallery and out again (now with a token redeemable for a beer at the pub next door). The vacant nature of the space makes clear that the point of this work is not to confront non-gallery goers with art, but to make the flow of crowds itself the subject of artistic inquiry. Responses to this detour ranged from hesitant to oblivious to cautious to nervous, with some even crossing to the other side of the road to avoid such ‘confrontation.’ Buchalter has an elegant commitment to letting go of ‘where’ his work takes place and acknowledges that his gestures may result in art that exists most potently in people’s memories. Participating in his workshop the next day, we discussed the vital importance of process-based performance art being presented to audiences in a manner as fulfilling as the original unique experience of the artist, rather than re-presented. The challenge of ephemerality—and the curse of unsubtle documentation—is something keenly felt in Australian live art and performance circles. I found Buchalter’s perspective persuasive and insightful.
plan b, Narrating Our Lines
photo Briony Campbell
plan b, Narrating Our Lines
Now nearing the end of the day, I jumped into a cab and headed to the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) for Plan B’s performance-cum-lecture Narrating Our Lines. Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers have geo-tracked their daily movements since 2003. From the birth of their daughter to visiting their favourite cafe, the incidental and the unexpected are gathered and examined for habits, tendencies, moods and prejudices. They shared this intimate practice with 12 residents of Birmingham, creating a living map via donated GPS data. After a long day of walking and thinking, it was terrific to sit and contemplate the constellation of Birmingham’s movements as of Wednesday March 23, contrasting my first steps in this strange city with the hyperfamiliar steps of locals.
So from imagined forests to Afghanistan to the micro-local, a day with Fierce proved instructive and insightful. It revealed how vital a festival experience can be when the artistic direction is passionately dedicated to site and place, showcasing a city’s shiny bits as well as the parts it would rather ignore. I wandered from major government-funded venues to ARIs, from decadent retail strips to industrial bohemia, yet Fierce’s sound artistic choices ensured the experience was consistently joyous, filled with curiosity and love for the diversity of Birmingham and its people. The festival was a lovely example of the extraordinary sense of immersion artistic directors can achieve with a program that’s cohesive and multi-faceted, with good clear signage making the journey between shows as full of character as the works themselves.
Working with an 18-month development period and a relatively small group of artists, as an international arts festival Fierce is miles away from the superficial supermarket approach of some million-dollar arts festivals, where the connection between artist, locality and audience is so presumed, so without consideration or care, as to be lost altogether. Festivals must continue to assert their rationale beyond a marketing guide or catering to a collection of people who came last year. In my own practice and in those that inspire me, there exists an attempt at genuine and specific engagement with artists and the audiences who care enough to pay attention.
With curation charged with humble curiosity for the “hyperlocal” and a dedication to openness and possibility that consistently allowed its artists’ works to exist in the “supernow,” Fierce 2011 impacted deeply on the city it sought to explore, the artists within its embrace and the visitors who witnessed it sparkle.
Martie Maguire, Chris Corrigan, Chronicles of Long Kesh
photo courtesy Ten Days on the Island
Martie Maguire, Chris Corrigan, Chronicles of Long Kesh
A BURLY, RUDDY-FACED INMATE STANDS ATOP HIS BED IN HIS SOLITARY CONFINEMENT CELL AND BELLOWS “I’M THE EMM-CEEEEEE, WITH THE PERSONALITEEEEE.” HE GOES ON TO ENCOURAGE HIS FELLOW INMATES OF CELL BLOCK H TO SING, TELL STORIES, TO DO ANYTHING AS LONG AS THEY JOIN HIM ON ‘AIR’ ON HIS RADIO STATION THAT RELIES ONLY ON THE VOLUME OF ANY ONE VOICE AND THE POROSITY OF A CELL. THIS IS OSCAR. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE IRA AND A LONG-TERM INMATE OF LONG KESH AND HE CAN ALSO MAKE A MOTOWN TUNE SPARKLE.
Chronicles of Long Kesh, one of the headline theatre shows of Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island festival, depicts a 30-year period in the Belfast gaol that began in the early 70s when the British government had the authority to intern offenders without sentence. We are witnessing a scene that takes place as this group of inmates hovers on the edge of an historic and tragic decision to launch a rolling series of hunger strikes as a protest against their mistreatment in this institution.
Seven players working with a minimal set of grey, body-length boxes perform the high energy play by Belfast local and ex-IRA member Martin Lynch. The show offers insight into the tempestuous politics of the period, but its focus is squarely on all of the people involved—the IRA, the Loyalists, the prison guards and the families of these people. In a post-show talk Lynch says, “I wanted to write a play that was true to the people I grew up with.” In doing so, he pulls no punches when it comes to depicting the violence and despair of these years in gaol, where hunger strikes were preceded by years of protest. During this time inmates remained naked except for blankets, in solitary cells plastered with their own shit as gaol management withdrew services such as cleaning in an attempt to stop the protests.
What is most surprising is that Chronicles of Long Kesh is funny, perhaps even delightful, despite the content remaining so difficult to digest. Lynch’s key device to achieve this mood is song. While the prisoners may not have sung Motown tunes as Lynch’s players do, it is stories of the galvanising action of singing and talking that inspired this play. Lynch recalls that his generating idea was hearing that Bobby Sands—the first to die on the hunger strikes—recalled the story of Spartacus for his fellow inmates over a three-week period.
Animal Farm, Wild Rice
photo Albert Lim
Animal Farm, Wild Rice
Another high energy show with a serious intent, Animal Farm, directed by Ivan Heng of Singaporean theatre company Wild Rice, manages to be a quirky mash-up of the book by George Orwell, while remaining faithful to the detail of the text. Like Lynch’s show, the scene is established by the players rather than the set, with much of the action simply performed in front of a full height ‘brick’ wall painted with the imposed rules of “Animalism.” An enthusiastic one-man band plays from a raised platform within the orchestra pit. Dressed in colours that offer a nod towards communism and revolution—red, white and grey—the players create the various farmyard animals with sets of signature gestures that allow them to flip between duck, goose, pigeon, pig, cow and horse. It takes a little time to get used to each of the characteristics and hear the text of the play through the stamps, snorts and wing flutters, but the players are remarkably consistent and convincing in their portrayals.
While I was able to come to terms with Lynch’s infusion of humour into the traumas of Long Kesh (feeling I was witnessing a true coping mechanism among those inmates), I could never quite relax into Heng’s wacky portrayal of Orwell’s text. With schmaltzy tunes such as “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, slapstick humour and a generous smattering of pop culture references, the show often felt like a pantomime and yet the serious themes persisted. These opposing directions appeared awkward, although I did muse that I may have seen it with different eyes had I the benefit of a more intimate understanding of the complexities of Singaporean culture.
Ming Wong, still from Life of Imitation
courtesy Ming Wong and Ten Days on the Island
Ming Wong, still from Life of Imitation
Ming Wong: Life of Imitation is a show that offers some insight into an aspect of Singapore’s culture. Installed at CAST gallery, the show presents a small section of a much larger exhibition taken to the 2009 Venice Biennale. It incorporates several works by Ming Wong in conjunction with an array of artifacts such as film posters from a golden age of cinema in Singapore through the 1950s and 1960s. The most compelling of Ming Wong’s works is Life of Imitation in which two projections, each paired with a large mirror, face each other across the gallery. The artist has recreated a short, emotional excerpt from the 1959 film entitled Life of Imitation, where the same two female characters are played by a rotating series of cross-dressed male actors collectively representing the country’s multicultural mix. The dialogue in the looped scene between a young mixed-race woman and her estranged black mother reveals the moment when the daughter is caught out in her assumed ruse as a white woman. Ming Wong’s interpretation of this film hints at an aspiration to escape the constraints of one’s cultural heritage or any defined role. Once again, I sit on the outside of cultural understanding, but I feel as though this work offers a small window into the Singaporean psyche.
In keeping with a core commitment of the festival to be a statewide event, several productions were staged in regional areas. Minotaur—The Island, the first in a trilogy by Chamber Made Opera, was performed in the Dennes Point Community Hall on Bruny Island. With rich mythological fodder as a base, David Young and Margaret Cameron’s work is an esoteric take on the story of Ariadne lamenting her abandonment by Theseus, whom she saved from the Minotaur. Wearing a series of handbags as hats, the players work with a minimal set and makeshift percussion to tell Ariadne’s story. Their focus is on spoken word, noise and movement and on improvised instrumental music rather than sung text.
While I don’t believe that any art form should be constrained in its reach, I felt disappointed that the ‘opera’ seemed to have been lost in the making of Minotaur—The Island. Small moments of poetic, sung text by Deborah Kayser (Ariadne) were haunting and beautiful, but they were fragments in a work that felt more like a series of experiments in physical theatre, held together loosely by the landmarks of a well-known story—a red thread, a labyrinth, an island. I don’t think I’m mistaken in gauging that the audience was at best puzzled at the conclusion. A major factor in my disappointment—particularly given the eight-hour adventure required to get to the island location and back—was that the work was performed in a bland community hall, rather than two minutes away on a beach or jetty within extraordinary surrounds that may have added resonance to the story. Given Chamber Made is known for playing with context in their performances staged in private living rooms, the choice of venue seemed an odd and perhaps risk-averse decision.
Intension 2011, Craig Walsh (three channel video projection at Franklin Square, Hobart
Intension 2011, Craig Walsh (three channel video projection at Franklin Square, Hobart
A free festival highlight was Digital Odyssey by Craig Walsh, a public work developed as part of his Hobart residency. Located at Franklin Square and on the edge of the wharf in Sullivan’s Cove, the artworks brought the space of the tree canopy and the water surface to life using projections. The Franklin Square location was the most successful as large video projections of young faces were cast onto the canopy of several trees surrounding the public space. The mapping of light created the illusion that the trees had been trimmed, or had grown into the shape of the faces and I was not alone in finding it mesmerising to stare into the ‘eyes’ of this silent, blinking and seemingly benevolent vegetation.
There is ongoing talk within the local arts community about the festival and its direction. This year’s Ten Days felt like a series of isolated performances rather than a cohesive, transformative event, which is partly to do with the selection of shows but also the unfortunate circumstance of decreased funding. The Ten Days team, to their credit, has continued to battle on in increasingly difficult financial circumstances, but in light of newer festivals in the state such as MONA FOMA, which has quickly become a summer highlight in Hobart as well as Junction Arts Festival in Launceston, it does seem as though a significant rethink is needed. Perhaps we don’t need a statewide festival any more. Perhaps a permanent theme of ‘islands’ is limiting to potential content. And maybe one reason why we all love MONA FOMA so much is that it’s a festival that is not tangled up in defining Tasmania’s identity or battling with the impression of being the poorer cousin to Melbourne or Sydney, yet in the act of ignoring these issues positively contributes to the redefinition of this place.
Chronicles of Long Kesh, writer Martin Lynch, directors Lisa May, Martin Lynch, musical director Paul Boyd, Green Shoot Productions, Hobart Theatre Royal, March 30-April 3; Wild Rice, Animal Farm, director, designer, choreography Ivan Heng, George Orwell’s novel adapted by Ian Wooldridge, composer Philip Tan, Hobart Theatre Royal, March 25-29; Ming Wong Life of Imitation, artist Ming Wong, curator Tang Fu Kuen, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST), March 24-April 24; Chamber Made Opera, Minotaur—The Island, composer David Young, writer, director Margaret Cameron; Digital Odyssey, artist Craig Walsh; Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania, March 25-April 3
dancer with David Dingala’s group from Groote Eylandt, Mahbilil Festival
photo Dominic O’Brien
dancer with David Dingala’s group from Groote Eylandt, Mahbilil Festival
DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER ANDRISH SAINT-CLARE HAS MADE JABIRU’S MAHBILIL FESTIVAL A DISTINCTIVE CULTURAL EVENT IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY, WITH ITS INNOVATIVE INSTALLATIONS, PERFORMANCES AND FAMILY-ORIENTED APPEAL. FOR 2011 HE’S BEEN INVITED TO BE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE FAMOUS GARMA FESTIVAL AS WELL, A QUITE DIFFERENT EVENT BUT WITH SOME IMPORTANT SHARED PRIORITIES, NOT LEAST FOR YOUNG INDIGENOUS ARTISTS. I ASKED SAINT-CLARE ABOUT HIS BACKGROUND AND HIS APPROACH TO EACH OF THE FESTIVALS.
What is your background as an artist and producer?
My mother collected and illustrated folk songs and tales when I was a small child and also forced me to study the cello, which I got good at. Later after the difficult years as a dislocated and deprived teenager looking for an Australian identity, I started to meet and work with artists, musicians, filmmakers and became a member of a seminal theatre group, The Performance Syndicate, led by Rex Cramphorn which was devoted to realising a new performance language that paid homage to our Asian geography.
This early period involved various excursions from Khatakali to Kabuki to Martha Graham, writing for radio, learning film editing at ABC TV, composing on an Atari and tutoring for NAISDA, doing all manner of things as an arts worker and performer. Then after abandoning the arts for a decade or more I was invited back to compose for a ballet by Kim Walker about the life of Aboriginal opera singer Harold Blair.
A couple of years later I decided to abandon city life and settled in the Northern Territory and spent a lot of my time in remote communities creating and devising performance works with the people there. On Elcho Island I found an opportunity to create a work about the contact history of Yolngu people from North East Arnhem Land and the so called Macassans from the island of Sulawesi in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The resulting large-scale stage work Trepang was widely appreciated and has been written up in various books and articles.
Trepang was followed up by another large live performance work for the stage called Fire Fire Burning Bright about a massacre of Aboriginal people in the Kimberleys around the closing stages of the First World War. The work was performed by Gija and Mirrawong speaking people at the Quarry for the Perth International Arts Festival and at the Arts Centre’s State Theatre for the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
After this period, finding it increasingly difficult to raise funds for large stage work, I found myself more and more involved with community cultural development projects including producing festivals.
Why your particular and enduring engagement with Indigenous cultures?
I have a refugee background and had considerable racist experience when I first arrived in Australia as a child. This continued in lesser ways of discrimination for many years and added to this were the very distressing stories my mother related to me about the war years in eastern Europe, which included the murder of several relatives and the scattering and dispossession of my family. All this led me to have great sympathy for the lot of Aboriginal people when I finally met and made friends with some as a young adult.
From these roots and the sometimes lengthy travels I undertook to places in South America, North Africa and Indonesia set me on the road to a fascination with Indigenous people and cultural studies. Of course, as one matures and illusions dissipate, it becomes untenable to apply attitudes of ‘study’ to the many Indigenous people who have become personal friends and family.
Yawk Yawk figures by Techy Masero after bark paintings of local totem figures. Lotuses by Conor Fox open to release illuminated balloons
photo Dominic O’Brien
Yawk Yawk figures by Techy Masero after bark paintings of local totem figures. Lotuses by Conor Fox open to release illuminated balloons
How long have you been working with the Mahbilil Festival and what is its particular character and appeal?
Originally I was asked to do a cultural mapping of the area around Jabiru by a mining company looking to develop small business with Bininj people in 2004, but ended up being asked to take over the Jabiru Wind Festival by Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation and change it to a more Indigenous event, which I did successfully. In 2009 I was again invited back to reverse a slide in the quality and direction of the festival and again made it largely about local and regional Indigenous culture with a youth focus.
Having worked on a number of regional festivals I generally look for what is unique in local characteristics and resources. Jabiru is a mining town with a mixed population of Indigenous and multicultural backgrounds so I thought it would be good to reflect this diversity, something that is rare in the remote and regional festivals of the Northern Territory. The town is also situated in the midst of a vast wetland full of birds, buffalo, barramundi and so forth, so we have instituted a magpie goose cooking competition for instance, judged by chefs from Cooinda and the Gagaju Crocodile Hotel. Magpie geese are delicious to eat and there is no place else in Australia really that you can get a taste of this bird. We also feature large earth oven cuisine where buffalo is cooked in maleluca bark and spiced with local native herbs.
The festival site is also in a park next to a lake, so on a laid back family afternoon you can eat, shop for artefacts, watch Aboriginal artists weaving and painting and let your kids go on free water slides and dodgem cars and enter spear throwing and didgeridoo blowing competitions. Then you can marvel at the magical installations on the water in the fading sunset.
This part of the festival is all about art and multimedia. The installations are based on local Indigenous mythological figures, the use of which has been approved by the local elders and are interwoven with soundscapes and, when possible, traditional dance. In 2009 we created large, illuminated mobile puppets mounted on boats that appeared like creatures from another world. Last year we installed five-metre tall Yawk Yawk figures, the Bininj “mermaids” on the lake. These were surrounded by gigantic lotus buds that opened to reveal illuminated balloons that floated up into the starry darkness like mermaid eggs.
The final part of the festival is devoted to the concert stage. Here we have all manner of bands from Indigenous groups such as Narbalek to funk and rock from the night spots of Darwin interleaved with dance performances that have included Maori poi, Balinese, Congolese, traditional performance from Groote Eylandt, Oenpelli and hip hop. Simply put, the festival caters to family, art and entertainment with a broad, eclectic programming mostly absent from the other festivals.
Gary Lang’s group, Goose Lagoon
photo Dominic O’Brien
Gary Lang’s group, Goose Lagoon
What do you feel you’ve achieved with Mahbilil?
Mahbilil is devoted to winning hearts and minds in the town and celebrating our communality. The festival has certainly achieved this and virtually everyone living there comes out to enjoy the sights and activities. Local attendance has also increased since we discontinued alcohol being served on site. We also have an increasing number of visitors to the extent that you have to book way ahead for accommodation in the town.
Beyond this, the festival is about showcasing what is going on, especially for children and youth. The Kakadu Youth Centre for example runs many after-school workshops where the young learn to make videos, train in music, songwriting, dance, gymnastics and various other arts and crafts. There are also extensive collaborations with the Jabiru Area School that tend to go into overdrive a few weeks before the festival. By now I feel that we have achieved a unique festival that is contributing cohesion and pride to the life of the town. For the first time last year we were asked to expand the festival with sporting events and we’re working on a parade, which will hopefully display floats and marching groups contributed by the organisations and businesses in the region.
Garma is already well defined, not least as an ideas and issues festival. How did you come to it and what do you wish to do with it in terms of continuity and new directions, if any?
There was nothing special about how I came to Garma. In early 2010 there was a change of administration at the Yothu Yindi Foundation, which runs Garma under the guidance of a Yolngu steering committee. I was asked if I wanted to direct the festival. I said no straight away, as I didn’t think I had enough time available to do the amount of work it would take and I was also uncomfortable with the idea that a non-Indigenous person should be the director, even though there had never been an Indigenous director before. I could not think of a Yolngu who had the training, experience or willingness to take it on, so I recommended Rhoda Roberts, whose Dreaming Festival I had attended a couple of times. A short while later I was rung again and asked if I could handle producing some part of the festival at least and I ended up agreeing to do the Bunggul, the traditional performance section, which was put on every afternoon. I basically accepted because I had been working with Bininj in central Arnhem Land for the past two years and this was an opportunity to get back together with my Yolngu friends and do things together. As well, Rhoda’s production team were all southerners, so they had no one else who knew the elders in the various communities to negotiate with to bring their teams to Garma.
Early this year, things had moved on again and I was asked to be the artistic director, as well as carry out many of the other directorial jobs. I thought that within the steering committee’s guidelines I could perhaps try to change a few small things in the proven formula and provide a situation which might be both more supportive of local talent while being more open to presenting contemporary culture from the Yolngu communities. I was also aware from many of my younger colleagues ‘down south’ that Garma was unknown to most of their generation, yet here it is, the most significant Indigenous festival in Australia.
As you say, Garma programming has been well defined for a dozen years, so it is not something which can be easily toyed with. Many important people from traditional leaders to industrialists to politicians and academics attend the key forum lectures and discussions, nor are the exhibitions and performance-oriented activities devoid of representational significance or statement of values and status. There are however gradual steps which need to be taken to keep proceedings open to voices and influences that maintain currency as well as cultural integrity.
Garma is essentially an Indigenous bush festival, not a pop extravaganza. We do not strive to showcase established and well-publicised artists, but find it more valuable to present incredible talents found in the communities who may not have had the advantages of promotional opportunities found in cities. There are sweet and powerful singers as good as any in the city and these may be seen at the 2011 Garma Festival. What is more, we are negotiating a deeper and more extensive set of Bunggul or ceremonial dance performances than perhaps anywhere in Australia.
Finally we have also identified some extra time in the daily regime allowing for the presentation of contemporary performances that combine traditional dance with, for instance, a contemporary band rendition of manikay or song. This is the living culture that youth are experimenting with in their communities. They get almost no government support and the commercial world is thousands of kilometres away, so Garma is one of the rare opportunities for them to reveal their work.
Garma Festival, North-East Arnhem Land, Aug 5-8, www.garmafestival.com.au; Mahbilil Festival, Jabiru, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Sept 10
RealTime issue #103 June-July 2011 pg. 10
Beck Cole on the set of Her I Am with Shai Pittman
photo Sam Oster
Beck Cole on the set of Her I Am with Shai Pittman
CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF INDIGENOUS LIFE OFTEN SEEM TO DWELL UPON THE TRAGIC ASPECTS OF THE PAST, THE OVERPOWERING WEIGHT OF A TRAUMATIC HISTORY OBSCURING ONGOING EFFORTS TO IMPROVE LIFE IN THE PRESENT. WHILE POWERFUL AND CONFRONTING FILMS HAVE BEEN MADE ON THE ONGOING DISINTEGRATION OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES IN REMOTE AREAS, STORIES DEALING WITH THE EXPERIENCES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN URBAN AREAS ARE RARELY, IF EVER, TOLD. WITH HER DEBUT FEATURE HERE I AM, WRITER-DIRECTOR BECK COLE HAS BROKEN THIS MOULD, CONSTRUCTING A QUIETLY ENGROSSING PORTRAIT OF CITY LIFE FOR INDIGENOUS WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA THAT IS IMBUED WITH GENTLE HUMOUR AND A THOUGHTFUL AND UNASSUMING OPTIMISM.
Here I Am follows the struggles of Karen Burden (Shai Pittman) in her attempts to turn her life around on being released from prison. Desperate to regain custody of her young daughter Rosie (Quinaiha Scott) from her unforgiving mother Lois (Marcia Langton) while persuading the authorities that she’s put her drug-addled past behind her, Karen enters a women’s shelter run by the formidable Big Red (Vanessa Worrall), settling into the emotional hard work of straightening out her life.
Working from her own script, Cole’s film illuminates the reality of a “fairly common experience” through a simple but effective naturalistic style that allows her to lay bare the human story behind the statistics. “Karen comes from me really,” she says, “my experience and what concerns me and the things that I think Aboriginal women experience…There is a disproportionate number of Indigenous women in prison in this country, that’s a fact…You’re making a film that you hope will engage an audience, because everyone’s got a mother, most people are parents at some point in their lives, so it’s dealing with universal themes. But it is also taking you into a world where you (probably) haven’t been before, one that really exists.”
In this film, Beck Cole draws on her experience making documentaries—her previous work includes Making Samson & Delilah (2009) as well as the brilliant SBS series First Australians (2008) with Rachel Perkins—and the half-hour drama Plains Empty (2005), which also followed the experiences of a lone woman. Cole shot Here I Am on location in the “familiar territory” of Port Adelaide (her upbringing being punctuated by regular moves between Alice Springs and South Australia) to lend the film an inimitable aura of realism. “We were in that world all the time,” she comments, “it was a really good grounding, a reality check, to be making a story amongst it…we were really welcome there. [Adelaide’s] like a big country town, really laid back.”
Immaculately shot amongst cheap motels, decaying industrial infrastructure and cigarette-butt littered streets by director of photography (and Cole’s husband) Warwick Thornton, Here I Am is grounded by an extraordinary performance from Shai Pittman, who approached her task with similar energy and persistence to her director. “I love doing this style of work,” she enthuses. “I suppose being an actor you’ve got to be quite open to diverse, different people…Karen was really easy to relate to. There were times when I just thought, okay, this is a test…[but] I did it all, never questioned it.” Says Cole, “Shai was completely and utterly fearless.”
Karen’s story plays out against the backdrop of the women’s shelter, the makeshift camaraderie among the residents leavening the desolation that continually threatens to overwhelm her. As Cole notes, “it’s important to have a laugh in dire situations.” As well as giving roles to theatre veterans Betty Sumner and Pauline Whyman, Cole drew on predominantly Indigenous, non-professional actors from the local community in casting the supporting roles, their efforts adding to the film’s raw honesty. “I like to try and find the heart in people, get them to express that,” explains Cole, “but when you’re putting words in their mouths you’re dealing with something else, it’s a different scenario…It was challenging, and I think it’s just something that you’ve got to embrace and look for those little quirky moments…That’s what I like. I think you can tell when there’s that essence of that person’s heart in that moment on screen.”
Indeed, the roles of many of the institutional figures encountered by Karen—her parole officer, a job-seeking coordinator, a child welfare officer—are played by Indigenous women who hold similar positions off-screen, a decision that Cole believes reflects an encouraging trend in reality. “I’ve got loads of friends who work in those sorts of jobs…Women are in these jobs, right across the country. I think it’s a statement about employment, a statement about taking control of your own destiny and getting to change things for the better—you’ve gotta get in there and work from within. It’s not rocket science.”
Which doesn’t mean it’s easy. Against Pittman’s smudged and battered Karen, Cole sets the stony and unrelenting figure of Lois, who has achieved a position of stability through hard, repetitive but essentially restorative labour—she is employed, significantly, as a cleaner. Langton, a renowned academic and social activist, was by all accounts an inspiration on set, reading Senate Notes between takes—when not on Facebook. “She’s very strong,” says Pittman. “She reminds me of Indigenous mothers and grandmothers these days [who are] just like her; she’s strong like that. It was just like having my grandmother on set, or my mum.”
Much of the emotional power of the film comes from the ultimate reassertion of Karen’s individual dignity and sense of self-worth against the contemptuous judgement of her mother and society at large. In a remarkable scene towards the end of the film, she takes a shower, a simple symbolic act shot with uncomplicated grace. “I reckon you can forgive,” Cole muses, “…[but] the thing that is really hard to shake is shame…When I was thinking about Karen I was thinking: how do you get over the shame of neglecting a child? Because that is mega-shame. How do you forgive yourself for that? You can’t, all you can do is try to forget it—and you can’t do that either…It’s a hard question.”
A willingness to confront hard questions seems to lie at the heart of Cole’s filmmaking. As with other contemporary Indigenous filmmakers such as Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds and more recently Toomelah) or Thornton (Samson & Delilah), Cole has received immense support from the Indigenous Branch of Screen Australia who recognise the importance of talented Indigenous storytellers sharing their stories. “I think there’s…an important place for films like [Rolf de Heer’s] The Tracker (2002) and others,” says Cole, “the more the merrier—the history of this country being told from all its perspectives is an important thing. But the reason why there’s a lot of support for films made by Aboriginal people about Aboriginal people has been largely I think due to a commitment by Screen Australia and its Indigenous Branch… it’s been strategic I think, and it’s great that there’s been such a high calibre of films released. It’s no longer this bullshit ooga-booga blackfella sort of stuff. These are stories that audiences can sink their teeth into and enjoy. That’s all you want for someone who’s paying 15 bucks to see a film…Now there’s more of a push to get the next group of people through, to keep this momentum up. It’s an exciting time to be a filmmaker in this country—particularly an Aboriginal one.”
Here I Am, writer, director Beck Cole, director of photography Warwick Thornton, producer Kath Shelper, Scarlett Pictures, 91mins, 2011
AT THE FILMART MARKET THAT ACCOMPANIES THE HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (HKIFF), THIS YEAR THE TALK WAS ALL OF THE RISE OF CHINESE CINEMA AND WHETHER WE WERE SEEING A GOLDEN AGE. THE IMMEDIATE RESPONSE TO THIS QUESTION WAS A RESOUNDING YES, WITH THE BOX OFFICE ROCKETING PAST 10 BILLION RENMINBI ($A1.45B) AND A RECORD NUMBER OF FILMS PRODUCED LAST YEAR.
This represents hefty growth, but the longer the panellists tried to talk up China, the more the doubts started to emerge. China’s box office still doesn’t represent such a great advance on Australia’s $1.1 billion, and it seems there are only 20 million active cinema-goers in China. Other revenue sources such as video, television and the internet remain sadly underdeveloped and, worst yet, of the 536 films made in China last year, only 100 got any kind of distribution. While Chinese films still have almost 60% of their domestic market, this is attributable to a handful of blockbusters.
A lot of films are being made throughout East Asia right now. The most interesting are shot cheaply on digital video, sometimes with seed money from the promotional events that accompany Asian festivals. They go largely unseen within China and the industry folk at FilMart have little interest in them. One of the few places where they mingle is at HKIFF, so it seems an ideal place to sample developments on either side of the Chinese cinema chasm and also to consider the middle ground.
let the bullets fly
The biggest recent hit in Chinese cinema is Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly (2010). This is a remarkable and welcome development, not only because it is a pretty good movie but also because Jiang has shown himself to be a fine filmmaker, one whose last film, The Sun Also Rises, wilfully embraced all the obscurities of art cinema.
The new film is set during the 1920s, a transitional period when China was struggling to move from peasantry to modernity. It is flush with two-fisted automatic pistol action and flashy CGI effects, but succeeds in using digital effects for something more than just spectacle. In fact, spectacle is held in check for moments of flourish, while character interaction is still the main driver. Jiang plays a bandit who starts out simply wanting to make a fortune and ends up achieving something more. There are some clear analogies to the spaghetti western here. The film is a poker game between Jiang and an urbane warlord played by Chow Yun-Fat—two smiling antagonists learning mutual respect even while each plots to kill the other. This battle of wits is all macho co-operation on the surface and simmering animosity beneath it. Somehow, China will take a step forward out of this confrontation, though each of the protagonists will be left behind.
Devils on the Doorstep (2000) showed Jiang to be a fabulous stylist and this latest film demonstrates a confidence and storytelling finesse. It is one of those rare instances where a blockbuster can capture a mass audience’s respect for pleasurable innovation. Significantly, it marks a step away from the overblown, period martial arts fantasies which have weighed down big budget Chinese production for a decade now.
old dog
On the other side of the divide is Old Dog, a cheap, digital feature from Tibetan Pema Tsuden. The story is of a Tibetan mastiff owned by an old man. These dogs are in demand by Chinese businessmen and the old sheepherder is besieged with offers to sell before the dog is stolen. Of course, this is all open to interpretation as an allegory of Tibet’s situation in relation to the Han Chinese. Tibetan culture can provide no place of respite from the demands of the Chinese.
On the other hand, we can also see the dog as simply a dog. There is a resolute refusal to take the easy option by allegorising or sentimentalising the story. The dog is the item of exchange that keeps the narrative going, but it has no name and is never touched or spoken to by its master. Things rarely need to be spoken in this film. One scene is shared between a father and his son who has just been arrested. They say hardly anything but pass a lighter back and forth with an eloquence that speaks loudly.
There is also a lot of spare time in the film: time to show guys playing pool in the street, time to show a herd of cattle pass by. One memorable shot is sustained so that we can watch a sheep stuck on one side of a fence try to get through to rejoin the flock.
Narratives are like bags—you can put a lot of things in them. Pema’s bag has a lot of space in it for wonderful things. The camera is kept back from the action, not to distance you from the characters in the style of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, but to place the characters in their environment. Part of the project of the film is simply to show you what small Tibetan towns are these days, with their mixture of wide, muddy, rubble-strewn streets and cloud-adorned mountains; where trucks and motorcycles share the streets with goats and cattle.
Chongqing Blues
chongqing blues
To be stuck in the middle of the Chinese cinema is an uncomfortable place. Dan Edwards’ accompanying HKIFF piece (p15) touches on the ungainly way that Jia Zhangke is trying to scramble across the divide. A few years ago Wang Xiaoshuai, director of Beijing Bicycle (2000), was grouped together with Jia as one of the key figures of the so-called Sixth Generation. So what if the Fifth Generation was largely a marketing device and that the 6G tag never took off as a label in the broad post-Tiananmen territory of low budget grunge in which filmmakers who were never going to be accepted by the Party made China look like hell on earth.
Fifteen years on, this miserabilist orthodoxy has run out of steam, Wang is no longer a cutting edge figure, but he has a new film, Chongqing Blues (2010). He isn’t a particularly distinctive stylist or social critic, but he is still a solid filmmaker. The film is dominated by Wang Xueqi’s fine, understated performance as Lin, a middle-aged sea captain returning after an absence of 15 years to make peace with his past. The sailor is home from the sea because his estranged son, who hates but loves his absent father, has been gunned down in a hostage-taking standoff.
Like many recent Chinese films, this one addresses the generational gulf in China. Lin shares the problems of millions of migrant workers who have left their families to earn a living, only to find that they have to learn how to be fathers on their return. Wang follows the action in longish handheld takes as the father wanders a city he barely recognises. His son’s crime and death grow out of the way that Chinese youth is poised on a knife-edge between aimlessness and the lure of spurious success.
An epilogue: my HKIFF ended on a strange note with a visit to the HK Film Archive for a screening of the Australian National Film and Sound Archive’s restoration of The Man from Hong Kong (1975). Coming so soon after Mario Andreacchio’s Dragon Pearl and the formation of an Australia-China Film Alliance to try to attach Australian cinema to the coat-tails of the Chinese market, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s delirious mixture of popular film elements seemed especially poignant as a road not taken, and as a nostalgic remembrance of action genre traditions in Australia and Hong Kong that are now, alas, dead. The film is a reminder that there was a brief moment when Australian and Chinese film cultures briefly touched and that bringing them back into alignment remains an elusive quest.
[The renminbi (literally people’s currency ) or the yuan is the official currency in the mainland of the People’s Republic of China. Eds]
Hong Kong International Film Festival, March 20-April 5, 2011, www.hkiff.org.hk
HONG KONG’S INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL EMBODIES ALL THE STRANGE CONTRADICTIONS UNDERLYING CHINA’S DIVIDED CONTEMPORARY CULTURE. ON THE ONE HAND THE CHINESE STATE HELPS PROP UP A FILM INDUSTRY BOOMING IN TERMS OF CINEMA NUMBERS AND BOX OFFICE SALES. ON THE OTHER HAND SOME OF THE NATION’S MOST TALENTED AND POPULAR FILMMAKERS SEE THEIR WORKS DELIBERATELY SHUNTED INTO QUIET SEASONS—JIANG WEN’S LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010) SPRINGS TO MIND, (P14)—TO LEAVE HOLIDAY SEASONS CLEAR FOR SAFER, VACUOUS HISTORICAL BLOCKBUSTERS OR OVERT PROPAGANDA LIKE FOUNDING OF A REPUBLIC (2009; RT94, P21).
Other key contemporary directors like Wang Bing are barely known on the mainland, their films not permitted in cinemas or on television. Only in Hong Kong—a part of China, yet culturally quarantined from the mainland—can these films rub shoulders, providing some kind of rounded picture of what’s happening in Chinese cinema.
the ditch
No title at Hong Kong this year highlighted the divide between China’s official and unofficial sectors more starkly than Wang Bing’s The Ditch (2010). While many Chinese features since the 1980s have touched on the suffering inflicted by Mao’s endless mass political campaigns, few have been so brutally raw in their depiction of the Maoist era. Wang emerged from China’s independent documentary sector in 2003 with his nine-hour epic West of the Tracks, about the closure and decay of a massive socialist industrial complex in China’s northeast. His documentary roots are in evidence in The Ditch, an unembellished realist drama based on Wang’s interviews with survivors of Mao’s labour camps.
The film opens with the arrival of prisoners in a vast desert landscape, which appears empty until the men are assigned beds in caves dug into the desert floor. This is the Gobi in China’s northwest, where thousands were exiled after taking up Mao’s invitation to speak out about societal problems in the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. The severity of their desert plight was compounded by the food shortages that swept China in the wake of the botched Great Leap Forward. Wang disturbingly evokes the desperation of men on the edge of starvation, consuming roots they know will poison them and finally resorting to eating the corpses of fellow inmates.
This bleak tale plays out in long shots, the men only vaguely differentiated from each other as the indignities of prison camp life take their toll. They are dwarfed and ironically imprisoned by their wide open desert surrounds, adrift in a world utterly divorced from the urban environments they have come from. Wang shadows his characters in long tracking shots evoking the ghostly presence of the dead littering the landscape outside the caves. Every frame of this movie feels haunted—by hunger, death and the knowledge that the Chinese authorities have attempted to erase this history from the nation’s consciousness.
bachelor mountain
Yu Guangyi’s documentary treads more familiar ground, presenting a subtle portrait of the pressures placed on rural areas by China’s city-centric mode of development. In the country’s far northeast a logging community ekes out an existence in a harsh landscape now largely bereft of timber. Most of the local women have left for the promise of a better life in the cities.
We meet San Liangzi, a 46-year-old laid off worker, one of those left behind in this isolated community without money, a steady job or a wife. For a decade he has nursed a crush on Wang Weizi, a forthright woman more than 15 years his junior who runs a small inn, pursuing the tourist dollar with a single-minded determination. She also appears to be gay, a fact that does nothing to dampen her suitor’s obsession. During tourist seasons, he quietly tramps over to Wang’s inn every night, labouring without recompense as visiting urban tour groups indulge in hedonistic rituals of dancing and drinking around him.
Yu’s film is resolutely non-judgmental and handles San’s gentle, lumbering personality with tenderness. At one level the documentary is a study of quiet personal obsession, but we are also left to ponder the personal and social distortions created by economic circumstances that have left the mountain stripped of trees, the local community without young women, and men like San stranded with virtually no hope of a steady income or family life in their hometowns.
yulu
Jia Zhangke is one of the few filmmakers who has successfully straddled the divide between the commercial and independent industries in China in recent years, continuing to produce astute, innovative films since he began submitting his work for approval—and official mainland release—in 2004. His involving documentary, I Wish I Knew (2010; RT99, p17) appeared at HKIFF this year alongside the more recent project, Yulu.
It’s perhaps unfair to describe Yulu as a “Jia Zhangke film,” since he produced the work, which actually comprises a dozen or so short documentaries by seven different directors profiling “up-and-coming figures who the younger generation can easily identify with,” to quote the festival program. Jia directs the opening and closing segments, both of which unfortunately exemplify the film’s problems.
Jia’s opening portrait of Cao Fei, an entrepreneur who has created a groceries shopping website, is characterised by the lack of probing insight that runs throughout Yulu, reducing some of the episodes to the tone of a motivational video. The uncritical celebration of a “can-do attitude” becomes most problematic in the final segment—again directed by Jia Zhangke–on Pan Shiyi, Chairman of SOHO China, the developers who famously constructed a series of vast residential-commercial complexes around Beijing. Unsubtle attempts to ‘modernise’ the face of major Chinese cities have seen hundreds of thousands of people forcibly thrown out of their homes across the country, often with little or no compensation—a process that has greatly enriched developers and many government officials. Admittedly, SOHO’s complexes have largely been built on former industrial sites rather than residential zones, but like all such developments they have involved the commercialisation of land supposedly held by ‘the people’ under the socialist system, with the proceeds pocketed by officials. Jia’s uncritical celebration of a figure who has amassed immense wealth through this process is somewhat puzzling, given the attention his previous works have paid to China’s disenfranchised.
Other segments offered more interesting subjects, such as Chen Tao’s profile of the blind folk singer Zhou Yu and the AIDS charity worker Zhang Ying. Wei Tie presented a moving snapshot of Zhao Zhang, founder of the environmental NGO Green Camel Bell, while the strongest segment was Tan Chui Mui’s profile of investigative journalist Wang Keqin. Most of the episodes, however, suffered from the same lack of depth that plagued Jia’s contributions.
In the post-screening Q&A, an audience member pointedly asked if the film’s upbeat tone and theme of striding confidently forward were inspired by the walking figure of the Johnnie Walker logo. The liquor firm was the film’s principal sponsor.
a divided culture
If none of the Chinese documentaries at HKIFF this year had the power of last year’s Petition (2009; RT97, p16), Wang Bing’s drama The Ditch demonstrates the independent sector’s ongoing interest in unearthing China’s buried stories—and the cinematic power of these hidden tales. Meanwhile Jia Zhangke’s Yulu did nothing to combat perceptions that political and market pressures often work hand in glove to dilute directors’ critical prowess. While most of the Chinese films at HKIFF in 2011 fell somewhere between these two poles, the selection illustrated that for all the liberalisation of China’s cultural sphere in recent decades, there remains a sharp divide between what can and can’t be shown in official mainland content, reinforcing the unfortunate truth that much of the population remains ‘shielded’ from the nation’s most incisive film products.
35th Hong Kong International Film Festival, various venues, Hong Kong, March 20-April 5, www.hkiff.org.hk
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