IFChina Studio founder and filmmaker Jian Yi, outside the studio on the campus of Jinggangshan University
JI’AN DOESN’T LOOK LIKE THE MOST AUSPICIOUS PLACE FOR A GROUNDBREAKING EXPERIMENT IN CHINA’S BUDDING CIVIL SOCIETY. THE TOWN DOESN’T APPEAR IN ANY ENGLISH LANGUAGE GUIDEBOOKS, THE LOCAL STATION PLATFORM IS JUST A LOW-SLUNG SLAB OF CONCRETE AND, IN EARLY SPRING WHEN I VISITED, A BONE CHILLING MIST HUNG OVER THE TOWN. YET THIS MINOR CHINESE CITY IS HOME TO IFCHINA ORIGINAL STUDIO, A BOLD ATTEMPT TO GENERATE COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN THE ARTS AND ORAL HISTORY IN THE HEART OF ONE OF CHINA’S POOREST REGIONS.
hidden stories
“We wanted to start with oral history because this place is so special—the Chinese revolution under Mao Zedong started here,” explains Jian Yi, a gently spoken local filmmaker whose credits include the documentary Super, Girls (2007). Jian Yi founded IFChina Original Studio with his wife Eva in 2009 on the campus of Jinggangshan University. Their activities include theatre classes, video workshops and photography programs, all built on an oral history foundation.
In a nation where history is always highly contested and politicised terrain, IFChina’s attempts to record personalised stories from China’s recent past and incorporate these into theatre and film projects is not only brave—it’s virtually unprecedented. “We are really doing groundbreaking work,” Jian Yi acknowledges. “We are facing an audience with zero literacy about documentaries and narrative films…many people who come to our screenings say, ‘That was the first documentary I ever saw’.”
Despite being a minor city, Ji’an provides fertile ground for a documentary maker looking to generate community interest in oral history. The remnants of the Chinese Communist Party fled to this area after thousands of members were massacred by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Shanghai in 1927, an incident that led to a fundamental shift in the previously urban-based party. As Mao Zedong rose to the fore with his vision of an agrarian-based revolution, the Communists regrouped and declared a Chinese Soviet Republic just south of Ji’an, a region they controlled until 1934, when encirclement forced them to embark on their “long march” to northwest China.
Since founding IFChina Original Studio, Jian Yi has been working with locals—mostly students from Jinggangshan University—to capture this history before it vanishes with only official accounts remaining that leave much unsaid. He cites a story from a 97-year-old local as an example of the tales they have uncovered: “This guy told a story of how his sister tried to get back the body of her husband, one of two men ‘wrongly executed’ by a faction of the Communists.” The murdered pair were local bandit leaders that Mao had persuaded to join his cause, but who were then killed in circumstances that remain unclear to this day. “The story was so human—you know, when we talk about Jinggangshan we think about this huge revolutionary era that’s so heroic. But this one little human story can reveal a side to the era that has been previously buried under slogans and a ‘grand’ historical narrative.”
IFChina Original Studio also works with locals to record more contemporary explorations of China’s rapidly shifting social reality. The 10,000 Village Writing Project will see students from rural areas at Jinggangshan University trained in recording oral history. “We’ll ask them first to write about their own family,” says Jian Yi. “We already have some young people writing about their experiences with the One Child policy. Most of the young female students from rural areas have younger brothers, so all of them have experience of the punishments of the policy. Then they will expand to their extended family, and the village as one community.”
One of their primary goals is to create a series of handbooks that will facilitate the creation of similar projects around the country, as well as hopefully leading Ji’an locals into more sophisticated forms of expression like documentary films. Jian Yi sees this nurturing of local culture as vital to China’s future, as the nation stands at a crossroads between its poverty stricken past and a materially wealthy but potentially culturally impoverished future under a system rife with restrictions.
“I’m convinced culture is a basic need,” Jian Yi asserts. “People are still trying to survive, but I don’t think we can survive as a proper society without culture. Many people around me are very cynical, while many people who do think independently tend to be very critical. I think it’s a step forward from not thinking at all, but then they don’t have the kind of positive energy which a society needs to cultivate and build something. I don’t think you can build something on negative energy, I don’t think you can build something on an emptiness.”
participants in the studio
reconnecting
It was his desire to build and cultivate a positive ethos in one of China’s more disadvantaged regions that led Jian Yi to give up a comfortable academic position in Beijing and return to his hometown to establish IFChina Original Studio.
“I lived in Beijing for more than a decade—going to school, teaching and working,” Jian Yi recalls. “Being in Beijing you really begin to have illusions about the country and you begin to misjudge many things. When I came back [to Ji’an] every year to visit relatives, I felt like I was in a different world. So that was the first objective—to get reconnected to social realities. The second objective was to do something similar to what Wu Wenguang and I did with the Villagers’ Documentary Project.”
The Villagers’ Documentary Project was an earlier attempt to forge a creative space for China’s rural classes, who despite comprising the majority of the country’s population, rarely have the chance to represent their own lives in any medium, let alone a relatively expensive one like video. Jian Yi was able to garner funding from an EU project on village governance in 2005 and worked with well-known Chinese documentary maker Wu Wenguang (whose credits include China’s first independently produced documentary Bumming in Beijing back in 1990) to train farmers in documentary making. Jian Yi says his work on the Villagers’ Documentary Project gave him the experience and confidence he needed to strike out and establish IFChina Original Studio a few years later.
international exchange
In addition to fostering localised forms of creative expression, an important part of the studio’s vision is giving Ji’an locals exposure to visiting foreign residents and interns. These programs, in turn, provide visitors with a chance to experience China away from the booming urban centres like Beijing and Shanghai. “I think it would be very exciting for people to come here to do their work, because it’s a totally different environment to Beijing,” enthuses Jian Yi.
IFChina’s internship program provides young people with interests ranging from arts management to filmmaking an opportunity to spend anything from one month to a year working at the studio. Similarly, the residency program provides a chance for scholars, artists and filmmakers with an interest in participatory cultural work to spend one to two months living on campus at Jinggangshan University, working with IFChina.
As well as accommodation, the studio provides volunteer translators who will help residents visit the region’s more remote revolutionary sites, including some historic villages. “You know, the social realities are there—Mao Zedong started from the villages here, and today China’s rural areas are still where China’s future has to come from,” comments Jian Yi.
Although IFChina Original Studio is clearly underpinned by an ambitious vision, Jian Yi sums up their work in quite modest terms: “We try to do very little things in a little community.” Yet as an earlier generation of Chinese in the same area demonstrated 80 years ago, little things with deep roots can one day change a nation.
Arts workers and scholars interested in internships or residencies at the studio should contact Jian Yi via the IFChina website at: www.ifchinastudio.org
IFChina Original Studio, Ji’an, Jiangxi Province, People’s Republic of China
IN SPITE OF ISOLATED EARLY EXAMPLES SUCH AS LONG WEEKEND, PATRICK (BOTH 1978) AND RAZORBACK (1984), IT’S ONLY OVER THE LAST DECADE THAT AUSTRALIAN HORROR HAS TRULY FOUND ITS VOICE, GAINING INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION, FINANCIAL SUCCESS, GRADUAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND SUPPORT ON THE PART OF AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT FILM FUNDING BODIES. THE NUMBER OF HORROR FILMS MADE SINCE 2000 (OVER 60) IS MORE THAN THREE TIMES THE NUMBER MADE IN THE 1990S (MARK DAVID RYAN, WHITHER CULTURE? AUSTRALIAN HORROR FILMS AND THE LIMITATIONS OF CULTURAL POLICY, MEDIA INTERNATIONAL AUSTRALIA INCORPORATING CULTURE AND POLICY, NO. 133).
saw
If one film can be said to have kicked off this boom in the genre, that would be Saw (2004), the first in what has become the most commercially successful horror franchise in history. The brainchild of James Wan and Leigh Whannell, two young Melbourne filmmakers, Saw, as an Australian success story, is notable for its complete lack of ‘Australianness.’ Picked up by Lionsgate in the US after failing to secure funding in Australia, Saw is internationalised horror—horror with an American accent but no clear national identity.
Sharing certain characteristics with Se7en (1995) and Silence of the Lambs (1991), Saw takes as its focus an intelligent serial killer who wants to play a game with those involved in his crimes. Although associated with the representation of strong violence, Saw keeps its gruesomeness in context and is not deserving of the disparaging ‘torture porn’ label bestowed (often justly) upon many of its imitators. In its pared-down, grim scenario, narrative is paramount. As with many a low-budget horror film, the initial set-up is minimal: two men regain consciousness to find themselves chained by the ankle at opposite ends of a grimy industrial bathroom. Between them lies a dead man.
The more mature, self-aware of the pair, Dr Lawrence Gordan (Cary Elwes) speculates, “Whoever brought us here could have killed us by now, but they didn’t. They must want something from us. Question is, what?” A mini-cassette each man finds in his pocket provides more riddles than answers. It also introduces the film’s main narrative preoccupation: the idea of the Game. The Game takes its cue from computer games (“Game over,” the killer tells his victim at the film’s end) as well as the competitive reality TV phenomenon, where distrust is fostered and contestants can only progress at each other’s expense. There is only one ‘winner.’ In keeping with the killer’s nickname, “Jigsaw,” the Game is also a puzzle that the victim-contestants must solve, full of hidden symbols, clues and riddles.
Jigsaw’s identity is part of the puzzle for viewers and characters alike. He hides behind an array of facades and disguises, including the puppet on a trike delivering the killer’s recorded messages; the assailant in a pig-mask; and Zep, the hospital orderly whom the audience are led to believe is Jigsaw, until we discover he’s just one more participant-’player’ in the Game. Jigsaw, like Se7en’s John Doe, is a moralistic killer who perversely attempts to teach his carefully selected victims the value of life. With its emphasis on saturated colour (green and red predominate), occasional frenetically sped-up scenes, the presence of puppets and masks and tricksy narrative, Saw uses stylisation rather than naturalism to create an atmosphere of horror.
wolf creek
Though spawning a similarly ‘iconic’ serial killer, Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) differs markedly from Saw in that it’s naturalistic and undeniably Australian. Before the opening credits, portentous documentary-style captions (much favoured by horror directors) appear onscreen informing us that, “The following is based on actual events. 30,000 people are reported missing in Australia every year. 90% are found within a month. Some are never seen again.” By adopting this visual characteristic of a documentary, Wolf Creek attempts to move its scenario out of the comfort of the cinema and into the lived reality of its audience.
Wolf Creek follows a trio of backpackers—Australian Ben (Nathan Phillips), Liz (Cassandra Macgrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi) from England—as they drive from Broome towards Darwin, taking in Wolf Creek Meteorite Crater along the way. McLean deliberately avoids in-depth characterisation; in the manner of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, the trio exists purely in the present. In the relatively long lead-in before any violence occurs, the emphasis is on their carefree youthfulness. As if to contrast with this innocent exuberance, and to offer a presentiment of future events, McLean hints at an ugly, misogynistic side of Australia from the film’s beginning. “They get real easy when they travel,” the Broome used car salesmen tells Ben, in reference to female backpackers. Later, a group of men in an outback pub joke about “gang-banging” the girls.
When Mick Taylor (John Jarratt), the film’s monster, appears, Kristy whispers, “He’s hilarious, he’s like one of those guys from Outback Australia shows.” This observation is underlined by parallels drawn in the film between Mick and his cinematic namesake, Mick “Crocodile” Dundee, with the latter’s famous “That’s not a knife” line quoted twice. Mick Taylor is Dundee’s dark counterpart. He’s also a figure with an intentional resemblance to backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, sharing the NSW serial killer’s enthusiasm for weaponry, hunting expertise, killing methods (severing of the spine, for instance) and protruding teeth. In Mick, the beer-swilling, sexist hunter stereotype in Ted Kotcheff’s seminal 1971 film Wake in Fright is taken to its extreme.
Despite the film’s title and some vaguely mystical allusions recalling Picnic at Hanging Rock (as when watches stop in the vicinity of the crater), there’s no sense of the landscape being threatening in itself. The real horror lurks in the ugly collection of sheds that constitute Mick’s hideaway, flickeringly illuminated in the darkness; and in his rifle sights, when a sunlit road provides no cover.
Black Water
black water
Horror takes us out of our comfort zone, which for a certain sub-genre, means following urban holidaymakers into the wilderness and whatever threat awaits them there. In Wolf Creek, it’s a psychopath, in David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki’s naturalistic Black Water (2007), a crocodile. Like Wolf Creek, Black Water uses ‘documentary’ captions, tersely explaining that the Northern Territory’s saltwater crocodile population is expanding alongside its human population. It’s also “based on true events.” As with Greg McLean’s follow-up to Wolf Creek, Rogue (2007), another crocodile film, Black Water’s subject is a river tour gone wrong.
Unlike Rogue, however, which uses stunning aerial shots and an animatronic croc to awe its audience, the minimalist Black Water works more subtly, employing landscape not as mere backdrop, but as an integral part of the threat. The camera dwells on the scenery: initially, accompanied by a gently strummed score, the river seems idyllic. Later, when a crocodile (real, not animatronic) has upended the tinny and killed the guide, the surroundings transform from peaceful to sinister. The three terrified protagonists taking refuge in a mangrove tree are interlopers negotiating a hostile environment: one that won’t let them escape. This is a film that manages to do much with relatively little.
Insidious
insidious
All three sets of filmmakers are horror aficionados, but Whannell and Wan’s interest so far lies in generalised genre horror (in the manner of the Spierig Brothers, discussed in Part 2 of this article) whereas McLean, Nerlich and Traucki are concerned with developing distinctively Australian horror films. These variously draw on horrific elements of recent Australian criminal history and wildlife and the sinister potential of the landscape, as well as recalling Australian cinema classics. All continue to work in the genre: McLean has set up a production company and is working on Wolf Creek 2, and Andrew Traucki’s shark-themed The Reef was released earlier this year. With their new film Insidious (released in Australia in May) Whannell and Wan have taken their genre expertise and made what could be seen as a quintessential horror film: one designed primarily to scare.
As with Saw, Insidious is internationalised horror set in America, the only Australian element being the nationality of the female lead, Rose Byrne and of course its makers (Whannell also acts). In aspects of the art direction, certain scenes and the placement of a child at the centre of horrific events, Insidious is intentionally reminiscent of classic 1970s and 80s paranormal horror (think The Exorcist, The Shining, Poltergeist). Some of its stylisation even recalls Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Wan weaves these influences into a beautifully orchestrated film, which fulfils his early promise as director of Saw, demonstrating what he is capable of with a more generous budget and timeline.
Part 2 of The Horror: How Australian? will appear in RealTime 104.
REVELATION CONTINUES TO EXCITE PERTH AUDIENCES WHO ARE ENVIED EVERY YEAR BY THEIR INTERSTATE PEERS FOR THEIR ACCESS TO SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST RECENT, STRANGE AND REVEALING FILM FARE. JUST A PRE-LAUNCH GLIMPSE OF A SMALL SLICE OF JACK SARGEANT’S 2011 PROGRAM, CURATED WITH HIS CUSTOMARY FLAIR, IS ENOUGH TO WHET THE APPETITE AND TRIGGER TREPIDATION. IN THE FOLLOWING CLUSTER OF FILMS THE BODY IS SEEN FROM A NUMBER OF PERSPECTIVES—AS ZOMBIE, THIRD GENDER, SKATEBOARDER RADICAL, CANCER VICTIM, MURDERER AND UNIVERSE-ENCOMPASSING ARTIST-SCIENTIST-PHILOSOPHER.
the advocate of fagdom
Angelique Bosio’s 2011 welcome documentary, The Advocate for Fagdom (France, 2011, 91mins, www.theadvocateforfagdom.com), will put Bruce La Bruce’s LA Zombie (RT99, p26) in perspective with its survey of the cult filmmaker’s output from shorts to the features Hustler White, No Skin Off My Ass and his zombie sex films. The specialist lineup of interviewees includes LaBruce himself, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Harmony Korine (RT99, p16), Richard Kern and Revelation director Jack Sargeant. Bosio is a festival guest.
the ballad of genesis and lady jaye
Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (US, Germany, UK 2011, www.balladofgenesisandladyjaye.com/ballad/) investigates the ‘pandrogeny’ project of artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (70s performance art group Coum Transmissions; Throbbing Gristle; Psychic TV) and wife Lady Jaye transcending notions of gender by “transforming their bodies through cosmetic surgery into a third body.”
dragonslayer
Hot from SXSW 2011 in Texas where it won Grand Jury Award Documentary feature and Jury Award Best Cinematography comes Tristan Patterson’s Dragonslayer (USA, 74mins, www.dragonslayermovie.com). The film tracks an itinerant skateboarder Josh Sandoval as he journeys through suburbia “like the classic anti-hero, part-punk and part-bohemian, avoiding the bleak certainties of everyday life in favour of the magical pleasures to be had in skateboarding, hanging out with his friends and falling in love.”
gravity was everywhere back then
Described as “dreamlike,” the animated film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (Brent Green, 75mins, 2010, http://gravitywaseverywherebackthen.blogspot.com) will feature a live soundtrack performance by five of the film’s makers. It’s based on the true story of a man who, with love and hope, builds a healing-house for his terminally ill wife. Revelation reports that “director Green built a replica of the healing machine in his garden for the film, his own obsessions mirroring those of his subjects.”
Heaven & Earth & Joe Davis
heaven & earth & joe davis
Peter Sasowsky’s Heaven and Earth and Joe Davis (USA, 90mins, 2011, www.joedavisthemovie.com) introduces us to artist, philosopher and scientist Joe Davis: “art and science fuse in his work; whether creating a genetically modified apple designed to tempt the Devil, recording the sounds of micro-organisms or encoding Greek philosophy into fly DNA.”
Stranger still is Davis’ account of “the broadcast of the harmonic frequencies of vaginal contractions into space as a comment on the censorship of gender by the space program.” Reevlation reckons that polymath Joe’s enthusiasms will generate a revitalised sense of awe about the universe of which we are part.
the redemption of general butt naked
The Redemption of General Butt Naked (Daniele Anastasion, Eric Strauss, 2011, USA, 84mins) won Excellence in Cinematography at this year’s Sundance (www.generalbuttnakedmovie.com). Revelation fills us in on the background to this documentary: “During the [first] Liberian civil war (1989-1996) Joshua Milton Blahyi, aka General Butt Naked, led his brutal army, many of whom were child soldiers, into murderous attacks. Known as the Butt Naked Batallion because of their habit of fighting naked in order to get the spirits to protect them, the Warlord and his men were responsible for thousands of deaths.” Blahyi has since reappeared as a Christian seeking forgiveness from victims and his own soldiers. The strength of the film lies apparently in its avoidance of easy judgment given the moral complexity of a post-colonial war.
soda_jerk v tony lawrence
If these films are not enough to make you see the world in a different light, Soda_Jerk v Tony Lawrence might do the trick. Instead of revealing unexpected realities, these artists play with the very way the world is mediated for us. Berlin-based Australians Soda_Jerk and Sydney’s Tony Lawrence present a feast of new and recent works using whatever comes to hand—mixing, mashing, experimenting in their very different ways. Soda_Jerk will premiere the epic Pixel Pirate 2: The Director’s Cut (2011), messing with iconic images, forms and sound-image norms. Lawrence will present four short films, “from the rock-based Goldtop Mountain, through to the poetic evocation Girl On Fire, the quasi-religious imagery of Monsignor Blood and the almost mystical From Water (2009-2011).”
Rekindling Venus: In Plain Sight 2011, Lynette Wallworth, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival
photo Tony Lewis
Rekindling Venus: In Plain Sight 2011, Lynette Wallworth, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival
SOME TIME DURING THE WINTER OF 2010 I FOUND MYSELF BASKING IN THE WARM, SYNAESTHETIC GLOW OF AN ANACHRONISTIC SUN. THE DECKCHAIR ON WHICH I RECLINED PROVIDED JUST THE RIGHT VANTAGE POINT FOR CONTEMPLATION OF THE WONDERS OF ARTIFICIAL SUNSHINE. RATHER LIKE THE SUN DOMES OF RAY BRADBURY’S SHORT STORY “THE LONG RAIN” (1950), RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER’S GLORIOUS SIMULATED SUN INSTALLED AT MELBOURNE’S FEDERATION SQUARE OFFERED WELCOME RESPITE FROM INCLEMENT WEATHER. AS PART OF THE CITY OF MELBOURNE’S LIGHT IN WINTER FESTIVAL, SOLAR EQUATION RESONATES AS A PARABLE OF THE UBIQUITY OF DIGITAL LIGHT, ITS AMBIENCE IN THE CONTEMPORARY BUILT ENVIRONMENT, ITS FACILITY IN ENABLING SO MUCH OF WHAT WE SEE AND ITS REMARKABLE CAPACITY TO SUBSTITUTE APPEALING COPIES FOR THE REAL THING.
Such themes were among the concerns of the two-day Digital Light symposium, the public face of Genealogies of Digital Light, an ARC (Australian Research Council) Discovery project that seeks to provide a critical account of digital light-based technologies “by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media.” The principal researchers of the project and organisers of the conference—Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Les Walkling—conceived the event around a number of questions, chief among them the issue of how Australian and international artists working with light-based technologies are considering “the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital processes” in their work.
This reflexive gesture was welcome, for at face value the notion of digital light, in itself, is not immediately compelling as a framing theme for a packed two-day program of speakers. As if adding to my growing relief, Sean Cubitt’s opening remarks set the right conceptual tone for the event, asserting that there is still a “general ignorance” regarding digital technologies and how they actually work, despite their omnipresence in our lives. While this polemical sortie clearly identifies the research opportunity of the project, it also opened up a dialogue to do with the realpolitik of the digital, providing a reason why members of the public would bother giving up half their weekend to attend such a conference. Alvy Ray Smith, computer graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar, detailed the extraordinary and exponential development of computational power since the early 1960s in an entertaining and authoritative talk. He also set the digital record straight on a crucial point: pixels are actually round, not square.
The pixilated, block aesthetic of the 1980s and 90s that signified the emergence of the digital world was in fact an optical illusion, a mis-seeing of digital light. In a similar spirit of critical revisioning, Geoffrey Batchen boldly asserted, “photography has always been embedded in the DNA of digital media.” Among the many exquisite examples he discussed to support his position was Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 contact print of two pieces of lace that he presented to Charles Babbage. “It’s as if Talbot wants to show us,” Batchen suggests, “that the photograph too is made up of a series of smaller units”—in other words, round pixels. Appropriately closing the show, Victor Burgin’s conceptually rich presentation also détourned the histories of cinema and photography, returning to their very origins in the manipulation of light and its capacity to fool the eye. Burgin’s own recent practice of compositing moving, panoramic montages from sequences of still images, evidenced the uncanny and even unsettling sensation of moving through a natural landscape that does not move with you.
The event certainly brought together an impressive who’s who of Australian and international artists, curators and technological innovators worthy of the radiance of Lozano-Hemmer’s sun. In this the symposium provided the refreshing opportunity to engage with historical perspectives alongside glimpses of contemporary aesthetic practices that explore the notion of digital light. Lynette Wallworth’s beautiful Rekindling Venus series engages with her concerns about the impact of climate change on ecosystems, using a cell phone app to transform hand-held media into a “virtual porthole to coral reefs and connected real-time data.” This canny use of augmented reality brings to life the illusion of a vibrant, three-dimensional world of fragile beauty. The symposium also offered Jeffrey Shaw the opportunity to document his long association with the wonders of light, from his expanded cinema events of the 60s, his light shows for bands such as Genesis in the 70s, to his immensely rich and varied experiments with immersive and interactive cinema and the convergence of real and virtual spaces as manifestations of light: a history that in itself charts the sedimentary record of artists working with digital technologies during the last decades of the 20th century, as well as looking back to the trompe l’oeil experiments of Baroque optics and illusionism in painting and architecture. Similarly, Stephen Jones’ comprehensive history of early electronic art within Australia added to the sense of a rich heritage of experimentation with digital light in this country. And as luck would have it (or was it an artefact of the digital?) Jones’ long awaited book Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956-1975 (MIT Press, 2011) was hot off the press, providing a concrete instance of the longevity on show in both his and Shaw’s presentations.
Heaven’s Gate 1987, Felix Meritis 1787-1987, Shaffy Theater, Amsterdam, Netherlands
With the advent of the minutely small (such as nanotechnology and biomechanics), a deeper questioning of the metaphysics of digital light is emerging, whereby the notion of “seeing,” as curator Christiane Paul eloquently described, becomes irrelevant. This alternative epistemology of light was taken in a different, haptic direction by Stephen Jones back to the telegraph in his re-tracing of the digital as a strict micro-economy of “on/off,” associating the digital “picture element” with the dots and dashes of the telegram. Alvy Ray Smith decisively quashed the hype around 3D TV and cinema, pointing to the misconception that 3D was ever possible on the two-dimensional screen to begin with, since it “happens in the brain, not in the display.” Smith also contributed to this galvanizing counter-phenomenology of digital light at the symposium with one of the most memorable aphorisms of the event, “Reality begins at 80 million polygons per frame.” But reminding us of Lucasfilm’s famous acronym REYES (“renders everything you ever saw”) may prove to be the boldest gauntlet thrown down to artisans of digital light in their quest for the highest-fidelity vision; the ultimate dream when the map will surely replace the territory.
Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation Public Symposium, University of Melbourne, March18-19, 2011
IN A RECENT ARTICLE FEATURING ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG’S SYNTHETIC KINGDOM PROJECT, HETTIE JUDAH ASKED, “WOULD PEOPLE STILL BE SCARED OF NANOTECHNOLOGY IF WE COULD MAKE IT STRAWBERRY FLAVOURED?” IN SOME WAYS THE ARTWORKS IN LIFE 2.0: ARTIFICE TO SYNTHESIS ARE SO SUBTLE THAT THEY DON’T NEED SWEETENING. NEW TECHNOLOGIES SLIDE INTO OUR LIVES IN SUCH AN INNOCUOUS MANNER THAT THE TECHNOLOGIES DISCUSSED IN THIS EXHIBITION SEEM TO BE ALREADY NORMALISED.
Much of the exhibition is couched in scientific-utopian terms which, on the surface, could be read as advertisements for synthetic engineering. The exhibition conjures an intense fascination for what we have done and can still do with synthetic life. There is only a slight feeling of discomfort about some of the proposed uses—a subtle twinge, miniature, like the subject matter of most of the artworks.
Some of the concepts that the exhibition asks the viewer to consider are not too far away from what people are already doing. If we can breed a sheep just for the purpose of shearing it, then why can’t we use the same sheep to provide dialysis for a human? Is one ‘use’ of the animal more humane than the other? If we use animals for our entertainment (pets, racing) or manufacture them for our food, why not use them as medical aids? Revital Cohen’s Life Support: Respiratory Dog and Dialysis Sheep proposes using retired working animals in medical programs, producing a symbiotic relationship between animal and patient. A lamb lies down on a bed of hay next to a sleeping man; the image is beautiful, softly lit and sensuous. Both man and lamb are connected to a dialysis machine, blood is feeding out of the man into the lamb, waste is processed by the lamb’s kidneys, a natural cleaning system, and eliminated through the lamb’s urine. Healthy blood flows back into the man. During the day the lamb is free to graze in the backyard and at night, while it sleeps, it is put to work. In a kind of chimerical/cyborg configuration, human, machine and animal come together and produce what curator Melinda Rackham describes as an emotionally and physically intimate healing relationship. Two of Cohen’s four photographs of Dialysis Sheep and Respiratory Dog are in everyday picture frames—taking the concepts further into the domestic arena—but are we ready to be so emotionally and physically (even parasitically) dependent on animals?
Life Support: Ventilation Dog, 2009, Revital Cohen
image courtesy the artist
Life Support: Ventilation Dog, 2009, Revital Cohen
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s individual artworks and collaborations dominate the exhibition space. The Synthetic Kingdom: Synthetic Pathologies features beautiful luminescent photographs: Bioluminescent Kidney Stones, CMYK Plaque (on a set of teeth), Pollution-sensing Tumour Lung and Colonic Alchemy (gold faeces), with each body part showing anomalies formed by the body’s exposure to synthetic bacteria that have accidentally escaped from laboratories, factories and broken products. In this fictitious scenario, some of the bacteria have evolved, changing their function as they proliferate. Each image comes with a back story, such as Colonic Alchemy, where a patient’s waste material is turned to gold—although genetic testing failed to find the origins of the bacteria that caused this precipitation. These stories are almost believable; I found myself questioning whether this had already happened somewhere. Ginsberg plays with the fear of invasion/infection by our last ‘other,’ ie bacteria, with the alchemists’ quest finally answered by something that we have made, but cannot quite control.
In The Synthetic Kingdom: A Natural History of the Synthetic Future, exhibited as an animated video and as a diagram, Ginsberg explores the need to add a new branch to the Tree of Life—Synthetica. She asks, “How do we classify natural and unnatural if life is built from scratch?” The animation explores the way that life can be built from existing DNA rather than from petrochemicals. In E.chromi, collaborating with James King and the Cambridge University International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team, Ginsberg explores how the team constructed bio-bricks, synthetic genes which, when inserted into the bacteria E.coli began to secrete colours visible to the naked eye. The animation projects future uses for these bacteria: by 2039 they could be used to make a yoghurt drink which changes the colour of waste to indicate the presence of specific diseases in the body. A physical example of this is also exhibited as The Scatalog, a case of brightly coloured stool samples, each colour indicating a different disease. The animation also suggests that in the future a new profession will be created, with people searching the world for DNA that produces certain colours. Colour swatches are shown alongside a whale and a canary, perhaps suggesting that synthetic manufacture will not quite be able to stop the plundering of the natural world.
The two artworks by Richard Pell, from the Centre for Postnatural History, provide captivating catalogues of genetic research. A Selection of Noteworthy Genetically Engineered Bacteria, 2011-05-17, a cabinet of curiosities, features ‘highlights’ from the world of miniature synthetic life. Two samples that stand out are the Olfactory Art Bacteria, engineered in Bangalore India to produce the smell of fresh rain at the start of the monsoon season (why has this not been sold commercially?) and the GenTerra bacteria used by the Critical Art Ensemble, which was seized by the FBI in a mismanaged bioterrorism investigation. GenTerra was used in a performance that implicated the audience by giving them permission to release samples of bacteria into the atmosphere, one of which was possibly synthetically manufactured. These samples are fascinating as a catalogue of what can be done with genetic engineering—the presence of Gen Terra along with the sealed case that the samples are presented in is a reminder of the responsibility that accompanies this desire to tinker with the world. Pell’s Strategies in Genetic Copy Prevention looks at techniques that are used to control life, such as sterilising insects that were damaging the cattle industry in the United States and, on a more sinister note, sterilising humans (those considered to be criminal, idiots and rapists) in a plan passed in Indiana in 1907, a practice that died out after World War II. This is another reminder of the implications of these new technologies, beyond fashion and politics.
Deborah Kelly’s animation Beastliness is part of her ongoing exploration into the poetics of biotechnology. The animation features hand-cut chimerical creatures made of human, animal and plant parts dancing seductively together in a crazy mating ritual. Kelly writes, “The horizonless, post-species-specific possibilities of our new on- and offline lives demand sustained investigation as we tango into the far-fetched future, propelled by unchecked hungers.” In some ways, Life 2.0 is very clean and sanitised—if it weren’t for the uproarious music of Beastliness, inserted between the soothing pseudo-scientific soundtracks of Ginsberg’s animations, desire in all its messiness might not enter the gallery space. Kelly’s animation actively injects a little of the dystopian into the utopian future of manufactured scientific endeavour, moreso than some of the more subtle works in the exhibition. Beastliness leaves us with the question: what should we fear and what should we celebrate? It’s a question that bypasses the need for sugarcoating.
Life 2.0: Artifice to Synthesis, curator Melinda Rackham, RiAus Gallery, The Science Exchange, Adelaide, 7 April-July 8
BEN FERRIS’ 80-MINUTE DRAMA, PENELOPE, IS AN UNUSUAL WORK THAT PROVOKES REFLECTIONS ON CURRENT FILM AND VIDEO PRACTICES, NOT LEAST BECAUSE THIS INTENSELY VISUAL FILM WILL HAVE ITS PREMIERE AUSTRALIAN SCREENINGS IN A MUSEUM AND AN ART GALLERY. IT’S A FILM THAT ASKS YOU SURRENDER TO THE MOMENT.
With video art revitalised by relatively inexpensive, software-rich new technologies in the 21st century, art galleries have increasingly become sites for reflective viewing of works short, long, epic and looped. As per Christen Cornell’s encounter with Yang Fudong’s No Snow on the Broken Bridge and Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (p46), and in the tradition of video art, the viewing experience is supremely visual while cinematic expectations regarding character, dialogue, plot and structure are elided or subverted.
On the other hand, the experimental and feral heritage of video art increasingly sits beside sleek monumentally projected digital works, like those of AES+F and Isaac Julien in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, that are nothing less than cinematic in their scale and immersiveness. In fact the material distinction between film and video is fast disappearing, while not a few artists refer to themselves as filmmakers and leading visual artists—like Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen, Julian Schnabel—are making feature films.
Ferris’ film is a variation on the mythological tale of Queen Penelope waiting 20 years for the return of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, from the Trojan War. In that tale she is surrounded by 108 suitors who have assumed the hero is dead. Penelope defers choosing a new husband by focusing on the weaving of a burial shroud for her father, unravelling it nightly to extend the time of its making. Finally, she sets the suitors a near impossible archery task that the returning, disguised Odysseus executes with ease. He then kills the suitors.
Ferris’ telling is broadly true to the myth and sometimes to its detail (Penelope’s painful prayer to the god Artemis for death, for example), but in the end makes a surprising departure, one not to be revealed here but consistent with the film’s focus on Penelope herself. For the most part (save for cutaways to the loutish, gluttonous suitors), the film is realised as a sumptuous visual embodiment of her state of mind, shifting from recollection to reverie, delusion and nightmare, a condition amplified by the film’s real time unfolding and slow tracking shots. The camera’s long lines of movement and circlings suggest the omniscience of a storyteller who never speaks and is in no hurry to inform or guide us—there is little narrative propulsion and only spare dialogue. This is a film of the lived moment, quite apt for a contemplative gallery screening.
The slow pacing of the film correlates with a sense of timelessness in the late Jennie Tate’s expert production design. Penelope and her maids appear as if from a Classical frieze or a Renaissance painting of the same (glimpsed in the film’s opening), while the suitors seem attired like Florentine gentlemen. Odysseus in a trench coat smokes a cigarette and Penelope plays a 19th century piano. The elegant, modestly grand house has an Italianate openness and is imbued with a sense of mystery—perhaps the gods are at work, particularly towards the film’s end when huge timber doors are slowly buffeted then blown open and an aura glows around a determined Penelope. A single crow sits ominously on her windowsill. Wolves howl out of the emphatic sound design. Penelope’s silken weaving glows in the night like a spider web—and is unthreaded like one. The world of Penelope is an oddly disparate but simultaneously coherent one.
The formal camera work, its considered, painterly gaze and the symmetries of the film’s design are counterpointed by what they frame: Penelope’s disturbed state—her loneliness, her anguish over the sickness destroying her beloved geese, her imagined lovemaking with Odysseus in an autumnal forest and the nightmare of the suitors raping her maids (enough to soon stir her to action). It’s an effective dynamic in a film that warrants patient attentiveness to yield its subtleties and pleasures.
Penelope, director Ben Ferris, director of photography James Barahanos, production designer Jennie Tate, composer Max Richter, producer Irena Markovic; Australian/Croatian, 80mins; Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, June 15, 6:30pm, free; Art Gallery of New South Wales, June 25, 2pm, free
“IF IT CARRIES ON LIKE THIS IT WILL BECOME LIKE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION.” THAT WAS THE ASSESSMENT EXPRESSED TO ME RECENTLY BY A WELL KNOWN CHINESE CREATIVE FIGURE REGARDING THE CURRENT SITUATION IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. IF THAT SOUNDS LIKE HYPERBOLE, THE FACT THAT THESE WORDS ARE BEING UTTERED BY SOMEONE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHAT THE MAOIST ERA WAS ACTUALLY LIKE IS INDICATIVE OF THE PREVAILING MOOD AMONGST THE NATION’S ACTIVIST AND CREATIVE COMMUNITIES.
On Sunday April 3, China’s best known contemporary artist Ai Weiwei was taken from Beijing airport as he attempted to board a flight for Hong Kong. He has not been directly heard from since. His wife, Lu Qing, told international media outlets on Monday, May 16 that she had been allowed to see the artist the day before for around 20 minutes—her first contact with Ai for six weeks. It is still not clear where or why the artist is being held. Four of Ai’s associates have also been arrested and have not been heard from now for seven weeks.
As well as being a prolific filmmaker, architect and designer, Ai Weiwei has long been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. His domestic and international profile, however, led many to believe he was unlikely to suffer the harsh treatment dealt out to many lesser known opponents of the regime. In the words of The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones on April 4, his arrest is being interpreted as an attempt to “stamp out the idea that any individual is greater than the law of the state.”
Unfortunately Ai Weiwei’s case is just the tip of the iceberg. After anonymous calls for a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” emulating recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East circulated online in mid-February, the Chinese authorities moved swiftly to neutralise the perceived threat. Initially political activists were targeted, including lawyers and well known bloggers. In March, they also began exerting pressure on parts of China’s creative community.
The China Human Rights Defender website claims, “The Chinese government has criminally detained a total of 39 individuals since mid-February.” Seventeen of these are still in detention, nine have been charged and are awaiting trial and three have already been sent to camps for “re-education through labour.” The claims are supported by a map detailing the names and locations of those detained (see chrdnet.org). Earlier this month the same organisation reported that around 200 others have been placed under various forms of “soft detention”—in other words, house arrest.
In addition, an unknown number of people across China have been subject to a ramping up of intrusive surveillance, harassment and interference in their daily lives. On March 18 for example, I visited the academic and documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming (no relation to Ai Weiwei) at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. Ai has made numerous low budget documentaries focusing on controversial issues such as the spread of AIDS in rural China through unregulated blood collections.
As Ai Xiaoming led a translator and myself to her apartment, we were intercepted by a plain-clothed security officer who addressed Ai by name and asked what we were doing. He was joined a few moments later by another man and a woman, while two other men stood watching a few metres away. None of the group were uniformed or offered any form of identification. The first man informed Ai Xiaoming that we needed to accompany him to the campus security office (bao wei chu), while the woman asked me and my translator our names, occupations and places of origin. Ai Xiaoming agreed to accompany the “officers” if they let me and my translator go. As my companion and I made a hurried exit we were followed by other plain-clothed personnel into the subway station next to the campus.
On May 13 China Human Rights Defenders reported that Ai Xiaoming has recently received a high volume of “silent phone calls, believed to be automated, that have disrupted her phone service.” The keyhole to her front door was also recently filled with glue by an unknown harasser.
Although certain filmmakers and artists have long been under surveillance and subject to phone taps, since the 1980s it has been rare for Chinese authorities to physically prevent artists meeting with foreigners. It is a disturbing development that the kinds of restrictions that more radical political activists have long endured are now being extended to established creative figures.
In more bad news for China’s film community, on April 18 organisers announced the cancellation of the 8th Documentary Film Festival China, an event staged annually since 2004 in the far flung Beijing suburb of Tongzhou. The festival is one of a handful of regular events in China showcasing films made outside the country’s state-controlled approval system. The 2011 edition had been planned for the first week of May. Critic and programmer for the Vancouver International Film Festival, Shelly Kraicer, reported on the dGenerate website (www.dgeneratefilms.com) on May 12 that, “Several levels of government, represented at a surprisingly high level, made it clear…that this was not the right time for an independent organisation to screen Chinese films that the state has not authorised.” Kraicer also claimed that foreign visitors who had journeyed to Tongzhou were followed by plain-clothed police.
The literary world has also been affected by the tightening of the cultural sphere. On March 27 Yang Hengjun, a China-born Australian novelist and blogger, disappeared in the city of Guangzhou. He resurfaced the following weekend and was allowed to return to Australia via Hong Kong, but he declined to elaborate on his experience.
Writer Liao Yiwu was less fortunate. In early May he was denied permission to leave China to attend the Sydney Writers Festival to talk about his new book, The Corpse Walker. This turn of events was disappointing but unsurprising—writers’ organisation PEN claims that Liao has been denied permission to leave his own country 14 times in the past three years.
It remains to be seen whether the present crackdown represents a longer term hardening in the government’s attitude or is simply a panicked, typically heavy-handed response to events overseas. Either way, it’s a sobering reminder of the immense arbitrary power wielded by China’s ruling party and how quickly cultural liberalisation can be wound back when the state feels threatened. Even if all the detained figures are released tomorrow, the atmosphere of fear will linger, intensifying the already pervasive self-censorship that exists in China’s media and cultural spheres. Which is, of course, precisely the intention. The message from the authorities is clear—the right to creative expression in China is always on notice.
This report is an updated version of the one originally appearing in the e-dition of May 10.
Christoph Schlingensief preparing for Church of Fear (2003)
ART WITHOUT BORDERS, EDITED BY TARA FORREST AND ANNA TERESA SCHEER, RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY INTELLECT, IS THE FIRST MONOGRAPH ON CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF, THE GERMAN THEATRE AND FILM ARTIST WHO DIED IN JULY 2010. IT IS THE FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE RESOURCE ON THE MAN CONSIDERED TO BE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT 20TH CENTURY ARTISTS OF THE GERMAN SPEAKING WORLD, BUT ALSO THE FIRST ACADEMIC STUDY OF A VERY PROVOCATIVE OEUVRE. I SPOKE IN MELBOURNE WITH ANNA TERESA SCHEER ABOUT THE ARTIST AND THE BOOK.
First things first: Schlingensief is almost entirely unknown in Australia.
In 2008, when I returned to Australia, I realised Schlingensief’s work was among that which had really impressed me during my 14 years in Germany—especially when I realised how apolitical Australian art had become in the Howard years. For example, there was no attempt to test the sedition laws. People seemed afraid of losing the support of the funding bodies. Schlingensief, by contrast, had gone out on a limb time after time, in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He was arrested twice and wasn’t bothered about the consequences.
In Germany, I was used to him being a household name—an unusual position for a theatre artist. It became especially apparent to me that his work needed to be written up when I began my postgraduate studies. He’s not mentioned in any of the ample literature that was coming out on politics and performance. American and British perspectives dominate the field, and still focus on people like Augusto Boal. Even Baz Kershaw, in The Radical in Performance, still talks about The Living Theatre and the Welfare State International from the 1960s.
After nearly 30 years of work, not much has been published on Schlingensief. Of course, there were articles in German papers and magazines, but that’s not the same as a scholarly, referenceable book. His work wasn’t considered serious—which didn’t detract from its power, from it being always sold out at the Volksbuehne in Berlin. The writing that did get published was primarily from his own collaborators. I was interested in how other people thought about the work, how it could be understood. In this book, we move from Adorno to Brecht to Goffman, looking for interpretive context.
We know Schlingensief as a theatre-maker, but his theatre career was an accident. He was an underground filmmaker when Matthias Lilienthal invited him to work in the re-established Volksebuehne in former East Berlin.
An incredibly smart move for Lilienthal, to pick up on a man who says his films were only ever going to be shown in cellar cinemas. Schligensief was invited after making the third film in his German trilogy, Terror 2000: Intensive Station Germany, which lampoons Germany’s memorial culture—politicians laying wreaths at every opportunity, the Gladbecker hostage disaster, the plight of the asylum seekers—piling up a lot of stuff together using very unaesthetic, trashy means. The film was called sexist, racist, every negative epithet you can imagine. And he was invited by Lilienthal to retort to critiques in a stage production.
I am intrigued by Rocky Dutschke ‘68 (1996), an early theatre work in which he tried to confront the Left’s nostalgia for the 60s and uncritical emulation of kinds of protest that are now futile.
It tried to re-create the 60s: Schlingensief in a Dutschke wig inciting people to go into the theatre, then out again for a protest, a love-in in the theatre…It inquired into the leftist mythology of Rudi Dutschke [assassinated leader of the West German student movement in the 1960s], seriously asking: is anything like this still possible, or are we all postmodern super-cynics and resistance no longer imaginable?
He really targeted the Left’s idealism: ‘We’ll still find the working class, who will revolt and take over.’ He wasn’t interested in that sentiment. You could absolutely not describe him as a leftist in those terms. He was an anarchic spirit, whose line was one of inquiry.
In your book cinematographer Sandra Umathum reflects very personally on what it meant to experience Rocky Dutschke ‘68.
The difficulty of writing about Schligensief’s work is that it was different every night. He throws dramaturgy overboard, gets rid of previously made agreements with the actors; he will on the spur of the moment upturn the whole thing. Key sections may remain—or maybe not! Schlingensief’s theatre work was not fuelled by a great love of theatre, of wanting to follow in Brecht or Grotowski’s footsteps. He was experimenting with theatre like a child with plasticine. What can you do with this? He was interested in the way theatre was never finished, but happened anew each night.
Rocky Dutschke ‘68 was the first performance in which Schlingensief used non-professional performers, a practice he continued throughout his career: people with disabilities, the homeless. In Hamlet in 2001 he conscripted a bunch of reformed neo-Nazi youths. He was not interested in the ‘show me your wounds’ approach in which we turn up to be compassionate. The audience is not allowed complacency.
He was not doing it to elevate the status of a minority, but to get to the core of societal problems—and not in a linear or simple, causal way. People forget how turbulent Germany was in the 90s. Moving the capital back to Berlin, the ‘media chancellor’ Gerhard Schroeder, then the bombing of Belgrade, the first time German troops were employed since WWII. Germany was outraged: this happened under a red-green government! Then the ongoing reunification debate: will we become the great nation of fascists again? All these things swirling around, as if in a washing-machine. And that is how these productions looked: like questions, with actors representing contemporary politicians, with references to the Nazi past…but always as this “past that will not pass.”
Was he an heir of Brecht in that sense?
Yes—the audience had to sit there and critically engage with their own society and socio-political problems, because he wasn’t telling them what to think.
PASSION IMPOSSIBLE, 1997
Passion Impossible was an inquiry into the city of Hamburg. Schlingensief was invited to create a work at the Deutsches Schau-spielhaus in Hamburg, Germany’s largest theatre [whose production Pornography was presented at Melbourne Interntional Arts Festival in 2010].
At that time, Hamburg station, which sits opposite the theatre, was literally a camp for the homeless and drug users. To get to the theatre, you had to step over their bodies. Schlingensief was essentially a moralist and found this situation unbearable. He first suggested to the administration they tear down the facade of the theatre and turn around the seats, to face the theatre across the road, the theatre of misery. The theatre rejected the proposal ‘for technical problems.’ Instead, they agreed to sponsor a benefit gala, to raise money for a mission.
The seven-day event Schlingensief staged was a mission in the former police station down the road and a series of mass events in public space. You had him standing outside the theatre in a policeman’s jacket with a megaphone, encouraging the theatre patrons to “come away from this ugly bunker! There’s nothing in here for you!” Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he would encourage people, having bought their ticket, to leave the building and come to the mission, which was a real mission—with beds and a soup kitchen. Here they had an open mike, a small stage and people could speak about whatever they wanted. He had an accordion player, the Salvation Army band, people singing songs…All sorts of little moments of what could be called entertainment.
Was this real or just a provocation?
It wasn’t clearly outlined. The theatre had publicised the event. The audience would buy tickets, then walk 200 metres up the road to the mission. You were paying to be involved with the people you would normally completely ignore, would never encounter in your daily life, or could have easily dealt with for free!
Participating in it was a provocation to oneself. Some of the stories of the homeless people were just awful. Early on, at the benefit gala, Schlingensief appeared with a decrepit battery chicken, and asked: “I want to see how much money can be raised to save the neck of this chicken!” People in the audience started protesting but he said, “We eat these chickens every day. What do you care about its life? I want to know how far people will go. We’re all addicted”—addicted to one’s own sense of doing good, of being a good citizen. We responded to the phone call, turned up at the benefit gala, did our little bit, even if otherwise we don’t really care. But now we’re really worried about the chicken!
But the main provocation was to the Lord Mayor by getting the citizens to eventually march up to the Town Hall, asking for the mission to continue. It became permanent.
I found Passion Impossible fascinating because it took it right out onto the streets. It is not dissimilar to Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre. There was a lot of media around. Questions were asked: Is he serious? Is this a charity campaign? Is it performance? Of course, it was all these things. And it evolved into an actual campaign, which he couldn’t have planned in the beginning. The work really asks: can art do something that politics can’t, create impetus for change? It questions our idea that artists can at best be pranksters. This is very different from watching The Chaser boys having a good time.
PLEASE LOVE AUSTRIA, 2000
I remember the reverberations from Please Love Austria (2000) as it made news throughout Europe that summer. There were riots!
2000 was the year when the liberal Austrian government became the only one since WWII to form a coalition with a far-right populist party, FPÖ, led by Jörg Haider. Sanctions were imposed on Austria. All of Europe was aware of Haider’s anti-immigrant campaigns.
Schlingensief was invited to create a work for the Vienna Festival. It was planned that shipping containers would be placed in the centre of town, on the Opera Square. These containers would be the living quarters for 12 asylum seekers for a period of seven days. Inside were webcams streaming to a website and Austrian citizens were encouraged to vote out their least favourite inhabitant, who would be taken to the border and deported. The winner would get 35,000 schillings and the possibility of becoming an Austrian resident by marriage. It followed the Big Brother format, which had just appeared.
It was only when Schlingensief, opening the show, revealed a large banner on the container, which said “Foreigners Out.” that it stopped being a game, or even funny. This is a well-known right-wing slogan: “Germany for Germans, Foreigners Out.” Jaws dropped. It attracted growing attention. People were coming through town for the festival and Schlingensief was there with a megaphone, exhorting tourists to take photos: “This is the future of Europe, this is Austria, send this to your friends at home, dear Japanese, dear Americans!” Austrians were shocked: “Besmirching our country!” Schlingensief kept publicly inviting Jörg Haider to meet with the asylum seekers—involving him in the performance, in absentia. The national boulevard press, the Kronen-Zeitung, were writing every day: “This Schlingensief clown is costing you money, dear readers.” Schlingensief retorted that they were just writing the program notes to his event.
The Left were campaigning against Jörg Haider. They saw the “Foreigners Out” banner simply as a provocation, accusing Schlingensief of misusing asylum seekers for his project. They marched around the container, demanding that he set those inside free, showing mind-boggling naivety—these were real asylum seekers, all with cases pending.
In the end they stormed the container.
Jumped on the roof, destroyed the banner, demanded a meeting. The asylum seekers had to be evacuated. The protesters then realised these were real asylum seekers and had to question their own activities. When they finally left, Schlingensief raised the ante by putting up an SS slogan that had been used by an FPÖ member: “Loyalty is our Honour.”
In that moment, it was as if Schlingensief reminded everyone that we were watching an art performance and that the real issue was only being represented. It questioned the efficacy of removing a symbol as a political action.
The Left-Right binary looked pathetic. The Right couldn’t take down the sign and government officials taking down an artwork would look pretty stupid. On the other hand, leftist protesters making insane demands weren’t effective either. Set the asylum seekers free—for what? Where?
The show wasn’t so much about the asylum seekers. Austria was televised around the world—the theatre was the Austrians, watching each other perform. Whatever happened, Schlingensief incorporated it into the work. That was the fun aspect of it. He didn’t have to rise to the bait or argue that this was a serious piece of political art. He would say: “I’m just repeating what Haider has been saying.”
Kerstin Grassmann, “Kandy” Mamounata Guira, Amando Komi in Christoph
Schlingensief’s award winning 2010 work Via Intolleranza
Slavoj Žižek calls this “radical overidentification”— an artistic position where you critique by overstating, by taking a claim to its absolute extreme to reveal its ugly possibilities.
Please Love Austria was a perfect example—the asylum seekers being forced to learn German, do callisthenics…It’s not as if Austria changed when the project left. That didn’t see the end of the coalition. But it showed how art can be directly involved in events of the day, in a very radical way.
In the book you point out the connection between Schlingensief’s work and the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s. You write about “an art practice that emerges from the social sphere—and that develops out of the active, creative participation of the viewer.”
The comparison with happenings is not wrong—everyday life, spontaneity, experiments. Schlingensief didn’t start something with a blueprint of how it should end, but set it in motion like a wind-up toy, to see where it goes. In Germany he is often considered the inheritor of the legacy of Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ discussions, definitions, ideas—of social sculpture, of an expanded form of art—Schligensief co-opted for his own ideas on an expanded form of theatre. Getting rid of the fourth wall, people leaving the theatre for the streets. That became really clear in 1998, when he ran his own political party in the German election.
Christoph Schlingensief (right), Chance 2000—Vote for Yourself (1998)
Christoph Schlingensief (right), Chance 2000—Vote for Yourself (1998)
CHANCE 2000—VOTE FOR YOURSELF, 1998
It started off with an event at the Volksbuehne. Schlingensief had a circus performance set up in a tent—the “electoral circus.” But at the same time, he started his own media campaign on national television about Chance 2000 – Vote For Yourself (1998). He was encouraging the disabled and the unemployed to run as political candidates. “None of these people in the Bundestag represent you. The idea that you will be represented by someone else your whole life is ridiculous—you have to prove you exist. Get involved in starting your own campaign.”
He toured Germany in a bus, campaigning non-stop. It wasn’t a completely serious attempt to form a political party. He would say, “Unlike all other politicians running in this election, the only promise I am going to make is that everyone will be bitterly disappointed.” Then he decided that the people who joined the party were too boring, left it and set up the Schlingensief Party. He wouldn’t let those he rejected into his new tent, but after two days they reunited. A very clever German reviewer commented that Schlingensief gave us a short run-through of democracy in a week. Parties, factions, reuniting, splitting up, another leader emerging, and all happening with such a turbulent tempo!
Germany was baffled: vote for yourself? Is he lampooning the election? The party got 30,000 votes. But the idea wasn’t that they would take over the Bundestag but rather “prove you exist.” In this world, where the only voices we hear are those of rich politicians, who are these faceless unemployed people, apparently numbering six million? He was demanding you make yourselves visible in a world that’s trying to erase you.
There was a lovely offshoot action of Chance 2000. Schlingensief announced that the six million unemployed would join him to jump into a lake, Wolfgangsee, where Helmut Kohl’s villa is, to raise the water level, flood Kohl out and give him cold feet. The police were sent to the village, all sorts of preparations were in place. Schlingensief turned out with about 300 people. But Kohl ‘participated,’ against his will, in a performance. It doesn’t really matter if it did or didn’t happen. People saw the clips, it was national news that there hadn’t been 6 million people, only 300.
Schlingensief really understood the sound-byte world we’re living in—he created a mythology around the work, pretending things would go further than they actually could, and were bigger than they actually were.
How did Schlingensief’s work fit into the German theatre context? I remember when Denise Varney [Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne] showed a clip from Please Love Austria in class there was incredible consternation about whether such an action was legal or not. In Germany Schlingensief reached the status of a star. He directed an opera for the Bayreuth Wagner festival. He was not living in a live art ghetto, the way one would expect here.
Events such as the one he staged in the election campaign of 1998 made him nationally prominent, while internationally it was Please Love Austria. He became the biggest name in art in Germany. After years of people saying it wasn’t real theatre, the fact that he wasn’t going away and was finally invited to direct Parsifal at the shrine of Wagner in Bayreuth, meant that he was finally accepted. On the other hand, he never became an intendant of a theatre—people didn’t trust him on that level. But after he contracted cancer, when he was only 47, he released a book—his cancer diary, titled Heaven Can’t Be More Beautiful Than Here—and it became a bestseller.
SHOCKED PATIENTS
He started a website, Shocked Patients (www.geschockte-patienten.org). The first thing he found out as a cancer patient is that you lose all autonomy. People start shoving tubes into you, no one talks to you, they talk over you. You are again erased. He created a forum for people diagnosed with terminal diseases, cancer and ALS [amyotropic lateral sclerosis] to write about their experiences, to have their own voice.
He had previously created a performance called Art and Vegetables (2004) at the Volksbuehne, in which, centrestage, was a woman with ALS, in bed, able to write messages by blinking at a computer screen. The woman, Angela Jansen, was quoted in the program, saying, “I’ve got everything I need, it’s just that I can’t move.” He used that as a reference to German society of the time. The woman became the forum moderator.
It’s not as if he avoided scandal, he sought the media, did things knowing they would provoke a reaction—saying unkind things about Lady Di, for example. But there is also his metaphorical language: “Jump into the lake and give Kohl cold feet,” or relating physical sickness to a social sickness and lethargy.
One of the reasons it’s hard to talk about Schlingensief’s work is because he covers so many forms: happening, performance, theatre, film, activism, politics. It’s hard to sum up his work. One motif is, perhaps, visibility, the other is putting himself in his work. And particularly interesting to me, in these times of complete social inertia—I’m thinking Australia now—is his idea of movement, getting out of torpor and lethargy. He often took to the streets with groups of people. “Move! It doesn’t matter where we’re going. I don’t even need a plan.” No need for direction – you just move. “We’ll figure it out as we go.”
Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer eds, Art Without Borders, Intellect Books, 2010; www.intellectbooks.co.uk
CHOREOGRAPHER WILLIAM FORSYTHE STATED, “THERE ARE WONDERFUL INNER THINGS HIDDEN WITHIN DANCING,” AND FROM THE LATE 19TH CENTURY TO THE START OF THE 21ST, SCREEN-BASED EXPLORATION HAS OPENED ACCESS TO ALTERNATIVE MOVEMENT WORLDS, ENGINEERING ALONG THE WAY THE CROSS-BRED DISCIPLINE OF THE DANCEFILM.
Formulating an academic approach to this field of study has been a more recent development, with groundwork laid over the last 10 years by a variety of approaches and writers. However in the introduction to her new book, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image, Erin Brannigan notes a ‘stand-off’ between dance and film discourse, with an often unclassifiable hybridised form left languishing in the theoretical margins. Brannigan manages to integrate both strands in a deeply rooted field of critical thought, making reference to Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze among others. She also nods to contemporary dancefilm practitioners—David Hinton, Miranda Pennell and Gina Czarnecki—with examples of work on an accompanying website. The book comes into its own, however, as an historical tour-de-force, probing deeply into cultural causes, presenting the reader with a spiralling timeline of critical nexus points.
Brannigan sets the scene by arguing convincingly for the emergence of, in Bergson’s phrase, ‘modern movement’ as symptomatic of the neurasthenic, turn-of-the-20th century city-dweller’s state, set within a wider historical context of technological transformation. Here, the primacy of the pose in classical ballet and still photography gives way to a notion of constant flux. This notion is presented as the defining characteristic of both modern dance and moving pictures, which are as inseparably entwined in Brannigan’s reading as the twin strands of a double helix.
Placed centrally to this argument is the work of solo performer Loïe Fuller, whose serpentine spin weaves through the cultural milieu of fin-de-siècle Paris, reflecting and expanding on the ideas of Mallarmé, Valéry, the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès. Neither ballerina nor showgirl, ‘La Loïe’ was the first artist regardless of gender to claim the title of director/choreographer, manipulating billowing fabric around a shrouded body as lighting effects conjured a continuous stream of allusion—flowers, butterflies, fire and snow. Complete in herself as a one-woman ‘moving image,’ Fuller is positioned by Brannigan as prefiguring the thematic and operational territory of both avant-garde film and postmodern dance.
The threads of this lineage are traced along multiple pathways, finding resonances between the work of Jean Renoir, René Clair and the Dadaists and writing on non-narrative cinema, such as that of Hungarian theorist Béla Balázs on the expressive potential of the close-up. The latter is explored in depth, with the abstracted play of bodily detail—the twitch of a finger, the ripple of a spine—central to much contemporary dancefilm cast as ‘micro-choreographies,’ small-scale, transformational experiments in ‘movement-for-movement’s sake.’ Brannigan also traces the historical roots of Delsartism—a gesture-based system of actor training—noting its role in the highly physical performance style of silent-era stars such as Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin. Tracking the pathways of this tradition through the pedagogy of the Dennishawn school and the Graham Studios, Brannigan winds her way towards the psychologically charged, non-linear montages of Pina Bausch and Wim Vandekeybus, finding particular significance en route in the gesture-heavy waking dreamscapes of Maya Deren.
A figurehead for the mid-20th century Greenwich Village avant-garde, Deren’s writing on a choreographic dimension to filmmaking is highlighted as central to an understanding of the field. Deren’s notion of “horizontal form”—where the feeling state of being-in-the-moment is explored in depth—provides Brannigan with a template for analysis not only of experimental film, but also for the Hollywood musical, here cast as “longer format vertical film form.” In contrast to much pre-existing, production-led analysis, Brannigan approaches this territory by highlighting the phenomenon of highly nuanced transitions between performance modalities. Focusing on a central—often female—physicality, she contrasts the precise, self-contained technical style of Ginger Rogers with the long-limbed, ground-covering expansiveness of Rita Hayworth, while casting the hyper-expressive sensuality captured in Marilyn Monroe’s close-ups as micro-choreographies in themselves. However Brannigan finds fullest expression of Deren’s ideas in the work of choreographer/director Bob Fosse, with Liza Minelli and Shirley MacLaine barely keeping in check an edgy over-exuberance, spilling out into highly stylised song-and-dance numbers.
Deren’s input is also tracked through convergence points where avant-garde film and dance intersect, noting her influence on the work of artists such as Shirley Clark, Amy Greenfield and Norman McLaren, before arriving squarely at the writings of Judson Church alumnus Yvonne Rainer and the movement research of fellow downtown Manhattanite Trisha Brown. Rainer noted that “dance is hard to see,” and Brannigan observes that Brown’s exploration of uninflected sequencing— characterised here as “anarchic phrasing” and as a lack of conventionally “privileged moments”—pushes technical boundaries in registering the “in-betweenness” of a work such as Watermotor (1978), ultimately captured in otherworldly slowed-motion by Babette Magnolte’s cinematography.
In her concluding chapter, Brannigan makes the case for a hugely disparate “cinema of movement,”—identifiable throughout genres from abstraction to advertising—bringing together the body-centric notion of ‘somatic intelligence’ and Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of “somatography.” The latter emerges as a highly significant element of Brannigan’s theorising. Described as “a writing on/of the body,” it provides graspable language for a notoriously slippery phenomenon—kinesthetic engagement with screen practices such as framing and edit. Brannigan goes further, arguing that this also allows for a kinesthetically framed viewing experience, sited within the “sensitive field” of filmic mise-en-scène and completing an improvisatory circuit of multisensory transference between moving image and audience—a “call-and-response” grounded in non-verbalised levels of body-based exchange.
Tackling a large-scale agenda from a meticulously researched and unapologetically dance-centred perspective, Dancefilm is a much-needed resource for the serious scholar. Viewed in addition to Karen Pearlman’s recent focus on a choreographic approach to editing in Cutting Rhythms (2009) and the appearance of the International Journal of Screendance in 2010, we could be forgiven for thinking that these are promising times for raising awareness of a significant field.
Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011
WHO ON EARTH WOULD WANT TO SPEND AN ENTIRE WEEKEND TALKING ABOUT ‘PRACTICE’? THIS QUESTION WAS ANSWERED WHEN THE NATIONAL DANCE FORUM, DESIGNED TO “REFLECT ON THE STATE OF DANCE PRACTICE IN AUSTRALIA NOW, AND TO CHART A COURSE FOR THE FUTURE,” QUICKLY SOLD OUT. DANCE TYPES, IT SEEMS, NEED LITTLE INCENTIVE TO RUMINATE.
True, there were two weeks of Dance Massive performances book-ending the talkfest in Melbourne in which to see practice in, well, practice. The forum sat neatly within the biennial festival’s program and the foyers of Dancehouse, Malthouse Theatre and Arts House were more than usually clogged on March 19 and 20.
Inspired by the 2010 National Theatre Forum that proved a dynamic meeting place for the theatre sector, Ausdance and the Australia Council supported independent producer Kath Papas to work with a National Advisory Group to create a platform of similar scale for dance. While Australia Council Director of Dance Carin Mistry’s summary of the event published on the Australia Council website emphasised the to-and-fro between dance in Australia and overseas, the forum was focused determinedly on the local. Mistry concluded her article with an aspiration for the debates of the forum to connect to the world stage. While there were two international guest speakers and several artists on panels who work internationally, there was a particular urgency to the discussions about the Australian context.
Three keynote interviews, 12 round tables and a plenary were interspersed with breaks in which the conversations were more hungrily pursued than the meals. Noise levels were high in the underground canteen of North Melbourne Town Hall, suggesting an excitement and energy to the communion that was repeatedly articulated over the weekend. There was a lot of kissing.
While I was unable to attend every round-table due to the simultaneous programming of three groups in each slot, I spoke with participants in each. The general opinion was that the more specific the theme, the better the quality of discussion. Dramaturgy for example, chaired by independent choreographer Brian Lucas with speakers Anne Thompson, Lisa O’Neill and Tang Fu Kuen, provoked a lively discussion of the whys, hows and whos of this discipline. The session on Dance Practice in Communities was equally specialised and energetic. Chaired by Annie Greig of Tasdance, speakers Philip Channells, Annette Carmichael, Jess Devereux and Dalisa Pigrum inspired the full room to contribute their experiences, sparking an upbeat debate that affirmed work that is often excluded from the spotlight. The session on Critical Feedback run by choreographers Becky Hilton and Lucy Guerin was a group exercise in self-analysis, attending to often painful aspects of the dance-making process.
Less successful were the larger panels or those where the topic was less clear. It bears remembering that the most innovative artists are not necessarily the most interesting speakers about their work, or that those who love to talk about their work are often not the most interesting. Young artists became rather bogged down in their personal experiences in a panel that sought to give them an equal voice. Artists expressing their enthusiasm for technology relied too much on said technologies in their presentation and forgot the bodies in the room. A long line of collaborators presented too many perspectives upon collaboration to find a thread and a discussion on practice itself succumbed to the perhaps inevitable navel-gazing its rather abstruse questions set up.
The roundtable entitled “Where are we?” directly addressed the Forum’s overarching theme. Keith Gallasch, Editor of Real Time, Kate Denborough, Artistic Director of KAGE Physical Theatre and Daniel Brine, Artistic Director of Performance Space, offered personal points of view in an optimistic survey of dance in relation to other artforms, other nations and other cultural pursuits. Gallasch, delineating a mock ecology of contemporary Australian dance, worried that elements missing in the system left dance undernourished, while Daniel Brine was curious about what he regarded as unwarranted anxiety about contemporary dance’s achievements. In this session, as in most, there were diverse questions from the floor, considering phenomena from mass-market television dance shows to dance in education.
The role of session Chairs was vital and excellent work was done by representatives of a broad range of organisations that support dance-making in Australia, including Jeff Khan, now at Performance Space, Helen Simondson from ACMI and Erin Brannigan from UNSW. Panels represented the geographical spread of artists and organisations in Australia although some complained of a metropolitan focus. Other complaints concerned the underrepresentation of sectors such as commercial dance although the organisers defended their right to focus upon the subsidised sector, with Ausdance spruiking forthcoming conferences in other areas.
The keynote speeches were a personal highlight. Lee Christofis, the ‘Parkinson of Australian dance,’ coaxed poignant observations of an extraordinary career out of leading Indigenous dance maker, Raymond Blanco. The warmth of this conversation at the start of the first day set the tone of pleasure and celebration that persisted. The first day closed with Chrissy Sharp, Chair of the Australia Council’s Dance Board interviewing choreographer Kate Champion, delivering useful insights for emerging makers in particular. Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchen was interviewed by dramaturg Tang Fu Kuen from Bangkok, assisted by Naree Vachananda’s good humoured translation. Klunchun’s discussion of his status as an artist in Thailand, making contemporary work in reverence of and direct challenge to the traditional Kohn dance style, was fascinating. Fu Kuen struggled to draw out the wider implications of his grappling with Western audiences and responses to his recent production, Nijinsky Siam, but each word Klunchun uttered was sufficiently different from the way in which Australians talk about dance to merit close attention and the room was more hushed than at any other time by this interview.
Forum Facilitator Kristy Edmunds kept us on mission, reminding participants at the start of each day of their responsibilities to contribute. The Forum published rigorous principles: namely to embrace and value diversity, to foster robust debate, to maintain a positive tone, to focus on the future and to challenge each other to delve deeper. Edmunds worked these principles in the final session entitled Artistic Stocktake, in which she broke the plenary into groups and demanded punchy answers to provocative questions. Conversation spilled out onto the footpaths and foyers of Melbourne and continues still.
National Dance Forum, An Australia Council for the Arts and Ausdance National partnership, Arts House, North Melbourne, March 19-20
{$slideshow} PERFORMANCE SPILLING OUT INTO STREETS AND ALTERNATIVE VENUES CHARACTERISES PERTH OF LATE. AIMEE SMITH’S MONSTERS OF ACCIDENTAL MEANING (SEE PAGE 30) SLIPPED HUMAN CONTAMINATION AMID THE MUSEUM’S INANIMATE SPECIES, WHILE CAROL BROWN AND DORITA HANNAH’S TONGUES OF STONE AND WILLI DORNER’S BODIES IN URBAN SPACE SHOVED DANCE DEFTLY INTO ANARCHIC OCCUPATION. SKIN BECOMES METAPHORICALLY TAUT IN SPATIAL TRANSGRESSIONS, IMPOSING ALTERNATING CURRENTS OF FLOW AND RESISTANCE IN MOVEMENT AND STASIS, FLESH AND STONE.
In spite of the accumulations of energy and imagination involved in birthing cities, their monumental structures and half-hidden crumbling decrepitude are forbidding places for performance. The city emasculates human playfulness, tames its makers—well almost. These recent dance invasions suggest that the scribbled traces of bodies can defy the immovable stance of skyscraper and underground labyrinth and tease the automated traffic of corporate workers and castaways.
Human shapes orchestrated into architectural recesses, plastered gecko-like on blank walls or swept like refuse into obscure alleyways comprise the snatched moments of Austrian Willi Dorner’s site-specific choreography captured on video. Faceless, his dancers freeze in tension infused inversions, their geometric interventions creating tensile counterpoints to the wedged planes and joints of construction. Each momentary anti-dance carries movement into the heart of stillness willing a paradoxical negation of the hegemony of buildings. While video clips offered tantalising glimpses into Dorner’s work, his lecture fell short on revealing the thinking that produced the curious shapes.
Gathering at the departure point for Tongues of Stone was quite another story. Here within the stagnant design of the railway station’s regulated flow, the senses prickled. How could performance overcome such drabness and discomfort, even given the careful attentions of the production crew, which proved to be an intrinsic feature of the choreography? Then the journey from civilisation’s underbelly began. I surged with the rest of the mobile audience wearing slightly disorientating earphones into the choreographies of passing traffic to settle around a distracted bride figure, her voluminous tulle swept up in the grime of time. Blinded by a gash-like eye-mask, she thrust herself against a wall, fingers groping and scratching the worded surface while soundtrack intonations dissolved. “My words go home/Fear and fury” rushed towards the past while she continued to dig into the inert stone text’s “I am present.” Distraught flesh, stone and elusive tongues began to map the city’s hidden traceries.
Danced ephemera with textile and text, water and chalk-dust transformed human-made surfaces and conventions: the total experience kneaded the city’s present into its multiple histories. Intentional aesthetic layers, such as the Greek myth of Procne and Philomela and the creation body of the Indigenous spirit Wagyl relayed both through the visual and sonic experience, dissipated somewhere in the complex assault on the senses but the fierce guardians of unborn futures, the red mop-head furies, marked alleys and atriums with ‘attitude’ and breathed exquisite billows of black cloaks across architectural sharpness.
That striking collision of built environment, past and transitory shadows emerged forcefully in another episode when the chorus inhabited the escape stairs at the back of Her Majesty’s Theatre. Serendipitously, the sun’s angle directed the tiered and cascading silhouettes of their toil up and down an adjacent wall. The powerful effect would be the envy of any theatrical designer.
Across main arteries and back alleys, the performance trajectory snaked its way with the Wagyl towards the corporate enclave, producing particular reflections of alienation on the Saturday of my viewing. The emptiness of glinting marble, revolving doors and manicured landscapes seemed woven into the theatricality. Dancers laconically shifted within water features and filled spaces with stunning red satin, but they were not entirely alone. Pertinent accidents occurred: a female guard walked embarrassedly into the spotlight and a white and black bridal party crossed the performance flow creating surreal counterparts to the story being told. The irony of intersecting processions was Felliniesque—tulle bright in one direction, red stained drama in another.
Accidental juxtapositions are crucial to these kinds of performances and, I assume, will be different with each presentation. Mind you, the final destination, the Convention Centre forecourt may invariably be uninhabited for the structure forms a dead end, barring access to the life-giving river beyond. Even the wondrous scrawls of the paperbark trees within which the final de-robing takes place cannot displace the poignancy of hidden waters and raped landscapes that linger after the dancers disappear.
STRUT and the Dancing Cities Network: Tongues of Stone, co-directors Carol Brown (choreography), Dorita Hannah (spatial design), sound design Russell Scoones, Perth Dancing City Event, April 9-16; Willi Dorner (Austria) Lecture presented by STRUT in conjunction with the School of Architecture, Curtin University, April 1
ANTICIPATION PERVADED MOUNTING THE STEPS OF MONUMENTAL OFFICIALDOM: AN EXHIBIT OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE ‘SPECIMENS,’ CATALOGUED AND DELICATELY PINNED WITHIN CUSTOM-MADE GLASS-LIKE SHOWCASES, WAS ABOUT TO BE LAUNCHED AT THE WA MUSEUM, GIVEN EQUALITY WITH THE PRESERVED ‘WONDERS’ OF THE WORLD. THERE WAS SOMETHING DELICIOUS FOR AN HABITUAL PERFORMANCE GROUPIE, NORMALLY LEFT TO NAVIGATE ILL-ANGLED STEPS AND SHAKY SEATING CONSTRUCTIONS, IN THE PERSONALISED ATTENTIONS GIVEN BY THE MUSEUM STAFF WHO GUIDED VISITORS THROUGH INTRICATE PASSAGES TO THE PERFORMANCE VENUE. THE SCENE WAS SET FOR ASCENSION AND, UNPREDICTABLY, FOR ACCIDENTAL SMALL DISAPPOINTMENTS.
Instead of the horrified delight of my first viewing of these ‘accidental monsters’ too close-up, amidst a small pressed crowd in the now condemned visual art space, Spectrum, the specimens of human bondage in their own wasteful behaviours were now tactfully arranged, beautified by spatial expansiveness and subdued lighting. Ironically, giving equivalent treatment to the rest of the exhibits failed to extend the visceral potency of these danced monsters. In line with their inanimate companions, the metaphorical blood and weeping gristle of the danced specimens were cleansed, spruced up for visual clarity.
The impact of Aimee Smith’s conception lies primarily in the spectator’s shocked recognition of the future, indelibly hatched in the human present. Encased in choreographed taxidermy and animated by innovative technology, the creatures strain in various ways within their bleak destinies. A body ‘drowning’ in a receptacle jam-packed with empty water bottles, speaks of the absurdity of our behaviour. The plastic agitation of the soundscape as a hand penetrates entrapment, mixes humour and desperation with equal and colliding effectiveness. In the Spectrum space, the hand scratching the glass carried the horrendous potential of penetrating the audience’s own skin. Here, the absurd concept remained: but its unsettling proximity was alleviated.
Rhiannon Newton’s caged beast, the once robust and insatiable human consumer, lay trapped in lassitude with flickering enticements for Vegemite and pizza projected across her hunching form, driven deep like irascible tattoos. With the venue’s distancing from the beast, spectator voyeurism seemed less likely to be caught in a hall of mirrors’ effect, watching-the-self-watching-the-self ad infinitum. Moreover, while the zoological inferences are not missed, they are ameliorated—tamed, in a strange way. This species at the edge of extinction suggests an intellectual exercise, at a remove from the confrontational recognition that the caged creature is the human present about to become its future.
In an adjacent enclave, Natalie Holmwood’s Sisyphus amassed boxed products, undeterred in rebuilding an ever-collapsing accumulation of excess. She also hoards communication, strings of incomplete messages winding up and down over the purposeless reconstruction: these two broken actions keep a disconnected rhythm.
Accidental Monsters of Meaning
photo Jarrad Seng
Accidental Monsters of Meaning
The additions to the original concept tend to be less pungent in accidental monstrousness. Aisling Donovan’s Arctic figure sways wistfully fragile, an illuminated slice of body against film of the eloquent, expansive landscape. Whispers of erosion play on the purity of wilderness, transforming environmental wellbeing into a half-remembered fictive icon. In the space, this exhibit acts like a floating tissue of memory, not dissimilar to the fossil imprint of a feathery vestige found in a display case at the entrance. Whether this imagistic statement relays the dangers of climate change is debatable. Similarly, the spectatorial powerplay integral to the press-button dancer (Bianca Martin) can slip into a one-sided game. I imagine that the school groups to explore the installation in the following week will push this facility to its limits without realising the mirror that it holds on this very behaviour.
These two specimens filled out the space but did they contribute to the self-inflicted extinction highlighted in the Spectrum configuration? There was also a sequential performance element in the original cramped presentation, wherein each exhibit’s greed was pitched onto and against its neighbours’, which contributed to the claustrophobic perspective. Implication, not just as spectators but as participants in present consumption leading to future collapse, was inescapable.
Enabling spectators to roam freely and democratically bears its own advantages, a conspicuous one being access by the general public and notably the school groups mentioned above. Smith’s political commitment to the persuasive attributes of performance is undeniable, as is the commendable gain of prestige and exposure granted by the museum venue. However loss might ensue, particularly if the other monsters in the equation, the spectators, are given hushed spaces in which to hide. The accidental meanings provoked in an unconducive space may, under the banner of protest, ironically be the best place to be.
Accidental Monsters of Meaning, concept, choreography Aimee Smith, performers Deborah Robertson, Rhiannon Newton, Bianca Martin, Aisling Donovan, Natalie Holmwood, Isabella Stone, sound design Ben Taaffe, costume design Esther Gauntlett, Jason Reibel, projections Aimee Smith, Chris Jordan, Western Australian Museum, Perth, March 26-April 3.
HAVING FUNDRAISED TO ENABLE THE ENTIRE COMPANY OF DANCERS TO ACCOMPANY DANCENORTH ARTISTIC DIRECTOR RAEWYN HILL TO HER BARYSHNIKOV RESIDENCY LAST SEPTEMBER, TOWNSVILLE WAS REWARDED WITH THE PREMIERE SEASON OF HER SHORT WORK BLACK CROWS, DEVELOPED DURING THE FORTNIGHT IN NEW YORK. HILL INVITED ROSS MCCORMACK AND ELIE TASS, IN AUSTRALIA EARLIER THIS YEAR WITH LES BALLETS C DE LA B, TO CREATE A SECOND SHORT WORK FOR DANCENORTH’S SEASON-OPENING DOUBLE BILL. TITLED [SIC], THIS EDGY AND CONFRONTING PIECE OF DANCE THEATRE WAS A PERFECT FOIL FOR THE CONSIDERED GRACE AND POWER OF BLACK CROWS AND A TESTAMENT TO THE VERSATILITY OF THE DANCENORTH DANCERS.
[sic] opens with a dormant pyramid of tangled bodies heaped against a wall as if thrown there. Apart from Nicola Leahey on top, standing semi-slumped against the wall with her back to us, it is difficult at first to see how many individuals are in the heap. To Jody Lloyd’s intoning, whispering soundtrack, Leahey eventually begins to jerk and slither down the now erratically twitching pile, while Lauren Carr slowly emerges like a breech birth from underneath. The two start inching across the floor in unison, on all fours, faces up. Their movements, initially insect like, progress to larger gestures and rolls, culminating in a twining, spastic embrace completely lacking in eye contact or any evidence of emotional connection.
Meanwhile the pile has been delineated and Thomas Gundry Greenfield, Jessica Jefferies and Jeremy Poi stand and stare down the audience, grinning malevolently. They intermittently reconfigure their cluster, moving without averting their challenging focus. This hostile inversion of the usual audience/performer gaze is discomforting. People cough, shift and half laugh.
All five dancers wear mismatched underwear—paradoxically exposed and vulnerable, yet bold as brass. The minimal costumes allow us to see every muscle isolation, each gesture and extension. When all of the dancers balance on their buttocks on the floor while holding an excruciating, uniformly angled Pilates V for what seems an eternity, the audience sweats in sympathy. The dancers hold and hold until quivering and in a pause in the music, their breathing provides the rhythm.
This almost perfect unison is a feature of [sic], right down to minute repetitions of flicked-back hair, lip biting and breath exhalation during a sequence of erotically charged flirtation with the audience. Set to a musical passage of classical strings, it appears to subvert the famous Swan Lake ensemble piece, with a pout and a lewd hip leading as the dancers rhythmically shift weight from foot to foot. Only Leahey falls out of time, blank-eyed and panicky, clutching at her throat. As Greenfield, Carr and Poi blithely continue the chorus line, Jefferies is on the floor. Leahey squats over her and, blank-eyed with an eerie absentmindedness, kneads the unresponsive Jefferies’ face while the audience squirms.
[sic] scrapes back the veneer of civilisation and utterly fulfils its intention as a series of moments of indulgence in primal, uncensored tics and urges. A sublime and grotesque experience, the entire audience is discussing it the moment it’s over and the descriptor ‘disturbing’ ricochets around during intermission.
Thomas Gundry Greenfield, Black Crows, Dancenorth
photo Bottlebrush Studios
Thomas Gundry Greenfield, Black Crows, Dancenorth
Black Crows takes us on a very different journey of heightened emotions, of people pushed to the limit by extraordinary circumstances (war) but held in check by a sense of duty, discipline and the common good.
The costumes are Amish in their austerity—shirtless black suits for Greenfield and Poi, long widows’ weeds and hair pulled back for Carr, Jefferies and Leahy. The floor is precisely blanketed with old newspapers and, from the first pass of the dancers across the stage, its orderliness irrevocably disintegrates. The simple metaphor works brilliantly, with dignity and restrained passion in the dancing, chaos and unpredictability underfoot. In one later scene the dancers briefly lapse into a panic, scrabbling on the floor trying to pick up as much newspaper as possible and clasping it to their chests. Their desire to know is poignant in its futility.
Spaniard Micka Luna’s pumping score is contemporary but suggests WWII with sounds evocative of aeroplane engines roaring, air raid sirens and radio static. Inhabited with heartbeats and night terrors, it winds down to a slow dance to support the tenderness and heartbreak of the final scenes of reluctant, duty-bound men leaving behind stricken women.
With some of the ensemble pieces obviously devised for three couples, the absence of one male dancer through injury compromises the symmetry occasionally, but more often works in favour of the current of loss.
Black Crows, a beautifully realised and satisfying entity in itself, is also a precursor for an upcoming full-length work, Mass, on similar themes, opening at the end of June. Raewyn Hill’s choreography and Luna’s score will be expanded, with Jocelyn West (UK) on vocals and Mariona Omedes (Spain) creating digital imagery for the performance.
Dancenorth Double Bill: [sic], choreography, concept, direction Ross McCormack, Elie Tass, music Jody Lloyd, lighting Van Locker; Black Crows, choreography, design concept Raewyn Hill, music Micka Luna, lighting design Van Locker, dancers Lauren Carr, Thomas Gundry Greenfield, Jessica Jefferies, Nicola Leahey, Jeremy Poi; Dancenorth, Townsville, March 18–May 13
Vicki van Hout working on the installation/set of Briwyant
photo Marian Abboud
Vicki van Hout working on the installation/set of Briwyant
IT IS TWO DAYS AFTER THE OPENING NIGHT OF VICKI VAN HOUT’S NEW DANCE WORK BRIWYANT (FOR ‘BRILLIANT’). WE ARE IN BAY 20 AT CARRIAGEWORKS, THE SPACE WHERE THE PIECE IS PRESENTED. IF VAN HOUT FEELS AT ALL PLEASED WITH THE POSITIVE FEEDBACK HER LATEST WORK HAS RECEIVED FROM AUDIENCES, PEERS AND CRITICS ALIKE (P32), SHE CERTAINLY DOESN’T LET ON. “THE WORK ISN’T DONE YET,” SHE SAYS MATTER-OF-FACTLY.
And it’s easy to see what she means: The cavernous theatre space is split into two by an enormous river-like installation made up of several thousand playing cards. After every performance, each card needs to be reglued to the ground edgewise—a complicated procedure that takes up to seven hours. An activity expected from an installation artist maybe, but from a choreographer?
“You gotta give it a go,” Van Hout quips. “I’m a perennial student. I’m interested in other artforms. At first I thought this piece should be in an art gallery. Sometimes I feel dance is not enough anymore. I like integrating other forms of art into my work. In some ways it’s an excuse to find out about things I don’t know much about.” After a pause, she shrugs: “Who knows? Maybe at some stage there will be no dance at all anymore. My interest in the arts didn’t start with dance so maybe it won’t end there.” And as for those cards? “I’m lucky,” laughs Van Hout. “My 60-plus year old mum has taken time off work to help me and the stage manager.”
A Wiradjuri descendant growing up in Dapto in regional New South Wales, Van Hout didn’t start to train in dance until her late teens. All through high school she had taken drama lessons, wanting to become an actor. She recalls, “Around the time I was living in a squat, The Gunnery at Wooloomooloo, and this guy suggested I should go to NAISDA instead. I remember asking him: ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘A place where you learn about your own people.’ I liked that.”
After four years at NAISDA, the National Aboriginal Islander Dance College, Van Hout received an overseas study award from ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) to train at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York. Far away from the usual preconceptions and prejudices regarding her aboriginality, Van Hout relished the opportunity to immerse herself in a culture not her own. “As I’m quite fair-skinned, not a lot of people recognized I was indigenous and hardly anyone asked any questions. I hung out with a lot of musicians from the alternative music scene and punk culture. Our haunt was Manic Panic, the now legendary punk store. Their tagline was ‘Live Fast and Dye Your Hair’.” And yet, Van Hout took her dance training very seriously. After graduating from the Graham School, she stayed in New York to train and work with various modern and postmodern dance artists. “My concern was that I wouldn’t have anything to show for my time there,” Van Hout says. “I didn’t want to come back without skills.”
All up Van Hout spent almost seven years in New York, eventually returning to Australia in 1996 to perform with Bangarra Dance Theatre on an Asian tour of their seminal dance work Ochres. She later joined Marilyn Miller’s Fresh Dancers collective created to focus on the corporate and commercial market. After initially working mainly as a dancer, she soon helped to choreograph many of the works presented at indigenous events and functions. She then gradually moved into creating her own work. “It was actually [fellow indigenous choreographer] Jason Pitt who encouraged me to take that leap,” remembers Van Hout. “One day he looked at me and said, ‘What have you got to lose? Just go for it, sister.”
And go for it, she did. Working incessantly over the following years, Van Hout has steadily built a reputation as one of our most interesting and prolific independent dance artists. She has developed a growing following for her deftly imagined and thoughtfully crafted works examining urban indigenous realities, especially in NSW.
Briwyant is Van Hout’s third full-length work. Conceived as a cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary dance piece, it examines the ongoing nature of ‘traditional’ Aboriginal practices based on story telling through the act of painting. As in many of her works, van Hout aims to explore the commonality between traditional and urban cultural experiences and how indigenous cultural information is disseminated: “I’m interested in what was, what is and what is similar. I’m always trying to find what is contemporary and relevant.” The work started out as an idea for a solo and evolved into its current form featuring six performers including herself.
“My initial interest,” explains Van Hout, “was in the question: what is it to look white and identify as indigenous? I wanted to peel back layers and find out what’s underneath.” She is outspoken on the issue of claiming her indigenous heritage: “It’s a birthright but not only a birthright. It’s living an obligation defined by what you do. You are what you do.” It is not surprising then that Van Hout is a passionate teacher who has been working at NAISDA for over 10 years. She feels a strong responsibility, she says, to pass on the cultural information and knowledge she has acquired. “I have been taught [Aboriginal traditional] dances, it is my responsibility to pass them on. They are not the sum of me though. I’m also teaching the contemporary indigenous technique that I have been developing through my own work. I want to instil body discipline in students so that they can be adventurous and try something different.”
As important as the engagement with her Aboriginal heritage is to her, at the same time Van Hout is adamant that she doesn’t want to be “put in a box.” She wants to be taken seriously as a choreographer on the basis of her skills, not merely for the fact she is indigenous. Recently interviewed for a case study of artists affiliated with Performance Space, she said: “It’s important to me to participate in the broader dance and performance arena. I want to be critiqued on a par with everyone else .”
This might explain Van Hout’s extensive engagement with dance outside exclusively indigenous contexts. In the last few years she has created numerous works for both tertiary institutions and youth dance companies such as ATYP, youMove, fLING Physical Theatre and DirtyFeet, as well as WAAPA, to name but a few. She also frequently employs non-indigenous dancers for her works. The cast of Briwyant, for example, is decidedly mixed. “We’re an eclectic bunch, no one is the same,” laughs Van Hout. And there is no question that she likes it that way. It confirms her fascination with juxtaposition, a device she frequently employs in her works.
“I like things that sit side by side and can’t be rationalised. I want to give people a glimpse, not lay it out for them.” The seminal experience that triggered her thinking in this respect occurred many years ago: “I was in Maningrida [indigenous community, Northern Territory], it was about 22 years ago, and I observed a young woman washing her child’s hair on a piece of corrugated iron while watching Dallas on a portable TV on the veranda of the nearby house. It was the most bizarre vision. But it had such poignancy and absurdist poetry. That’s what I strive for in my work.”
VICKI VAN HOUT’S CHOREOGRAPHY IS SOME OF THE MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC AND INVENTIVE SEEN IN AUSTRALIAN DANCE FOR A LONG TIME AND HER TEAM OF DEXTROUS DANCERS EXECUTE IT WITH HIGH PRECISION, UNBELIEVABLE ENERGY, HUMOUR AND ATTITUDE. VAN HOUT HAS BEEN A BUSY DANCER, CHOREOGRAPHER AND RESEARCHER TRAVELLING EXTENSIVELY TO INVESTIGATE INDIGENOUS DANCE. SHE HAS A COUPLE OF SUBSTANTIAL WORKS BEHIND HER, HOWEVER IT’S A NEW CREATION, BRIWYANT (FOR ‘BRILLIANT’), THAT COULD BRING HER THE ATTENTION SHE WARRANTS THANKS IN PART TO A SHORT BUT SIGNIFICANT PERFORMANCE SPACE SEASON.
In 2009 I was impressed by Pack (RT94), a sizeable piece in a Dirty Feet program of short works. I wrote: “In an intense work, four dancers, moving with bird-like alertness and the deep stepping of certain Aboriginal dance forms, map out their space territorially (with tape) and on each other’s bodies (with clothes pegs). Moments of intense, swiftly danced collectivity contrast with power plays and grooming displays—pegs removed gently from pinched flesh. This fascinating work, in which the tipping point seems to be whenever ‘enough is enough’ and the dividing tape is ripped up, fuses contemporary dance with Indigenous inflections to suggest that when it comes to territory we humans are pretty much just another animal.”
In Briwyant, Van Hout pays similar if much richer and more elaborate attention to the integration of dance with design. Scarves, for example, are transformatively shaped to suggest digging, cradling and the binding of one person to another. Hundreds of playing cards are arranged across the performing space evoking a riverscape. These are deployed, quite laterally, like the dots of the Indigenous paintings that fascinate the choreographer with their shimmering brilliance. On the Performance Space website, Van Hout writes, “Cards/ As the repetition of a dot/ Layed down as a river/ As a deck to share the wealth/ Made from?Dots on a canvas/ When sung/?Signify ancient power/ To transport us to the dreaming/?The everywhen.” She explains, “Briwyant is inspired by bir’yun: brilliance, shimmer and shine. In Yolngu traditional painting, bir’yun is the effect of intricate crosshatched patterns creating a sensation of shimmering movement over the painting’s surface, a manifestation of ancestral forces.” Briwyant conveys an engrossingly similar phenomenon when a dark upstage rectangle disappears the dancers but then bathes them in sparkling light.
The choreographer’s sources are many, drawing on and effectively melding diverse Indigenous and other forms within a dance theatre framework that ranges from droll rhyming verse (delivered by the charismatic Van Hout herself) to a lucid dreamtime tale transformed into dance, to witty social encounters and sometimes mysterious but never less than intriguing images pertaining to Indigenous art and culture.
Soundtrack, media and lighting are occasionally burdened with superfluities, but the best of Marian Abboud and Imogen Cranna’s digital media effects, Elias Constantopedos’ score and Guy Harding’s lighting fuse seamlessly with Van Hout’s organic exploration of the relationship between bodies and the lines, dots and the hatched ‘shimmer’ of Indigenous art. Danced organically across Van Hout’s playing card landscape design, this makes for a powerful experience, at once magically elusive and cohesive. Dancers Henrietta Baird, Ian RT Colless, Ghenoa Gela, Raghav Handa and Melinda Tyquin are superb.
Briwyant, Performance Space, choreographer, designer, performer Vicki Van Hout, dancers Henrietta Baird, Ian RT Colless, Ghenoa Gela, Raghav Handa, Melinda Tyquin, digital media effects Marian Abboud, Imogen Cranna, composer Elias Constantopedos, dramaturg Kay Armstrong, lighting Guy Harding; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, april 13-16
MARTIN DEL AMO IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS INTRIGUING SOLO WORKS AND FOR SOME OBSERVERS IT MIGHT SEEM THAT HIS MOVEMENT LANGUAGE IS SO INTERLINKED WITH HIS PHYSIOGNOMY THAT IT CANNOT BE PERFORMED BY OTHERS. HOWEVER FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW DEL AMO HAS UNDERTAKEN A VARIETY OF RESEARCH PROJECTS INVOLVING HIM AS A NON-PERFORMING CHOREOGRAPHER. A RECENT PROJECT AT SYDNEY’S CRITICAL PATH SAW PAUL WHITE PERFORMING AN UNCANNILY ACCURATE YET TRANSFORMED VERSION OF ‘DEL AMO’ MOVEMENT.
Discussing his reasons for the transition from solo performer to director-choreographer, del Amo cites Kate Champion from Force Majeure who was also, at one stage, best known for her solo works. “Kate said you can only mine yourself for material for so long and at some point you get more interested in other people’s backgrounds, stories and ideas. I think this is exactly what happened to me. I’ve always really enjoyed working by myself and having that freedom but sometimes I thought it would be nice to work with other bodies and have another input on that level.”
Del Amo undertook some early research in 2008 with WAAPA’s post-graduate dance company, LINK. The work, Mountains Never Meet, an exploration of the difference between walking and dancing, was made with an all female cast. “I was working with very reduced movement material, but treating it in a complex way choreographically and that was quite difficult for the dancers…it [required] completely adapting or un-learning what they had studied over the years.”
While he found this process valuable del Amo says, “I felt there was something else in that work—the way it could communicate with audiences— that could be captured in a different way.” So for the version that is to take place in August as part of the Western Sydney Dance Action and Parramatta Riverside Dance Bites program, del Amo has chosen to redevelop the work with nine male non-dancers. Having finalised his cast with co-operation from Bankstown Youth Development Service (BYDS) he says, “I’m really happy with the guys that we’ve got now. It’s an eclectic bunch from different cultural backgrounds, different ages [ranging from 15 to mid-20s] and they also have slightly different sporting or physical backgrounds.”
For Mountains Never Meet del Amo has also invited former professional soccer player turned performer Ahil Ratnamohan—most recently seen in his own work, The Football Diaries (RT91, p42) and in Branch Nebula’s SWEAT (RT102, p15)—to take on the role of artistic associate. The working relationship between the two is an ever-evolving one. While del Amo has worked as a mentor on some of the younger artist’s projects, Ratnamohan has taken on the role of trainer and consultant on del Amo’s works such as It’s A Jungle Out There (2009-2010). “I wanted a more urban, non-dance feel and asked him to do soccer training with me to improve my footwork. Out of that—being his mentor and him being mine—we established some kind of training practice.” As well as performing in this project, Ratnamohan will have the roles of collaborator and liaison with the other performers. Del Amo says, “the choreography and direction is with me, but we’re actually sharing how that is being implemented.”
Ratnamohan will also perform in Duel, a duet with Connor Van Vuuren that Martin del Amo is choreographing to accompany Mountains Never Meet. “Duel involves much more intricate movement and is inspired by some memorable sporting battles, but not tied to one particular sport.” Again, the performers have different training backgrounds, Ratnamohan in soccer and van Vuuren in martial arts and gymnastics, so the choreographic relationship is ambiguous—“Is this a battle against each other, with each other or for each other? It’s also an investigation into what constitutes a duet. In some ways it’s set up as two intertwined solos rather than as a proper partnering duet.”
Del Amo is also known for his strong collaborative relationship with composers and in this instance he will continue his collaboration with Cat Hope who scored the original LINK version in Perth. Del Amo says, “The sound world Cat has created relates to the physical concept of the work without mirroring or imitating it. It features whistling, urban sounds such as AM radio and a big percussion section consisting of marching band sounds without the band music. Cat will digitally manipulate pre-recorded elements live which ensures some ‘breathing room’ for the interplay between movement and sound. “
Both Mountains Never Meet and Duel look to be exciting additions to Martin del Amo’s impressive and highly idiosyncratic body of work.
Western Sydney Dance Action & Riverside Theatres 2011 Dance Bites, Mountains Never Meet, choreographer Martin del Amo, artistic associate Ahil Ratnamohan, performers Ahil Ratnamohan, Connor Van Vuuren, Fraink Maino, Benny Ngo, Mahesh Sharma, Sean Stanley, Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talaoloa, Dani Zarodosh; composer Cat Hope; Parramatta Riverside Theatre, Aug 17-20
MELBOURNE CHOREOGRAPHER SANDRA PARKER’S LATEST WORK DOCUMENT, “AN IN-DEPTH EXPLORATION OF THE WAY IN WHICH A ROOM RETAINS THE RESIDUE OF HUMAN OCCUPATION,” WILL PREMIERE IN JULY. THE WORK IS EMERGING FROM A 14-WEEK RESIDENCY AT DANCEHOUSE. PARKER WAS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF DANCE WORKS 1998-2006 MAKING DISTINCTIVE CROSS-ARTFORM CREATIONS. HER WORK HAS BEEN SHOWN INTERNATIONALLY, INCLUDING NEW YORK IN 2007 WITH THE VIEW FROM HERE, AND IN CHINA WITH PLAYHOUSE FOR THE GUANDONG MODERN DANCE COMPANY.
Will you physically create a room or use video and movement to do so?
I’m interested in trying to evoke a room, a rehearsal or performance space in image and light; and also through using language to describe the qualities of the space. I’m keen to play with the juxtaposition of the actual performance space with details about the space conjured up by using other media. This may or may not confirm what is actually there in the ‘real’ space, or might have been there at another point in time.
Who are the artists you’re working with and how will each contribute to your exploration?
Rhian Hinkley (projection designer; see p29), Jenny Hector and Rose Connors Dance (lighting designers), Steven Heather (composer) and Rebecca Jensen (dancer) will bring responses to the ideas and offer material. Our collaborative approach is to see where the correspondences, counterpoints and parallels lie between forms then try to find combinations that open up and suggest ways of experiencing the ideas at play within the performance. For example, I might make movement that I think feels one way but, when watched with certain sounds, radically alters the perception of the movement. I look for ways to use collaborative material as active in the performance and not just ‘accompaniment’ to the main action. I’ve also asked performers I have worked with before to contribute to the process of making the work.
Precisely how do you generate the material—do you have a particular methodology?
I began the project by asking dancers Deanne Butterworth, Carlee Mellow and Joanna Lloyd— with whom I have worked previously, but who won’t be directly involved as performers in this project—to come into the studio with me and respond to a series of questions through a ‘performed interview’ about work we have created together. In one case, this spanned back some 15 years. I am interested in not only what they remember of the movement and why, but also other things that are remembered about making work. Responses have ranged from things like describing the atmosphere of the space, how they felt about what they did, how they approached performance and personal things that were going on in their lives at the time.
I’ve also been interested in trying to describe movement. The gap between what we think movement is, what we say about it, how it appears and if it can ever be ‘perfectly’ documented in language, video or sound; and also the sometimes vastly different perception of process, choreography and performance that can exist between the choreographer, external to the work and the dancer internal to it.
I’m working with Rebecca Jensen for the first time. We met at VCA and again when I led the Learning Curve residency for recent graduates at Dancehouse in 2010. Earlier this year Rebecca also came and worked on secondment during a creative development for my new project, The Recording. She represents a new generation of young Melbourne-based dancers. I was interested to work with someone with whom I have little history, as opposed to the long-term relationships I have with Deanne, Carlee and Jo. I am interested to see how Rebecca works with material that is passed on to her through these dancers and how it changes. What detail is maintained, or left behind.
Elsewhere you’ve used ‘documents’ to describe what comes out of your process?
By documents, I mean creative material. I usually work by generating a lot of material and collect movement phrases, sound, text, video material, then start layering things. I look for tension between elements: a summation of parts. The collected material will range from drafts of choreographic material to ‘formed’ phrases that we have decided are finished. I want to try to use everything—even if it isn’t necessarily ‘finished’ material.
You’ve expressed “an interest in capturing the physical traces and after-effects of movement once it has passed,” saying, “ Document will chronicle the evidence of events that are seemingly over and complete, yet somehow remain.” Given the preoccupation with “the now” in the work of a number of contemporary practitioners it’s fascinating to see you addressing traces. How did you come to this preoccupation?
I think this interest harks back to some really early works, in absentia (1997) for example, a work with 16mm film that I made with Margie Medlin. The ephemeral nature of dance is so fundamental to working in the form that it poses a central problem that I have always found challenging and opens up many questions about how to approach dance making. I’m interested in the problem of trying to capture movement—actually ‘choreograph’ it, to set it down, if in fact that is ever really possible. The problem of trying to set movement and then return to it and re-perform it, could be seen as a futile exercise in trying to reclaim that which can never be recaptured; but for me it also offers a way to question assumptions about what you think is ‘there’ and to make it anew, to reinvent, to ask what else movement can do.
The fact that movement is ephemeral lets you give it up and move in new directions. So if traces exist in the work they are there as tools to show this difference—not simply as nostalgic recollections, but to say, this is what it might have been, but now this is what it could be.
You’ve written, “the process of creating Document will seek to investigate how choreography can be understood as a record of bodily memory and sensation.” What do you think the ramifications of this are for choreography?
A few years back I watched a documentary on the Ballet Russes that contained footage of company dancers re-enacting choreography. I was struck by how their bodies held very clear sensations of movement, even though they weren’t leaping through the air. I was intrigued by how this represented a dance experience because much of what we normally expect from dance was completely taken away, yet it felt so ‘full.’ I became interested in the ramifications of this for choreography, to move beyond representation or conceptualising movement to the co-presence of phenomena interior to the body as it moves. I’m interested in exploring the possibility of creating a poetic choreographic rendering that envelops and embeds a density of experiential phenomena under the surface of choreography, what French dance writer Laurence Louppe suggests is “the tracing of what the letter does not say, but where another text shows through, another reading of living substance.”
I think this is especially relevant given the current preoccupation in dance with needing to produce ‘product’ that has a sense of solidity about it. Or that appeals directly to particular tastes or markets or can be identifiable in certain terms. I am interested in trying to open up and question what is there before us on stage.
You’ll find reviews of Sandra Parker’s works in our extensive 1994-present
archive, RealTimeDance
Sandra Parker, Document, from Housemate VII Residency, Dancehouse, July 27-31; www.dancehouse.com.au
Spotlight Bunny, Julie Vulcan, Ashley Scott & Friends with Deficits
courtesy the artists
Spotlight Bunny, Julie Vulcan, Ashley Scott & Friends with Deficits
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS FOR PERFORMANCE IN RECENT YEARS HAS BEEN THE EMERGENCE OF YOUNG INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS, FESTIVAL DIRECTORS AND CURATORS. MANY ARE WOMEN, OFTEN WORKING IN TEAMS AND PRODUCING EVENTS THAT PRESENT BUT ALSO NURTURE NEW WORK—DRAMATURGICALLY BUT ALSO IN TERMS OF MANAGEMENT, RISK AND TECHNICAL AWARENESS. IMOGEN SEMMLER IS ONE SUCH PRODUCER CREATING UNDERBELLY IN 2007, A FESTIVAL WHICH SUPPORTS INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AND GROUPS, EMERGING AND ESTABLISHED, WORKING IN A VARIETY OF PRACTICES. THIS YEAR THE THREE-WEEK WORKSHOP AND PERFORMANCE DAY WILL BE STAGED ON SYDNEY’S COCKATOO ISLAND.
Underbelly in 2011 predictably includes a diverse range of projects. Here’s a few examples. The Sexy Tales Comedy Collective will develop a theatre and music work titled 100 Years Of Lizards. Neil Brandhorst’s Horizon will be an installation that “disrupts the sensory information required to make sense of the environment…revealing how previous experiences provide meaning in new situations, and result in the feelings and urges that become our behaviour.” Spotlight Bunny, a work conceived by Sydney performance maker Julie Vulcan working closely with sound maker Ashley Scott and emerging performance collective Friends with Deficits to “explore location, the influence of soundtrack and the slippery nature of context. Influenced by drive-in culture, it blends the past with today’s iPod culture in an intimate performance for four audience members at a time in a stationary car.”
In Inflate My Heart With 1000 Gushes Of Wind, Swanbrero will “insert a piece of Parramatta Road into the natural wonderland of Cockatoo Island. The work will experiment with large-scale interpretive choreography, costume and wind to create melancholic spectacle.” The group (Corey Crushcore Dreamlover and Lara Thoms) describe themselves as “faded, cheap, fraying and bending over so far that their heads are scraping the ground.”
Tell me about starting up Underbelly and why you did it?
I come from an events background, working on different festivals and putting on little events myself—sort of underground. I liked the idea of bringing a lot of artists together in a festival but also starting with the development of their projects. Having artists together you’d see them make great connections, but it was fleeting and then they were off. So I thought it would be good to bring development and presentation together under the one roof.
Secondly, I felt there was a lot of stuff happening in Sydney at the time that was perhaps a bit hard to access, say about five years ago. There were great underground spaces but you had to be in the know. This was pre-emailing list, pre-Facebook, so it was more text messages or word of mouth. I started talking to groups who I’d been working with or knew of and put together a group of local artists with projects.
The first year was very much curated. I came up with the concept and just did it with people I was interested in and staged it at CarriageWorks. The second year we did it there again but it was open to applications—a lot of people said, how can we get involved? So that process has continued, which has been great.
You’re still curating or is it more like a fringe festival model?
We have a curating committee—applications come in and we choose projects. We have certain loose criteria—to support emerging artists and artists experimenting with new forms or more established artists pushing themselves in new directions or wanting to do more research-based work.
Would you or your committee have seen much of the work?
Not necessarily. We focus on new work. Artists have to have a pretty good argument as to why their work should be included because the whole idea of the residency is to present something for the first time. Sometimes it’s a work in progress. Some projects develop just a few scenes or the beginning of an idea.
And audiences watch the development?
Yes. We’ve had shows that have gone on to become fully formed and feature at fringe festivals or Next Wave. It’s good to get projects at an early stage—they need the lab time.
So you’re providing a service for people to innovate. Do you charge artists for that?
No. This year we’ve developed a project fund. It’s not a huge amount of money but we want to resource projects. We don’t want artists to be out of pocket. If they come with an existing grant or other support, that’s great but we do try as best we can to facilitate their project; that includes technical support, publicity, marketing, the venue…And we provide a lot of mentoring. For a lot of the artists, this might be the first time they’ve been involved in a festival. We help them with producing, budgeting, maybe the technical side of producing and we ask them all to do risk assessments. They might not have done that before so we’re happy to hold their hands and take them through the process. But we’re not doing it for them—we make sure they learn. There’s a lot of contact. We have a producer who works directly with the artists. I did this in the first few years but now we’re expanding.
How many of you are there?
At the moment there’s Clare Holland, our executive director, and myself. In two weeks we’ll have our event producer Jenn Blake and then we’ll have a production manager, a technical co-ordinator and a marketing co-ordinator, a publicist and an artist co-ordinator, like a program co-ordinator who manages all the artists. So it’s a big team!
Corey Crushcore Dreamlover, Inflate My Heart With 1000 Gushes Of Wind, Swanbrero
courtesy the artists
Corey Crushcore Dreamlover, Inflate My Heart With 1000 Gushes Of Wind, Swanbrero
Does the income from box office keep the event afloat?
Box office is a very small part of our income, mainly because the lab is running for three weeks prior to the festival which is a one-day event—and we try to make the tickets quite cheap, around $15 to $20. It’s a bit like a music festival where you choose shows and wander round installations. You get to see the whole gamut of what’s on offer. We started out with very little money, but CarriageWorks was a great venue partner—they gave us a lot of in-kind support.
We set up as a not-for-profit organisation and grew gradually. We started getting support from the City of Sydney, set up more formally in 2009, and had a year off because I realised it wasn’t going to be sustainable if we just kept doing it on a shoestring.
We get Arts NSW funding and we’ve recently received first time Australia Council funding for this event through the ARI [Artist Run Initiative] fund. We’ve also found really interesting partnerships with foundations whose interests are aligned with ours, and we have an amazing board.
How do audiences engage with Underbelly?
During the lab, we run tours. We invite the audience to come and watch the projects in development. One of us will take you round and you’ll meet the artists. And what’s happening more and more, because of the audience component at the lab, is that artists are applying with projects that need the audience for development—maybe content generation or particular feedback or testing things or interactivity or even making or building things. So that allows the lab experience to be really fun for the audience and it’s also giving artists unique access to the public through a residency. So it’s not just a work in progress showing. It might be the I Can Draw You a Picture team—they made a printed publication last year with the audience generating the content during the lab.
We call this the Public Lab. People can come pretty much every day for 10 days of the three weeks. You can come out to the island and do a tour. Projects that really require audience participation might want two hours a day. So we’ll pop that in the lab calendar that from, say 1-3pm, head out to the island and you can take part in this project. There’ll be social experiments where the audience become active participants. A quarter of our projects would have that component but it’s often those that then go on to other festivals. There’s a real live art push and I think that term is constantly evolving where once it was performance art or contemporary performance. In this area huge boundaries are being blurred between audience and artists and participants.
What characterises the works that appear in Underbelly?
We have a lot of installation, works by visual artists and filmmakers. We’ve had a couple of dance films over the years—the dance pieces are created on site, filmed, edited and shown. A filmmaker last year made a 3D video where you looked through a little box. He did it with really cheap technology because he’d been working in really high-end production for big companies but he wanted to show people how you could do it really cheaply and easily using a few mirrors and an old monitor. We also have a lot of dance and theatre. We’ve had the classics—Pig Island and Eddie Sharp. Whale Chorus are back this year with a project. There a lot of emerging and experimental theatre people, a lot of hybrid stuff, a lot of blending and theatre work like Eddie Sharp’s Some Film Museums I Have Known (shown at the Old Fitzroy recently).
The word that was associated with Underbelly for a while was “underground.” Is that still a viable term?
I think it’s really moved on, particularly in Sydney. The “underground” as it was five years ago has really blossomed through different changes such as to the licensing laws, the support of FBi Radio, the inner west venues—different elements that have brought that culture out into the open. For years you heard that there wasn’t much going on in the arts unless you were in the know. Now people are saying, “oh wow there’s heaps of stuff happening.” You see it in events like Tiny Stadiums, Imperial Panda, new venues, Performance Space’s LiveWorks and their Clubhouse. A lot of it is because groups have come out of what was the underground five or 10 years ago.
Is Underbelly becoming more of a full-time job?
It’s becoming more full-time, which is great. Bringing Clare Holland our executive director in has been a huge part of that—the ability to work year-round and find the funding to do it. It’s not full-time but it’s definitely part-time most of the year. I do other independent producing work. I did the Statues Project for City of Sydney’s Art and About last year and I produce some theatre for other people. I do research for documentaries in my other life. It’s about juggling. I think making Underbelly sustainable has been a really big focus. .
You usually get a good turnout on the big day. How many are you anticipating this year?
We’ll expect maybe 1200-1500 if it’s a nice day. If it’s raining, it’s about who wants to get on the ferry. The thing is, people like going out to Cockatoo Island. Even though it’s winter. I think the Biennale has shown that everyone’s still pretty happy to go out there and its all under cover. You don’t have to worry about getting wet—you just don’t take your jacket off.
Underbelly Arts, Underbelly: Public Lab, July 3-12; Festival, Cockatoo Island, Sydney, July 16 , http://underbellyarts.com.au
SIMON STONE CREATES HAUNTED THEATRE. NOT HAUNTING THEATRE (THOUGH IT CAN BE THAT). AND NOT THEATRE THAT HAS MUCH TRUCK WITH THE SUPERNATURAL, THOUGH I WOULDN’T GO SO FAR AS TO SAY THAT HIS IS A WHOLLY SECULAR OR MATERIALIST AESTHETIC, EITHER. BUT LIKE MANY OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES, HIS THEATRE IS SHADOWED BY RESTLESS SPIRITS AND THIS IS NOWHERE MORE EVIDENT THAN IN THE DIVIDED RESPONSES TO HIS RECENT PRODUCTION OF BERTOLT BRECHT’S FIRST FULL-LENGTH PLAY, BAAL.
The reactions to this production have canvassed the spectrum from rave to rubbish; on Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes blog, the play produced one of the longest series of comments to date, with much passion displayed by respondents. It often came down to its writer: was there enough Brecht in here, or too much? And which Brecht? If this is the least ‘Brechtian’ of his writings, what can we do with it? Can we tackle Brecht from a post-Brechtian position, or is he inextricably embedded in the firmament of Western theatre?
It was Derrida who coined the term ‘hauntology’ and, while only a minor part of his critical theory, it’s a concept that has been picked up and developed in other areas, most notably musicology. For Derrida it was a notion used to explain the lingering presence of Marx in the post-Marxist era—an age which has seen the death of the Communist project, but which is still haunted by its echoes. The spectre of Marx is neither living nor dead; or, we may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with us.
Brecht is dead. Long live Brecht. A canon-related demise, perhaps. If, as Nietzche argued, a being is only defined at the point of death, when the possibility of becoming something else is reduced to zero, then poor Bertolt is as stiff as a plank. It’s hard to think of anything new that the writer could become. We’ve picked at, held up and turned over every scrap of his corpus. At best, a new production can aspire to the level of autopsy.
The point here is that Stone should be able to do whatever he pleases with the body of Baal, but his liberal reworking of the original is troubled by the elusive spectre of its progenitor. It’s a problem that unsettles so many adaptations of modern classics—we know what this text has to mean, so why is the voice of its author just a faint distraction at the edge of hearing? You can do what you want with your source—it’s the postmodern age, after all—but make sure the “spirit” of the original is firmly contained. It’s a criticism that’s been levelled at Kantor, Andrews, Lutton: they’re dressing phantoms in fancy robes, only serving to remind us of the death of the authentic, original voice.
And so this Baal is haunted by what it’s not. Stone reimagines the barbarous, adulated poet at its centre as a misanthropic rock god celebrated by the very society against which he pits himself. In this vision his descent into squalid self-gratification becomes a retreat into narcissistic solipsism; everyone in his world becomes a fractured mirror on his own psyche. Theatrically, it’s a potent interpretation: Stone establishes a recognisable onstage world before flipping a switch and taking us into an utterly different mode of being, in which ‘character’ (already a loosely applied concept here) is not just destabilised but liquidated.
It should be effective stuff. But there’s that spectre that won’t be laid to rest: what about Brecht? Why should it matter? I don’t think the playwright’s original text is all that much chop (neither did he, in the end). So why should it matter where he exists in all of this? It’s a question that hovers around Beckett too, and Chekhov, and Ionesco. I don’t think it should, but I don’t know what to do about it. Call in an exorcist.
Real TV’s recent production of British playwright Debbie Tucker Green’s Random was anything but haunted—it’s as fresh a piece of theatre as I’ve seen in years performed with a vitality that exceeds containment, with an immediacy that’s bracing. It’s difficult to believe that the script wasn’t written specifically for sole performer Zahra Newman, at times seeming almost as if it’s being written at the moment of utterance. It might be the unfamiliarity of the material, which traces a tragic day in the life of a British-Jamaican family of four; it’s a corner of London life that I can’t recall having been represented on Australian stages. But credit should really go to Newman’s performance, which I found jaw-droppingly acute. Her command of four distinct voices seems measured down to the micro-tonal level; even the simplest of gestures here conjures both character and the world in which they exist. Director Leticia Caceres has honed the piece to a fine point: there are no slack moments or unnecessary embellishments.
Random was presented at Brisbane’s WTF (World Theatre Festival) this year before a season with Melbourne Theatre Company. I was intrigued to see the Melbourne season located within the MTC’s education program. Certainly, it’s a piece that will easily resonate with teens and, quite likely, inspire many to delve deeper into theatre. But it’s also a piece that deserves to be seen by a broader audience. I hope it’s allowed to live on.
Somewhere between these two productions is Laurence Strangio’s version of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. It should be a dead play—it’s been worked over by so many student productions and university syllabi that it’s taken on the air of a museum piece. But Strangio’s production was an unexpected delight, both carefully judged and imbued with its own irreverent spirit.
This Six Characters… was an event. For all its self-referential meta-theatricality, Pirandello’s original is still a play. Strangio adds further layers which both problematise and extend the work’s conceit: here we are witnessing two actors and a director prepare for a reading of Six Characters in Search of an Author, before they are interrupted by six actors playing the six characters. The production widens the frame of its ur-text to encompass the site of its staging (quite literally, as it seems every nook of La Mama holds a secret in this work). The performers themselves are integral to the production’s meaning—it’s hilarious to watch Natasha Jacobs complain that Caroline Lee is too old to play her, while casting playwright Adam Cass as the director eventually takes on extra significance when that role shifts towards the ‘author’ of the play’s title.
It’s the integration of the audience that probably invigorates this piece, however. There’s no limp ‘audience participation’—rather, there’s no erection of a fourth wall to begin with. On the night I attended audience members were happily talking to actors throughout, anticipating events, making in-jokes, praising bits of direction. There was still a play occurring somewhere in there, but by acknowledging the essential artifice of the whole shebang we were invited to investigate it from the inside, rather than dissect it as a preserved fossil of another era. Pirandello is dead, for sure, but for two hours here I quite simply forgot that he’d ever been alive.
Baal, writer Bertolt Brecht, translators Simon Stone, Tom Wright, director Simon Stone, performers Brigid Gallacher, Geraldine Hakewill, Luisa Hastings Edge, Shelly Lauman, Oscar Redding, Chris Ryan, Lotte St Clair, Katherine Tonkin, Thomas M Wright, set & lighting design Nick Schlieper, costumes Mel Page, composer & sound designer Stefan Gregory, presented by Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company; Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, April 2 – 23; Random, writer Debbie Tucker Green, director Leticia Caceres, performer Zahra Newman, designer Tanja Beer, composer & sound designer Pete Goodwin, presented by Real TV, Melbourne Theatre Company; Lawler Studio, MTC, May 3 – 13; Six Characters In Search of an Author, based on the play by Luigi Pirandello, concept, direction, adaptation Laurence Strangio, performers Adam Cass, Dean Cartmel, Caroline Lee, Alicia Benn-Lawler, Clare Callow, David Pidd, Natasha Jacobs, Karen Berger, Gabriel Partington, Carmelina Di Guglielmo, Josie Eberhard, lighting design Bec Etchell, design consultant Dayna Morrissey, puppets by Johannes Scherpenhuizen; La Mama Theatre, May 11 – 29
Yana Taylor, Irving Gregory, The Disappearances Project, version1.0
photo Heidrun Löhr
Yana Taylor, Irving Gregory, The Disappearances Project, version1.0
VERSION 1.0 HAS BEEN CREATING AMBITIOUS PERFORMANCE WORKS IN AUSTRALIA SINCE THE 1990S. THEIR LATEST, THE DISAPPEARANCES PROJECT, UNFURLS SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY AS IT INTERROGATES THE LOSS THAT REVERBERATES ACROSS SPACE AND TIME WHEN SOMEONE YOU LOVE DISAPPEARS. PERFORMERS IRVING GREGORY AND YANA TAYLOR TAKE THE AUDIENCE WITH THEM INTO THE TENSE AND SOMETIMES SHATTERING STATE OF MOURNING FOR THOSE WHO REMAIN UNCERTAINLY LOST.
In the company’s characteristic verbatim style, the performance includes excerpts from interviews conducted by version 1.0 with people who had experienced the loss of a loved one through disappearance. The performers share excerpts from stories they gleaned from these interviews, telling them as if they were their own. The authenticity of these narrative fragments in The Disappearances Project is both fascinating and painful to witness.
The first light of Yana Taylor and Sean Bacon’s video projection flickers across a large screen to Paul Prestipino’s emerging soundscape, laden with falling raindrops and trembling cascades of sound. The video, shot through the window of an endlessly, slow-moving vehicle, creates the sense of an exhaustive and inexorable search. Streetlights leak into a dawning cityscape to the incessant sound of dripping water. Rural and suburban streetscapes flitter onto the screen—their familiarity directly implicating viewers in the stories they will hear.
Yana Taylor and Irving Gregory’s miked voices emerge, disembodied—as if suspended in space—until their bodies are gradually illuminated by side lighting. For most of The Disappearances Project, the performers remain seated—upright, alert and tense on wooden chairs either side of the stage. Their near frozen stillness and the nervy soundscape charge the space with a sense of impending danger, tracing a plateau of quiet intensity which creeps to its peak when Taylor’s numbness begins to crack towards the end of the piece. The heaviness of the stories they tell visibly wears away at her, while Gregory maintains a veneer of relative calm.
The syncopated rhythm of the utterances is strung tightly across this ineffable space of mourning. Throughout, the performers’ alternating bursts of monologue bleed into each other’s stories, fragmenting them. Sometimes these stories enunciate glimmers of optimism, but always back-gridded by confusion and slowly building to existential explosions like, “It got to the point where I wanted to go missing, too.”
Taylor and Gregory do not perform fixed characters, but multiple embodiments from a range of experiences of loss. These float across the surfaces of the skin and the resonant timbres of their voices, a performative choice that neatly destabilises the potential for a linear performance structure and without leaning into didacticism. Sustained, disciplined stillness allows for this, as does the weaving of multiple stories into the performative fabric, without the performers embodying any singular identity. Perhaps Taylor and Irving explore a type of traumatised dis-embodiment, where they are rendered motionless due to the incomprehensible size and weight of such loss—a loss that always remains open, without closure.
The terrifying ambiguity of not-knowing displaces the missing persons’ loved ones. This nightmarish loss is always repeating itself in The Disappearances Project by perpetually asking, ‘What if?’ Taylor and Gregory articulate the varying registers of hope, denial, despair and anger that fill this non-place, for the most part with sensitivity and command.
The audience is encouraged to maintain a critical distance for the majority of the performance. At certain points, I wanted to be invited to ‘feel-with’ these stories of loss, rather than hover over them. This is the challenge of verbatim theatre that version 1.0 repeatedly faces with gusto: how can performance move an audience affectively, whilst also moving them to think critically about important social issues? The company managed this particularly well in The Bougainville Photoplay Project (2009-11).
Despite the successes of The Disappearances Project, I’m uncertain as to whether it met that challenge this time.
What The Disappearances Project highlights is a bureaucratic system predicated upon bodies that are fixed, stable and identifiable. The disappeared haunt the loved ones left behind who are punished further by bureaucracy’s inability to cope with the intricacies of human feeling. Where do loved ones of those who have disappeared go for help? Can our system accommodate and support complex human experiences? Whether or not verbatim theatre is an adequate mode for responding to such questions, at the heart of The Disappearances Project is an important plea to rethink the inadequacies of apparent democracy that fails when we need it most.
version 1.0, The Disappearances Project, concept, research, co-direction Yana Taylor, David Williams, devisers Irving Gregory, Paul Prestipino, Yana Taylor, David Williams, performers Irving Gregory, Yana Taylor, composer Paul Prestipino, lighting Frank Mainoo, film direction Yana Taylor, filmmaking collaborator Dan Jamieson, cinematographer, Sean Bacon, producer David Williams; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, May 3-7
THIS IS—OF THE OTHER EXAMINES THE COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN XX AND BRIGID JACKSON; THEIR FIREFLY-BRIGHT HOPES, SEPARATE SETBACKS AND THEIR ONSTAGE CHEMISTRY. AT ITS CORE IT IS A STUDY OF YOUNG ARTISTIC LIFE, OF THE DESIRE TO BE IN THE MENTAL AND PHYSICAL SPACE WHERE A CREATIVE SPARK IS IGNITED AND BURNS, THE ARTIST BECOMING A CONDUIT FOR SOMETHING ELECTRIC AND COMPELLING. WHAT TEARS PEOPLE AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCTIVE STATE IS THE STUFF THAT INFORMS ART—LIFE. DEATH LOOMS TOO, AS DO ILLNESS AND DISAPPOINTMENT.
X and Jackson have tackled autobiographical material using two complementary elements, touch and text. The words here range from prosaic to poetic, sometimes in the same monologue. Occasionally the performers seem to antagonise each other for real; spontaneous flashes of heat in their words raise questions about the proximity of real life to their art. Favouring performance based solely on movement, Jackson admits that hearing the first words come out of her mouth on stage is challenging.
The two young women who met at VCA in 2007 are tense and loose by turn, one earthy, one ethereal. The material in this performance, while broad in scope, has developed from their experiences of isolation. Jackson, the ethereal one, was at her mother’s side last year as she succumbed to cancer and then suffered a physical breakdown herself—”my scalp just let [my hair] go.”
Jackson’s grieving is conveyed powerfully and simply with a wet tissue placed over her face like a death mask then slowly inhaled into her mouth. On the floor, her ballerina-slim body raggedly convulses as it struggles to breathe through sobs. Remaining silent here, she avoids histrionics.
Bare-boned and intimate, the performance relies on few props—a radio, vacuum cleaner and tissue box—which relate to the shared living arrangement of the artists at one point. It was difficult not to feel a pang of empathy as Jackson expressed a desire for a baby to please her dying mother. X was in Paris at this time, directionless and lonely—reality in the city not living up to her artistic ambitions.
The stories overlap and run parallel to one another, the performers picking up loose pages from the floor, reading from their missives to each other unsystematically. X crawls close to the walls in the claustrophobic, blackened space at La Mama, scratching her arms against their surfaces in an act of frustration and restlessness. Unable to console each other adequately through written language, the dialogue turns to the platitudes that close their emails. Their unravelling is best conveyed physically. Jackson traces an operating vacuum cleaner nozzle across her skin in an act of seeming self-harm or procrastination.
Jackson and X push each other into new depths of their practice, both in the thoughts they share and their exploration of physical expression. There is a moody, ad lib quality to the piece as the duo builds a quiet, emotive landscape brick by brick, word by word.
This is—of the other, made & performed by XX and Brigid Jackson, La Mama, Melbourne, March 23-April 23
Alan Lao, Effie Nkrumah, Frank Mainoo, Ama and Chan, Urban Theatre Projects
photo Heidrun Löhr
Alan Lao, Effie Nkrumah, Frank Mainoo, Ama and Chan, Urban Theatre Projects
THAT “REALITY TELEVISION” IS AN OXYMORON IS FAIRLY COMMON KNOWLEDGE. FROM SURVIVOR AND BIG BROTHER TO MASTERCHEF AND THE AMAZING RACE, THE “REALITY” OF THE GENRE HAS ALWAYS TAKEN A BACKSEAT TO THE “TELEVISION” OF IT. THE TRUISM THAT OBSERVATION ALTERS THE THING OBSERVED IS TRUE ENOUGH OF CINEMA VERITE AND NATURE DOCUMENTARY, LET ALONE OF A PROGRAM THAT HOLES UP 16 OF SOCIETY’S MORE VACUOUS SPECIMENS IN A FORTRESS OF ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM AND PLIES THEM WITH ALCOHOL FOR THREE MONTHS. IT IS DIFFICULT TO THINK OF RICHARD HATCH AS A MODERN DAY ROBINSON CRUSOE WHEN JEFF PROBST KEEPS ROCKING UP AT CAMP LOOKING LIKE THE ACTIVITIES MANAGER FROM A NEARBY SPA RESORT. AND EVERYONE KNOWS BY NOW THAT BY THE TIME THE JUDGES TASTE ANYTHING ON MASTERCHEF THE DISHES HAVE BEEN COLD FOR A GOOD 45 MINUTES AND THAT THE CONTESTANTS THEMSELVES RECEIVE SUB-PAR CATERING.
At least within this country, however, the least realistic thing about reality television is its colour: these programs have an insidious tendency to be a starchy, unrepresentative White. (To its credit, MasterChef has been somewhat more colourful than other programs—Chinese-Australian Adam Liaw won the competition in 2010, Malaysia-born Poh Ling Yeow came second the year before that, and Greek-Australian George Colambaris is one of the three judges—but even its line-up tends towards the starchy.) One can’t but recall Lee Lewis’s 2007 Platform Paper on cross-racial casting: “I had grown accustomed to New York’s mixed-race casts and was astonished that the ethnic diversity that was so apparent on the streets was not replicated on Sydney’s stages,” Lewis writes. Let’s hope she didn’t tune in to The Block or My Kitchen Rules.
It should come as no surprise that Urban Theatre Projects’ Ama and Chan takes this sorry state of affairs as its starting point. As Caroline Wake writes in her introduction to RealTime’s online archive of pieces on the company and its work: “Time and time again, Urban Theatre Projects has explored who becomes marginalised, how and why…Through their many productions we have come to know many modes of resilience: modest contingent, defiant, temporary, permanent and sometimes triumphant, but rarely in the way we expect.” Certainly, that is the case here. Where one might expect an angry, even militant, approach, Ama and Chan’s critique is instead subtle and good-humoured, worn on the sleeve of the production only lightly, as though it could, like lint, be brushed away without a second thought.
Indeed, if the production’s strategy could be summed up in a word, it would perhaps be “charm.” Performers Effie Nkrumah and Alan Lao have created, in the titular characters, two intensely and immediately likable protagonists. Ghanaian-Australian Ama and her bumbling Chinese-Australian husband Chan meet the audience in the foyer of the Bankstown Arts Centre prior to the show in a hilarious meet-and-greet that might be better described as an accost-and-berate. (Chan gives the vegetarians a particularly hard time.) They spurn political correctness. (Ama asks the row of Africans in the audience to smile. When she fails to see their teeth in the darkness, she frowns: “Hang on! That’s just a row of empty chairs!”) To a large extent, the characters hew pretty closely to stereotype. Chan’s Chinese-Australian accent is straight out of the fish markets and Ama’s entire persona reminiscent of blaxploitation’s sassy supermamas. When the piece reveals its interest in reality television, however, this reliance on types is revealed to have a very particular purpose: we quickly realise that these same types fall outside television’s prescribed and limited definition of social reality.
Effie Nkrumah, Alan Lao, Ama and Chan, Urban Theatre Projects
photo Heidrun Löhr
Effie Nkrumah, Alan Lao, Ama and Chan, Urban Theatre Projects
Drew Fairley’s production posits a unique solution to this problem: Ama and Chan take to the internet with a YouTube cooking show. (Within the context of the narrative, their reasons for doing so are less social than financial: the couple’s furniture has been lost by removalists on the day they are supposed to move into their new apartment. Chan hasn’t purchased insurance, one suspects characteristically.) Dedicated to “Ghanaian-Chinese fusion,” with the cuisines, like the character types themselves, given added depth and richness by their collision with one another, the couple’s show takes advantage of the digital sphere and its much-touted capacity for breaking down cultural barriers and opening up more inclusive and representative spaces.
A Catfish-esque montage of images from Google Maps, iPhone text messages and online airline booking sites opens the production, serving as its prologue and providing us with the characters’ back stories. The networked world also played an important role in the production’s marketing strategy, with audiences invited to befriend Ama and Chan on Facebook and follow the latter’s hilarious videoblog in the lead-up to the season.
With the Arab Spring still in full swing as this issue goes to press and with the importance, if not necessarily the centrality, of these same technologies to those struggles, the exploration of their capacity for creating new spaces here at home seems timely. Ama and Chan’s mode of resilience, too, is a digital one.
Urban Theatre Projects, Ama and Chan, director, writer Drew Fairley, devisors, performers, writers Effie Nkrumah, Alan Lao, dramaturg Alicia Talbot, musician, performer Reza Achman, Bankstown Arts Centre Theatre, Sydney, May 4-14
IS IT SACRILEGIOUS TO ADMIT THAT I’M UNDERWHELMED BY ROLAND BARTHES’ CLASSIC ESSAY “THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE”? BEYOND THE TITULAR CONCEPT THAT THE VOICE CONTAINS THE ESSENCE OF ITS PRODUCING BODY, “THE GRAIN,” THE ESSAY REVEALS LITTLE ABOUT THE RAW VOICE ITSELF, CONCENTRATING MORE ON BARTHES’ OPINIONS ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC.
While Barthes’ “grain” is well-referenced in VOICE: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media, edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen, the 19 essays gathered here prove much more satisfying. The book offers multiple analyses of the voice in concert with and beyond language, with a focus on the mediated voice and its relationship with technologies and modes of contemporary art production.
The book is divided into four areas that essentially lead us from the gadgets of the past to propositions for the future. The first section, “Capturing Voice,” explores technologies by which the voice has been synthesised, recorded, stored and transmitted. Theo van Leeuwen looks at instrumental emulations of the voice, starting with pipe organs and ending with the synthesised samples found on his Roland RD300-SX, discussed within the framework of authenticity and modality theory. Thomas Y Levin conducts a whirlwind tour of the history of voicemail revealing a range of fascinating early inventions and proposing that the recorded/transmitted voice is a form of writing.
Virginia Madsen and John Potts look at the extension of temporally dependent radio into the realm of on-demand voice casting, exploring amateurism and audio blogging along with Brecht’s idea of radio as a two-sided exchange. Martin Thomas’ chapter on archiving Aboriginal languages is particularly fascinating with its analysis of the use of language in Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes and the possibilities that digital technology offers for communities to archive themselves.
Part two, “Performing Voice,” groups together essays that explore the voice in action across a range of artworks that can loosely be defined as ‘performed.’ A particular highlight is Brandon LaBelle’s complex analysis of sound poetry perhaps because it most directly addresses the paradoxes inherent in vocalisation. LaBelle states that in “attempting to free orality from the constraints of linguistic meaning, sound poetry edges against tensions inherent in subjectivity…sound poetry yearns for language by rupturing the very coherence of it.” He also identifies the tension in sound poetry between the desire to embrace technology and the pursuit of a raw, primal voicing with examples from artists such as Henri Chopin, William Burroughs and François Dufrêne. He concludes with the proposition that as we now live in the realm of the digital, the modernist project involving the fragmentation of the subject has been replaced by a networked and “distributed sense of subjectivity.”
Amanda Stewart’s artist statement follows on aptly from LaBelle as she describes her explorations into “the materiality of language itself.” Tracing her trajectory from poet-on-the-page to performing vocal artist via radio production, Stewart offers an astute analysis of the role of technology in her practice, both analogue and digital. Meredith Morse’s exploration of the voice in the works of choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti is also a fascinating read, exploring how their voices ruptured the perceived sacredness of the silent dancing body. While she suggests these artists’ explorations anticipated digital approaches, the overall analogue preoccupation of the chapter makes this essay feel slightly tangential to the overall framework of the book.
The third section, “Reanimating Voice,” offers the most practice-oriented chapters, focussing on many illuminating examples of the voice and its manipulation in screen media. The highlight here is the chapter on filmic voices by academic Helen Macallan and sound designer Andrew Plain. Plain’s real world perspective mixed with Macallan’s informed analysis offers many insights into the effect digital processes are having on voice in film, particularly regarding the hierarchy of voice to sounds within a score and the importance of spatialisation given the renewed excitement about 3D cinema.
Mark Ward and Axel Stockburger’s chapters on the voice in video and computer games cross over considerably. Stockburger offers a more academic overview with an emphasis on the role of the user’s voice in the game, while Ward presents an in-depth analysis of sound design in the game BioShock. As with Macallan and Plain’s chapter, it is particularly insightful due to its inclusion of detailed statements by the game’s Audio Lead (head sound designer) Emily Ridgway.
The concluding section, “At the Human Limits of Voice,” starts with a poetic exploration by anthropologist Michael Taussig addressing the spiritual nature of humming, using examples ranging from Winnie the Pooh to the Iroquois people and ending with an excerpt from the Chicago 7 trial involving Allen Ginsberg. The thrust of his argument is that “humming is central to language, as a base state of the voice, humming being neither conscious nor unconscious, neither singing nor saying, but rather sound where the moving mind meets the moving body.”
Nermin Saybasili continues the spiritual exploration in her analysis of a range of media artworks addressing migrant experience in Europe, arguing that the displaced and disembodied migrant voice is essentially a haunting, occupying a liminal space which is in fact inseparable “from the social body.”
The book concludes with a chapter by Philip Brophy exploring how “the human voice readily becomes its other through vocalisation,” using examples of songs by popular artists including Michael Jackson, Cornelius, Yoko Ono and Scott Walker, as well as Luciano Berio. Interestingly this and another chapter by Ross Gibson on the pre-digital nature of King Tubby’s dub, including a quick summary of modern vocal production techniques, are the only chapters that deal with music as such. This ensures that the book is not swamped by multifarious discourses on popular music, allowing alternative voices about voice to be heard.
It is this range of approaches and the presence of multiple stylistic voices that makes this book so enjoyable. I particularly appreciated the inclusion of more personal writing from the likes of Amanda Stewart and Theresa M Senft. The latter’s autobiographical account of her adventures—with telephone sex chat lines, self-help cancer tapes, computer voice recognition and Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room—is both informative and moving. The whirlwind smash-and-grab poetics of Mark Amerika also makes for a provocative read.
Norie Neumark frames VOICE: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media with an introduction offering a range of theoretical approaches to the paradox of vocality which many of the individual chapters expand upon, providing the book with a strong academic underpinning. However for me it is inclusion of real life applications and statements from practising artists interwoven with theoretical analysis and provocation that make this book a pleasurable, accessible and edifying read.
VOICE: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media, editors Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London, 2010
“PEACOCKS ARE VAIN AND STUPID,” CONDUCTOR SIMON CHARLES EXPLAINED. “AT MONTSALVAT ONE KEPT ON COMING INTO THE GREAT HALL AND STARING AT HIMSELF IN THE MIRROR.” THE RECENT PERFORMANCE, FEATURING FOUR PIECES COMPOSED DURING CHARLES’ RESIDENCY AT THE VICTORIAN ARTIST COLONY, WAS UNDERSCORED BY A LESSON FROM THE PEACOCK: YOU CAN MAKE SERIOUS MUSIC, BUT YOU ALSO HAVE TO MAKE FUN OF YOURSELF. THIS DID NOT MEAN THAT THE ENSEMBLE, FEATURING AVIVA ENDEAN ON CLARINETS, MATTHEW HORSLEY ON PERCUSSION, KIM TAN ON FLUTES AND RYAN WILLIAMS ON RECORDERS, SHIED AWAY FROM FULL-BLOODED ‘SERIOUS’ MUSIC, TO WHICH THE FIRST HALF OF THE CONCERT WAS DEDICATED.
Tan opened the concert by sending Toru Takemitsu’s “Air” darting about the lofty spaces of Richmond Uniting Church. The solo flute meditation on air in and outside the body requires the performer to turn breath into wind, imitating a gust one minute and a gale the next. Maintaining intonation and rhythmic precision amidst the composition’s swelling melodic zephyrs, Tan delivered the impossibility of controlled abandon.
“Air” set the impressionist tone for the rest of the first half, sitting comfortably alongside the light tone colour of Charles’ “White Simplex” for bass recorder, bass clarinet and percussion. The overblown, underblown and plosive attacks on the deep instruments sounded as though you were wandering past a drain pipe and heard, far below, some peculiar machines having a secret conversation.
The machines were brought to light for Charles’ percussion piece “Matcham’s Junk.” Charles carves, or threads, a delicate miniature from the barely perceptible sounds of springs, tiny stones and grating pipes, fittingly sourced from the backyard collection of the late jeweller, sculptor and former resident of Montsalvat, Matcham Skipper.
Open ocean provided the program for Liza Lim’s solo clarinet work “Sonorous Body” inspired by the text from her opera The Navigator: “Horizon and water/ Could never be lovers/ Horizon adores only distance/ Sonorous water/ Searching for its sonorous body.”
Lim paints a horizon of undulating microtonal lines, broken only by key clatter and pops and slaps like water on the side of a boat. Endean on clarinet gave expression to the horizon’s infinite desire for distance through her fearsome dynamic range, from the piece’s ear-splitting climax to the barely audible, bubbling double trills at its conclusion.
The second half of the program featured theatrical works that tested the peacock’s composure with both humour and challenging political themes. Matthew Horsely’s “Murdering Creek Rd” was inspired by the composer’s night time visit to the scene of a premeditated massacre of Indigenous Gubbi Gubbi people by white cattlemen in the 1860s. In the first movement the performers call forth chaotic screams from their instruments before breaking into fragments of Australian folk song. Manically waving a lagerphone, Horsely may be conjuring a lawless, unstable, early colonial Australia. He may also be making a humbling parody of contemporary music in the face of an issue that it can only address with difficulty. The second movement asks, “whether the ghosts can be appeased and the land made whole again.” This time, Horsely draws from the Pentecostal musical tradition of New York saxophonist Albert Ayler, with a nod to an account of the massacre that suggests it occurred immediately after a church service. The work does not attempt to answer conflicts arising from its engagement with the historical moment, with Horsely conceding that, “the only answer we receive is the percussive equivocation of the pobblebonk frogs.”
Horsley’s rendition of Greek born French composer Georges Aperghis’ “Le Corps à Corps” saw the solo percussionist careening around the church on an office chair. Horsley played a commentator, narrating the car-cum-chariot race at breakneck speed while accompanying himself on a Persian zarb.
The concert concluded with Charles’ “LOL On My Face,” featuring the disturbing juxtaposition of a dirge-like canon exercise played on alto flute, bass recorder, clarinet and crotales and a vocalist retching and croaking “Shut up, Shut the fuck up!” Humorous, yes, but also strangely beautiful. Providing experiences from sublime to ridiculous, Plight of the Peacock both strutted and laughed with pride.
Plight of the Peacock, conductor Simon Charles, clarinets Aviva Endean, percussion Matthew Horsley, flutes Kim Tan, recorders Ryan Williams, Richmond Uniting Church, Melbourne, May 6
Kusum Normoyle, Sean Baxter, Peter Blamey, High Reflections
video still courtesy Kusum Normoyle
Kusum Normoyle, Sean Baxter, Peter Blamey, High Reflections
THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENNIUM WAS A GOOD TIME FOR EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND AUDIO ARTS IN SYDNEY WITH SEVERAL REGULAR EVENTS SUCH AS IMPERMANENT.AUDIO, DISORIENTATION, IF YOU LIKE IMPROVISED MUSIC WE LIKE YOU (AKA THE NOW NOW), ¼ INCH AND SOUNDNOSOUND TAKING PLACE IN A RANGE OF INTRIGUING ARTIST-RUN (ILLEGAL) VENUES LIKE SPACE 3, LAN FRANCHI’S MEMORIAL DISCOTHEQUE AND HIBERNIAN HOUSE. THERE WAS A REAL SENSE OF COMMUNITY AND MOMENTUM GUIDED BY SOME EMERGING CURATORS AND FUELLED BY YOUNGER ARTISTS COMING THROUGH TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS SUCH AS THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY AND UTS.
By around 2006 things were dying down: venues were scarce, event organisers became tired and/or got real jobs and the media arts bubble burst, taking with it the more audio focused university courses. But maybe this was the pause that refreshes because in 2011, along with a few of the older events that continue, there is another batch of regular gigs with new performers and new audiences. Over the next editions I will survey some of these, exploring their particular flavours (and flaws) and discovering ways in which artists are currently reshaping our expectations of music.
the silent hour
The Silent Hour is the latest addition to the experimental music scene, starting in January 2011. It is run through The General Store Gallery, William Street in Kings Cross, under the guidance of Ben Galvin with occasional guest curators. The shows are irregular but can occur up to twice a month and the programming so far shops across a range of styles from improv, audiovisual, pop inflected electronica and a hint of noisier stuff, with no sense of a rigid agenda.
A small but loving audience attended Session IV featuring three acts. Hinterlandt (Jochen Gutsch, from Germany now residing in Sydney) presented a jam-packed set on keyboard, trumpet, guitar, samples and vocals. He moves effortlessly through a lot of material and after 30 minutes it begins to feel overloaded, but it’s well-produced electro pop with complicated structures and warped edges. Scissor Lock (Marcus Whale) is a man about town, performing regularly at many of these series. His luscious rafts of sound made from layers of static and mangled voice form into sweet and abrasive crescendos that seem at once familiar yet unique.
Visiting German artist Max Neupert closed the night with a live data and video link up with THE! —Tommy Neuwirth, Clemens Wegener—in different locations in Germany. Writing only code they played a collaborative piece of shifting beats and bleeps that was complex and playful, making the most of the limited midi sound palette. In the following weeks Neupert also presented Satellite Zodiac, a gallery installation mapping the realtime data of satellites across our night skies with moving laser pointers. This forms part of an intriguing body of work concerned with modern astronomy.
While the rhetoric around The Silent Hour is somewhat overwrought and the title curious given the events are neither silent nor an hour in length, the intimate space, openness of curation and the enthusiasm of Ben Galvin make this series worth investigating.
Daisy Buchanan, Ladyz in Noyze, Adelaide
photo Spoz
Daisy Buchanan, Ladyz in Noyze, Adelaide
ladyz in noyz
Predominantly a Melbourne activity run by Lara Soulio, this was a tour to promote the CD compilation of the same name, with gigs in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Newcastle (Soulio is extending the work of Marlo Eggplant’s US compilations through Corpus Callosum). While there has been reluctance in the past few years (in Sydney at least) to create separate women’s sound events, it feels as though Ladyz in Noyz has a celebratory, non-righteous agenda that releases it from concerns about ghettoisation. The ladyz vibe was nicely reinforced by the venue, The Red Rattler in Marrickville, a fully legal artist-run theatre established by a collective of women in 2009, which has been a godsend to the alternative performing arts.
Refreshingly, there were four acts from out of town that I hadn’t heard before. Rites Wild (Adelaide) presented a set of songs made from big dirty synth sounds, pared back drumming (by a male) and distorted war chant vocals creating a Nico-esque dirge. Daisy Buchanan (Melbourne) on keyboard offered blizzards of shredded descending tones and dark, folky vocals, heavy on apocalyptic atmosphere. I particularly enjoyed Oranj Punjabi (Melbourne) who used a tabletop full of pedals and electrical boxes, setting up drones by singing into an electro-hacked tin can, her metallic thumps and big delays reminiscent of early industrial music. Finally Festive Jackals (Lismore/Melbourne) sculpted vocal utterances into thick layers of buzzy fuzz, their delayed shouts escalating into a nightmare soundscape that might have pleased Dante.
While each of these artists had their own methodologies, there were strong similarities in their dirty fuzz, bassy drones, submerged vocals and sudden stops. Onnie Art (Melbourne) offered a slightly different approach working with voice, electronics and objects (a tape measure flicked savagely) creating a more chaotic, comic performance. Kusum Normoyle (Sydney) gave us the most physical and brutal set, her screaming and feedback assault deftly crafted to form a thick but detailed noisescape. Normoyle aside (her signature is brevity), I was surprised that all sets barely topped 15 minutes. While particularly sensitive to artists overstaying their welcome I couldn’t shake the feeling that these ladyz should boldly demand more of our time.
While not yet a regular Sydney event, Ladyz in Noyz is certainly an interesting addition to the sound landscape. Lara Soulio has plans to make it happen here again, hopefully with more local involvement.
Machine Death
photo Paul Marshall
Machine Death
high reflections
It could be argued that High Reflections kicked off the resurgence of sound activity in 2009. Caleb Kelly, curator of previous activities such as the seminal impermanent.audio and Pelt Gallery teamed up with Alex White who moved straight from running Electrofringe (2007-08) to take on Serial Space, the venue originally founded by Tameka Carter and Louise Dibben in 2008 that can also be credited with keeping the lights on through the dark times. Taking place monthly on a Saturday night it offered a more upbeat but no less edgy side of experimental music, drawing in elements from more alt-pop genres like metal, no-wave, freak-folk and psychedelia.
I use the past tense as the curators have decided to wrap it up with the final two nights taking place at The Red Rattler: a mini-festival presenting 17 artists, many in new combinations. One particularly successful pairing featured Jon Hunter and Nonemusic (Nic de Jong from Naked on the Vague) playing a sustained guitar epiphany. For the majority of the piece Nonemusic focused on a detuned arpeggio loaded with delay to create an ever-evolving sea of notes. Hunter exacted astounding sounds from his guitar—bubbling water, banshee howling and a truly bone-chilling wooden creaking like a ship in the process of breaking up. The cohesion between the two loosened as it morphed into a kind of broken pop song, but overall we witnessed a dynamic meeting of minds and guitars.
The second evening offered some magic sets. Long time favourites who perform rarely, Machine Death work with dirty minimalist pulses that build by infinitesimal layers, like intricate Japanese lacquer work, to enormous noise. If they’d pushed the volume just a little more in the latter tracks, we just might have reached that higher plain.
Sean Baxter on drums, Kusum Normoyle on voice and Peter Blamey on electronic emissions offered some hardcore extreme clamour. Normoyle prowls the stage, howling and triggering feedback that wraps around Blamey’s deep, electronic eructations, with all the spaces filled by Baxter’s metal pipes clattering over his drumkit: loud, dense and bracing.
However the real highlight was the psychological terror induced by Thembi Soddell’s performance. With the lights turned off and a request for quiet (even the rattling fridges were silenced), Soddell, hidden from view, created an amazingly evocative soundscape of unspecified but terrifying dread coming towards us slowly from a distance. An intensifying rumble augmented by half-human, half-animal shrieks reaches its zenith and then sucks back down, vacuum-like, to a ringing almost-silence, only to begin again. With a fine balance between augmented field recording and machine noise Soddell perfectly controls this exhilarating journey into her unconscious—or is it our own?
The final night of High Reflections was a fitting roundup of two years of diverse and adventurous programming and it is sad to see the end of another era. But as this current resurgence of gigs evidences, it’s all part of a greater cycle—there’s more to come.
Next up I’ll report on visits to Sound Series and 1/4 inch.
The Silent Hour, curator Ben Galvin, The General Store, March 31, www.the-generalstore.net/The_SIlent_Hour.html; Ladyz in Noyz —Sydney, curator Lara Soulio, The Red Rattler, April 10; High Reflections, curators Caleb Kelly, Alex White, The Red Rattler, Sydney, May 25-26, www.highreflections.org/
Janet Baker-Finch, Erik Griswold, Nicholas Ng, Vanessa Tomlinson
photo Sharka Bosakova
Janet Baker-Finch, Erik Griswold, Nicholas Ng, Vanessa Tomlinson
IT’S CLOCKED OUT DUO’S SEASON OPENER AT QLD CON’S RECITAL HALL. NICE SIZED CROWD, NICE PRE CONCERT BUZZ. STAGE SET-UP IS A COUPLE OF PIANOS, PERCUSSION, VIBES, BIG DRUMS. UP THE BACK, HIGH OVER A TALLISH THIN PLATFORM, HANGS A WIRE BASKET AND A LARGE CIRCULAR CONE, POINTY SIDE DOWN. ERIK GRISWOLD INTROS THE PROGRAM (SEVEN PIECES IN 60 MINS), THANKS THE GUESTS, USES THE ‘EXPERIMENTAL’ WORD. TELLS US THE WIRE BASKET AT THE BACK HOLDS ICE THAT WE WILL HEAR MELTING ONTO STUFF LATER—I MUST ADMIT I DID NOT NOTICE IT AGAIN OTHER THAN TO WONDER FROM TIME TO TIME IF I SHOULD BE NOTICING IT.
Clocks tick away (tonight’s theme) and the concert starts with Wake Up!—a sort of programmatic journey across the sleep cycle. Percussive tic-tocs and prepared piano chimes move into fast rolls on skins, then a long middle section of hits on wood like a bunch of clocks ticking to their own individual time frames. Tube cut metal bells tinkle out a lullaby against sparse piano before waking to a strangely funkless swamp groove.
Now that everyone is awake it’s onto breakfast with two guests—Lawrence English and Janet Baker-Finch—and Tomlinson playing what could be cereal bowls. Tomlinson is doing percussion-as-Foley and even though it is really nice to hear the different sounds and consider the transitions from beats to clicks to noise to tones as one clicks and taps and scrunches ever faster, things get a bit formless. I invoke audience privilege and blame the performers for my wandering attention rather than thinking it is my fault for not understanding what is going on. But…in come some seagull sounds via English’s field recordings and that gives the whole thing a bit of retrospective sense. The dynamics of the previous section anticipated the seagulls. They have taken the formless and unpredictable and retrospectively predicated it on familiar nature. This is a great touch as so much of listening is about forward prediction and this piece reverses that default. Instead of modulating prediction to give meaning through elements of musical surprise and familiarity we get storytelling and memory to make sense of the past. Then again, as Griswold starts rolling a ping pong ball on the strings of a zither and yet another instrument gets its time in the sun, I wonder if perhaps I’m reading a bit too much into it. Then the seagulls disappear and cycles of soft ocean waves fade in to gently underpin the form with another scale of repetition.
A few shorter pieces follow. Griswold sings what sounds like a Chinese street vendor’s call to Nicholas Ng’s accompaniment on erhu. Fast atonal bits and pieces come in on percussion and piano then it all syncs together through a majestic chordal sequence before more traditional tune, riffy piano and vibes. Like an update to mid 70s jazz fusion a la Jean-Luc Ponty.
The guest spot with Joel Stern introduces old school electronic FX—squealy pig snorts, booming bass drums. The interplay between the performers is excellent; they seem to be really listening and adapting to each other. Switching on and off, back and forth, bursts of noise then a quick stop tight with the drums–like stadium rock gods trading ever-harder solos as a contest in status updates.
The final piece is Spill Redux with Baker-Finch, a re-working of the earlier Spill [www.clockedout.org/projects/dsfpercussion.html]. Here we discover the purpose of the hollow inverted cone suspended at the back. It is filled with rice and swung as a pendulum, rice slowly leaking from the bottom. The rice spills onto a variety of surfaces, such as bowls and paper, to make gentle bursts of percussive noise. Using a leaking pendulum to drive a rhythmic pulse is a beautiful idea, as the period of a pendulum’s swing remains constant even as the arc of the swing gets shorter. Another link to clocks.
Baker Finch moves in and out of the arc of the pendulum’s swing. She wears a garbage bag dress, outsized castanets on her fingers, metal kitchenware on her limbs. She drags her foot through the spilled rice to make sound, slow and hypnotic, then reaches into the falling stream of rice, making washes of sound that hint back to the earlier field recordings of ocean waves. The rice runs out and the evening finishes on church bells and a call to prayer. The weekly rituals. Awake and asleep. Waves and the ocean tides.
Wake Up! Clocked Out Duo (Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson) with Janet Baker-Finch, Lawrence English, Nicholas Ng, Joel Stern, Queensland Conservatorium, Brisbane, March 23
ite-Listening: Brisbane, Guidebook and 3” CD, Room 40
LAWRENCE ENGLISH WANTS US TO EXPAND OUR PERCEPTION. HE DOESN’T JUST WANT US TO PAY MORE ATTENTION TO SOUND, BUT TO PREFERENCE OUR EARS IN OUR SENSORY ENGAGEMENT WITH PLACE. THIS IS HARDER THAN IT SOUNDS. FOR ONE, OURS IS INCREASINGLY A VISUAL WORLD, FORMED, LIVED AND KNOWN THROUGH TEXT AND IMAGE. SECONDLY, OUR EARS HEAR CEASELESSLY, BUT OUR BRAINS ARE TRAINED TO PROTECT US, APPLYING ‘NEUROLOGICAL COTTON WOOL’ THAT FILTERS AND PROTECTS US FROM THE SHEER MASS OF AUDITORY INFORMATION WE ENCOUNTER IN EVERYDAY LIFE.
This idea is not a new one, as audiophiles know—the concepts of acoustic ecology and the human mediation of the environment through sound have been around for 50 years or more. English himself has extensively promoted the idea of careful listening to spaces to cultivate a sense of sonic aesthetics through phonography in some of the world’s wildest places. His latest intervention is in many ways the natural next step for the project he terms site-listening—a handbook to guide the listener to experience and apprehend the sounds of various locations in and around South-East Queensland.
Site Listening: Brisbane invites us to offset our ordinary ocular-centrism in a guided tour of some 17 natural and manmade sites within the Greater Brisbane region. The book includes discussions of the act of listening in Brisbane, opening with a short essay by English outlining the project and closing with essays by Nick Earls and David Toop. The quintessential Brisbanite, Earls emphasises sound’s snapshot function, pointing out how some of the most familiar and pervasive sounds in our day-to-day life—the beep of a reversing truck or the click of a resident gecko (“40 to a house on average”)—haven’t always been here but rather, over the last two decades or so, have insinuated themselves into the normal sound of living here. Though he also considers sound’s transience, Toop provides an insight on the “bizarre, totally unfamiliar sounds” the city serves up to an outsider. One of his most memorable descriptions is of the evening roost of squabbling flying foxes, “hung messily from the trees as if a cargo of broken black umbrellas had been dumped from a plane flying overhead” and sounding like “a large man wallowing in a bathtub filled with squeaky rubber ducks.”
The sites we are guided to in the book are precisely noted with a colour image, map and GPS co-ordinates and a short description of the possible sounds the listener may hear unfolding at different times of day. The guide covers the city’s orifices: its airport, port, marina, railway and other major organs, like the football stadium and Gallery of Modern Art. The city’s lungs are also included in the form of inner- and outer-city parklands, matchless wetlands and state forests. Throughout the book, English’s highly attuned sonic sensibilities—both legacy and matrix of his field recording practice—result in fine-grained textual description of the sound-making structures and bioacoustics in each site. While the guide’s locations, and numerous others, are listed on the project’s website—part of English’s ongoing and expanding mission to psycho-acoustically map Queensland—this little book is an important publication. An attractive object, its cover cleverly folding out to display an A4-sized map of the locations, it is only just bigger than an audiotape, making it the perfect size for a pocket when not being consulted on location.
Some Brisbanites may feel a little conflicted about the choice of locations. On the one hand, there is a particular thrill in revisiting a familiar location, such as the heritage-listed Highgate Hill lookout on the knoll of Dornoch Terrace, a popular spot during visually spectacular events such as fireworks and eclipses. The site-listening approach suggests “recommended time: late night.” On the other hand, natural locations are incontrovertibly special sites, such as the Tinchi Tamba tidal wetlands teeming with life-giving mangroves. Many, if not most, are (largely) protected by state legislation, or at least widely acknowledged for their cultural and environmental value. In a fast-growing region there are other sites around this city that, though not yet recognised or protected, are just as important—”spaces where life occurs,” to use Christian Norberg-Schultz’s famous phrase.
While it’s great to see mention of local, unofficial landmarks such as the Griffin Park bat colony, there is a rare opportunity here for advocacy on behalf of numerous other significant sites threatened by the city’s insatiable hunger for space. Inner-city bushland, dwindling koala habitats and historic architecture critically endangered by ‘sustainable development’ in a rapidly disappearing Brisbane come to mind. Their non-inclusion means that the book centres on mainly known locations, and has longevity—it will still be relevant long after endangered places are developed. Then again, being mentioned in a book like this could prove very pertinent to ongoing efforts to preserve and retain these spaces. Considering the locations that are included, it’s worth remembering that legislation can always be changed, and that even those places currently designated as reserves are only a planning decision away from permanent disappearance.
English mentions this constant flux, and in many ways this book’s quiet insistence that we spend our time not just passing through or looking at, but paying real attention to ‘place’ acts as an implicit assertion of the public value of these and other shared landscapes. To visit the geographies mapped in this guide is to realise how readily the process of privileging sound reveals details the eye can overlook, and how much the ‘spirit’ of a place emerges from interactions between the environment and the human sensorium. The quiet act of dwelling intentionally in these locations generates an awareness of the small and meaningful within the infinite and the everyday. As Toop puts it, when we really listen to sites, what we hear, when we realise we are “just one moving point in a distinctive web of resonances, atmospheres, pressure waves, echoes, signals and silence,” is our place within them. This may be the most valuable guidance of all: that landscape is not just something we behold with our senses, but something to which we are also beholden.
THERE WAS THE SMELL OF PEPPER CHAI AND DAMP JACKETS AT COLBOURNE AVENUE FOR SUNWRAE’S SYDNEY LEG OF THE EAVESDROPPING TOUR. COSY SOFAS AND RED WINE MADE US AT HOME WHILE ICONIC WONKY LAMPS LIT THE PLAYERS OF SUNWRAE QUINTET. USUALLY A NINE-PIECE, SUNWRAE ENSEMBLE IS A PREMIER NU-CHAMBER GROUP THAT BLENDS MELODIC PHRASES AND INTERWEAVING RHYTHMS, CREATING FLOWING MUSIC WITH FAR REACHING APPEAL. ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AND TRIPLE-THREAT PIANIST, PERCUSSIONIST AND COMPOSER RAE HOWELL LEADS THE GROUP FROM THE PIANO WITH PASSION.
Howell’s compositions are explorations of texture, where melodies arise from group-created shapes. Even when a solo tune is clear it’s the harmony that’s in focus. Howell’s music is often described as cinematic and is charged with emotion and potential for imagery. Her sound flaunts a complex understanding of classical music but is delivered with the natural simplicity of popular music. If her lilting ostinati don’t hypnotise you at first, her engrossed head bobbings will.
Minus an alto flute, vibraphone, harp, double bass and percussion, Sunwrae Quintet was destined for reduced sound, but the Sydney performance suffered from other factors. Playing their guts out, the musicians’ energy was greater than the sound they impelled. The great little venue in Glebe did not do any acoustic favours for the non-amplified group. Fuzzy, directionless sound forced intimacy as the slouchy-couched audience leaned in to hear, but left a strange feeling of communal deafness. Is it possible for a room to suck so much sound away?
The most characterful piece of the night, “Mmm, Good Question,” let Sunwrae fool around with vaudevillian snippets lifted from every cliché you’ve known and loved. Creepy clown, scratches from the grave, a gate that needs oiling, those screeching trills near the bridge of a violin that elicit a physical reaction: your skin crawls with the memory of that pesky kid from school who clawed the chalkboard. The quintet’s answer to the fairground zombie vampire apocalypse craze is yet a spacious music that makes a listener hear the sounds of the room. It breeds hyper-awareness as it slinks into a warped corpse-bride’s tango, then deflates as the strings put on the shifty eyes—left right, left right—removing any doubt that this music is comedy, before returning to the fair.
Two world premieres were received well but didn’t jump out of the program. The best performances were of tried and tested hits like “Autumn Never Fall,” where Sculthorpe seagulls flew by (a technique on cello popularised by Peter Sculthorpe where harmonics in close succession sound like flying sea rats). We were given further license to imagine with “Far Away Castle” (soundtrack to a children’s film) as its Chinese-fantasy-esque love theme emerged. Rachel Kim on first violin realised key themes while second violinist Zac Johnston danced in his chair. The stoic bass section, viola player Phoebe Green and cellist Tim Blake, gave nuanced performances that made up for occasional blips in the upper parts. The most exciting offering of the evening was “The Machine,” a favourite piece that might have had a love affair with a Tenori-On, or this digital version at http://mandaflewaway.tumblr.com/post/2057242738
Chugging, cogs chipping, driving pistons, “The Machine” grinds away. Spurts of sound are left behind as the music reproduces conditions for further outputs. This machine seems to borrow its climaxes from the choral works of Stanford or Herbert Howells, only to disjoint them, cut them short, move on. Containing many complete musical ideas, like a mash up of distinct quotations, the work’s cogs really shouldn’t engage with such cohesion, but do. “The Machine” manufactures landscapes for the listener, ones that pan in and out, at stages zooming so far out of the wheeled workings that the contraption’s business is made invisible and insignificant with distance. This piece has been part of Sunwrae’s repertoire for a few years and has conjured similar images for others including Tom Fraser, whose animation of turning wheels, dripping taps and racing scenery now illustrates the track’s video clip.
Howell’s relaxed between-song chat heightened the family vibe in the crowd, but reinforced the sense that this gig in the tour was like a dress rehearsal: that show where the bumps are ironed out before the more important overseas appearances. On their way to Ho Chi Minh City Opera House, we forgave them. The crowd loved the performance and applauded for an encore that the freshly formed quintet could not provide, saying apologetically, “We don’t have anything else prepared.” They’d given us everything they had. Finishing off with a repeat of “Rainlessness” written by Howell during a cold stay in Canada, they created a new moment from material we’d already heard. It’s perhaps this quality of ‘being’ that makes Sunwrae’s performances so memorable: they play each piece as though for the first impassioned time.
THE AUSTRALASIAN PERFORMING RIGHT ASSOCIATION (APRA) AND THE AUSTRALIAN MUSIC CENTRE (AMC) HAVE ANNOUNCED THE 2011 WINNERS OF THE INAUGURAL ART MUSIC AWARDS IN THE GENRES OF CONTEMPORARY ART MUSIC, JAZZ AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC IN A SLEEKLY ENTERTAINING CEREMONY AT SYDNEY THEATRE DROLLY HOSTED BY JULIAN MORROW, PEPPERED WITH SOME FINE LIVE PERFORMANCES AND FRAMED BY DIGITAL IMAGERY THAT KEPT US IN TOUCH WITH CATEGORIES AND PRECISELY WHO WAS WHO.
It was gratifying for the RealTime Editors to see Queensland’s Clocked Out (Erik Griswold, Vanessa Tomlinson) and Western Australia’s Cat Hope honoured with awards. These are artists whose work we have long admired and featured.
Clocked Out won the Award for Excellence by an Organisation or Individual for their annual programs, in this case their 2009-2010 program which premiered 15 new compositions, included three international tours, plus community projects in regional Australia. They also won the Queensland State Award. The inaugural Award for Excellence in Experimental Music was taken out by Cat Hope artistic director of Decibel which in 2009-10 undertook 11 commissions for new Australian work, 10 performances, toured interstate and had four live broadcasts for ABC Radio. Hope also received the West Australian State Award for Decibel in the category of Excellence in Experimental Music
The Performance of the Year Award went to soprano Jane Sheldon and the ever inventive Ensemble Offspring conducted by Roland Peelman for their collaborative project, The Origin Cycle. Sydney-based composer Paul Stanhope won Instrumental Work of the Year for his String Quartet No 2 and Vocal/Choral Work of the Year for Deserts of Exile from his Exile Lamentations choral cycle performed by the Choir of Trinity College. Orchestral Work of the Year was awarded to James Ledger’s Chronicles performed by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Daniel.
The WA winning streak was confirmed by Johannes Luebbers who received the award for Jazz Work of the Year for his big band work Ashes to Ashes, performed by the Johannes Luebbers Dectet.
Other award winners included Michael Kieran Harvey who received the Tasmanian State Award for his homage to Frank Zappa, 48 Fugues for Frank, and recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey who took out the Victorian State Award for Performance of the Year for her multimedia creation, En Masse.
The Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music was shared between Patrick Thomas and John Hopkins. Thomas recalled a long career, commencing as 3rd flute at 14 years of age, looked back fondly to the Modern Music forum he established in Brisbane with Tony Gould and going on to conduct some 110 works by Australian composers, quipping “nor just first performances!” As a young concert-goer in Adelaide. I was always impressed with Thomas’ commitment and the calibre of his conducting. Unfortunately, he was a casualty of the reforms of the mid-1980s when the ABC was divested of its orchestras. Some compensation comes with the imminent release of an eight-CD collection of his performances as conductor. John Hopkins was also appreciative of the best years of the ABC in the era of conductors Joseph Post and Bernard Heinze (whom I recall gently lecturing a restive Adelaide Symphony Orchestra audience about the meaning and sounds of Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Music). Thomas remembered the pleasure of conducting the music of Sculthorpe, Penberthy, Brumby and others, while Hopkins treasured the particular memory of Richard Meale conducting Nigel Butterley’s Laudes and Butterley conducting Meale’s Floridas in an exciting time for Australian music. As the Art Music Awards indicate, now is another such time.
APRA and AMC, Art Music Awards, Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, May 3
Adam Norton, Mars Gravity Simulator, 2011, Awfully Wonderful
photo Lucy Parakhina
Adam Norton, Mars Gravity Simulator, 2011, Awfully Wonderful
CONTEMPORARY ART OFTEN APPEARS SCIENCE-FICTIONAL, AS IT EMPLOYS THE LATEST VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES AND ADAPTS SCIENTIFIC IDEAS FOR ITS OWN ENDS. EXHIBITIONS OF SCIENCE FICTION (SF) IN ART ARE HOWEVER A MOSTLY RECENT PHENOMENON. IN THE RICH ANTHOLOGY OF WRITING THAT MAKES UP THE CATALOGUE FOR AWFULLY WONDERFUL, SWISS CURATOR PATRICK GYGER LISTS RECENT SHOWS ON SF AT THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS (ICA) IN LONDON, THE POMPIDOU IN PARIS AND ELSEWHERE. YET THESE EXHIBITIONS FALL SHORT OF BEING ABOUT SF, INSTEAD HAVING SF-INSPIRED THEMES. THE ICA USES ALIENS AS A METAPHOR FOR MULTICULTURALISM (ALIEN NATION, 2006), WHILE THE POMPIDOU JOINS THE RAFT OF CONTEMPORARY SHOWS ABOUT UTOPIA (LA NUAGE MAGELLAN, 2007).
The Awfully Wonderful exhibition is more explicit as it tackles the relationship between SF and contemporary art. In doing so, it makes the striking conclusion that new technologies and cutting edge sciences in fact have little to do with the SF genre. Curators Bec Dean and Lizzie Muller instead populate Performance Space with low-tech works that speculate on such archaisms as travel through time and outer space. Two architectural dioramas by David Lawrey and Jaki Middleton recall dusty museum exhibits while portending an apocalyptic future, their miniature city overtaken by disaster. Sam Smith’s Time Travel (2009) also hinges upon the past’s future, alluding to a philosophy of travelling through time while compelling our gaze with its scenes of cinema and television. Deborah Kelly’s collages of oceanic creatures and 1960s pornography also appear out of time, their tangles of limbs and tentacles recalling the erotics of surrealism. The paradoxes of these old media works in wood, video and paper build a picture of SF as the retro-futurism of today.
This appears to be bad news for SF—that it is no longer the cutting edge genre of technology and prediction in a world that has come to look like the future itself. Like contemporary art, the world is science-fictional, leaving the actual genre stranded in a time out of time. Video works by Ian Haig and Philip Brophy push this retroactive logic to the extreme by making pastiches out of SF images, evoking clichés of gender war and alien visitation. A near naked Hayden Fowler also plunges us into a muddle of time, as he inhabits his installation of futuristic domes and grass in the CarriageWorks foyer only to evoke images of life in prehistory. Fowler imagines himself to have returned humanity to nature but this is a cleanly engineered nature with lawn and laboratory rats. There is something perversely troubling about a live performer in a set that might have been dropped from a cheap 1970s SF film. Such a meticulous realisation of the most lurid SF scenography is both compelling and discomforting in our technological age, which has long rendered such pastoral visions the stuff of fantasy.
If Fowler is a visionary, ready to move into the greater laboratory of a bioengineered world, Adam Norton is ready to move to Mars. By hanging a body harness above a room-sized running track (also in the vast CarriageWorks’ foyer), the space-suited Norton simulates the planet’s gravity, as well as NASA’s own training regimes. The sight of Norton bouncing around his track is spectacular, his sincerity and enthusiasm backed by the authenticity of his research. Norton’s work is among several in the show that shape-shift from art installation to actual science. Haines and Hinterding’s pair of cloudbusters—orgone energy machines after the plans of Wilhelm Reich—also stand at the slipping point between creative fabrication and scientific actuality. It is only a shame that there are no demonstrations of their potential to seed clouds, whip up a storm or even a tornado. What greater legacy for an exhibition like this than a great whirly-whirly lifting the tin from Darlington terraces, art’s possibilities spinning out of control in a science-fictional world?
A collection of obsolete technologies from the Powerhouse Museum also simulates the simultaneity of science and art. Safely encased in perspex, these technological artefacts are displayed in low light as if they might suddenly collapse back into their own times. One is a circumferentor, a low cost surveying instrument from the 1800s decorated with vegetal designs, appearing as if from some alternative steampunk timeline. Another, a 1K microcomputer from 1980, the Sinclair ZX80, has all the appearance of a dinosaur with its garishly large keys. These technological relics bring a scientistic sincerity to the show, casting a serious light on the allusions to arcane SF that might otherwise be comic.
Frame Drag 1988 / 2009 / 2024, Ms&Mr
courtesy the artists
Frame Drag 1988 / 2009 / 2024, Ms&Mr
These devices are in neat contrast to one of the more metaphysical works installed beside them. A magnificent pair of video portraits by Ms&Mr alludes to some ambient, transgendered future. Two simple loops present enigmatic figures that seem to be lost in some nebulous eternity. On one screen a man’s arm disappears into a forest of stars, while on the other the artists, in footage from different times in their lives, are smoothly juxtaposed so they appear to share smoke from a cigarette. She inhales his exhale and exhales in turn in a triangulation of sensual, ambient whiteness.
The feeling that Awfully Wonderful occupies a fold in time, as it plays upon the paradoxes of an art about the future that is nonetheless a future imagined by the past, tells us as much about contemporary art as science fiction. In rushing to capture the present, attracted by this or that technological or cognitive widget, contemporary art often wilfully forgets its own past. This show casts a more complex light upon the meaning of the contemporary, insofar as its technological and political conditions have been constructed by past imaginings. If contemporary art is the dominant genre of a global, networked present, Awfully Wonderful gestures to the romanticism that produced this contemporaneity, the fantasies that brought it into being.
The success of the show also lies in the absence of the kind of grandiose work that makes contemporary art so emasculated. Instead, the artists here work in the spirit of what SF scholars call the tinkerer, the handyman who fiddles with the details of lamps and lunch trays in a quest for everyday happiness. This is in contrast to the grandeur of new media and its ambitions to rewrite the history of art, and to the new genres of technological art, such as bio-art and nano-art that are so closely tied to the politics of their industries.
Instead, Awfully Wonderful is driven by a pragmatic and retro utopianism. Simon Yates’ hilarious Metropolis Robot is symptomatic of humble hope, as he creates a walking version of Fritz Lang’s cinema icon. In a single stroke Yates solves one of the most expensive problems in robotics, this being the bionics of walking, as he suspends the robot with cheap helium balloons and propels its legs with two AA batteries. Such is the genius of the tinkerer, who shows us that the future, or even the present, is not as complex or difficult as we might have imagined it to be.
Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art, curators Bec Dean and Lizzie Muller, Performance Space, Sydney, April 15-May 14; www.performancespace.com.au
{$slideshow} IN HIS VIDEO WORK FIVE PRODUCTION COMPANY LOGOS IN 3D, EMILE ZILE STANDS AROUND LOOKING SLIGHTLY BORED IN JEANS AND A HOODIE IN AN EMPTY SPACE THAT COULD BE A GALLERY, EXCEPT THAT IT’S LIT BY OFFICE-STYLE SETS OF CEILING FLUOROS. INCONGRUOUSLY, WE HEAR A DESCENDING WALL OF SOUND MIMICKING PERFECTLY THE IMPRESSIVE ZOOMS AND SWEEPS OF CINEMA COMPANY PROMOS—AND FROM HIP HEIGHT WE WATCH ZILE GIVE US THE ACCOMPANYING ‘3D GRAPHICS’ IN A SERIES OF SMALL-FRAME HAND MOVEMENTS. THE GESTURES ARE BOTH RIDICULOUS AND ORDINARY. IN A DIFFERENT CONTEXT THEY MIGHT READ AS EXPLANATORY OR, ODDLY, AS A MIX OF ‘SHOWING’ AND ‘GIVING.’
When the ‘music’ zooms in, out, up or down, so do the hands. One by one, Zile works his way through five short aural ‘signature’ tracks over two and a half minutes, never appearing to take any more interest in what his hands are doing than he might if he were at home watching a series of TV ads. It looks vacuous, but no less so than the brightly coloured starbursts and rotating logos of corporate motion graphics. Which I guess is, at least in part, the point.
Amsterdam and Melbourne-based Emile Zile’s work ranges from solo performances to VJ-ing, gallery installations and video. Five Production Company Logos in 3D fits into a stream of Zile’s thinking that concerns itself with “an ever-accelerating culture of image consumption and distribution.” A couple of (much) earlier works put the new work into context for me, one of them being 6pm Personality (1999). TV newsreaders’ heads are fairly crudely disjoined from their words, bobbing and mouthing in reversed black and white. Almost too simple, their de-contextualisation exposes the coded patterns to which our perception so easily adapts, highlighting gestures that otherwise lock unnoticed onto our media ‘receptors’ like dubious nutrient onto enzyme.
And then there is Larry Emdur’s Suit (2002 see RT57, and RT84). Zile is chosen as a contestant on The Price is Right. He comes-on-down, gliding and shuffling. He shrugs, waves his hands, twitches and finishes up on stage, generating a series of movements that range in possible interpretation from ‘right on’ to ‘wow’ and then well beyond meaning. Host Larry Emdur can’t talk, he can only meet gesture with gesture, synching into Zile’s dance with a set of his own random movements—his ‘receptors’ forced to instantly accept Zile’s ‘language’ by TV’s imperative to keep moving seamlessly. Both works illustrate a fascination with body movement transformed for media consumption.
Philip Brophy, in his catalogue essay for Five Production Company Logos in 3D, sees Emile Zile’s groin-level gesturing aptly as a ‘spoof’ on masturbatory corporate excess. It strikes me also as a kind of post-mass-media shadow-puppetry, almost as though Zile might be telling us a story around the campfire, his flickering hands casting the shape of mythical battles or god-heroes onto thin air. The banal human presence is complicated by the artist’s transformation of gesture into looped-back, empty artifice. Throughout the video the glimpses of his shoulders and face, the way he wanders back into start-position between ‘takes,’ suggest boredom. There’s also something of the Archibald Packer’s Prize about it, the appearance of a moment where the common man steps out and has his say—or has a lend of us.
At face value Emile Zile spoofs the smoke and mirrors of the corporate-logo-in-extremis, but in the end, of course, his movements depend as much on our ability to read signs as the logo itself does. What separates it from a dumb joke is perhaps—or of course—only the gallery. It’s like air guitar, or a kind of 21st century Rolf Harris painting—a whipped-up cliché on a wall, elevated in status by the perfect, synthesised pomposity of Adam Milburn’s spot-on soundtrack. Married to Zile’s movements, Milburn’s swooping synths no longer signal the magnificence of big business and CGI graphics. Instead the audio pans out sideways to encompass the ego of the artist, even as the artist himself stands around in scuffed shoes ineffectually waving his hands.
The human body can only be in ‘3D,’ can’t it? And yet it’s obvious that what comes out of the graphics studio is as human—the product of clicks and drags—as a pair of hands, thumbs hooked together casting a bat shadow on the wall behind it. In the 2.5 minutes it takes for Zile’s Five Production Company Logos in 3D to loop around and begin again, his hands approach, recede, make clunky little chops in the air, respond to 60-Minutes-like ticking and Val Morgan-like aural morphings and take a rest at the end with briefly folded arms. In the CGI studio there’s a keystroke to ‘cut’ that monumental ending. Emile Zile simply clicks his fingers.
Five Production Company Logos in 3D, (single-channel video, 2010) artist Emile Zile, audio Adam Milburn, Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne April 2–23
Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest–Part IV, 2006, Yang Fudong
courtesy the artist, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest–Part IV, 2006, Yang Fudong
STEPPING FROM PADDINGTON’S GOODHOPE STREET INTO YANG FUDONG’S NO SNOW ON THE BROKEN BRIDGE (2006) AT THE SHERMAN CONTEMPORARY ART FOUNDATION, YOU FIND YOURSELF PLUNGED INTO DARKNESS. EIGHT SILVER SCREENS FLICKER TO YOUR RIGHT, ASSISTING YOUR EYES TO ADJUST, WHILE CLUMPS OF BEANBAGS TAKE SHAPE SLOWLY IN THE SHADOWS TO YOUR LEFT. A FINE THREAD OF MUSIC BECOMES DISCERNIBLE—SMATTERINGS OF PIANO AND VIOLIN EMERGING FROM SOMEWHERE BEHIND THE SCREENS. YOU SINK INTO A SEAT AND ALLOW THE ARC OF BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES TO ENGULF YOU.
Your first thought on entering this work is where to place your attention. Each black and white image is gorgeous, yet none lasts more than a few languid seconds and the screens all compete for interest. For a moment your eye rests upon a woman in a silk cheongsam and fur stole, laughing as she crosses a bridge with her friend. Then you’re distracted by a man approaching in long, traditional Chinese robes, or another in a suit and bowler hat. Exquisite shots of plum blossoms and Chinese pavilions, of young lovers and girls in dapper drag, begin and are then replaced, until you relinquish expectations of narrative and give over to a dreamlike state.
Like much of Yang Fudong’s work, No Snow on the Broken Bridge draws on classical Chinese aesthetics, early 20th century fashion and the trope of the young romantic to create a feeling of disconnectedness from the world. Set amidst the scenery of Hangzhou’s famous West Lake, the film has a sense of both floating and ennui, its cast of preened young characters indolent to the point of camp. There are moments when people disappear behind boulders, or lie in the sun with great portent, feeling almost like Picnic at Hanging Rock: young people in their finery experiencing the power of nature and beauty. Running at 11 minutes, with no real beginning or end, the installation is a playful mosaic—an impressionistic dreamscape pregnant with unexplained mystery and meaning.
Downstairs in the gallery’s annexe, Yang’s film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003-07) continues these themes and visual references—again, in Yang’s signature monochromatic style. An epic work, it consists of five parts, each running between about 30 to 70 minutes and totalling almost five hours in all. The film is loosely based on a story of seven Taoist sages from the Wei Dynasty (220-265BC) who rejected public life in favour of one of seclusion in the forest. Choosing not to belong to the bureaucratic elite, they devoted their lives instead to conversation, poetry and music and the pleasures of food and wine.
As with Broken Bridge, Seven Intellectuals evokes a sensation of drifting, its young and debonair protagonists seemingly lost in their search for meaning. The film also samples imagery from traditional Chinese poetry and painting, mixing this with fashions from 1930s Shanghai to create an urbane and otherworldly feel. Despite this ambience, however, Seven Intellectuals is set in current times, its characters contemporary in their existential dilemmas, their environment a half-demolished, half-built China. Moving from the famous scenery of Huangshan Mountain (the ‘sea of clouds’) to life in a modern apartment, to a farm, to an island and back to the rubble of a modern Chinese city, the film’s five parts present aspects of contemporary life framed by an aesthete’s imagination.
There is something of De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) in Seven Intellectuals. These suave and privileged young people are seductive, but cold, their lassitude faintly disconcerting. The film’s melancholy is reminiscent too of Visconti’s Death in Venice and there are moments in the first part of Seven Intellectuals in particular, when youths languishing on rocks or staring off mountain tops echo the young Tadzio pointing to the sky. Yang is working within a number of cinema traditions and has cited both European and Chinese filmmakers as influences on his work.
It is perhaps the combination of these two cultures and their fascination for one another that makes Yang Fudong’s films so alluring, particularly for a Western audience—the plaid suits and mountain mists, the chinoiserie. It’s easy to linger under the spell of these installations, their strangeness providing just the right amount of intrigue (while their familiarity consoles). Yang has stated his attraction to the traditional aesthetic of yihui, or sensation, and this exhibition works on you in this way. Making few demands, these works lull you to a point where it becomes easier to surrender to their beauty than to try to piece together their meaning.
Yang Fudong, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest; Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney, March 18-June 4, www.sherman-scaf.org.au/exhibitions
DISASTR Hotel, 2011, DV Rogers, The Right to the City
photo courtesy the artist
DISASTR Hotel, 2011, DV Rogers, The Right to the City
“SHE’S FOR SANDAL-WEARING, MUESLI-CHEWING, BIKE-RIDING PEDESTRIANS.” THIS WAS PAUL KEATING’S EXTRAORDINARILY ARROGANT DISMISSAL OF MAYOR CLOVER MOORE’S PRESENTATION TO NSW PARLIAMENT OF A PETITION WITH 11,000 NAMES PROTESTING THE CURRENT DESIGN PLANS FOR THE BARANGAROO URBAN WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT, WHICH LED TO HIS REACTIONARY RESIGNATION FROM THE PROJECT.
Tucked within the more sedate enclave of Sydney University’s Architecture Department, far from the combative squabbling of ex and current politicians, the Tin Sheds Gallery in April hosted The Right To The City, a multifaceted exhibition, symposium and publishing project that, while not directly concerned with this particular urban conflict, echoed its tensions by seeking open-ended responses to the spatial politics of the city.
Here, interdisciplinary artists cultivated the gallery space and beyond with sculptural objects, installations, video, photomedia and speculative works that circumvented the top down approach to urban planning, testing what might emerge in the interstices of public, creative and professional dialogue.
This was by no means unfamiliar territory for co-curator Zanny Begg, who two years earlier helped create an impressive exhibition for Performance Space, There Goes the Neighbourhood, which explored the regeneration of Redfern (RT92, p52). At Tin Sheds, where she is Director, Begg worked in tandem with University of Sydney Senior Lecturer Lee Stickells to present an exhibition more general in reach, taking as its starting point a 2008 article by British geographer David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” although his are concerns that have been percolating for some time. They are questions of access, whether we build for people or for profit, how public and disused space might be used more creatively and what power, if any, citizens have to influence the development of the city. Despite the timely and prescient nature of these concerns Sydney is notoriously a city driven by consumerism, which means that urban activism is often met with apathy. Yet the continuities between works presented in this exhibition reveal how, as life increasingly falls into an earn/buy cycle, certain symbols that resonate as alternatives are at least gaining greater visibility.
Among the most prevalent is the communal garden. As an embodiment of sustainability, collectivity and self-reliance it’s understandable that it figured in a number of works presented. The most striking treatment was arguably a multi-channel video installation by the France-based architects Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu, At the Ground Level of the City (2001-2005). This was an unconventional account of their ECObox project, a series of nomadic self-managed community gardens installed in urban wasteland sites in the suburbs of Northern Paris. Drawing upon 99 hours of archive footage of the gardens gathered over five years using a “participative camera” that passed through multiple hands to record everyday life at the sites, a dynamic and non-linear documentary approach successfully conveyed the fluid and evolving nature of these reclaimed spaces. Played in fast succession and spliced across seven screens, the footage was set to a soundtrack mixing industrial noise, world music and snippets of conversation, injecting vitality into the ‘quotidian’ while avoiding romanticism in the subtle acknowledgment of the inevitable development of the sites.
SquatSpace Mapping Project, The Right to the City
photo Zanny Begg
SquatSpace Mapping Project, The Right to the City
In a nearby corner, Sydney’s SquatSpace responded to the challenge of recording the collective’s transient history by using chalk to plot their 10 year legacy of urban activism on panels of blackboards in an ebbing and flowing ephemeral timeline, Network Map (2011). The sprawling and indefinite history was complemented by a short documentary film by Justin Hewitson, Squat the Lot (2000-2003), which recounted the turbulent period when artists occupying vacant council-owned buildings on Broadway were evicted prior to the Sydney Olympics. The video was perhaps the most outspoken work in the gallery, as others appeared more concerned with subtler, less anarchic modifications of urban space. Chicago’s Temporary Services surveyed with a forensic eye milk crates refashioned into basketball hoops and roadside memorials in their series of photographs, Public Phenomena (2008-2010), while urban redevelopment took a lo-fi turn in Milkcrate Urbanism’s The North Eveleigh Propositional (2011). After a mobile feedback box was dispatched to various locations around Redfern inviting alternative development proposals for the former railyards site, the feedback was incorporated into a newspaper style publication and pinned to the wall although, with only three suggestions on display, this particular speculative project felt a little incomplete.
When the force of nature unexpectedly asserts itself, the task of remaking the city becomes a more urgent dilemma. Hunkered down in an outdoor refuge campsite a short walk from the gallery, DV Rogers presented the 14-day endurance performance installation DISASTR Hotel (2011), which saw the artist build two hexayurt shelters following an open source design by Vinay Gupta and then invite visitors to stay overnight to judge the efficacy of the shelters and to consider their own preparedness for a disastrous event. Some Ballardian style signage spelling out DISASTR in large letters studded with brightly coloured light bulbs created a performative setting, however this was not a work of science fiction. On the contrary, Rogers was concerned with enacting “a symbolic field test,” demonstrating how DIY open hardware structures already exist as viable transitional responses that could be set up in present day disaster zones. The question is, what is holding us back from implementing them?
With a tagline citing Buckminster Fuller’s provocation “we are called on to be the architects of the future, not its victims,” the exhibition’s earnestness was counterbalanced with some playful, tongue-in-cheek works. The Holmes stereoscopic viewer received an anthropological twist in Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe’s primitive masks jerry-rigged with plastic ephemera and clapped-out gauges. Another collaborative duo, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, accosted visitors with Sound Barrier 2011, a giant wooden catapult sporting a slingshot stockpiled with fluorescent orange earplugs. Flung target practice style at a blank white board, the spray of compact foam bullets on the wall resembled a minimalist colour field painting meets urban-noise-pollution-dart-board, a witty indictment of how the gentrification process demands not only land but also sensory homogenisation.
Stepping outside the gallery and into the courtyard, where students and lecturers were breaking between classes, reinforced how critical the site was to the effectiveness of this exhibition. Some of the less polished, work-in-progress installations might not have withstood the tougher aesthetic scrutiny of an austere white cube space. But in an environment where art, design and education naturally cross-fertilise, such works became key components in what was essentially an art forum. While we may lack a centralised method to surmount the circle of government, developers and purchasers who largely determine the evolution of our cities, by giving expression to the humbler gestures and desires of the everyday, this exhibition highlighted the alternatives that can burst through the cracks when necessity, inspiration or sheer dogged perseverance take hold.
The Right to the City, curators Zanny Begg, Lee Stickells, artists Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, atelier d’architecture autogeree, DV Rogers, Temporary Services, SquatSpace, Milkcrate Urbanism [Sophie Warren, Jonathan Mosley, Marjetica Potrc, Tessa Zettel, Karl Khoe], Bababa International, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, April 8-30
Daníel Bjarnason, Ben Frost, Sinfonietta Cracovia, “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” Music for Solaris; Unsound Krakow
photo Anna Spysz
Daníel Bjarnason, Ben Frost, Sinfonietta Cracovia, “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” Music for Solaris; Unsound Krakow
COMPOSER AND MUSICIAN BEN FROST’S BOLD DECISION TO RELOCATE FROM MELBOURNE TO ICELAND IN 2005 SEEMS TO HAVE PAID OFF. IN 2006 HE TEAMED UP WITH ICELANDIC PRODUCER VALGEIR SIGURÕSSON AND US COMPOSER NICO MUHLY TO FORM THE BEDROOM COMMUNITY LABEL PRODUCING TO MUCH ACCLAIM THEIR OWN RELEASES AND THOSE OF OTHER GENUINELY INTRIGUING ARTISTS.
In between touring schedules around Europe’s key music festivals Frost has written sound scores for the Icelandic Dance Company and the UK’s Random Dance as well as Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine. In 2011 Frost is the Rolex Music Protégé under the mentorship of Brian Eno. Coincidentally he has been collaborating with Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason, the Sinfonietta Cracovia and Eno on a commission from the Unsound Festival to re-interpret the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovsky’s mesmerising epic Solaris (1972).
messing with a masterpiece
Frost is happy to admit that he came up with the idea behind Music for Solaris because of his dissatisfaction with Eduard Artemyev’s sound score for the original film. “I don’t dislike the music, I think it’s really beautiful, but it’s a science fiction score. It’s music that’s made to [give you] this feeling that you are in outer space, which in my view is not at all what the actual story is about. The space setting is merely a vehicle to get across a much bigger, more human concept—something that’s much more about inner space.”
Frost feels that Stanislav Lem, author of the novel Solaris, was not completely aware of the humanistic depths of his book, and that it was Tarkovsky’s interpretation that revealed these aspects. He says, “I think that [Tarkovsky] took it to a far more spiritual place. It’s become evident that Lem was pretty dissatisfied with the Tarkovsky version.” It is this element of interpretation or misinterpretation that he feels is the key to his project. “One person can take something from an idea that the person who [instigated it] didn’t actually see themselves and from that you can create all these variations on a theme.”
It’s a deft conceit that frees Frost somewhat from criticism for tinkering with Tarkovsky’s masterpiece. I admire Artemyev’s score for maintaining and heightening the psychological tension while not employing ‘dramatic’ filmic techniques. If Frost’s creation makes it to Australia I’m looking forward to comparing the relationship between the original and its re-interpretation.
finding the language
Frost had been waiting for an opportunity to work with Daníel Bjarnason since they first met in 2002. Bjarnason is a classically trained composer, while Frost has emerged more from the popular electronic end of the music spectrum. Frost describes Bjarnason’s music: “He has a very hardened, quite unromantic aspect to his work that I really appreciate. The thing that I love about his music is the visceral brutality of it. He really stabs you with things. It becomes quite oppressive [but] really dynamic as well.” It has taken until now for the pair to discover a shared language to enable a meaningful collaboration.
The core of that shared language turned out to be improvisation with the basis of the final composition arising from sessions recorded while watching the film, with Bjarnason on heavily prepared piano and Frost on heavily prepared guitars. Frost describes the process: “We did this a few times. There were a lot of moments where we were just sitting in this room watching the film together, but every now and then we’d find things in it, find angles on it and go off into weird little slow jams, ending up with all this material [that] became the basis for the score.”
They then fed the audio files into a computer to generate MIDI data resulting “in all kinds of errors and misinterpretations of that material, which in turn created a whole new set of ideas that were wrong.” However the errors were what Frost was looking for: “I was really interested in the idea of translation and transformation through misinterpretation of information. For me, [this] is what Solaris is about—this idea of missing information. This woman [Hari, who is] being projected back to [Kris Kelvin] is essentially his memory of her. It’s not her in the true sense. So I really liked the idea of working musically that way.”
Daníel Bjarnason, Ben Frost, Sinfonietta Cracovia, “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” Music for Solaris; Unsound Krakow
establishing equilibrium
The process didn’t end there. Bjarnason and Frost then took this machine translation and retranslated it back into a form humans could play, scoring it for the 30-piece Sinfonietta Cracovia. The reasoning for this third level of interpretation was also inspired by the themes in Solaris. Frost explains, “It’s not so much about the presentation of this being in front of you…it’s what do you do with that information that becomes interesting? That’s the drama of that story: Kris trying to kill Hari three times, eventually giving up and finding some new level of existence through that. Some sort of spiritual equilibrium comes through that process.”
Interestingly, equilibrium has also been reached in the creative partnership of Frost and Bjarnason. Both artists are renowned for their epic compositions but Frost says that Music for Solaris has turned out to be “a very subtle piece of music…It’s almost like phase cancellation—you take two gigantic forces and put them together and you get something that’s not the sum of its parts but actually the negative space that’s created by the two of them.”
mirror images
After this process of re-interpretation, Frost found that he was not so interested in performing the score to Tarkovsky’s original film, so for the visual element of the 50-minute composition he turned to his Rolex mentor Brian Eno (the pair had actually been working on the project prior to the official commencement of the mentorship). Eno, in collaboration with Nick Robertson, chose to mirror the music-making process in some ways. Taking individual frames from the film, they used morphing software to create long, extruded transitions, thus creating new, machine-made material. Frost admits to being rather hands-off on the visual element: “I’ve always struggled with the relationship of video, particularly live video, to music. From my point of view the video is Brian’s thing. I’m really very happy [that there is this] other entity who is approaching the same ideas and material with the same intent but who is essentially oblivious to what I’m doing. We’ve performed it three times now and I don’t get to see the screen a lot, but it’s really quite remarkable how often things happen [together]—the synaesthetic synch of everything is really quite profound.”
“We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” Music for Solaris premiered in October 2010 at the Unsound Festival Krakow, with subsequent performances at Unsound New York, The Donau Festival in Austria (of which Frost was also a curator) and most recently in the Reykjavik Festival. With each performance developing it further, Frost admits that the work is “divisive” and requires a lot of its audience due to its slow, quiet intensity.
emotional extremes
Extrapolating from the process of Music for Solaris and his previous albums Steel Wound (Room40), Theory of Machines and By The Throat (Bedroom Community) along with his longstanding ‘band name’ School of Emotional Engineering, I suggest to Frost that he appears preoccupied with the coldness of machines and the quest for deep emotion. He replies, “I think it’s a fascination with extremes: the fascination with dynamics. I want the best of both worlds. My work in the greater sense is increasingly about finding ways to create space between those two things. I think the void is far more interesting than the edges of it. I think that’s probably what drives a lot of these ideas. But then again I’m still working it out.” And, as Ben Frost has only just cleared his 20s, there’ll be plenty of time and opportunities for him to keep chipping away at it. The results so far have certainly been impressive.
Ben Frost has also composed the soundscore for Australian writer-director Julia Leigh’s film debut Sleeping Beauty, premiering at Cannes 2011 and screening at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival. www.sff.org.au/
“We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” Music for Solaris, composers, performers Ben Frost, Daníel Bjarnason with Sinfonietta Cracovia, video Brian Eno, Nick Robertson; Unsound Festival Krakow, Poland, Oct 24, 2010; Unsound Festival New York, US, April 6; Donau Festival, Austria, April 29; Reykjavik Arts Festival, Iceland, June 4; www.bedroomcommunity.net/artists/ben_frost
David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, The Outlands, 2011, production still; Anne Landa Award
courtesy of the artists and BREENSPACE
David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, The Outlands, 2011, production still; Anne Landa Award
haines & hinterding win anne landa award
The Art Gallery of New South Wales has announced that David Haines and Joyce Hinterding have won the $25,000 acquisitive Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts. Their large-scale screen work The outlands invites you to manipulate alone or together two twigs that trigger massive environmental changes to refracting, crystalline worlds light years from video game violence and scenic literalism. The award exhibition, Unguided tours, curated by Justin Paton (art critic, author and senior curator at Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand) is well worth a look with each of the works discretely housed. Other engaging works are by Rachel Khedoori (Australia/USA), Jae Hoon Lee (Korea/New Zealand), Arlo Mountford (Australia), Charlie Sofo (Australia) and Ian Burns (Australia/USA). Unguided tours: Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2011, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, to July 10
politics & the wild western at acmi
German artist Julian Rosefeldt’s American Night is a five-channel installation that “embraces the conventions of the Western film genre, deconstruct(ing) the myths surrounding the foundation of America and offer(ing) a scathing commentary on recent US foreign policy. Using settings that are commonly associated with Westerns—a communal campfire, the local saloon, a log cabin where a woman waits alone, a deserted main street and a lone rider travelling across a rugged landscape—American Night offers an alternative view of freedom, one where satire and the unexpected are never far away. Filmed in southern Spain and the Canary Islands on an original Sergio Leone film set, the title of the installation refers to the filmmaking technique of shooting ‘day-for-night’, also known as ‘American night’, a practice that was commonly employed during the making of Westerns. On one channel, a group of cowboys huddle around a campfire discussing freedom and their right to carry a gun, with their conversation consisting entirely of quotations lifted from pop-culture figures such as film director Jean-Luc Godard, rapper 50 Cent, and former actor and National Rifle Association President, Charlton Heston. On another channel, George Bush and Barack Obama appear as the characters in a puppet show being played out in a saloon” (ACMI press release).
Rosefeldt’s work has been shown at the Bienal de São Paolo, Athens Biennial, PS1 (New York), British Film Institute (London), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Hishhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington). In 2007, he was awarded the Filmstiftung NRW Award at the KunstFilmBiennale Köln for his film work, Lonely Planet, and won the Vattenfall Contemporary 2010, assigned in cooperation with the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. He currently resides in Berlin. Julian Rosefeldt, American Night, Gallery 2, ACMI, Melbourne, June 21-July 31
tanja liedtke documentary at sydney film festival
Much admired at its premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival, Life in Movement, an 80-minute tribute to the late choreographer Tanja Liedtke by writer-director-producers Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason, will be screened in competition at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival. The FOXTEL Australian Documentary Prize is open to factual films of any length with a cash prize of
$10,000 to be presented at SFF’s Closing Night ceremony June 19. Life in Movement traces the journey of Liedtke’s collaborators 18 months after her accidental death in 2007 as they internationally tour her award-winning productions with footage of performances and archival material of the artist at work. Life in Movement, Sydney Film Festival, June 18, 6.15pm, http://sff.org.au/
Natalie Randall, Rhubarb Rhubarb, Some Film Museums I Have Known
photo Lucy Parakhina
Natalie Randall, Rhubarb Rhubarb, Some Film Museums I Have Known
LIKE ALICE DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, I HAVE TUMBLED DOWN THE STEPS OF GOODGOD DANCETERIA (ONE OF THE SMALL BARS NOW POPULATING SYDNEY SINCE THE CHANGE IN LICENSING LAWS) AND FOUND MYSELF IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE OR, RATHER, A KIND OF ‘META-VERSE.’ YOU KNOW THE SORT—A WORLD WHERE THE BOOKS ARE ABOUT BOOKS, THE FILMS ABOUT FILM AND, IN THE CASE OF THE IMPERIAL PANDA FESTIVAL, THE PERFORMANCES ABOUT PERFORMANCE.
rhubarb rhubarb
Rhubarb Rhubarb’s Some Film Museums I Have Known is an extended riff on the relationship between technologies of magic (holograms, dioramas, toy trains, tiny cameras, live feeds, films etc) and the magic of storytelling (see a snippet on YouTube). It starts with a pitch for a film which is part adventure, part action, part fiction, part science fiction, part comedy, part tragedy, part romance and of course completely clichéd. Our heroine’s (Natalie Randall) obsession with film is such that not only is she pitching scripts but also a plan to establish a film museum at Barumpool. Hovering above her, and interjecting at will, are the holographic Lumiere brothers (Nick Coyle), who might be in her mind or an installation in the coming museum, but are probably both. The script (Eddie Sharp and Kenzie Larsen) risks collapsing under the weight of so many citations, but Will Mansfield’s imaginative set and Randall’s endearing performance ensure that it holds strong. There is much more to say about how screens and screen culture have changed stories and our ability to tell them, but by placing Some Film Museums I Have Known on stage (as opposed to say in an interactive installation), Rhubarb Rhubarb suggests that performance might be the most magical technology of all.
Gareth Davies and Charlie Garber, Masterclass
photo Lucy Parakhina
Gareth Davies and Charlie Garber, Masterclass
gareth davies, charlie garber
Masterclass is a show about the elusive art of acting. Born to a mother who worked in the chorus of Les Miserables, Gareth (Gareth Davies) has spent his entire life on stage. In the absence of any actual part in the musical, he has invented the character Charlie Garber (Charlie Garber), who becomes so life-like, scene-stealing and all-consuming that eventually he/they is/are fired. This sends Gareth into something of a funk and the rest of the show is about Charlie’s efforts to cheer, cajole and encourage him back onto the stage. This involves flashbacks, montages, mimed games of basketball and trips to the “dream forge.” In other words, the show is less a masterclass in acting and more a surreal mapping of an actor’s subconscious. In this sense, Masterclass reminds me of Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, especially since the subterranean disco at GoodGod could easily pass for floor seven-and-a-half. There are few things more fun than watching good actors do bad acting, and Masterclass is eccentric, charming and clever.
Zoe Coombs Marr, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life
photo Lucy Parakhina
Zoe Coombs Marr, And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life
zoe coombs marr
Zoe Coombs Marr’s solo show And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life (see also RT98) references a musical, West Side Story, via the flute solo she played in a medley at her high school band camp. Wearing goofy glasses and a purple, green and black nylon track top, Coombs Marr grips the sides of the lectern, breathes heavily into the microphone and starts her presentation with laborious definitions from the dictionary. From here, she segues into a more general reminiscence of her only-slightly-misspent youth, in which she taped Xena, hoped to become a lesbian, wondered about kissing, worried about flute playing and distracted herself from her worry by thinking about kissing again. Towards the end of the show, Coombs Marr confesses that she has since found out there is no flute solo in West Side Story; her febrile teenage mind simply magnified the importance of playing the regular flute line. Does it matter? Probably not, she concludes—such moments of grace are rare and can’t be recreated. Or can they? In relating her stories of lust, loss and dinosaurs, Coombs Marr creates a show that is both cringe-worthy and cool.
Claudia O’Doherty, What Is Soil Erosion?
photo Lucy Parakhina
Claudia O’Doherty, What Is Soil Erosion?
claudia o’doherty
If Marr’s is a show about a show that never was, then Claudia O’Doherty’s What Is Soil Erosion? is about a show that cannot be—primarily because television producers refuse to commission her 26-part series on the basis that it is “formless.” The same cannot be said of her beige pants, however, which are as tight as her top is loose. Dressed as a dorky scientist, O’Doherty proceeds to plough her way through every single episode, combining corny presentational poses, crappy graphics and a series of ridiculous surveys. Interspersed among the facts about soil erosion (yes, really), are asides about her cold sores and accidental abortion as well as some free shopping vouchers. It’s occasionally too long, but with some judicious editing, this will be a tight, punchy comedy.
Dr Brown, Because
photo Lucy Parakhina
Dr Brown, Because
dr brown
During O’Doherty’s show I share a joke with the man standing beside me, who turns out to be the comedian Dr Brown. His show Because is hard to describe, but “silent stand-up” or “post-clown” comes close. In the opening sections, he brings an audience member onto the stage, gets a second member to help hoist the first onto their shoulders and then asks the other spectators to cheer. This, of course, requires another round of applause, so a third spectator is brought onto the stage to lift the second etc. In another section, a baby doll cries so he wraps it in a nappy, spraying the audience in the process, and carries it upstairs—we see nothing but hear a stomp and an ominous silence. In the final scene, he strips down to a Starbucks apron, performs an elaborate dance that involves manipulating the apron strings with his buttocks, and then sits down, lifts up his apron and pours water on his groin, shouting accusingly, “What do you want from me?!” He stalks up the stairs, leaving the audience thinking this the funniest and weirdest thing they’ve seen in ages.
Miles O’Neil, Miles O’Neil’s World Around Us
photo Lucy Parakhina
Miles O’Neil, Miles O’Neil’s World Around Us
miles o’neil
The same venue also hosts Miles O’Neil’s World Around Us. O’Neil manages to conjure several worlds: with some found Super 8 footage, which is projected onto a bed sheet, he evokes the 1970s; with stories of discovering pornography with his friends, he calls to mind the 1980s; and with stories he’s borrowed from a taxi driver and a homeless man, among others, he manages to evoke our contemporary world. In between these found images and stories, he also plays a few songs and the combination makes for a simple, subtle and unassuming show.
The Suitcase Royale, The Suitcase Royale’s Test Flight#1
photo Lucy Parakhina
The Suitcase Royale, The Suitcase Royale’s Test Flight#1
the suitcase royale
O’Neil also appears in The Suitcase Royale Test Flight#1, which is slightly less subtle, with its endless fart jokes and cross-dressing. Set in a town that is being attacked by zombats (zombie wombats), the show follows the travails of the last survivors as they pursue the creatures across the country, into caravan parks and eventually into a cave. It feels unfair to review something that is so obviously still in development, so suffice to say that Test Flight#1 is stylish (in the sense that it is recognisably Royale) but not especially substantial, and will need a few more sorties before it can soar.
Pig Island, Cab Sav
photo Lucy Parakhina
Pig Island, Cab Sav
cab sav
The festival concludes with Cab Sav, a sort of contemporary performance variety night. Lara Thoms opens proceedings by standing centre-stage in a watermelon-coloured leotard; her arms flop and she occasionally bends at the waist. It’s not clear who or what she is until a motor starts and an inflatable man, of the kind you find in car yards and beer ads, bursts into life and across the stage. Matt Prest appears sans pants, which is all the more disturbing because he is wearing a very dorky, chunky knit cream sweater on top. Post (Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor and a man who is standing in for the very pregnant Natalie Rose) presents an excerpt from their forthcoming show (Who’s the Best?) alongside a segment from an old one (the bounceathon from Shamelessly Glitzy Work, RT98).
Brown Council stand shame-faced as an audience member is summoned to read out a terrible review of their performance A Comedy—slightly amusing but somewhat disingenuous since the show has, for the most part, had a very favourable reception (see RT98, RT101, RT101).
Then the members of Pig Island (Nick Coyle, Charlie Garber and Claudia O’Doherty), who have appeared separately throughout the festival, reunite for a short skit in which they have to save Imperial Panda—one last show about a show. Finally, Panther contrives an exercise whereby we move our chairs, stand in pairs and shout “my darling, I love you” at each other. Then the music cuts in and we find that we have cleared ourselves a dance floor.
This final night serves as a microcosm for the festival as a whole, in the sense that it looks deceptively casual but is in fact carefully produced. Though there’s no explicit festival theme, the work presented at Imperial Panda nevertheless shares a sensibility—relentlessly intertextual and often intermedial, but just as often determinedly lo-fi and DIY. There is also a resolute refusal to appear too serious about or within the work, despite the fact that it takes serious ambition to produce each show and the festival as a whole. Beyond this, what stays with me is the event’s infectious sense of fun. Perhaps it’s about nothing more and nothing less than the pleasures of performance or, more accurately, meta-performance.
Rhubarb Rhubarb, Some Film Museums I Have Known, performers Natalie Randall, Nick Coyle, writers Eddie Sharp, Kenzie Larsen with Natalie Randall, Nick Coyle, set design, holograms Will Mansfield, director Eddie Sharp, Old Fitzroy Theatre, Feb 18-March 12; Masterclass, writer-performers Gareth Davies, Charlie Garber, GoodGod Danceteria, March 4-12; And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life, writer-performer Zoe Coombs Marr, Redfern Town Hall, March 11-13; What Is Soil Erosion?, writer-performer Claudia O’Doherty, GoodGod Danceteria, March 17-19; Dr Brown, Because, writer-performer Philip Burgers, March 18-19; Miles O’Neil’s World Around Us, writer-performer Miles O’Neil, Helen Rose Schausberger Labortorium, March 15; The Suitcase Royale, The Suitcase Royale Test Flight #1, writer-performers Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil, Glen Walton, Helen Rose Schausberger Laboratorium, March 17-19; Imperial Panda Festival, Sydney, March 4-20; www.theimperialpanda.com
ENCASED BY OLD SYDNEY SANDSTONE, COVERED IN ANCIENT SPONGY KIKUYU AND FASHIONED INTO QUARTERS BY QUAINT HEXAGONAL SHAPED CEMENT FOOTPATHS, A ONCE OVERLOOKED COURTYARD AT SYDNEY COLLEGE OF THE ARTS (SCA) HAS BEEN GIVEN SOME EXTRA TENDER LOVING OF LATE.
how does your garden grow?
Since mid-2010 Lucas Ihlein and Diego Bonetto’s project Tending has gently moved in and things have started to grow, both in the garden and online via their blog. Tending is a kind of artists’ garden experiment that engages with the biological, social, aesthetic and institutional fabric of a small, but not altogether insignificant, place.
The project was conceived in collaboration with Ross Gibson (Professor of Contemporary Arts, SCA) as a potential research focus for staff and students that would work towards materialising the garden theme of the college’s Callan Park location. For Gibson, the significance of the project lies in the way that gardens are “like comprehensible and pleasurable versions of the messy contemporary world—interactive, delicate, hard work, generative, social, beautiful, requiring constant care and co-operation.”
The initial plan, explains Ihlein, was to occupy a piece of land at the entrance of the college and have the garden function as a de facto go-between for the two worlds of “art school” and “rest of the world.” However, bureaucratic and institutional complexities made this difficult and Tending was made to adapt and cooperate with its current, more internal, location in the courtyard next to the SCA library. It is within this context that Ihlein and Bonetto have described Tending as a process that “intervenes, lightly.” Like a newly emergent eco-system Tending has fractured as much as it has fused through soft day to day interventions and co-operation(s)—that have gently pushed at what is possible artistically, institutionally, biologically and socially.
Located in Kirkbride Park, on the historic grounds of Callan Park, in the former-psychiatric-hospital-cum-contemporary-art-school, Tending’s relationship to place is decisive. Callan Park is an environment where the contemporary politics of arts education, mental health and urban land development are forever simmering below the surface of the rolling parklands and iconic architecture that fill 61 hectares of contested real estate on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Quietly, yet ever present, older Indigenous and settler histories embedded in the local area also linger.
W.L. 19-8-44, Tending
photo courtesy of the artists
W.L. 19-8-44, Tending
The wider environment that SCA inhabits is dense, rich and also massively under explored. Having moved from Balmain into the Kirkbride Block in the early 1990s the college is still in the process of finding and settling into the full potential of its relationship to place. The fact that Ihlein and Bonetto describe their weekly digging and planting sojourns as a “mental health day” is illustrative of the delicate and subtle connections to place that have come into operation through this art project. Fragments of people’s lives—names and dates etched long ago into the trunks of over-looked palm trees—come to the fore through the process of Tending. On the blog the artists ask: “Who were W.L. and D.W.?…and what was going on for them in these decades, during and after the war?”
Betty harvesting some banana leaf, Tending
photo courtesy of the artists
Betty harvesting some banana leaf, Tending
process and products
There is a genuine warmth and unpretentiousness that characterises the project both in person (on site) and via the blog (online). Characters emerge in the unfolding narrative of Tending—characters that can just as easily be plants as people. The blog’s quaint attention to detail begins to feel like a slow meditative reality TV show, whose production team would be carrying around copies of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life alongside their shovel. Some characters stay longer than others, such as Tending’s switched on VIP Betty whose knowledge has gone deep into that soil, but they all contribute to an interesting balance of contention and co-operation, order and unruliness that sits at the core of Tending as an artwork in process.
But Tending is not an artistic process without products. Indeed, gardens themselves provide ideal places to explore the dynamic between process and product. As Ihlein explains, “one would quickly tire of digging the soil if, season after season, there were no yields.” Some products Ihlein and Bonetto have seen emerging from the collective labours of Tending include: physical pleasure; a clear mind; some lettuces, cucumbers, pumpkins and lots of basil; knowledge about what to plant at different times of the year; new friendships; heated discussions about the definition of art; some small wages; a series of guest lectures; an open-air studio; an improvement in soil quality; a restful place on campus…
Grass, Tending
photo courtesy of the artists
Grass, Tending
tending the future
The future of Tending is uncertain. The artists are looking into ways of enabling the garden at SCA to continue indefinitely, mapping out a kind of “management hand-over” to students and staff at the college, which the artists have jokingly likened to the process of America pulling out of Iraq. There are also pending grant applications that could potentially see the project extend over to the main campus of Sydney University as part of a new Diabetes and Obesity research facility, whereby gardening-as-art will be put to practical use beyond its current context. In the process we might just see the estrangement that all too often exists between disciplines further collapse.
In his essay, The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière argues that emancipation is not so much about “activation” over a “passivity” that is perceived to be inherent in spectatorship, but rather about breaking down the very oppositions that inform this kind of hierarchical understanding of things. Rancière concedes that an emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators. In this sense Tending is producing a community of gardeners that bring worms to the surface of the soil and sprout edible fruits from seeds as much as they uncover over-looked histories, confront artistic norms and forge new relationships with people and place.
Lucas Ihlein and Diego Bonetto, Tending, Sydney College of the Arts, www.tending.net.au
This article was first published in our May 24 e-dition.
I was turned on to music at the age of 14 when I heard the Prelude to the first Bach cello suite on Neon Genesis Evangelion. I had moved from the Blue Mountains to suburban Adelaide when I was young and perhaps the cello made me remember something about the mountains. Two years later I played the piece to get into a special interest music school and started playing cello in bands, string quartets and orchestras, before starting a music degree at the Elder Conservatorium of Music. I quickly developed RSI and turned to studying musicology, English, philosophy and cultural studies at Adelaide University and Melbourne University, with a little stay at McGill University in Montreal. I am currently completing a PhD in musicology at ANU on the rapport of music and philosophy in the works of the philosopher Alain Badiou and the composer François Nicolas. Apart from writing I like to compose for theatre and art installations. I still like the mountains but don’t get to them very often.
Exposé
I write because I want to know how ideas are relevant to music and vice versa. Getting the right match is very difficult, but a discursive approach to a work, not just a performance or a composer, can be really enriching for listeners. To this end RealTime is Australia’s most important and proactive source of writing on contemporary music. You can make that extra discursive leap and don’t have to be afraid of it being edited out before the final print.
The Astra Chamber Music Society is another long-standing and praiseworthy institution, not least because I get to sing with them every week. Where else can you premiere a new Australian work one moment, then sing some obscure baroque requiem mass or early 20th century atonal number the next, alongside much better singers so you feel like you’re in the best karaoke bar ever? It’s Astra’s 60th birthday this year. Happy birthday Astra. I love you.
I am also developing a vested interest in disability access in the arts, having been quite immobilised by ankylosing spondylitis this past year. Perhaps mentioning my ank. spond. blog here (www.ismethotrexatekillingme.blogspot.com) will inspire me to post more on it.
We should keep on talking in the face of music. We will be shamed by the music, but that is necessary to learn to listen again.
I grew up in Adelaide and Göteborg as a bilingual Greco-Swedish-Australian kid who wanted to play soccer for AC Milan. Then, a role in a French company’s production at the 1996 Adelaide Festival gave me a deludedly halcyon image of what it was to be involved in the arts. I hold Barrie Kosky personally responsible for curating this corruption of innocence. So, I went to the Victorian College of the Arts as an acting student and now I am an actor, an Artistic Associate with The Hayloft Project, a member of the Green Room panel for Independent Theatre and an out-of-form soccer player.
Exposé
I began writing on theatre, film, music and dance while studying at VCA. In a curriculum that focused entirely on kinaesthetic learning there was no outlet for the written word, very little space for intellectual discourse or the communication of ideas beyond the sheltering walls of the studio. In response, I founded a student blog, wangled review tickets from theatres, cinemas and festivals, encouraged my friends to join me and suddenly became an editor and critic. Today, my writing about the arts coexists with my own artistic practice—I see both fundamentally as means to communicate and interrogate.
HighRise: An Intimate Portrait of a Vertical Neighbourhood
photo Joanne Saad, design ragingyoghurt.org
HighRise: An Intimate Portrait of a Vertical Neighbourhood
an intimate portrait of a vertical neighbourhood
In the wake of the MCA’s The Begin-Again in Hurstville (see RT103), comes the HighRise project in Auburn. Like The Begin-Again, HighRise is a large-scale public sound and video installation work that has been developed over several months through the collaboration of community residents and artists. The artists include award-winning photographer Joanne Saad, visual artist and producer Khaled Sabsabi (RT98, 2010 Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Scholarship recipient) and producer Lina Kastoumis (previously at Urban Theatre Projects); the residents are from the Auburn Central high rise complex. The result is a work that includes nearly 100 individual videos, which will be projected in an open-air setting in the courtyard and on the buildings of Auburn Central. HighRise begins on Thursday May 26 and runs over three nights, with two 30-minute screenings per night. HighRise: An Intimate Portrait of a Vertical Neighbourhood, Auburn, May 26-28; find them on facebook
Within and Without
photo Datu Arellano
Within and Without
anino again
If you saw The Folding Wife (RT79), then you will already know the alchemy that happens when Deborah Pollard, Paschal Daantos Berry, Valerie Berry and Manila-based multi-media artists Anino Shadowplay Collective collaborate. This time they are working on a project called Within and Without, which is billed as “a contemporary performance and event that explores the city of Manila, through representation of its landscape, history and culture” (press release). Blurring the lines between theatre and visual arts, this project will take over both the gallery and performance spaces of Blacktown Arts Centre. Bookings essential. Deborah Pollard, Valerie Berry, Paschal Daantos Berry and Anino Shadowplay Collective, Within and Without, Blacktown Arts Centre, June 22-July 2, www.artscentre.blacktown.nsw.gov.au
tiny revolutions & deviations from the norm
In another exciting collaboration, Perth-based pvi collective (RT44, RT95, RT99) are working with Vitalstatistix in Port Adelaide at the Waterside Workers Hall for three weeks. On May 27, they host tiny revolutions, a show-and-tell where they discuss “the role intervention plays in their practice and their latest body of work as well as subtle (and not so subtle) strategies for mis-behaviour in public spaces and their philosophy of instigating tiny revolutions through art” (website). Then in mid-June, they present transumer: deviate from the norm, which was commissioned for the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, and has been made in the ‘awaiting development’ landscape of Port Adelaide with a team of local artists. The show is billed as “darkly playful site-based intervention, inviting audiences to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment” (website). pvi collective at vitalstatistix, tiny revolutions, May 27; transumer: deviate from the norm, June 10-12, Port Adelaide; www.vitalstatistixtheatrecompany.blogspot.com
Thukral and Tagra, Dominus Aerius elegance – 6, 2008, acrylic and oil on canvas
image courtesy the artists and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
Thukral and Tagra, Dominus Aerius elegance – 6, 2008, acrylic and oil on canvas
cosmo-popular cultures
La Trobe University Museum of Art (LUMA) is showcasing selected works by leading artists from Australia, India and the Philippines in the exhibition Vernacular Cultures and Contemporary Art. The exhibition features “contemporary artists whose work incorporates expressions of indigenous and/or locally specific popular cultures” and examines such themes as “surf culture, karaoke, religious iconography, street advertising and popular architecture” (press release). The artists include Raqs Media Collective (RT43), Thukral and Tagra, Fiona Foley (RT94, RT94), Scott Redford (RT55), Sangeeta Sandrasegar (RT77), Maria Cruz, Mark Salvatus, TV Moore (RT57), Hoang Tran Nguyen, and Ken Botnick and Diana Guerrero-Maciá. The exhibition program also features a public lecture by the renowned Indian artist Pushpamala N (RT65) on June 9 and a performance by the Australian art rock band The Histrionics on June 10. Vernacular Cultures and Contemporary Art from Australia, India and the Philippines, curator Ryan Johnston, LUMA La Trobe University Museum of Art, May 5-June 15, www.latrobe.edu.au/luma
Carl Warner and Ross Gibson
protection (2011, detail)
c-type photographs and blackboard paint
image courtesy of the artists and UQ Art Museum, source material courtesy of Fryer Library, the University of Queensland
Carl Warner and Ross Gibson
protection (2011, detail)
c-type photographs and blackboard paint
art and refuge
The University of Queensland Art Museum is hosting three related exhibitions from June 11 to August 7. The first is Waiting for Asylum: Figures From an Archive. Working with the Fryer library archive of refugee ephemera, collaborating artists Ross Gibson (RT54, RT91), and Carl Warner interpret the precarious position of the asylum seeker past and present. The second is Collaborative Witness: Artists Responding to the Plight of the Refugee, in which artists “challenge one-dimensional portrayals and become not only witnesses, but also collaborators on the complex story of those seeking asylum” (press release). The show includes works by Benjamin Armstrong, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Jon Cattapan, Tim Johnson and Karma Phuntsok, Rosemary Laing (RT58, RT85, David Ray, Judy Watson (RT69) , and Guan Wei (RT81). The third show is John Young: Safety Zone, which responds to the hidden history of the ‘Rape of Nanjing’, when a group of 21 foreigners saved the lives of 300,000 Chinese by sheltering them in the city’s international ‘safety zone.’ Caroline Wake, author of our Archive Highlight Art & Asylum: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics, will be reviewing the shows in RealTime 104. Waiting for Asylum: Figures From an Archive, curators Prue Ahrens and Michele Helmrich, project researcher Gillian Whitlock; Collaborative Witness: Artists Responding to the Plight of the Refugee, curators Prue Ahrens and Michele Helmrich, John Young: Safety Zone, University of Queensland Art Museum, June 11-Aug 7; www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au
Joe Lawlor from Desperate Optimists on the set of Tiong Bahru in Singapore 2010
photo courtesy of the artists
Joe Lawlor from Desperate Optimists on the set of Tiong Bahru in Singapore 2010
desperate optimists: community on screen
The Dublin-born, UK-based performers and filmmakers Desperate Optimists are visiting Australia to screen Tiong Bahru, the unique outcome of their engagement with a Singaporean community. Made by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy and co-produced by Singapore-based Dan Prichard, it’s part of an innovative series titled Civic Life. It screened at Rotterdam and Dublin film festivals earlier this year, at the Festival of Ideas in Bristol and IndieLisboa in May. There’s an interview with the makers in Sight and Sound. The Civic Life blog includes a trailer for Tiong Bahru, photographs and another interview. The wide screen cinematography, seamless continuity and the cumulative evocation of social life around a small district are seductive, focusing on small pleasures and low-key dramas. Community members perform with ease and conviction. Desperate Optimists’ extensive Australian program includes screenings, talks and workshops at ACMI, Footscray Community Arts Centre; Metro Screen, AFTRS, Performance Space and ICE, and as part of the Sydney Film Festival at the Art Gallery of NSW. See the websites of the above organisations for dates
Penelopa
the patience of penelope
The award-winning writer-director Ben Ferris’s art film Penelopa is finally being released, screening at the Art Gallery of NSW and the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney. Penelopa is the first Australian-Croatian co-production and is adapted from Homer’s tale of Penelope, depicting her psychological struggle as she waits 20 years for her husband to return from the Trojan War. The film “draws on the long-take filmmaking style of art film directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror), Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) and Bela Tarr (The Man from London)” (press release). Penelopa, Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, June 15, Art Gallery of NSW, June 25; www.penelopa.com.au
In their manifesto, Decibel state that they “seek to dissolve any division between sound art, installation and music.” Their CD Disintegration: Mutation represents more than just sound. To appreciate it fully, you must read the liner notes, visit their webpage and preferably see a performance either on YouTube or, ideally, live.
Decibel blend acoustic instruments (strings, woodwinds) with electronics (keyboards, turntables, Max MSP processing and networking) and you can watch their scrolling graphic scores online, adding a significant dimension to the appreciation of the music. I’ve not seen them live, but it’s clear that Decibel performances are dramatic presentations and the abstract sounds are given degrees of meaning or emphasis depending on the depth of the listener’s engagement.
Track 1 is Decibel founder Cat Hope’s composition “In the Cut,” for cello, bass clarinet, bass guitar and a turntable playing a specially made recording of a descending tone. “In the Cut” uses pitch, texture and timbre to chilling effect. Inspired by the eponymous Susanna Moore novel (which became a Jane Campion film), it starts with a squealing violin note that’s joined by cello and clarinet. The pitches slowly fall, the instruments eventually detune and the sound becomes chaotic, suggesting entropic decay, as if music itself is collapsing. Behind the arrhythmic, sinking line is a low, droning, all-consuming rumble. Music like this is best heard on a PA at high volume to add visceral impact.
Track 2, Hope’s “Kuklinski’s Dream,” begins with an ethereal, breathy whisper that segues into the more strident and densely woven timbres of bass clarinet and strings that echo and mock the eerie whispering sound. The dreaminess of the high-pitched opening becomes nightmarish when we discover that the sound source is the bowing of knife blades, referencing the murder-weapon of late Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski, after whom the work is named. The sight of the bow hairs being shredded in live performance would add a macabre visual element—a musical instrument that self-annihilates. The graphic score is based on fragments of Kuklinski’s signature so that the work, for three carving knives, bass clarinet, double bass, cello and processing, directly embodies his persona as well as his apparatus. Whereas “In the Cut” represented entropy through pitch and distortion, “Kuklinski’s Dream” represents murder.
Lindsay Vickery’s “Transit of Venus” is a gently developing progression of tones and timbres involving live processing and performer-specific click tracks that, together with the graphic score, guide the pitch, dynamics, textures and time periods. Hope’s double bass creates a bubbling sensation that sits below the fluttering violin and pizzicato cello, and each instrumental voice ebbs and flows intriguingly as the work unfolds. The final work is Vickery’s “Antibody,” which was evidently inspired by biological mutation, and in which Malcolm Riddoch’s organic looking online visual representation maps the harmonics graphically, showing how they grow outward from the central tone. The same visual representation could be made for any sonic event, but it seems essential to the concept for this work. The sound is a densely layered haze of momentary gestures and structural threads, and the cello line is especially interesting. The longest track at 14 minutes, for alto flute, bass clarinet, violin, cello, keyboard and processor, it has an engagingly quizzical musicality.
Whereas Decibel has previously foregrounded works by other composers, this CD comprises compositions by its members demonstrating their manifesto. Hope’s compositions contrast with Vickery’s in the nature of the inspiration for the work. Hers have great psychological and theatrical impact, while the lush complexity of his suggests a more conventional musicality, as you focus on the timbres, textures, resonances and formal development. Both composers continue the interrogation of sound in space and the possibilities for the generation and realisation of sound, though the CD format unfortunately restricts spatial awareness. They also mix improvisation with graphic scores, programmed electronics and click tracks, making for a highly complex set of performance parameters, though these are undetectable when listening to the CD, as is any aleatoric variability from performance to performance.
Disintegration: Mutation is absorbing and resolved work that extends the aesthetic that has emerged over recent years in blending the sonically possible into the demandingly-but-satisfyingly musical. The CD’s title suggests Decibel’s approach —the disintegration of conventional music and the mutation of sound into new forms.
See also Darren Jorgensen’s review of Decibel’s performance of Alvin Lucier’s work in RT97; Jonathon Marshall’s review of Decibel’s Tape It! performance in RT94; and download a sample from RealTime’s SoundCapsule #1.
Sonia Teuben, Simon Laherty, Small Metal Objects
photo Jeff Busby
Sonia Teuben, Simon Laherty, Small Metal Objects
[This introduction was written in November 2011. New links will continue to be added to the list below. Eds.]
Since 1997, RealTime has displayed a strong commitment to the work of artists with disabilities, providing perspectives on disability offered by art. This archive highlight offers a snapshot of the landscape of disability arts in Australia from the RealTime archive, drawing attention to two central issues that become apparent when canvassing the body of work the magazine has produced about disability and art. First, disability arts practices consistently redefine and expand sensory catalogues of what it is to be human—offering new ways in which the experience of humanity can be felt. Second, writers face unique challenges when articulating these new geographies of humanity produced by artists working in the field.
the disability arts landscape
If we were to read disability arts in Australia as a body, the backbone would clearly be the work of Back to Back Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre, companies whose work demonstrates enduring excellence and global impact. Formed in 1987, Geelong-based Back to Back is Australia’s first professional performing arts company for people with disabilities. Their acclaimed work has toured nationally and internationally making the most significant global impact of the disability arts companies in Australia. Experiments with staging (Food Court), sound (Small Metal Objects), explorations of the audience-performer relationship (Small Metal Objects again) and a remarkable intellectual curiosity (Soft) are some of the hallmarks of Back to Back productions. Thematically, their catalogue features explorations of the body, love, sex, self-perception and space.
Next of Kin, Restless Dance Theatre
photo Chris Herzfeld
Next of Kin, Restless Dance Theatre
Adelaide-based Restless Dance Theatre is a slightly younger company with a central performance ensemble of young disabled and non-disabled dancers aged 15 to 26. Restless also has a touring company, with dancers and collaborators engaged on a professional basis to make works for touring nationally and internationally. Since 1991 Restless has explored issues of independence (Safe From Harm, Rebel Rebel), and intimacy (Bedroom Dancing, The Heart of Another Is a Dark Forest) while consistently expanding dance theatre (Unspoken Outloud) as a form.
Other notable contributions to disability arts in Australia include the work of Melbourne’s Rawcus and Adelaide-based No Strings Attached, along with the significant presentation of works by other artists and companies at festivals such as Wataboshi, High Beam and Art of Difference, which bring disabled artists together as a community.
finding the words
Disability arts practices often act as a compass that maps radical articulations of humanity. These mappings offer ways of rethinking and feeling cultural spaces of culture typically outside of the mainstream. While these sensory explorations are the work of the largely very accomplished artists, their practices demand other kinds of work for writers and audiences. This is the labour of adequately expressing new sensations in relation to cultural forms and professional practices. Reading the back catalogue of writing about disability and art in RealTime, there are moments where new philosophies of arts practice are articulated in synergistic journalism (RT22; RT53) and inspired intellectual offerings are made in response to live art (RT82). At other points, disability acts as a fault line on which writers stumble and which they conceptually struggle to cross.
In this way, disability and art come together to pose two challenges. The first of these is the call for audiences to feel anew and, in so doing, to brave unique sensations. Dominant tropes of disability representation continue to haunt the work of artists with disabilities, writers and the experiences of disabled people—namely, the freak show (RT62) and disability as other. But these well-worn notions are challenged by the work of many artists (RT22) and writers (RT69) who are able to offer new ways of putting disability politics into print.
The second challenge posed by the union of disability and art is exactly this call for journalists and industry professionals to journey into thought in order to offer words that do some kind of justice to the material cartographies created through enmeshments of disability and art. In his book S/Z, French semiologist and cultural theorist Roland Barthes famously characterised a “writerly text” as one which “is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (Paris: Seuil, 1970). For Barthes, reading such work should not be “a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing,” but rather a “form of work.” In rising to understand the moments in which writers adequately express sensations of disability art in words, it is exactly this form of work in which we, as readers, must learn to engage. Anna Hickey-Moody
There is always a certain sense of paradox about improv recordings. As Jim Denley (one half of Blip with Mike Majkowski) notes: “However entangled in the moment when generated, the finished products are compositions…reviewed, edited, mixed, mastered, fixed, made repeatable and generally fussed over” (‘Networks, Playfulness and Collectivity: Improv in Australia, 1972-2007’, Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia, ed G Priest, UNSW Press 2009).
Interestingly the CD notes reveal Calibrated to be the sixth attempt to record this musical relationship, which has been developing since 2008. So while the album offers the first 42 minutes of a two-hour session as it happened, in the moment and unedited, the process of spontaneous music making together with the idea of a fixed recorded outcome, is in fact well rehearsed.
The result of these rehearsals is a very clear sense of engagement, or entanglement as Denley calls it, between the two artists. Over the three tracks, Denley (alternating between alto sax and flutes) and Majkowski (on double bass, pitch pipes, objects and voice) traverse an evershifting terrain, without losing sight of each other, or their individual footing.
Track 1, “Pod,” explores quiet sparse textures, mixing Denley’s spittle-filled wash with Majkowski’s faraway strangled vocals. A half-melody from Denley, almost a by-product of other activities, merges with the reediness of Majkowski on pitch pipe, which he plays simultaneously with quiet percussive bass bowing. A sense of turn taking, or question and answer develops as plucks and tongue tocks stab at each other, culminating in a long, multi-tonal note from Denley.
Track 2, “Oat”, thickens up the tonal material from “Pod,” with Majkowski making long low whooping sounds by rubbing his hand over the body of the bass which interplay with Denley’s hollow reedy tones. Deep bass bowing creates a sense of tension, while the application of a balloon to the bass induces a kind of chirping over which Denley concludes with mournful, gliding sax squeals.
Tracks 1 and 2 are relatively short so by the final 21-minute track, “Branes,” the duo is primed. Majkowski starts suddenly with the harsh, sustained rattles produced by applying a plastic cassette case to the bowed strings, sounding like a castanet player on speed. Denley counters with impossibly long flute notes that devolve into a quasi-syllabic play heightened by Majkowski with intense skittering of the bow over the strings. At one juncture they explore pitch extremes: Majkowski drags out low bass notes as Denley produces piercing piccolo peeps. At another Majkowski introduces bell tolls with each pluck of a bass string, while Denley emulates a kind of digital serialism on overblown flute. As often happens the ending that presents itself is ignored creating an epilogue of sax death throes with a definitive hard-edged stop. It’s been quite a journey.
An important element to capturing the spontaneous nature of this kind of music is to maintain a sense of the room in which the moment is recorded, and the clear miking of Denley in the left channel and Majkowski in the right is unfussy. It allows for a sense of orientation, particularly helpful as it seems that Majkowski can produce woodwind-like sounds, and Denley can produce string timbres. Of course, mixing this up and fusing the sound sources might offer an intriguing sensory complication. Having seen these artists play live, I have a clear idea of the extended techniques involved in the making of many of the obscure sounds, but I wonder how a listener without the memory of the gestures of performance would experience the recording—perhaps it would make the textural and timbral material even more heightened. With or without prior experience of these artists live, however, it is impossible not to appreciate that the music-making undertaken on Calibrated is part of a rich and ongoing conversation between two of Australia’s most engaging improv artists.
Gail Priest
Ai Weiwei missing poster
photo stunned
Ai Weiwei missing poster
“IF IT CARRIES ON LIKE THIS IT WILL BECOME LIKE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION.” THAT WAS THE ASSESSMENT EXPRESSED TO ME RECENTLY BY A WELL-KNOWN CHINESE CREATIVE FIGURE REGARDING THE CURRENT SITUATION IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. IF THAT SOUNDS LIKE HYPERBOLE, THE FACT THAT THESE WORDS ARE BEING UTTERED BY SOMEONE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHAT THE MAOIST ERA WAS ACTUALLY LIKE IS INDICATIVE OF THE PREVAILING MOOD AMONGST THE NATION’S ACTIVIST AND CREATIVE COMMUNITIES.
On Sunday April 3 China’s best known contemporary artist Ai Weiwei was taken from Beijing airport as he attempted to board a flight for Hong Kong. He has not been heard from since. Ai, who is also a prolific filmmaker, architect and designer, has long been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. His domestic and international profile, however, led many to believe he was unlikely to suffer the harsh treatment dealt out to many lesser-known opponents of the regime. In the words of The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones on April 4, his arrest is being interpreted as an attempt to “stamp out the idea that any individual is greater than the law of the state.”
The “law of the state” in this case—as in many others—is proving very flexible, since Ai Weiwei has not been formally charged and none of his friends or family, including his wife and mother, is aware of his current whereabouts. Various other members of Ai’s circle have also been arbitrarily detained for varying periods, and his associates Wen Tao, Zhang Jinsong, Hu Mingfen and Liu Zhenggang are all still missing at the time of writing.
Unfortunately Ai Weiwei’s case is just the tip of the iceberg. After anonymous calls for a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” emulating recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East circulated online in mid-February, the Chinese authorities moved swiftly to neutralise the perceived threat. Initially political activists were targeted, including lawyers and well-known bloggers. In March, they also began exerting pressure on parts of China’s creative community.
The China Human Rights Defender website claims, “The Chinese government has criminally detained a total of 39 individuals since mid-February.” Seventeen of these are still in detention, nine have been charged and are awaiting trial and three have already been sent to camps for “re-education through labour.” The claims are supported by a map detailing the names and locations of those detained (see chrdnet.org). Earlier this month the same organisation reported around 200 others have been placed under other various forms of “soft detention”—in other words, house arrest.
In addition, an unknown number of people across China have been subject to a ramping up of intrusive surveillance, harassment and interference in their daily lives. On March 18 for example, I visited the academic and documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming (no relation to Ai Weiwei) at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. Ai has made numerous low budget documentaries focusing on controversial issues such as the spread of AIDS in rural China through unregulated blood collections.
After a translator and I met Ai on campus, we headed to her nearby apartment. As we approached her residential block around five minutes later we were intercepted by a man—presumably a plain-clothed security officer—who addressed Ai Xiaoming by name and asked what we were doing. Our questioner was joined a few moments later by another man and a woman, while two other men stood watching a few metres away. None of the group was uniformed or offered any form of identification. The first man informed Ai Xiaoming that we needed to accompany him to the campus security office (Bao wei chu), while the woman asked my translator and I our names, occupations and places of origin.
Ai Xiaoming agreed to accompany the ‘officers’ if they let my translator and I go. As my companion and I made a hurried exit we were followed by other plain-clothed personnel into the subway station next to the campus.
Ai Xiaoming later contacted me and stated she suspects her phone is tapped and her email account has been hacked. Our experience shows her apartment is certainly under surveillance, although she says she was unaware of this until the incident on March 18.
Although certain filmmakers and artists have long been under surveillance and subject to phone taps, since the 1980s it has been rare for Chinese authorities to physically prevent artists meeting with foreigners. It is a disturbing development that the kinds of restrictions that more radical political activists have long endured are now being extended to established creative figures.
In more bad news for China’s film community, on April 18 organisers announced the cancellation of the Eighth Documentary Film Festival China, an event staged annually since 2004 in the far-flung Beijing suburb of Tongzhou. The festival is one of a handful of regular events in China showcasing films made outside the country’s state-controlled approval system. The 2011 edition had been planned for the first week of May. Artistic Director Zhu Rikun was quoted in the English-language edition of Chinese newspaper The Global Times as saying, “We cancelled it ourselves. The overall situation was tense, and we had received a lot of pressure.” The report did not elaborate on the nature of the pressure or its source.
In the current environment, Chinese-born foreign nationals have found that holding a foreign passport does not necessarily protect them, as the Australian novelist and blogger Yang Hengjun discovered when he disappeared in the city of Guangzhou on March 27. He resurfaced the following weekend and was allowed to return to Australia via Hong Kong, but he declined to elaborate on his experience, telling The Age, “I can’t keep having media attention and continue my pursuit of democracy in China…The more questions I answer outside China, then the less I can do inside.”
It remains to be seen whether the present crackdown represents a longer-term hardening in the government’s attitude or simply a panicked, typically heavy-handed response to events overseas. Either way, it’s a sobering reminder of the immense arbitrary power wielded by China’s ruling party and how quickly cultural liberalisation can be wound back when the state feels threatened. Even if all the detained figures are released tomorrow, the atmosphere of fear will linger, intensifying the already pervasive self-censorship that exists in China’s media and cultural spheres. This is, of course, precisely the intention. The message from the authorities is clear—the right to creative expression in China is on always on notice.
Katherine Evans (centre), Jianna Georgiou and Ciaran Woods, Take Me There
photo Chris Herzfeld
Katherine Evans (centre), Jianna Georgiou and Ciaran Woods, Take Me There
I AM NOT YOUNG ENOUGH TO HAVE GROWN UP WITH MY MEMORIES PLAYING BACK ON HOME VIDEO. WHILE OTHER FAMILIES IN THE SUBURBAN 1970s HAD SUPER 8, MY FAMILY HAD SLIDE SHOWS ON A BED SHEET AND PHOTOGRAPHS STUCK IN ALBUMS. MY MEMORIES OF OTHER TIMES AND PLACES ARE ORDERED, THEREFORE, BY THE SHOOT-AND-SNAP OF PHOTOGRAPHY, NOT BY THE ZOOM-AND-FLOW OF HANDHELD VIDEO. I SEE THE IMAGE BUT I DON’T REMEMBER. OR IF I DO, THEN I CAN ONLY RECALL THE FREEZE-FRAME OF THE SINGLE SHOT.
In Take Me There from Restless Dance, performer Alice Kearvell recounts her birthday memories. She begins remarkably with birthday number one: “lots of cuddles with my family and had a BBQ and dessert and I got shy.” By her second: “I was screaming and my brother put his hands over his ears. And I remember my sister was there and we had party food and dessert.” And for her third: “I think we went out for tea, no lunch, that’s right, at the cafe. And I remember had party food and dessert.”
Alice mediates these memories on stage from a green expanse of chroma-key, while live video of her performing is composited with home videos of her birthday celebrations. The resulting memory-flow is streamed to seven screens strapped-up around the stage. Other performers enter singing “Happy Birthday” and carrying gas-filled party balloons. But this is not a re-enactment. It is more a tribute to the displacements of home video, flowing into memory formations of the self elsewhere—at other times, in other places.
Beside the green expanse and video screens, the 12 performers in this work occupy a space—designed by Gaelle Mellis—which is as empty as a waiting room with its row of plastic chairs and a single potted plant. Where else do they want to go?
Dana hangs out with some friends in an abandoned house. Matt wants to be anywhere, stretched out and relaxed, lying on the grass. But Jennie can’t get anywhere, wherever that may be. Kathryn wants to go downtown to the rough-and-tumble of the inner city. Lorcan wants to go to Ireland. Courts goes swimming in the pool and Dana remembers snow falling in Romania.
The video magic of chroma-key makes these escapes of memory and imagination possible on stage and screens—or so it seems. When Lorcan flies to Ireland, he takes his seat in the aeroplane as the ensemble joins him from the side. Together they dance the gestures of the flight attendants’ safety routine. Once in Ireland, Lorcan—Leprechaun-like—makes another performer disappear from the screen by draping her in green.
When Kathryn goes downtown, she is moved and bumped around by two performers dressed in green. Against a backdrop of city lights and traffic, she jumps and twists and screams unheard. On the screens, of course, her manipulators have disappeared; she is tossed and turned by the unseen forces of the city.
Courts White and Jesse Rochow, Take Me There
photo Chris Herzfeld
Courts White and Jesse Rochow, Take Me There
The work itself bears the traces of its making. Director Daniel Koerner asks the audience in the program—as he may have asked the performers in rehearsal—“If you had the chance to go anywhere, do anything, where would you go? What would you do there?” Technological conceits of appearance and actuality are exposed in the performance with humour, tracing the cruelty of those liberal injunctions to “be who you want to be” and “go where you want to go.”
Aspirations to overcome the constraints of time, place and physical capacity are mediated by memories and technologies. But the gap between individual aspirations and the uniformity of ensemble behaviour is not so thoroughly explored. Individual imperatives to “take me there” are met with collective actions in response that set limits and refusals. The performance only tolerates one aspirant at a time, who must return to the ensemble if they are to grant freedom to another.
There is even something slightly petulant about the work’s imperative. “Take me there” sounds like an unruly child speaking to a reluctant parent, or a traveller of privilege issuing instruction to a driver—as if the speaker is incapable of getting there without the generosity of our contribution.
Between the individual and the ensemble there is also scope for mid-scale interactions less explored in this work. In choreographies of twos and threes and fours, performers say to us and others, not “take me there,” but “we’re getting out of here!”
Come Out Festival, Restless Dance Theatre, Take Me There, director Daniel Koerner, assistant director Philip Channells, designer Gaelle Mellis, lighting designer David Gadsen, composer Ian Moorhead, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 25-April 2; www.restlessdance.org
This article was first published as part of the May 10 e-dition.
There’s a busy two months ahead for new music lovers. First, Mike Majkowski (Earbash and RT97) and Decibel (RT94, RT97) join forces for concerts in Canberra and Sydney. Decibel will also be performing at PICA in the second of three concerts there with new works by ensemble members Lindsay Vickery and Cat Hope as well as by Chris de Groot, Thomas Meadowcroft and John Cage as well as an arrangement of Scott Walker’s Benito’s Dream (you can hear some of Decibel’s work in our Sound Capsule and keep an eye out for Chris Reid’s review of their CD in our next e-dition). The Sunwrae String Quartet is also on tour (and will be reviewed in RT103), with concerts in each capital city, a guest appearance at the Camden Heaven Music Festival in Port Macquarie and a trip to Vietnam. Finally, Canberra is again hosting its adventurous International Music Festival (see our 2010 review). Decibel and Mike Majkowski, Canberra, May 14, www.thestreet.org.au and Sydney, May 15, www.cityrecitalhall.com; Decibel, Concert 2, PICA, June 20, www.decibel.waapamusic.com; Sunwrae String Quartet, Eavesdropping Tour, May 5-June 9, www.sunwrae.com; Canberra International Music Festival, May 11-22, www.cimf.org.au
music theatre at home
Chambermade Opera continues its series of intensely intimate operas (The Itch, Another Lament and Target, with Dwelling Structure, subtitled “An Opera in 8 Time Use Episodes.” Citing poet Emily Dickinson, CMO suggests “you will dwell in possibility, a doorless house??,” in what promises to be a highly unusual work created by sound artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey with writer Cynthia Troup and “visual assemblage by Neil Thomas, and neighbourly interruptions by The Suitcase Royale.” Chambermade Opera, Dwelling Structure, May 26-28, www.chambermadeopera.com
Kit Wise, Xanadu 2009, HD video installation, silent 6:00, mirrored glass, Digital production Darin Bendall, an Experimenta Commission
image courtesy of the artist
Kit Wise, Xanadu 2009, HD video installation, silent 6:00, mirrored glass, Digital production Darin Bendall, an Experimenta Commission
old new media
From new music to new media…if you missed it in Melbourne last year, you can catch Experimenta: Utopia Now on tour at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. The show features the work of Patrick Bernatchez (Canada), Michael Burton (UK), Cao Fei (China), Christopher Fulham (Australia), Christian Jankowski (Germany), Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer (France/Austria), Scenocosme (France), Kit Wise (Australia) and dynamic Melbourne duo, Van Sowerwine & Isobel Knowles, all of whom investigate the double meaning of utopia as the “good place” and/or “no place.” In her RealTime review last year, Saige Walton said the “selected works ranged from joyous and humourous to desolate and unnerving” (RT96). There’s more media art to be seen at the Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Drawing from its collection, the gallery’s latest exhibition, Physical Video, explores the use of the body in video art, featuring work from the early 1970s through to the present day. Artists include Bruce Nauman (US), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Japan/US/Vietnam, RT46, RT50), Dennis Oppenheim (US), James Oram (New Zealand) and Mike Parr (Australia, RT102) among others. Experimenta: Utopia Now, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, May 12-June 19; www.experimenta.org; Physical Video, GoMA, Brisbane, May 14-Sept 4 2011; www.qag.qld.gov.au
the winner: douglas sirk box set
Our thanks to all the entrants in our competition who informed us how the Madman Douglas Sirk box set would improve their lives. The winner was Melbourne choreographer Phillip Adams, who wrote:
“For those of you who know me, I am strictly a 50s man. From Featherston chairs to Palm Springs chic and my car—a 1959 Merc. The delights and the details in the designs of Sirk’s films in the box set would keep me enthralled hour after hour. The inspiration from the set decorations alone would be like a home magazine filled with retro gems: styles, suits, gloves, backdrops, kitsch all rolled into one. Well, I might even go as far as having Written on Wind playing nonstop as my bedhead artwork. Sirk is a man after my own heart.”
The 9-DVD box set of the great films of the 1950s master of aesthetically and socially incisive Hollywood melodramas, Douglas Sirk, was generously provided by Madman Entertainment.
Ash Keating, Label Land (2009), Human Rights Arts and Film Festival
photo courtesy of the artist
Ash Keating, Label Land (2009), Human Rights Arts and Film Festival
the politics and poetics of human rights
It’s 50 years since the United Nations Refugee Convention was established, which makes the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival particularly relevant this year. The festival starts in Melbourne with a program that includes film, visual art, poetry, theatre and public forums. The films will be shown at ACMI in a week-long program of documentaries, animations and shorts. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre is presenting Not Only My Story, a play in which refugees collaborate with artists such as Yumi Umiumare (RT39, RT71, RT94). There is also artwork by Ash Keating (RT77, RT86, RT91). Smaller versions of the film program will tour Canberra, Alice Springs, Brisbane, Sydney, Byron Bay, Adelaide and Perth. Human Rights Arts and Film Festival, Melbourne May 12-22, national tour May 26-June 12, www.hraff.org.au
Robyn Stacey, Tall Tales and True, Stills Gallery
photo courtesy of the artist
Robyn Stacey, Tall Tales and True, Stills Gallery
head out to head on
Head On Photography Festival is now in its second year. There are over 130 indoor and outdoor exhibitions, events, seminars and workshops across Sydney over seven days. Of particular interest is Robyn Stacey’s show Tall Tails and True at Stills Gallery, Paddington, as well as the group exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 featuring Destiny Deacon (RT66), Bill Henson, Tracey Moffatt (RT102), Julie Rrap, Patricia Piccinini (RT43), TV Moore (RT57), Isaac Julien (RT42, RT97) and Anne Zahalka. There are also two interesting tours on offer: one to a camera obscura in Centennial Park and another of the Powerhouse Museum’s basement, which houses a considerable collection of 19th century cameras and photographs. Head On Photo Festival, May 5-June 11, www.headon.com.au
John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi & John, John Jasperse Company, Dance Massive 2011
photo Alex Escalante 2007
John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi & John, John Jasperse Company, Dance Massive 2011
New York dance maker John Jasperse looks like he’s firing in Becky, Jodi and John, one of the works in the excellent 2011 Dance Massive program in which enormous creative energy was unleashed on the stages of Malthouse, Dancehouse and Arts House across almost two weeks. In this edition we’ve reproduced a selection of reviews sweated out daily by the RealTime writing team for what was certainly a smokin’ Dance Massive. Long may it burn for the sake of Australian contemporary dance and its lovers; but what exactly is the future for Dance Massive?
And while we’re on burning issues, the detention by the Chinese Government of Ai Wei Wei, a leading Chinese artist whose work and personal presence has been strongly felt in Australia, has revealed in no uncertain terms that China will not tolerate any dissent, particularly while the so-called Jasmine Revolution continues to build in northern Africa and the Middle-East. In 2009, Ai Wei Wei was beaten by police (resulting in an operation for a subdural hematoma); last December he was prevented from attending the Nobel Peace Prize awards; and he was subsequently placed under house arrest for protesting the government demolition of his Shanghai studio. The artist was detained on April 2 at Beijing airport while on his way to Hong Kong. His home and studio have been searched and his staff detained as well. The United States, France, Britain and Germany have all called for the artist’s release and the Australian Government has stated its concern. “Only sustained international pressure can help Ai Wei Wei now,” says Sophie Richardson, Asia Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch. We should all urge our government to intensify its protest, not only against the detention of Ai Wei Wei but of other artists and dissidents.
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 1
APOLLO 13: Mission Control, Hackman
photo courtesy Brisbane Powerhouse
APOLLO 13: Mission Control, Hackman
IN THE POWERHOUSE FOYER FOR THE WORLD THEATRE FESTIVAL, A REALISTIC LOOKING SPACE MODULE BEARING THE INSIGNIA OF THE STARS AND STRIPES PROVIDES A BRIEF FRISSON FOR MEMBERS OF MY GENERATION.
Two apparently pregnant members of Chilean theatre company, Teatro en el Blanco, pour cascades of beans from burgeoning bellies onto a darkened stage at the finale of their play, Diciembre—a poignant, complex image encapsulating themes which inevitably bring up memories of past American interventions in that country.
In a foretaste of her project in development, Rramp, petite Lisa O’Neill en pointe pounds drumpads like an obsessed automaton creating a metronomic synergy of sound and movement. Guitar wielding, towering Goth-resplendent, Christine Johnson, inclines her Bride of Frankenstein bouffant condescendingly to enquire, “Do your feet hurt, dear?”
The hedonistic precinct of nearby Fortitude Valley at night was the location for a race to solicit someone willing to indulge in the chaste thrill of kissing a man in a rabbit mask, an innocuous fairytale recounted for us in a real-time version of the flicks by UK group Gobsquad (but no popcorn) in Super Night Shot.
Rats ran riot in a Polytoxic work-in-progress environment in the Turbine Hall, and the young performers of The Escapists inveigled us on a mystery tour culminating at the top of the Powerhouse in a breathtaking moment of pure jouissance. Distracted by a theatrical sleight of hand, we rummaged in boxes to release a flight of balloons (ho hum). Only when we looked over the balcony did we perceive the panorama of the forecourt below which at that time of day was a teeming thoroughfare. Bathed in a late afternoon glow, hordes of pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, mothers with strollers and children in hand, flaneurs of all kinds went about their business each holding a string with a balloon attached. A joyful flash of Seurat by the river. I thought I caught a glimpse of Jacques Tati bicycling through. And then in a gesture of detournement worthy of the Situationists, they insisted on giving us $2 back on the price of our ticket.
These random snapshots of the World Theatre Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse in February might conjure pictures from any alternative (read niche marketing) festival anywhere in the world. What was so unique about WTF that I should sing its body electric? First let’s clear the decks. WTF aimed to capture the imagination of younger generations by providing a saturated environment similar to events like The Big Night Out, accessible ticket pricing and answering its own question—WTF is theatre?—with exemplary pluralism. Some people complained that Gob Squad belonged in a film festival and was not pertinent to theatre. Gob Squad, of course, sits well in either format, and blurring the boundaries was a distinctive feature of WTF. But an ironic confusion of categories innocently appeared in locally produced Daniel Santangeli’s participatory Room 328, a show I admire. (See review). Young women high on pheromones and other substances blithely performed themselves careening through the space, apparently oblivious to the abusive acts the young male performers were perpetrating on their symbolic sister: a rubber sex doll. Santangeli’s forceful critique of clubland seemed cancelled out by WTF’s wooing of the same.
There was an apparent groundswell of young people, but the anonymous admixture of audiences was more apparent on band nights that ran concurrently with the festival on Fridays and Saturdays; audiences in the theatre were by and large the affluent and aficionados. Perhaps management should have bussed in young people with less ease of access. I spoke with a young artist who’d travelled up from Melbourne and was surprised not to meet friends with whom she’d studied drama at Queensland University of Technology not so long ago. Changing culture is a long haul I know, and WTF should be credited with putting its money where its mouth is with progressive programming that supports equity, fairness and tolerance. I personally look forward to a potentially broader conflation of audiences in 2012.
Groundbreaking is an overused word nowadays (compared to whom? Beckett? Kantor? Pina Bausch?) and I didn’t find any of the works earth shattering in this sense (except perhaps for the legitimate shock value inherent in the work in progress Black Queen Black King). So why was WTF so impressive? WTF promised a dialogue, and on this count it delivered. I was completely taken over by the conversation that took place between the shows (I mean the shows themselves were in conversation), something that captured a hopeful zeitgeist. Something that registered a seismic shift. Something with the colour of balloons. Something that restores to art its avant garde function as social antennae, pointing in the direction of new social imaginaries.
teatro en el blanco, diciembre
I interpreted the overall affirmative nature of this conversation as the tentative expression of an ethic of joy, previously postulated by Spinoza and Nietzsche, a joy that is not necessarily concerned with liberating mankind from pain and suffering (the American pursuit of happiness), but rather the living of a true life in this world. This ethic was given a voice in a final soliloquy by the politically uncommitted brother in the Chilean production of Diciembre who finds his personal discovery of love for men, whilst in the army, transcends opposing ideological imperatives represented by his two older sisters. Guillermo Calderon, the young award winning writer and director of Diciembre and representative of the generation who grew up under the fascist dictatorship of Pinochet, regrets the lack of any genuine attempt at a process of reconciliation in his country, but has been equally appalled by the so-called restoration of democracy in neo-liberal guise. His acidulous black comedy performed at breakneck speed by actors who doubled themselves in subsidiary roles in the blink of an eye, consummately, was a tour de force of round table discussions, especially as in the end the two sisters swap points of view, a not unlikely proposition evident from our own political comedy performed in Canberra.
art & egalitarianism
WTF keynote speaker Jude Kelly (artistic director of Southbank UK) in an inspiring extempore speech seemed to be groping towards articulating a political position that takes stock of the way power operates now, and that doesn’t rely on violence and the hardening of attitudes along right and left lines to arbitrate outcomes. She also seemed, bless her, to endorse the notion of some kind of redistribution of cultural wealth, an idea that has become a shibboleth in the economic sphere. She cited successful educational schemes along these lines gleaned from her travels in South America that in no way compromise artistic standards of excellence and come close to the realisation of Felix Guattari’s conception of an ‘ethico-aesthetic politics’. Another panel discussion pursued egalitarianism along intergenerational lines set out by Lenine Bourke (artistic director of Contact Inc) and Mary Anne Hunter in their Currency House Platform Paper, Not Just an Audience: Young people Transforming our Theatre.
Good Cop Bad Cop, Kassys
photo Prudence Upton
Good Cop Bad Cop, Kassys
kassys, good cop bad cop
Kassys in Good Cop Bad Cop presented a humorous, sharply observed and self-mocking observation of ourselves as we are, and how we embrace the media promulgated fabulising that allows us to invent and interpret these selves as our own. The video interviews that inter-cut the performance, are triumphs of banal, self dramatising content and sincere delivery. Their effortless stage playing style, by contrast, evoked the unsensationalised and natural behaviour of domestic animals with seeming spontaneity flowing into moments of pictorial stillness. I loved this unusual and quietly intelligent work both for what it said and left unsaid. (See also RT101.)
Kate Hunter, Nick Papas, Carolyn Hanna, Andrew Gray, The Waiting Room, Born in a Taxi
photo Leo Dale
Kate Hunter, Nick Papas, Carolyn Hanna, Andrew Gray, The Waiting Room, Born in a Taxi
born in a taxi, waiting room
I appreciate experiencing performers who are old in their craft. In Born in a Taxi and the Public Floor Project’s The Waiting Room the physical ensemble improvisation felt like a surfeit of riches in poor theatre guise. The ability of the performers to almost telepathically fragment and re-cohere always followed a mysterious boundary line between order and chaos. Cognitive scientists describe a process in which original ideas crop up at random and then survive or fail in microseconds, depending on their fitness for rapidly changing electrochemical environments produced by surrounding brain activity. The Waiting Room was such an environment. It seemed to elicit, in its exits and entrances, sad human reflections such as Gauguin wrote on one of his Polynesian paintings: “Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going.” In this way, the work was oddly moving. One room, one door, rows of chairs and ourselves as co-performers.
hackman, apollo 13: mission control
Apollo 13: Mission Control was a big flight of the imagination. However naive the New Zealand company Hackman might have appeared about Cold War politics and its involvement in the space race, it delivered a complex and immersive theatre environment which was impressive in its sheer enormity as a passable replica of the NASA control room of the period. Playing it was great fun for everybody. Narratively it followed a well-tried Hollywood formula about the grizzled veteran and the young nerd who eventually saves the day. However, this was played with credible verisimilitude and was really only background to our own involvement in bringing the boys home. They created a huge level of engagement leading to a crucial moment demanding that an audience member, in the absence of any one else—the actors having left the stage—spontaneously step into a performer’s shoes to respond to increasingly panicky calls from the astronauts. The spear-carriers carried the day.
temporary distortion, american kamikaze
A transnational collaboration by US company Temporary Distortions, American Kamikaze’s admittedly seductive pop aesthetic which, on the surface, appeared as a potent and congruent mix of art installation, video and live performance seemed nonetheless to be the odd man out at WTF. The set is a triptych of two human sized boxes with a vertical video screen between and slightly above them. The actors’ mode of delivery is straight on to the audience, they never make eye contact with each other, never touch and barely move. Their lines only tangentially read as dialogue. The video projections are beautifully composed, and have a ravishing cinematic sensuousness, acting as a hell-mouth for eruption of repressed materials reproduced from Japanese Horror Films and Hollywood film noir. The overall mood is subdued, overcast, brooding and a non-linear story line fractures both time and identity. In its hallucinatory darkness, this set-up reminded me of a 19th century wax museum which, it has been suggested, is a kind of proto cinema. The show deconstructed men’s phallic panic when confronted by women, the animal and death. However, women were portrayed as bereft, vacant objects of desire or else she-devils, and men remained either lone cowboys incapable of intimacy or else predatory beasts. Because we had no sense of characters, everything seemed reduced to a surface equivalence with no hope of change.
Zahra Newman, Random, Real TV
photo courtesy Brisbane Powerhouse
Zahra Newman, Random, Real TV
realtv, random; stephen oliver, black queen, black king
The lives of black minorities were examined in Real TV’s premiere production in Australia of Random by English playwright debbie tucker green, and in the presentation of excerpts from a musical theatre work in progress, Black Queen Black King by Queensland’s Steven Oliver. Random was a fresh and poignant one-woman show in the slice-of-life genre. Zahra Newman performed brilliant emotional riffs as she re-lived a day in the lives of a Jamaican working class family stricken out of the blue by the tragic death of their 15 year old son in a senseless street fight. In her role as older sister telling the story, Newman was by turns funky, cocky, caustically funny, magnificently sharp-tongued, sarcastic, sorrowing, angry and dignified. She slipped seamlessly in and out of multiple family and community roles. In a word, superb. Black Queen Black King was a confronting exposure of the lives of gay Indigenous men, as the play expressed it, “on the margins of the margin.” The script was gutsy, graphic, funny and often tender. It dealt with issues that seemed as melodramatic as a revenge tragedy but are the real stuff of Indigenous experience. I’m glad that Powerhouse director Andrew Ross seemed to be taking it under his wing.
World Theatre Festival 2011, Hackman, APOLLO 13: Mission Control; co-creator, director Kip Chapman co-creator, designer Brad Knewstubb; Born in a Taxi and The Public Floor Project, Waiting Room, director Penny Baron; Kassys, Good Cop Bad Cop, deviser-performers Liesbeth Gritter, Esther Snelder, Ton Heijligers, Mette van der Sijs and Adriaan Beukema; Gob Squad, Super Night Shot; deviser-performers Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Elyce Semenec, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will Mat Hand; Real TV, Random, writer debbie tucker green, actor Zahra Newman director Leticia Caceres; Temporary Distortion, Americana Kamikaze writer, director Kenneth Collins co-creator, video projection William Cusick; Teatro en el Blanco, Diciembre, writer, director Guillermo Calderon; SCRATCH SERIES: Polytoxic, The Rat Trap; Daniel Santangeli, Genevieve Trace, Room 328; Christine Johnston, Lisa O’Neill, Peter Nelson, RRAMP; Steven Oliver, Black Queen Black King; The Escapists, Elephant Gun; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 9-20
FOR THOSE WHO FEEL THAT THEATRE IS SUPPOSED TO BE A COMMUNAL EVENT, THIS YEAR’S PUSH FESTIVAL TURNED OUT TO BE A POWERFUL EXERCISE IN CIVIC BONDING. WHILE THE FESTIVAL WAS AS EXPANSIVE AS EVER, ONE OF THIS YEAR’S THEMES WAS “NOTIONS OF CITYNESS.” IN A CITY THAT PRIDES ITSELF ON ITS PANORAMIC “VIEW CORRIDORS,” ARTISTS AT PUSH REVERSED THE LINES OF SIGHT, CUTTING INTO THE SURFACE GLOSS OF THE URBAN MATRIX TO REVEAL A SURPRISING DEPTH OF COMMUNITY FEELING.
100% vancouver
Theatre Replacement’s adaptation of Rimini Protokoll’s 100% series—in this case 100% Vancouver—was perhaps the most explicit example of this depth. The show puts 100 citizens on stage—representing all of the city’s neighbourhoods, ethnicities and ages—and has them group and regroup according to how they answer a number of census-like questions. It can be a surprisingly moving exercise—to see someone take centrestage in response to “How many of you are sick?” becomes a remarkable act of exposure. Vancouver, often a poster child for post-modernist urban fragmentation, is shown here to be anything but a place of disjointed neighbourhoods in which people of varying backgrounds are unable to connect with one another. I confess I was astonished when fists were raised in solidarity to the question, “How many of you would fight for your city?” Was this an expression of existing bonds or a longing for a unified civic identity?
City of Dreams
photo Tim Matheson
City of Dreams
city of dreams
From demographic city to city as architectural accumulation. English director Peter Reder, in collaboration with Vancouver’s Urban Crawl Theatre, presented City of Dreams, an installation that constructs the urban landscape before the audience’s eyes. It begins with six performers outlining the contours of the city’s coastline with twigs and cedar fronds placed on the floor, and ends with them building a high-rise representation made of old bricks and glass vases. During the implied timeline, development accelerates after WWII. Neighbourhoods are filled in and the downtown area takes on the ‘city of glass’ character for which Vancouver has become known. Wine glasses line the waterways and dozens of tea candles are sprinkled throughout. In the dim light the effect is mesmerising. Each glowing candle is like a star in a constellation that happens to take the shape of the city.
During a post-show talkback spectators had a range of responses, from utter enchantment to grief at the loss of natural habitat and the aboriginal way of life. The unspoken ideological perspective of the piece was also questioned: didn’t the focus on urban development and on the past century support a Eurocentric, colonialist point of view? Reder had no arguments with any of this; he intended the piece to be open to interpretation; feelings of loss, including lost dreams, were part of it. I was one of the artists who built the Vancouver edition of Dreams, and I found that the differing opinions expressed by the spectators reflected my own conflicted views about creating the work. But I couldn’t deny that Reder and sound designer Tom Wallace had captured much of the city’s character. A week after the show closed I was riding my bike along the north side of False Creek at dusk. I looked across the water at the cluster of apartment buildings in Yaletown. The evening sun reflected off the glass exteriors. Individual flats were lit up warmly from within. It looked like life imitating art, like Reder’s miniature theatrical representation blown up to scale. It was breathtaking—monumental and fragile at the same time.
peter panties
It could be argued that with its tinkling of wine glasses amid a glittering assemblage of candle-lit skyscrapers City of Dreams had a West-side feel to it. Peter Panties, on the other hand, offered a glorious orgy of East-side freakdom. Panties, the brainchild of Niall McNeil, was co-written with Neworld Theatre’s Marcus Youssef and staged by the wild geniuses that typically make up a Leaky Heaven Circus performance. Panties is all about sex: Peter Pan (James Long), who by the end of the play is revealed to be McNeil’s alter ego, wants to get into Wendy’s (Sasa Brown) undergarments. The more Wendy resists coital and matrimonial union, the more trials the playwrights put her through. Peter is a creature of irrepressible sexual impulse; Wendy has a more thoughtful, searching side. While the character of Wendy is hesitant, the play as a whole indulges Peter/McNeill’s fantasies. These include having Wendy captured and bound by a Captain Hook figure in a scenario that is part innocent childhood fantasy, part sadomasochistic bondage routine; a showdown between Tinkerbell (Tanya Podlozniuk) and Wendy is performed in silhouette, emphasising the actors’ shapely bodies, and includes a tit-twisting wrestling match. I think it’s intended to be both titillating and absurd. Peter/McNeill’s adolescent sexual desire is the lens through which we see this transformation of the Peter Pan story, one in which escape from the constraints of ordered civilisation is taken to libidinal extremes.
The staging has a deceptively anarchic feel but is actually carefully composed and includes composer Veda Hille and the superb teenage rock band, The Bank Dogs, who together provide musical accompaniment for the songs. Peter Panties is like a slumber party where sexual latency bursts through the flannel and runs riot. The beautifully disjointed dialogue and stage imagery is full of unexpected turns, and is evocative of the theatre of Alfred Jarry, Dada and the Surrealists in that it is never lacking in delightful surprises. And, as a friend commented, “There’s something very human about it.” Kudos to Leaky Heaven for once again setting the standard for Vancouver theatre.
Hard Core Logo: Live
photo courtesy the artist & Push Festival
Hard Core Logo: Live
hard core logo: live
Vancouver didn’t invent punk, but it has carved its place in history as the founding city of hard core. If this is a city of glass, then legendary bands like DOA have made it their mission to smash in the windows of the over-privileged. Contrary to the civic pride expressed in 100% Vancouver, punk takes aim at the “plastic people building a plastic steeple” (in the words of DOA). But trying to squeeze Punk sensibility into a conventional theatre format is a tricky exercise. When so much order is imposed on chaos is it still Punk? Hard Core Logo: Live is November Theatre’s stage adaptation of Bruce McDonald’s film adaptation of Michael Turner’s book of the same name. Turner’s book is a poetic account of the disastrous re-union tour of Hard Core Logo, a fictional band based on the real-life legendary hardcore Vancouver band DOA. McDonald turns Logo into a road movie, which is appropriate to the structure of the book. DOA has been going strong since the late 70s, but this show is essentially a nostalgic rock revue in which four aging band mates try to rekindle the anarchistic spirit of their youth, with music by DOA icon Joey “Shithead” Kiethly and lyrics by Turner. Michael Scholar Jr, who wrote the stage adaptation (and performs the lead role), keeps some of the flavour of the road movie and book while managing to flesh out the characters and their relationships to a degree that elicits more emotional investment than its predecessors.
For a two and a half hour performance that can’t offer the visual distractions of cinematography, or the freedom to put the book down when interest flags, this was a good move. But the frame of a conventional theatre set-up, in which the performers are confined to a proscenium arch stage, and the spectators sit obediently in the assigned seating area, undermines any subversive intent. The Vancouver Punk scene thrived in venues where audience and spectator were always a threat to one another. There was rarely a tidy separation between the two. It was also a politically charged scene. Its anti-establishment posture was intelligently focused—a fact which seems entirely absent from any of the three versions of Hard Core Logo. To this day DOA, the grand-daddies of the scene remain anarchistically active, musically and politically. Hard Core Logo, on the other hand, comes off as a harmless meander down a grunge-bordered memory lane.
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver, Jan 18-Feb6, http://pushfestival.ca
Mat Fraser, Julie Atlas Muz, The Freak and the Showgirl
photo courtesy the artists
Mat Fraser, Julie Atlas Muz, The Freak and the Showgirl
WA’S ARTRAGE MOUNTED A MAJOR PUSH IN FEBRUARY TO BOTH DEVELOP THE FORMAT FOR A PERTH FRINGE IN 2012 AND TO TEST THE MARKET WITH AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM OF CABARET, BURLESQUE AND BOUTIQUE SHOWS. IT’S NOT THE ‘BIRTH’ OF A PERTH FRINGE AS SUCH; RATHER A RETURN—ARTRAGE ITSELF HAVING BEEN FOUNDED IN 1983 AS THE QUAINTLY NAMED FESTIVAL FRINGE SOCIETY OF PERTH.
Fringe World ran for three weeks and four weekends at The Pearl Spiegeltent (recently acquired by ARTRAGE) with a handful of ‘black box’ solo shows round the corner at PICA’s Performance Space. Audiences gathered before, after and in-between at the modest but pleasantly balmy outdoor hub of the Urban Orchard, tucked conveniently between the Art Gallery of Western Australia, PICA and the Perth railway station. As well as 23 shows from local, national and international performers—including the Wau Wau Sisters, Woohoo Revue, Frisky & Mannish, locals Sugar Blue Burlesque, Piff! The Magic Dragon (UK) and New Yorker David Calvitto, to name a few—Fringe World also included a two-day summit to thrash out how Perth Fringe 2012, dubbed “The Boutique Fringe at the Edge of the World,” might be structured.
Inclusion of the PICA Performance Space in Fringe World created an opportunity for four local solo performers (and one international) to enjoy the benefits of a high-profile central theatre venue and Fringe World’s readymade marketing machine. I managed to catch two PICA shows—Leon Ewing’s The Problem with Evil and Andrea Gibbs’ Grow Up.
The Problem with Evil is largely based around two ‘characters’: an Al Gore-style circuit-lecturer on a “demotivational tour” to encourage more evil; and a talking fish-puppet called Bruce. In a series of fairly heavy-handed monologues, the death’s head-masked public speaker referenced everything from the GFC to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and online paedophilia, enthusiastically equating profits, bushfires and mining with evil and even congratulating cats for devastating native wildlife. While the message was ironically clear, its delivery seemed confused at best and banal at worst. The crassness reached its zenith when Ewing performed a ludicrous ‘interpretive dance’ against repeated video loops of the World Trade Centre as the second plane smashes through the building. This scene was, admittedly, genuinely disturbing: is it evil to perform such a thing, or evil to be watching it? Or both?
Andrea Gibbs, Grow Up
photo Brett W Cullen
Andrea Gibbs, Grow Up
Perth comedian Andrea Gibbs’ Grow Up is a perhaps-autobiographical series of vignettes from childhood and adolescence, announced by scene-setting, projected titles such as “In Bathers I Trust.” From the poignant reflections of an eight-year-old pondering being killed by a werewolf, to the aching bravado of a teenager confronted by a male ‘skimpy’ after sneaking into the pub, Gibbs held the audience captive with her impeccable timing and telling gestures, subtle as the brush of her feet on the rungs of her stool. Like The Problem with Evil, Grow Up embodied a certain naivety—but unlike Ewing, Gibbs created a space for the unspoken, in a study of vulnerability that belongs as much to the adult performer as to the child.
Around the corner at The Pearl Spiegeltent, the programming encompassed a not-unexpected mix of music, comedy, burlesque, sideshow and circus, with a good number of local performers gracing the stage. Fringe World laid on plenty of ‘quality acts’—like Matt Kelly and Rich Higgins’ clever and pacy The List Operators, for example—and the queues were encouragingly long in a city unaccustomed to such a wealth of choices. Truly edgy or subversive work was a little harder to uncover; but Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz’s (UK/USA) The Freak and the Showgirl stood out with its self-proclaimed “orgy of flesh, flippers and fun.”
The Freak and the Showgirl is, at face value, pure burlesque: a series of themed show-numbers and skits loaded with spinning, sequined nipple-pasties and titillating tricks. What set it apart was not only that Mat Fraser has two very short arms—or ‘flippers’—due to his mother’s encounter with Thalidomide, but that he and Atlas Muz extend both the burlesque and the freak-show genres to talk about it, politicise it, and most of all to sexualise Fraser’s ‘different’ body.
Early in The Freak and the Showgirl, Atlas Muz and Fraser played with limbs, false limbs and limblessness, beginning with Atlas Muz’s strip act, complete with wolf mask and replacing her own hands with wolf ‘gloves.’ She and Fraser performed sleight-of-hand tricks to “It Wouldn’t Be Make Believe,” Atlas Muz standing behind Fraser and replacing his arms with her own. Fraser performed his own striptease, shedding a pair of prosthetic arms along with his clothes.
Between song-and-dance routines and the casting off of spangled costumes, Fraser introduced himself, firstly explaining his condition and a little later performing a monologue about the history of old-time dust-bowl freak shows. He painted a picture of the ‘empowered freak’ who earned a good living and lived independently with a supportive freak ‘family.’ Later still, Fraser turned himself into the sideshow, shaving himself, sawing through a piece of wood, unscrewing a bottle and then swigging from it. The absence of glittery costumes or sexy moves now turned the mirror back onto the audience: while burlesque is all about the gaze, suddenly it was no longer burlesque—our own voyeurism seemed to become the object of scrutiny.
The glitter kept on coming though, both performers exploiting every opportunity to strut, pout, shimmy and eventually disrobe; until sex and sweat seemed to have got the better of both Freak and Showgirl. From start to finish, The Freak and the Showgirl managed to carefully hone a razor’s edge between the bawdy and the troubling; and while seeing Matt Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz descend into a messy melée of simulated sex elicited slight shock, the feeling in the audience was far from discomfort.
Debate raged during the two-day Fringe World Summit as to whether Perth Fringe 2012 should be an Adelaide/Edinburgh-style open call, or a curated festival along the lines of the Dublin or New York Fringes. The question remains unresolved, but Fringe World 2011 gave Perth audiences a taste of things to come. And for local artists, many of whom have toured work to Edinburgh, Adelaide or the Canadian Fringe circuit, it was a rare opportunity to showcase their work on home ground.
Fringe World: Spiegeltent Program and Fringe World Solos,The Pearl Spiegeltent and PICA Performance Space, Perth, Feb 4-26
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet, InBetween Time
photo Jamie Woodley
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet, InBetween Time
ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM, ONE OF THE STRANDS OF THE 2010-11 INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL, THE EXHIBITION, WHAT NEXT FOR THE BODY, PRESENTS WORKS THAT “CONSIDER THE CONDITIONS AND OUTCOMES OF THE CONTEMPORARY BODY BREAKING DOWN…AT WHAT POINT DOES OUR MATTER CEASE TO BE OURSELVES?”
Director Helen Cole said during an exhibition tour that the commissioned work in InBetween Time came from artists who have a history of working with the body in live art contexts; who have done a whole lot of messing about with insertion and incision and bodily fluids and using the body as their canvas or perhaps their medium; who have on their own flesh tested the limits of endurance, exposure and incarnation. Some of these artists are moving on from thinking of the skin as ultimate border between one reality and another, as a barrier that must be tested and/or crossed. Cole explained that one question guiding her choices in curating the festival was, if you run out of body, then what? And what if the body is over, fails and dies? What about the traces that are left behind? The symposium on February 5 took up this and other issues in more detail.
death, tatts & zombies
In the first session, Dr John Troyer, Death and Dying Practices Associate at the University of Bath, talked about memorial tattoos. In this practice a person’s living body is used as a canvas to display an image of a dead loved one. Troyer’s presentation drew fascinating contrasts between different attitudes to tattooing: 19th century notions that tattooing and criminality are connected; the idea of the Noble Savage; the idea that the body is unfinished and needs to be modified in order to be cultured rather than natural, hence tattoos and body modification; that the tattoo may equally be a pledge of love, a nationalistic affirmation, a gesture of reclamation or a ritualised token; that a tattoo is a visible sign that provokes a narration of its meaning, in order to be activated.
The slides Troyer showed ranged from 19th century post-mortem photographs to a colour snapshot of the tattooed back of a girl he met on the beach. He asserted that memorial tattoos make death visible on a person who wears them. He also mentioned the practice of keeping post-mortem tattoo samples. Some examples from museums consist of a few square inches of inked skin stretched on a frame—what was once a living memorial, a trigger for the exchange of dialogue, memory and imagination in everyday live encounters, becomes an inert graphical object. At this point someone in the audience speculated on whether it would ever be possible to maintain an excised tattoo as living tissue.
Martin Hargreaves’ provocative presentation (he claims his research interests lie between boredom and hysteria) dwelt on what might be the ultimate body; unstable, ugly, predicated on decay and nihilism. Referencing David Wojnarowicz and Bruce LaBruce (RT99, p26), AIDS discourse and “the societal death-wish of the young effeminate,” Hargreaves made an unlikely case for the zombie as a signifier of the attempt to lead an ethical (gay) life. “What are the positives of opening up to zombie logic?” he asked.
Unlike the other contemporary horror tropes of vampire and werewolf, the zombie is not glamorous. Bereft of everything—mind, sense, volition, wholeness—the zombie is helpless to resist invading appetite, and is cannibal; the zombie will inexorably infect others with its own infirmity. It has nothing but its own self, which is defunct. Between helplessness and authenticity, the zombie figures as (heroic) exemplar of our hapless existence.
Mind you, going by Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People, the zombie is rather good looking. So far, so ghoulish.
immortal cancers, divisive dividends
Dr Muireann Quigley talked about legal, scientific and commercial issues pertaining to human remains: cadavers and cell strains. The speaker cited test cases to illustrate the current situation of property in the body. She talked about cell lines and cultures; mentioning such cases as Henrietta Lacks, whose cancerous tumour gave rise to an ‘immortal’ cell line still being used in laboratories around the world, contributing to the profit of the institution that first made a culture of it.
Quigley explained some of the legal precedents that create an economy around bodily remains, producing concepts of ‘bio-equity’ and of a ‘tissue economy.’ “Human bodies and bio-materials are firmly in the realm of property discourse and subject to property relations.” She noted that within this discourse there is conflict between emotional and scientific value, and between public and private realms. Listening to her explain the application of commercial values to bits of people’s bodies had a strangely fetishising effect. This bio-material also has some value simply because, being derived from humans, its use is transgressive, going against contemporary cultural mores. It is as if commercial value becomes a totem which science shakes in the face of those who might question the use of this material. It was odd, to say the least, to catch glimpses of such an archaic mindset underlying the operation of some of our newest technologies.
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly & Jennifer Willett, InBetween Time,
photo Jamie Woodley
Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), Kira O’Reilly & Jennifer Willett, InBetween Time,
bio-art: science look-alike
Dr Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly, whose collaborative photographic work Refolding (Laboratory Architectures) was part of the gallery exhibition, took it in turns to address the symposium. Willet spoke via Skype from Canada.
She began with a definition of bio-art. The prefixes genetic-, transgenic-, biotech-, vivo-, life-, ecological-, land-, bio- joined to the word ‘art’ all describe practices aligned to or contained within bio-art, whose artistic medium is life or living systems. It is a woolly concept but a large one, and it is easier to define what it is not, than what it is. Bio-art does not represent another thing, it forms neither pictures nor maps. Occurring in the laboratory, it may make use of methodologies more usually seen in studio practice, or may create a scientific methodology peculiar to itself. It is not science, although it may look like science.
Willet asserted that as bio-art involves the manipulation of life to aesthetic ends, it is political, intrinsically involving ethical considerations not conventionally afforded to other art forms. Typically, bio-art must adhere to ethical codes and community standards established by the scientific community. But, according to Willet, in requiring collaboration between artists and scientists, bio-art represents a democratisation of scientific processes.
Kira O’Reilly has been Honorary Research Associate and Artist in Residence at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham. In Refolding (Laboratory Architecture), installation photographs portray O’Reilly and Willet in scientific environments. The photographs illustrate a taxonomic system of which the humans are part. Through costume they are coded as part of the system; as observing it; and as camouflaged within it. Willet and O’Reilly wear specially designed white lab coats, each modified to indicate a different era, evoking its associated historical/cultural habits of thought.
The siting and collaborative methodology of Refolding (Laboratory Architectures) within a scientific institution, confers the institution’s credibility on the work. It is fair to say this is characteristic of bio-art.
to infinity and beyond!
The idea of regeneration and what cell technologies might mean for a transhuman, or indeed post-human future became a hot topic of the symposium. The aspiration towards immortality had kept surfacing all day. In spite of the context some element of magical thinking seemed to come in to play, fixing on the potency of physical traces we leave behind. It’s almost as if our detritus, our bits and pieces, achieve a witchy glamour from being at once inanimate while also theoretically capable of being reanimated.
I was comforted to recall something I wrote for the last InBetween Time in 2006: “(Sally Jane) Norman insisted that although technology has extended the human impulse to play with versions of embodiment and variations of reality, this has not changed our fundamental nature. ‘The post-carbon, hairy monkey Stelarc body refutes the idea that we are somehow less physical than we once were.’”
I say comforted. From the Golem to Metropolis to Dr Frankenstein to Planet of the Apes to Alien popular culture views the notion of humans using technology to enhance or engender life with foreboding and caustic cynicism.
jam tomorrow
As demonstrated in Dr Troyer’s presentation, Western culture has historically had a stronger appetite for the ghoulish than is currently generally acceptable. Museums once thought nothing of collecting and displaying anthropological remains, shrunken heads and skeletons of subject peoples, entire skins of tattooed men. These practices are embedded in the history of collecting, and are loaded as drastic acts of objectification of subject peoples’ bodies, a totem activity of the colonial project. However much potency Live Art practice derives from breaking taboos, it would be ironic if seizure of the trophy relic regained legitimacy under its wing.
Jordan McKenzie explained he was a founding member of the Dead Dad’s Club. His performances, a meditation on breath, were a response to watching his father die of emphysema. So, he creates traces: in Drawing Breath, McKenzie breathes into a charcoal covered paper bag which is burst against the wall, leaving a print of its impact. In Condensation Box and Holding My Breath McKenzie breathes into a glass tank, freezing the resultant condensation. The ice dissolves in his hands as he holds it above a block of charcoal, splashing and leaving a mark. The marks he leaves delineate the edges of representation, they signify a boundary where something existed for a short time. A notch is placed in time as well as space. In these actions, McKenzie is standing in for another body: he is his father’s proxy. His actions create the memorial.
Richard Gregory introduced Quarantine’s new project, When You Thought You Were (an Inbetween Time commission). The year-long participatory enterprise is “a biography of an (extra)ordinary person…a kind of wake for someone living” (www.qtine.com). Speaking of relics, memorials and celebrations, Gregory showed slides of grass, shoes, summer, dinner, play. He told the audience how, going to clear out his mother’s house after her death, before he locked the back door for the last time he had taken a jar of jam from the pantry. There and then he brought out a pot of jam and some teaspoons, placed the pot on a saucer and handed it down the table inviting the other panellists to taste it, which they did. He mentioned that blackcurrant jam wasn’t his favourite.
This is an action that suggests a form of immortality through sharing, lineage and relationships. The jam is a relic, it engages the senses and needs to be physically handled. It is concrete, it is able to be shared, it requires narration to release its meaning—it demands engagement on several levels before it can be understood; and its impact cannot be completely appreciated on a verbal level. The other thing demonstrated here was the difference between action and discourse.
“Once you are born, know you have to die.” With fireworks and intensity most of the symposium demonstrated the latter half of this equation. The achievement of many of the artists involved in InBetween Time was to give weight to the other half. Academic language needs to be able to position both these approaches along the same continuum: however much the occult needs to be revealed, so does the thing that is hidden in plain sight.
InBetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, director Helen Cole; symposium What Next for the Body, Feb 5; exhibition Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, Dec 1 2010-Feb 6 2011; www.inbetweentime.co.uk
Daniel P Johnson, Leeanne Letch, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
photo Germain McMicking
Daniel P Johnson, Leeanne Letch, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
THE 2011 BIGPOND ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL FEATURED A STRONG LINE-UP OF NEW AUSTRALIAN FILMS, SIGNIFICANT OVERSEAS WORKS AND, CHARACTERISTICALLY FOR THIS INNOVATIVE FESTIVAL, DIVERSE SCREEN WORKS THAT RICHLY ILLUSTRATED THE HISTORY AND POTENTIAL OF A RAPIDLY MUTATING MEDIUM. THESE INCLUDED A LIVE BENSHI PERFORMANCE, MUSIC FOR STAN BRAKHAGE FILMS (SEE CHRIS REID’S REVIEW), FESTIVAL GUEST SPECIAL EFFECTS LEGEND DOUGLAS TRUMBULL, AN ENGROSSING TRACEY MOFFAT RETROSPECTIVE AND THE INTRIGUING STOP[THE]GAP INTERNATIONAL INDIGENOUS MEDIA ARTS EXHIBITION AT THE SAMSTAG MUSEUM OF ART (SEE BELOW AND THOMAS REDWOOD’S RESPONSE).
The Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) was also held during the festival contributing informative and provocative discussions about innovation, funding and distribution (see Kath Dooley’s report).
In just over a week we sampled the festival’s diversity of forms and practices in an extensive program that nonetheless retained the requisite sense of intimacy that makes an event like this work its magic. However, slotting ourselves into half the duration of the program meant missing the competition winner Incendies (Canada/France, 2009) directed by Dennis Villeneuve who received the $25,000 10 News International Award for Best Feature Film. Special Jury Mention was granted to Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (Australia, 2011) a documentary directed by Adelaide filmmaker Matthew Bate. Meanwhile, word of mouth also rated highly the festival’s opening night film Bob Connolly’s Mrs Carey’s Concert (see Jeremy Eccles’ review) and hotly debated Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown, admiring the film for its superb craft but disturbed by its scenes of sustained violence.
The Four Times, Michelangelo Frammartino
michelangelo frammartino, the four times
In RealTime 101 Tom Redwood sampled the festival program, seeing the Kurdish director Shahrah Alidi’s Whisper with the Wind, winner of the Young Critics Award at Cannes, Year Without A Summer by Malaysian director Tan Chui Mui, Michelangelo Frammartino’s The Four Times (La Quattro Volte) and Romanian director Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (RT101). The Four Times proved particularly memorable, a sublime fiction that does away with language and conventional plotting, tracking the mysterious transmission of a soul from nature to man to domesticated animal to tree and—via ritual and artful rural manufacture—to fire, smoke and charcoal. All of this is achieved without any sense of religiosity (a seasonal church pageant is quite comical if juxtaposed with a moment of poignancy) and constantly surprises with its unpredictability and glorious cinematography. We’ll certainly now regard goats in a different light, observed here with the same acuity usually given human subjects. Surely The Four Times must have been a strong contender for the best feature award and, surely, it must find its way into other Australian festivals and cinemas. The incredibly elliptical narrative of Year Without A Summer, however, proved a considerable challenge, making even the Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wonderful Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives seem a relatively straightforward exercise.
Shai Pittman, Here I Am
beck cole: here i am
Beck Cole prefaced the screening of her first feature, Here I Am, by declaring it “a tribute to the women in my life.” It’s a film about women who have lost their place in the world and most of its players are women. The plot has a familiar feel—a young Indigenous mother, Karen (Shai Pittman), is released from prison into a half-way house; unskilled, she struggles to get a job while at the same time attempting to retrieve her child from her embittered mother (Marcia Langton) who has given up on her addict daughter. However, the spontaneity of the performances (mostly from non-professionals), the often witty screenplay (ample evidence of the Indigenous sense of humour that counters misery where it can) and Warwick Thornton’s luminous cinematography take us into less familiar territory. The scenes between the women in the half-way house are some of the film’s best (especially a late night party), revealing the diversity of backgrounds, troubles and personalities and the ways in which this temporary community is enabling for Karen—offering her support, companionship and an understanding of how others cope, or not.
A fascinating aspect of Here I Am is that most of the institutional figures that Karen encounters are Indigenous—job consultants, prison guards, social workers. And a firm, forceful and droll bunch they are, as if Cole is saying, with hope, that the world is changing: no longer is it a matter of Indigenous people oppressed by white police and bureaucrats, but something more complex. The film’s measured optimism is tempered, however, by some emotionally demanding scenes that leave despair on the agenda—a girl taken back into custody, Karen’s monitored meeting with her child and the tense encounters between Karen and her mother. Pittman plays her role with a quiet directness and an affecting watchfulness, as if slowly waking up to the real world, while Langton’s mother appears cruelly stubborn, unyielding almost to the end when the camera closes in on a look that says forgiveness might just be possible. With its tight focus on an imperiled woman in a transient community bounded by a less welcoming if stable world, Here I Am is an assured, finely crafted film, with some its greatest rewards to be found in the realism of its unaffected ensemble acting.
Lloyd Doomadgee, brother of Cameron Doomadgee, The Tall Man, Tony Krawitz
photo Hamish Cairns
Lloyd Doomadgee, brother of Cameron Doomadgee, The Tall Man, Tony Krawitz
tony krawitz: the tall man
Tony Krawitz’s documentary The Tall Man painfully captures the horrendous ambiguities surrounding the death of Mulrunji Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004 and the failure to convict police sergeant Chris Hurley for his part in the man’s death. Like Chloe Hooper’s award winning book of the same title, this is a film that attempts to deal with both (or more) sides of a story that is deeply complex given the character of Queensland colonialism, its police history and the cruel peculiarities of Palm Island, once run like a penal colony and still a place where people don’t belong to the land. The book is credited with inspiring the film, though the documentary doesn’t have Hooper’s first person presence nor her close, if shifting, relationship with the women of Palm Island—they’re certainly not as central to the film as in the book, nor is their strength as fully acknowledged.
Telling differences between book and film aside, The Tall Man stands on its own as an indictment of a system that has ruined the lives of Indigenous people and then held them guilty for the outcome. Krawitz combines recent interviews, historical stills and film footage, news reports, court case recordings and rough documentation of the rioting after Hurley was not charged. At times, as we take an account of an aspect of the unfolding drama, Krawitz cuts away to children diving into the sea, a boy riding a horse, as if some normal pleasures are being pursued amid all the pain. At other times his camera suggests anxiety and foreboding, wandering the nighttime streets of Palm Island. The rioting scenes (seen at greater length in Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man installation at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation), Hurley’s re-creation of the ‘tragic accident’ scene, the interview with Cameron Doomadgee’s son Eric before he suicides, the massive police force rally on behalf of Hurley, these and other images alongside the emotionally worn faces of victims and witnesses become indelibly painful.
vernon ah kee, tall man
Vernon Ah Kee’s large-scale video installation, Tall Man, fills the long wall of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation gallery with personal and archival news footage of the Palm Island riot, shot on the streets and from within the embattled police buildings. “They’ve just heard how Doomadgee died…Game’s on, we’re in trouble,” cries a policeman, issuing orders as projectiles crash into the building. All we see are his fumbling hands. “Put a few shots in the air to scare the shit out of the fuckers!” These trapped men know they might be killed. People make speeches in the street: in a telling moment, as a woman speaks passionately to the media (“We are an oppressed people”), someone cries out, “You, the media, you gonna put this on…no one will stop this tidal wave.” Somebody else yells, “Don’t edit it!” (Elsewhere the people of Palm Island are described as illiterate with no understanding of the court system—the consequence: “their fear is our fear.”) But amid the images of anger and confusion, Ah Kee interpolates footage of two children watching the burning police station from a distant hill, and the aerial view from the plane bringing in police reinforcements.
If Krawitz’s film unfolds the whole tragic story of Palm Island for our reflection, Ah Kee in 12 minutes has created an artistic, political document from the crude documentation of eruption of anger, fear and panic, multiplying the same image simultaneously across the four screens in one contiguous frame or mixing and juxtaposing discrete images to unnerving effect. It is a work that is at once contemplative and deeply disturbing. We are well used to the news media’s obsessive repetition of a small number of images that suit their purposes. Here Ah Kee rhythmically fixes our attention on video in the public domain that we might otherwise not be aware of and shapes it for our contemplation. If you’ve read Chloe Hooper’s book or you’ve seen Krawitz’s film, or done both, you identify key figures, filling in names not provided here, placing incidents and speeches, ascribing meaning—an eerie experience, as if of recognition. The inclusion of Ah Kee’s Tall Man video installation in the Adelaide Film Festival is an indication of the expanded vision of film and media arts that has been the mark of this event since its inception.
Daniel P Johnson, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
photo Germain McMicking
Daniel P Johnson, Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson
amiel courtin-wilson, hail
Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s documentary feature Bastardy, about actor, singer, potter and former criminal and addict Jack Charles, is blessed with brutal frankness, inherent sadness and remarkable immediacy in its embrace of a wounded man who nonetheless evinces energy, wit and creativity. Hail, Courtin-Wilson’s first drama feature, is also rooted in the life of someone who is very real, Daniel P Jones, another man associated with crime and drugs, a 50-year-old ex-convict who likewise found refuge in the theatre. In Hail, Jones plays Dan someone it seems very much like himself; the film’s plot, says Courtin-Wilson, is fuelled by the stories Jones told the director about himself and his milieu. Like Charles, Jones has a touch of the poet, but his character’s demeanor is cool to cold and, when on edge, restless, obsessive and downright dangerous.
Hail is a drama feature that deftly manages to fuse documentary immediacy (fluid hand-held camera work, raw dialogue) with carefully constructed scenography built around lyrical editing and richly textured and adroitly framed widescreen cinematography (Germain McMicking). It’s a big screen, immersive experience.
Just out of prison, Dan comes home to his girlfriend Leanne (Leeanne Letch). Initial awkwardness surrenders to a slow build to sexual embrace in extreme visual and aural close-up. The film then relaxes into a job search, funny if it wasn’t so sad. Jones has no resume and admits he’s a former criminal: “but I don’t steal from people I work with.” An employer who takes him on says, “You look like a criminal.” Dan humbly retorts, “I’ll put my teeth in for a start.” Later we see him insert his teeth before a mirror, shyly practising a smile.
After a near fight in a pub, Dan’s old friends, all reformed, gruffly advise him, “You wanna change, we’ll help you.” But all too soon his demons possess him (“I’m a danger to me…something out there wants me dead”), intimacy is too much for him (smashing a birthday cake, he flees the house) and he loses his job after falling from a ladder. Leeanne is murdered by an old drug-dealing flame (or, we wonder, perhaps by Dan himself in a fit of jealousy). Dan immolates her body in a car in snow country, madly stalks and assaults a woman but then with neat psychotic rigour calmly tracks the murderer for the balance of the film, torturing and killing as he goes. The stark beauty of the journey and the relentless suspense are engrossingly sustained but the sudden one-dimensionality of the revenge saga radically thins out the psychological complexities that had been so carefully and convincingly established earlier.
Despite this uneven development, Hail is a remarkable film: Jones and Letch’s performances are excellent in their portrayal of a profoundly uneasy love, cinematography is superb and the script tightly focused, conveying both spontaneity and a sense of craft and purpose. As Courtin-Wilson wrote of his earlier collaboration with Jones (Cicada, 2008): “I interviewed Danny, transcribed that material, edited it, then fed it back to him as honed dialogue in the context of dramatic scenes. In this way Danny is able to truly own the material while performing, thereby transcending the all too common problem of non-actors being given dialogue that never really sits comfortably with them. This technique also circumvents the issues with meandering improvisation as the raw material can be used extremely sparingly in the context of a scene” (http://hailmovie.com).
tracey moffatt: narratives
The Tracey Moffatt retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia is focused principally on the artist’s photographic and video works, offering cinematic pleasures of other kinds. Spaciously displayed, the exhibition was a vivid reminder of Moffatt’s gift for merging supreme craftsmanship, humour, pathos and tragedy to make beautiful art with political heft. There are the wickedly funny but revealing collections of movie clips (including Doomed, made with Gary Hilberg, 2007) built around particular themes in which, for example, scenes of women being physically abused become cumulatively more and more shocking while the female assaults on men appear happily vengeful.
The photographic series Up In the Sky (1998) and Laudanum (1999) suggest stills from films of earlier eras (hints of neo-realism and Nosferatu-ish shadow play respectively) that we’ll never see but can imaginatively piece together. Other works are more painterly but still invested with a strong sense of scenography as in Invocation (2000) with its 13 silk screen prints suggesting animation stills inspired, the gallery notes confirm, by Goya, Hitchcock and Disney. One of my favorite series, Scarred for Life (1994/2000), evokes documentary filmmaking with telling stills and suggestive captions (a weeping girl has “found out her real father’s name;” Homemade Handknit 1958—”He knew his teammates were chuckling over his knitted football clothes”). This finely staged retrospective warrants a national tour.
Stop(the)Gap curated by Brenda L Croft with overseas guests, presented a fascinating range of works from Australia, Canada, US and New Zealand each working the screen in a unique way, technologically and culturally (see Tom Redwood’s review). Nova Paul’s deployment of “three colour separation, an early cinematic optical printing process” (catalogue) in This Is Not Dying (2010) makes for a magical experience as a slowly panning camera reveals a community coming together, setting tables, and riding motorbikes. But as each movement continues, a trace of it remains and a third image manifests, each a different colour, each at their own lyrical asynchronous pace, suggesting co-existing realities unfolding in the slippage between past and present. Lisa Reihana’s sleekly crafted video images in Te Po O Matariki (NZ, 2010) silently evoke the power of song and ritualised gesture as it is passed through generations of women, hovering in dark space like Maori goddesses.
port projections: rea, genevieve grieves
In Port Projections, organised by the film festival’s Associate Director Adele Hann, Australian artists r e a and Genevieve Grieves projected extant works onto the face of large, old building, part of Port Adelaide’s historic Harts Mill. Arriving at night by car was a bit like going to a drive-in in the old days: a row of cars facing the ‘screen,’ people wandering about, chatting amiably. The Port River lapped quietly by as we looked up at the images overlaying windows, doors and brickwork without greatly surrendering their specificity. Instead the historical dimensions of both works with their 19th century contexts were amplified.
In PolesApart (2009, RT91), r e a, in a long black dress is lost in the bush, pursued by the unseen forces of colonial oppression and finally disappears—as if she’d been the Indigenous subject who never appeared in the ‘nation building’ Heidelberg School paintings. In Grieves’ Picturing the Old People (2006-7) project, the artist reconstructs the making of studio portraits of Indigenous peoples either attired in European garb or carefully arranged as anthropological curiosities, remnants of a dying race. There are moments of both humour and poignancy. For the artists this was something of an experiment: r e a told me that the possibility of further re-platforming of this kind excited her but would require more technical investment in the creation of future works. I could see the potential although it helped that I’d seen the works before and already knew what I was looking at. It might have been a more mysterious experience for others, but true to the Adelaide Film Festival vision here was another opportunity taken to expand our sense of cinema into public space.
charlie hill-smith, strange birds in paradise: a west papuan story
This not-to-be-missed film from Adelaide documentary filmmaker Charlie Hill-Smith is to be screened later this year on SBS-TV, trimmed from 75 to 52 minutes, while the full-length version will be released on DVD. The film was rejected repeatedly by ABC TV, leaving producers Jamie Nicolai and John Cherry wondering if the ABC was afraid of upsetting the Australian and Indonesian Governments. Certainly the Australian population needs to know that West Papuans are being oppressed, their environmental heritage ruined and their mineral wealth appropriated. If that’s upsetting, so be it.
This vigorous documentary effectively weaves together a number of strands. There’s Hill-Smith’s innocent, home-movie visit to West Papua in the late 90s (the beginning he says, “of my own rite of passage;” “we’ve been blundering around an undeclared war”) followed by a later, much more alert trip travelling deep into the country, meeting locals of all kinds and persuasions and interviewing exiled rebels across the New Guinea border (where one of the wives sadly declares the exhaustion of the women as the men talk on and on). Also in the weave is revealing news media footage grimly spilling out the country’s bloody history, and there’s the unfolding story of composer David Bridie working in a studio in Australia with West Papuan musicians on an evolving song. Not least, there are animation passages that vividly evoke a sense of the culture’s identity and challenges featuring birds both metaphorically and in terms of West Papuan mythologies.
Hill-Smith figures quietly in the film, sometimes merely sitting in the frame, writing, sketching, chatting. He tells us that he has emotional ties with an Indonesian family in Java, making his task emotionally harder since his return to the country any time soon is unlikely. Strange Birds in Paradise is a brave film, inventive, informative and provocative. It could make a difference. Australia provides aid to and investment in Indonesia but why, as the film asks, does that have to include military aid when it’s the Indonesian military that plays a major role in the oppression of West Papuans?
Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt
kelly reichardt, meek’s cutoff
So soon after enjoying the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, it was a great pleasure to see an even more atypical western, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (US). A small wagon train is lost on its way to California. The travellers are short of water, fear their guide, Meek (Bruce Greenwood), has deliberately mislead them and all are anxious about the hostility of the Indian tribe whose land they are crossing. The women in the train are at the film’s centre. When the men wander off to meet and make decisions away from the wagons, the camera and the sound stay with the women—like them we can sometimes only guess at what the men are saying. As conditions worsen, the group captures a lone Indian who appears to be singing the land, something the travellers can’t comprehend, their Christianity compounding fear of his apparent primitiveness. But, despite the cynical Meek’s desire to kill the Indian, they persuade him to lead them to water.
What is so striking about the film is Reichardt’s subtle portrayal of the cultural gaps between the men and the women (nuanced in varying, revealing degrees) and between the travellers and the Indian. The gap between the men and the women is negotiable to a degree—one of them (Michelle Williams) shockingly usurps the male prerogative at a critical moment, saving the Indian from Meek—but the chasm between invader and indigene is profound. There is no smoking the peace pipe or pidgin bartering or sign language, only the most basic communication. The sense of otherness is exacerbated by the long-held shots of the barren landscape and real-time takes of trudging to exhaustion. The dialogue is aptly spare and the performances, especially from Greenwood and Williams, idiosyncratic and finely honed. If not an action-packed Western, Meek’s Cutoff is suspenseful and insightful, a rewarding variation on the wagon train genre and deserving of cinema release here.
clio barnard, the arbor
The Arbor is a curious exercise in the reconstruction of the life of Andrea Dunbar, a poorly educated young woman from a Bradford housing estate in the UK who became a famous playwright for a brief period from the late 1970s although she’d never been near a theatre in her life until that time. While her acutely realist plays were being picked up by the Royal Court Theatre, Dunbar’s life deteriorated rapidly. Often staying in bed for most of the day, writing and then heading off to the pub, all the while she was seriously neglecting her daughters. We see TV footage of Dunbar but everyone else in the film—the psychologically wounded daughters (traumatised by a fire after they’d been locked in by their mother), distraught neighbors who looked after and loved the children, and Max Stafford-Clark from the Royal Court—are played by actors who lip-synch the recorded voices of the originals. They’re good performers, but the aesthetic motivation for director Clio Barnard’s approach is difficult to gauge. As well, a group of actors perform excerpts from Dunbar’s works in a park in the housing estate—we never learn what the gathered locals (mostly at a distance from the action) make of this exercise.
It was assumed that given Dunbar’s subject matter and insights, she was socially enlightened. What the film reveals is a broken marriage to a Pakistani man, the father of her first daughter. She subsequently treats the girl with disdain and, later, open hostility. She declares publicly, “I’m not a racist, I just couldn’t deal with Pakistanis.” (It seems her husband locked her in when she was pregnant as well as applying other constraints.) The daughter becomes a heroin addict, her son dies in mysterious circumstances (possibly accidental methadone poisoning), she is treated like a murderer, cleared and, despite her damaging history, admits, “I had to grow up and stop blaming the world.”
Although very oddly constructed (for example, the dramatic opening scene of a bed on fire and the adult sisters standing by it reflecting on their childhood has no later equivalent) and contrived (the lip-synching suggests documentary authority, but at a fictional remove), The Arbor is an intriguing and certainly disturbing experiment in the contemporary mode of melding documentary and outright artifice in ever more elaborate ways.
Enter the Void
gaspar noe, enter the void
In terms of cinematography, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (Germany/Italy) has to be seen to be believed. It trawls through contemporary Tokyo, drug-induced deliria, back street clubs and a multi-coloured fluorescent model of Tokyo (weirdly, the city subsequently takes on its astonishing hue). The film’s protagonists, brother and sister—American 20-somethings, refugees from the car crash death of their parents—are incestuously inclined; he’s flirting with crime and has had sex with his best friend’s mother; while she’s a dancer at a club owned by a criminal lover. At first the story is told elliptically as fragments of the past and present are put together, then melodramatically as consequences are played out and finally as a long, beautiful-to-look at but tediously sluggish hallucination when the young male enters the void. But it’s a void blindingly rich in colour and illusion (there’s even a Douglas Trumbull 2001-stargate homage). As in Hail, the descent into disaster becomes one-dimensional, but the film remains worth seeing for its uncommon narrative adventurousness and bold cinematography—no drugs necessary. A good film festival must bravely remind us of film’s potential in whatever form, using whatever technology and wherever shown—in cinemas, on computers, in galleries or public places.
Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival, including Stop(the)Gap, International Indigenous Arts in Motion, Samstag Museum of Art, Feb 24-April 21; Port Projections, Port Adelaide, Feb 25-27; Vernon Ah Kee, Tall Man, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Feb 24-March 26; Tracey Moffatt: Narratives, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Feb 25-March 20
The RealTime Managing Editors were guests of the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival.
Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011
AT THE EXHIBITION OPENING, AMID ENDLESS GLASSES OF CHENIN BLANC, THE GUESTS WERE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO WITNESS A TRADITIONAL KAURNA SMOKING. LOCAL ELDER UNCLE LEWIS O’BRIEN THEN WELCOMED ARTISTS, CURATORS AND GUESTS IN KAURNA LANGUAGE TO STOP(THE)GAP, AN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF INDIGENOUS MEDIA ARTS, BEFORE ADDING A BRIEF FOOTNOTE IN ENGLISH: “WE HAVE BEEN WELCOMING VISITORS TO OUR LAND FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS. THE PROBLEM IS WE’VE NEVER TOLD THEM TO GO HOME.” HIS COMMENT MET A GENERAL SILENCE.
A similar frankness runs through curator Brenda L Croft’s introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue. In an aggressive and confessional style Croft outlined her infuriation at being Indigenous and intelligent in a place as heart-poundingly and mind-numbingly stupid as mainstream Australia, where even the most elementary reflection on colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous Australians is consistently and wilfully avoided. It was an angry and perhaps reckless decision to share such unrestrained thoughts. For daring to express her outrage in forthright political language Croft was ruthlessly attacked by The Australian’s Christopher Allen in a review less concerned with discussing the artworks on display than with celebrating the writer’s tiresomely cynical politicking.
Such political directness was not, however, to be found in the artworks on display in Stop(the)Gap. Indeed, the exhibition is surprisingly non-confrontational. Something quite different (and often more complex than) direct ideological or political discourses on ‘Indigeneity’ is on offer here. Suggesting no easy answers, or even difficult answers, the conceptual implications of the seven featured artworks (of which I will discuss four) are instead fleeting and poetic, grasped for a moment.
The elusiveness of the artworks on display at Stop(the)Gap points to what might be understood as the exhibition’s determining ethos. Opening the forum held to discuss the exhibition, curator Croft (who coordinated the choices of her overseas guest curators) clearly explained her key goal for the exhibition as a movement (or series of movements) beyond colonial forms of representation towards Indigenous self-representation. And this, of course, means a movement into the unknown. In Croft’s words:
“Indigenous communities around the globe share colonial histories relating to dispossession, injustice, inequity and misrepresentation. Even in the 21st century, indigenous art continues to be negatively configured through the historical contexts of Western art.” Exhibition catalogue.
Alan Michelson’s large four-channel work TwoRow II (2005) stands as an emblematic expression of this ethos. Michelson (a Mowhawk member of the Six Nations) is clearly aware that a large part of the contemporary Indigenous artist’s energy must be spent bending, breaking, transgressing, transcending the constrictive and static representations of Indigeneity perpetuated by colonial discourses. That’s a no-brainer. Michelson is also aware, however, that there are two sides to this agenda. In TwoRow II, two horizontal bands of purple and white images (alluding to a belt woven by the Native American Haudenosaunee people to mark their 1613 treaty with Dutch colonists) denote the two sides of the Grand River in southern Ontario, Canada. One bank is populated by non-Native townships. The other is the site of a Six Nations reserve. Travelling in both directions along the river, the viewer absorbs these juxtaposed rows simultaneously (along with the contrasting Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and tourist commentary played on loudspeakers).
For Michelson the river both links and divides the Native and the non-Native. Ideas of ‘Coloniality’ (as well as ‘Indigeneity’ or ‘Aboriginality’) must therefore be opened up for questioning. The Colonial and Indigenous are interrelated and in a constant state of change. Quite literally, Michelson’s work keeps moving. The literal two-sidedness of Two Row II undermines the viewer’s desire to focus on one of these sides independently of the other. There is no stationary reference point.
Two other interesting and very different large-scale works came from Canadian artists Rebecca Belmore (of Anishinaabe-Canadian heritage) and Dana Claxton (of the Hunkapa Lakota Sioux nation). Noting their obvious differences, Canadian curator David Garneau (who selected both works for exhibition) emphasised his interest in their paradoxical commonality. Beginning at either end of a hypothetical Indigenous artistic spectrum, Belmore and Claxton seem to be moving towards something in the middle, some common problem or ideal perhaps. This dialectical relationship was emphasised by Croft, who positioned the two works opposite one another on the ground floor of the Samstag Museum.
At one end, Claxton’s Rattle (2003) is one of the most beautiful examples of installation art in motion I have seen. A difficult work to describe in concrete terms, Rattle is in the artist’s own words “a visual prayer attempting to create infinity…[much] like a palindrome” (catalogue). Across four screens—the inner two mirroring and the outer two mirroring—Claxton offers the viewer-listener a hypnotic and strangely powerful aural-visual experience of perceptual and perpetual rhythm. It is a delicately made and extremely impressive work, of living art over artefact, invoking traditional Sioux singing, music and movement without conceding to any coy idea of the ‘traditional.’
Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia
Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia
Rough, handheld and with a markedly street aesthetic, Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed (2002) seems to be everything that Rattle is not, certainly no delicate expression of Indigenous spirituality. Also seemingly the most overtly political work of the exhibition, The Named and the Unnamed is an installation based around Belmore’s performance work Vigil (in fact it is, more or less, a recording of this performance projected onto a wall sparely quilted with small lights perhaps indicative of the women lost—the subject of the work). Approaching performance as a sacred act, Belmore acts out a series of painful rituals on a street corner in downtown Vancouver, a site where many missing and now presumed murdered Indigenous prostitutes worked. It’s not entirely clear as to precisely why the artist performs particular rituals (stripping roses with her teeth, nailing her dress to telephone poles) but that’s how rituals work. In the exhibition notes, Jolene Rickard suggests Belmore’s intent is to set right or balance imbalance (“Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power,” 2005). With no material justice coming from authorities who have shown little interest in pursuing the cases of these poor, marginalised, Indigenous women, Belmore aims at a higher spiritual justice for these young souls in trauma. It is a problematic but also very arresting piece, demonstrating that sacredness has nothing, essentially, to do with style.
Finally, there’s Warwick Thornton’s Stranded —a difficult work to pin down, all the more so coming from the director of the realist masterpiece Samson and Delilah. On entering the space—with 3D glasses and complementary popcorn in hand—we see the artist himself, nailed to a kitsch fluorescent cross that spins slowly, hovering above a richly coloured central Australian landscape with wide open skies and waterholes. At the base of the cross is a skull and crossbones. Dressed in a drover’s outfit (a reference to Aboriginal stockmen?), Thornton seems at first to be feigning an heroic machismo, but then, in close-ups, is revealed as simply drowsy: sleeping, yawning, head slumping. On his chest (in intense close-up) are the bloody traces of a whipping.
The only explanation we are offered in the exhibition notes is that Stranded was inspired by a drawing the artist made when six years old, under which he wrote, “When I grow up I want to be just like Jesus.” Thornton’s decision not to attend the exhibition forum only reinforced a sense of his reluctance to explain anything more about the work. The ironic tone (the ludicrous cross, the costume, the flaccid hero) suggests a playful critique of European Christianity’s influence on First Australians, or of Thornton himself. But that doesn’t seem nearly enough. 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). We are also possibly witnessing a representation of a ‘lost’ Aboriginal generation, Thornton’s own, no longer under missionary control, yet still nailed to the cross, detached and hovering above the Land. 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.
If it can be put into words, Stop(the)Gap seems to outgrow old restrictions, naturally and organically, advancing towards new, as yet unformulated conceptions of Indigenous self-representation. The role Brenda Croft assumes as curator is unusually active in this respect. With a second chapter of Stop(the)Gap due for exhibition in various Adelaide gallery spaces in October, Croft envisions the exhibition as spreading worldwide, in a state of continual relocation and reconfiguration.
Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous arts in motion, curator Brenda L Croft, artists Rebecca Belmore, Dana Claxton, Alan Michelson, Nova Paul, Lisa Reihana, Warwick Thornton, Samstag Museum, Adelaide Film Festival, Feb 24-April 21
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, director Matthew Bate
“FILMS DON’T CHANGE THE WORLD. PEOPLE WHO SEE THE FILMS CHANGE THE WORLD.” THIS IS THE MOTTO OF GIL SCRINE’S CINEMA VENTURES, A DOCUMENTARY DISTRIBUTION MODEL, PRESENTED AT ADELAIDE’S HILTON HOTEL AS PART OF THE 2011 AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY CONFERENCE. ALONGSIDE THE HOST OF INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL SPEAKERS WHO PRESENTED KEYNOTE ADDRESSES, MASTER CLASSES AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS, SCRINE WAS NOT ALONE IN STRESSING THE NEED TO RE-EVALUATE ESTABLISHED MODELS OF DOCUMENTARY FUNDING AND DISTRIBUTION IN ORDER TO EMBRACE NEW METHODS OF CONNECTING WITH AN AUDIENCE.
Over four days, conference delegates were presented with case studies of recent TV and web documentary success stories and conversations on documentary craft, as well as alternative strategies for funding and development. Running alongside the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival, where for the second time, the F4 (First Factual Film Festival) was able to showcase the work of emerging documentary makers, the 2011 conference marked the launch of P2P: CO-CREATE, a networking initiative designed to connect Australian factual content creators with international partners. With the swag of national and international commissioning editors, acquisition managers and executive producers signalling what AIDC Executive Director Joost den Hartog describes as “a new found confidence” in the TV sector, one can only hope that many a deal was struck.
In a session exploring global trends in factual television programming, Stephen Harris of American A&E Television Network spoke of the need for programs to feature big characters, high stakes and unique access—traits undoubtedly present in Channel 4’s 2011 breakout hit, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. With 8.7 million UK viewers tuning in for the second of four episodes, this program’s success suggests that audiences want to connect with characters living in unusual or unfamiliar worlds. This premise has been explored locally (albeit on a smaller scale) through a community-made webisode project, Big Stories, Small Towns, also presented at AIDC. Giving voice to local groups in three South Australian towns, this innovative project offers its audience insight, for example, into the Longriders Motorcycle Club in Murray Bridge. With a clear community focus these stories tap into larger themes of belonging and identity.
Amal Basry with Steve Thomas, Hope
cinema ventures
Drawing on the DIY spirit of 1970s film co-ops, Cinema Ventures is an exciting attempt to reconnect with audiences at grass roots level. As Gil Scrine commented, this means getting films and the social issues they explore out to people in rural locations. With a focus on community, not unlike that of Big Stories, Cinema Ventures takes a philanthropic approach to the not-for-profit distribution of documentary. Inspired to find solutions to the difficulties facing community groups when attempting to undertake effective film screening fundraisers, the project began with an eight-leg tour of Steve Thomas’ film Hope, a documentary partly funded by refugee support groups. Screening in venues such as community halls and churches in remote parts of Australia, this survival story of a shipwrecked refugee boat drew audiences of up to 200 people at a time, with the filmmaker present to discuss his work.
Most surprisingly, the community group that initiated or helped organise the screening was able to keep the box-office takings, amounting to between $1,300 and $3,000 per screening. This is the beauty of Cinema Ventures: with the filmmaker receiving a standard film hire fee for each screening, and able to capitalise on revenue gained by undertaking guest lectures in local schools and businesses, it seems that everyone is a winner. Scrine commented that the industry was crying out for a new model of distribution. With many cinema chains owned by distributors (Dendy, owned by Icon, being one example) small, independent films often find traditional paths difficult to access. “You can easily get done down in the world of distribution,” remarked Scrine. “It’s hard to navigate.”
Since the initial tour of Hope, a website has been developed with assistance from Screen Australia and several state agencies, and a slate of films is being assembled. Scrine encourages filmmakers to think of Cinema Ventures as a distributor that could be attached to projects in the development stage, assisting with the raising of production funds through philanthropy. As one AIDC attendee commented, the strength is in Cinema Venture’s database, a list of remote venues, screening contacts and audience information that can assist with the organisation of a tour. With the ultimate goal of establishing a network of occasionally used community cinemas in rural locations, Scrine is already in talks with groups in Wynnum and Stradbroke Island.
“It’s amazing after a screening when people have to pack the chairs away, when someone says, ‘come back to my place and we’ll open a bottle of wine and have a party.’ That sort of thing doesn’t happen at Hoyts.”
from the sunroom to sundance
In the wake of the Sundance Film Festival screening of the South Australian documentary feature Shut Up Little Man (Sophie Hyde, Matthew Bate), the From the Sunroom to Sundance panel discussion elaborated on models of documentary development and production funding currently in place at the South Australian Film Corporation. Alongside Matt Bate, Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason of the prolific Adelaide-based company Closer Productions, SAFC CEO Richard Harris explained how the programs Film Lab and the Documentary Innovation Fund have allowed for the production of stories that may not have been made otherwise.
In the case of the Film Lab feature film development and production initiative, the focus involves developing people, rather than projects. Although not initially designed for documentary production, it was soon apparent that Matt Bate’s Shut Up Little Man was an international project well suited to the initiative’s tight budget constraints. Bate commented that the project had received little interest from the ABC and SBS due to the American nature of the story, and the film would not have been made without SAFC support. The guaranteed production funding meant that the director could establish sound relationships with the subjects of the film in the development phase as there were no questions as to the certainty of the project. As well as receiving a special mention in the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival’s official competition, Shut Up Little Man is currently negotiating a deal for theatrical distribution in the USA and Canada following its successful reception at Sundance.
The SAFC Documentary Innovation Fund is unique in that it backs projects without the constraint of having a broadcaster attached prior to production. For Sophie Hyde this meant the opportunity to break out of the emerging filmmaker mould with her feature length project Life in Movement about the late dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke. SAFC support meant that Hyde was able to access additional development and production funds from Screen Australia and the Adelaide Film Festival, where the film premiered to rave reviews. SAFC Director Richard Harris commented that the two SAFC initiatives are not about ignoring old methods of development, but rather, embracing new ones. As session moderator Julia Overton commented, “It’s all about backing talent.”
Other AIDC conference highlights included a masterclass on “maximising the story” by producer, John Smithson (127 Hours, Touching the Void) and from Dr David Gallo from the Oceanographic Institution’s keynote address on the wealth of deep water stories that wait to be told. (Did you know that there are lakes and waterfalls underwater? There were certainly many AIDC delegates left open mouthed when Gallo provided still images of the phenomenon.) With these and many other speakers on the guest list, AIDC was an opportunity to pose questions about rapidly changing methods of development, production and audience engagement, as well as how to network and deal. As Smithson concluded, it’s about finding the small human story that paints a bigger picture. Then it’s about getting that story out there.
AIDC (Australian International Documentary Conference) 2011, Adelaide Hilton, March 1-4
BOB CONNOLLY’S DOCUMENTARIES HAVE AN EXTRAORDINARY QUALITY, LIKE ROUNDED WORKS OF FICTION. THE WONDERFUL PNG TRILOGY—FINDING THE CHARACTER THAT LINKED FIRST WHITE CONTACT WITH A TRIBAL WAR IN THE PRESENT; THE LAST MINUTE MACHINATIONS THAT DECIDED THE LEICHHARDT MAYORALTY IN RATS IN THE RANKS; THE BRITTLE EMOTIONS BEHIND ACADEMIC FACADES IN FACING THE MUSIC.
In Mrs Carey’s Concert—Connolly’s first documentary in a decade and made without the balancing force of his late wife and film-making partner, Robin Anderson—we’re once again suffused with musical emotions. But we also have good and bad leads, two last minute crises and a cathartic triumph. What’s amazing is that the world in which Connolly and new film-partner Sophie Raymond are operating is a private girls’ school as it spends 18 months working up to a massive concert in the Sydney Opera House—an ethos apparently quite beyond the predictability or manipulations of drama.
And yet Chinese immigrant Emily Sun makes both character and musical leaps over that period to progress from a kid vaguely at risk to a model of self-knowledge, as well as knocking off a damn fine performance of the Bruch Violin Concerto’s first movement at 12 weeks’ notice. We realise she couldn’t have done it without Head of Music Karen Carey’s subtle mind games. But would Emily have discovered that without this film?
Even more ethically tight-roped is Iris Shi—another Chinese-Australian girl at the ethnically diverse Methodist Ladies College—who must have adored having her leather-jacketed, gum-chewing badness given star billing. Her cool boasts of exploiting her teachers’ weaknesses are linked on screen to Mrs Carey’s one moment of self-doubt in a saga that’s intended to confirm the life-changing power of music. One has to wonder, though, whether Iris’s life was changed one iota by her minor musical role singing in the Slave’s Chorus from Aida?
To achieve such delineation, time was of the essence. Eighteen months filming allowed Connolly’s camera to become part of the MLC furniture, even in the cramped staff quarters where conferences and the cajoling of girls occur. But another 18 months was needed to turn 263 hours of random events into this coherent story: editing credits to Sophie Raymond and Ray Thomas. What story streams or high dramas were left out?
Certainly the wider school story was brushed aside—you’d think they did music all day and every day; not just 45 minutes a week. But multiple cameras at the concert meant we not only got a ‘Last Night of The Proms’ detail of the musicians we’d got to know enjoying their finest hour; we also saw the backstage dramas of Mrs Carey nearly losing a star wind player and actually losing her conducting score, and some grainy, Breughellian images of tired and tense teachers undergoing the finely balanced intensities of the concert.
There’s a naughty schoolboy just under Bob Connolly’s hide. One of film’s joys is the alert camera work that picks up the cheeky reactions of the girls, unseen by their teachers, and an episode with a sabotaged computer took me right back to the ‘invisible’ snowball left in the middle of my boys’ school Music Room—its existence denied by the whole class. Gender equality at last!
And how marvellous that everyone involved—from precious parents to mocked teachers—gave their assent to appear unvarnished in the film.
But, since the project emerged from Connolly’s recording of a previous Mrs Carey’s concert when another violinist was boosted up to concerto level, it certainly distinguished this version that Emily Sun’s back-story has enough human and musical twists to both underscore the constant battle between the technicalities of just playing the notes and finding emotion in both the score and herself, which carries this film into the realm of the ‘migrant overcoming the odds’ story.
Mrs Carey’s biennial triumph of the will is made bitter-sweet by her comment that her pupils will leave school and she’ll lose them: “we have to start all over again…”, a wistfulness underlined by the credits ending with the cacophony of recorders that began this musical progress. But that’s the teacher’s inevitable lot. And Mrs Carey won’t only have this film as succour in her retirement—she’ll also have the sound of Emily Sun’s career, which has already progressed to the Royal College of Music in London. Will she follow Iris Shi so keenly, though?
Mrs Carey’s Concert, directors Bob Connolly, Sophie Raymond, camera Bob Connnolly, editors Sophie Raymond, Ray Thomas, producers Helen Panckhurst, Bob Connolly, Music Films, 2011, 95mins; www.mrscareysconcert.com
Mrs Carey’s Concert premiered at the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival and screens throughout Australia from April 28, except Brisbane from May 5
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
SHAUN GLADWELL’S FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION AT ACMI, THE MAJOR COMMISSION STEREO SEQUENCES, PROMISES TO BE ONE OF THE ARTIST’S BOLDEST STATEMENTS TO DATE. WORKING ON A GRAND SCALE, THIS SHOW AFFORDS GLADWELL THE OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE A NEW SERIES OF WORKS WHICH GENERATE A PATTERN OF INTERCONNECTED NARRATIVES—A DIALOGUE BETWEEN PERFORMER AND PERFORMER, PERFORMER AND MACHINE, BODY IN LANDSCAPE AND ONE IN WHICH THE VIEWER BECOMES AN ACTIVE AGENT. FOLLOWING ON FROM HIS TECHNICALLY EXTRAVAGANT VIDEO WORKS OF RECENT YEARS, GLADWELL’S CONCERNS FOR THIS SHOW REFLECT A NEW MODESTY TO HIS PRACTICE, WITH A REVIVED INTEREST IN THE EXTREMITIES OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SUBJECT AND ITS REPRESENTATION ON FILM.
For this exhibition, Gladwell returns to some of the guiding principles of his early experiments in the late 90s where, for example, he explored the freedoms of the early Handy Cam, turning the camera on himself as he skateboards through the streets of urban Australia. The final artwork, he states, reveals itself in the final edit, and while the new works are clearly more involved, the drive for undirected experimentation is evident.
soldiers: dance with camera
The logic for this show evolved from a commission by the Australian War Memorial, the institution somewhat controversially appointing Gladwell as their Official War Artist at the end of 2009. Locating himself in southern Afghanistan, Gladwell ran a series of ‘workshops’ with two soldiers. During this process, he handed the camera to the soldiers to record each other acting out a series of self-generated mirroring movements. Through repetition, a constant in Gladwell’s oeuvre, the work documents the ritualistic practice of gestural movement and by default taps into the commitment and focus which is central to the soldiers’ training and performance in the extremes of war.
Gladwell refers to this action as akin to “an early form of dance” and it is clear that the suspension of consciousness, which the soldiers develop through the work, is the artist’s aim. The dedication and focus of the subject, be they skateboarder, break-dancer or soldier are the drivers for Gladwell’s search for the ‘authentic.’ While on initial approach this may be easily dismissed as cultural appropriation, it becomes clear that Gladwell’s impetus is to capture on film the intense psychological states that occur when the body is placed in extreme situations.
In handing over the camera to the performer, the authorship of the work is largely relinquished. This seems not to perturb Gladwell who places his practice firmly in the context of Dan Graham’s performative experiments in the 1970s: “I particularly loved the idea of him not reporting the work but enabling the audience to do so.” Like Graham, Gladwell wants to test the conventions of the audience and performer relationship, a practice clearly rooted in his own origins in urban sports and street cultures. Through the gesture of self-documentation, Gladwell is almost testing his own levels of perception; as for the viewer, we are there to accompany him on this journey of curiosity.
figures, machines, landscape
Shaun Gladwell is not concerned with the democratisation of media, a notion that has engulfed our digital age. Though he enjoys his works appearing on social networks and flirted briefly with placing work onto handheld consoles, his concerns are much more discursive—connecting subcultures to cultural traditions. He places cars, helicopters and other machines of transportation into a desert landscape in order to portray the details embedded within these grand gestures. Gladwell references the Romantic German landscape artist Casper David Friedrich and particularly his genre-defining painting Wanderer Above The Sea Fog (1818) which depicts a lone figure standing triumphant at the peak of a mist-engulfed mountain. In Gladwell’s works the individual employs the machine to attempt mastery over landscape, while their anonymity and subsequent insignificance marks this as an ultimately barren act.
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Shaun Gladwell, Parallels (2011), synchronised dual channel HD video
new perspective, new vulnerability
Though now distanced from his early works involving the reappropriation of physical acts into alien environments, Gladwell’s new work, Stereo Sequences, is still rooted in the depiction of the body in space—largely the Australian landscape. His shift of focus from urban to outback was pivotal in Interceptor Surf Sequence (2009) where the cinematic idioms of Australian action movies dictated the overall aesthetic. Within the new works, this landscape is conveyed to the viewer less through the vista of Hollywood than as a point of exploration for the artist for whom this terrain is also unfamiliar. This shift adds vulnerability to the work by replacing the readymade, fast paced aesthetic of Australian action cinema with a more naive consideration of the vast terrain. The boldness of this act reflects the fluidity of Gladwell’s larger practice—he is in a process of exploration and traditional conventions are discarded as necessary. This notable shift in the artist’s work is one of which he is fully conscious: “I like the idea that a signature style can be broken…if an idea demands a certain methodology then you have to go with it.”
a crossfire of images
The monumental scale of the films will be key to the presentation of the final works at ACMI. Each film is presented as a pair, which the audience passes through a central corridor. Gladwell intends that walking through these coordinates you make decisions as a viewer, again suggesting a nod back to Dan Graham’s experiments, with the audience caught in what Gladwell describes as a “hall of mirror gazes.” Within this crossfire of images, the viewer encounters simultaneous movement of the subject in real-time, with the recorded figures at times looking at each other and sometimes moving within the frame. However it is the body’s relationship to machines—helicopters, cars, skateboards—in the environment that drives the motion in this series, creating a comparative study.
the urban edge in a spin
The urban edge to Gladwell’s practice prevails within this show, particularly in a series of films focusing on the singular performative act of spinning. Engaging a range of practitioners from break-dancing, skateboarding and capoeira, Gladwell ran a series of ‘relational workshops’ in which he asked each practitioner to perform the act at its most extreme within their own discipline. The actions recorded, Gladwell then shared footage with the other groups in an attempt to engender a form of cultural fusion around spinning. Through this process, the rotation of the body in space becomes apparent, amplified through Gladwell’s use of a fixed, overhead camera point which frames the body in motion. Gladwell will install these films as a ceiling projection suspended above the audience inviting the viewer to address them from a horizontal position. The Romantic element of the artist’s practice is again evident as the original, fast, physical act mutates into a series of ethereal movements forming a never-ending choreography in space.
It is hard to pin Shaun Gladwell’s practice to a single genre. He is at once a landscape artist, a social documenter, choreographer and performer. His work, however, provides a moment to reflect on what it means to be a solitary being in a dense and hyper-paced world. His empathetic interventions into subcultures and landscapes exaggerate the potential and limitations of the body while reaffirming the value of the individual self. The most ambitious works to date from Shaun Gladwell’s prolific output will leave you feeling at once displaced, overwhelmed and fragile but, above all else, alive.
ACMI, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences, Federation Square, Melbourne, June 1-Aug 14; www.acmi.net.au
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 26
Snow White, Re-enchantment, courtesy ABC
RE-ENCHANTMENT IS A TRANSMEDIA DOCUMENTARY PROJECT, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY SARAH GIBSON AND PRODUCED BY SUE MASLIN. APPEARING ON TV, RADIO AND INTERACTIVELY ONLINE AS WELL AS VIA FACEBOOK AND TWITTER, IT EXPLORES “WHY FAIRY STORIES CONTINUE TO ENCHANT, ENTERTAIN, FASCINATE AND HORRIFY CONTEMPORARY ADULT AUDIENCES.” THE PROJECT COMPRISES A WEBSITE [WWW.ABC.NET.AU/TV/RE-ENCHANTMENT] WITH AN OPEN FORUM AND CURATED EXHIBITIONS, 10 THREE-MINUTE ANIMATIONS AND A SERIES OF NARRATED FAIRYTALES.
You’ve received critical acclaim as a documentary-maker. What drew you to the idea of an online documentary that also crossed into other media?
I have been making documentaries for over 30 years and I have always been interested in experimenting with the documentary form. Re-enchantment was a new direction, allowing me to explore whether working in a multiplatform and interactive way could extend the documentary essay and the poetic possibility of documentary—both have been important in my previous documentaries such as Myths of Childhood and The Hundredth Room.
To be honest when I began this project, I was extremely frustrated with the documentary landscape that was dominated by ‘reality.’ I have always been interested in documentaries about ideas and fairytales were occupying my thinking at this time. Although I had no previous experience working in interactive online form I was excited about the possibility of engaging with audiences in new ways. Fairytales seemed ideally suited to an interactive approach.
I saw other documentary makers using the web to repurpose their documentaries originally created for television but I was more interested in working on a project that was conceived for the web, that could use interactivity to extend the purpose of the project.
How different was it to embark on writing an online documentary?
I knew I did not want to retell the stories themselves but to approach their interpretation at the same time as deepening our connection to the mystery of the stories. I was interested in the way artist and filmmakers had reimagined these stories and sensed that Re-enchantment would in itself be a work of creative reinterpretation.
I began with research into each story and a script writing process thinking about how we might engage with the interpretations. I knew I wanted all six story spaces in the forest to look and feel different, using the motifs and symbols unique to each. Bluebeard was the first space developed. This is a story based on keys and a forbidden room. The script developed around Bluebeard’s castle where you find a “corridor of interpretation” and each door you unlock leads to a different take on the story. Cinderella unfolds in a vaudeville theatre and carnival space where different stage shows and experiences with a wheel of fortune and kissing booth determine the ideas you encounter. Rapunzel is set in a tower within a tree where you find yourself in a lift and choose a hair treatment. Each floor you enter challenges you with new content about interpreting the story.
Many visual ideas came from workshopping my scripts with lead animator and graphic designer Rose Draper and interactive designers Catherine Gleeson and Keren Moran and producer Sue Maslin. There was a massive job of visual research by Penny Chai who fed many images by artists into the script development phase. As the visual designs and ideas for interactivity were developed, I did more research and writing. We were all working without a template. I had to learn a new language of ‘navigation’ and ‘asset management.’
It was at this script stage that I had input into storyboards and visual design but then these images and ideas disappear into the world of computer programming and I would not see the results till many months later. This is a very different and frustrating process compared to shooting and editing a documentary. I found it very challenging that in this process I was committing to visuals very early with little or no opportunity for editing and changes. I did not know how interactive elements would work until they were programmed. On the plus side, there was an enormous possibility of layering graphic elements and images that has made for an extremely beautiful and poetic aesthetic. I kept reworking text throughout.
The role of writer/director of content changes in the interactive form. In a linear mode you can structure your documentary around an unfolding argument, even a visual one. But in an interactive mode users skip, hop, immerse, revisit or even turn off the sound. I had to accept they go on a journey of ideas that you as director can’t control. So the challenge is that, even more than in linear documentary, the form must embody my ideas. Each section of the site then has to engage the user in some way with the thinking about the story.
What gave you the inkling to focus on fairytales?
As a small girl I had a mysterious book of fairytales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Dangers lurked in the woods. Caged birds and frogs changed into princes. The Little Match Girl died unfairly I thought. Each time I reread this book I thought I would be able to understand it, but I never did. Fairytales frightened me and fascinated me at the same time. When I became interested in Jungian psychology, I was once again confronted by the strangeness of these tales and their deep resonance in the human psyche. They have continued to surprise and delight me.
When I was making my documentary series Myths of Childhood (2006), I was drawn to fairytales because their more realistic depiction was an antidote to the over sentimentalised idea of childhood in contemporary western culture as a magical, precious time, a period separated off as special and permeated with adult nostalgia. In fairytales children are abandoned by their parents, mothers imprison and plan to eat their children and fathers have incestuous relationships with their daughters. But fairytales also provide hope in the battle against impossible odds and the comforting idea that others have been there before us.
The idea for Re-enchantment was seeded by a conversation. I have been making documentaries since the 1970s and increasingly my documentaries have taken up the relevance of psychological ideas for contemporary culture. In all my work I have been pushing our expectations of documentary. I was chatting with my friend and producer Sue Maslin at an exhibition opening. When she heard I was interested in fairytales she suggested that this would make a great interactive documentary. At that point I had no idea how one made an interactive documentary but we both agreed that fairytales were ideally suited to an interactive form.
Do you have a favourite fairytale?
I ‘lived’ the Hansel and Gretel story as a child and as an adult spent a long time learning to burn the witch in the oven. A fairytale will mean different things to us at 5, 15, 35 and 55. I love the dark aspects of fairytales, in particular stories of the negative mother who imprisons and threatens to devour her children. Now I think about what we can learn about ourselves as older women from the Baba Yaga or old witch stories.
Did this initial response colour how you went about directing the project?
I knew that the power of fairy stories lies in their mystery. They are poetic and cannot be reduced to ‘this means that.’ I think it is exactly because of this they continue to enchant and satisfy us. Visually I wanted to keep a poetic quality and the story spaces to be evocative and where possible playful. Rather than stripping away the mystery and enchantment, the project threads together various interpretations and versions of a story from the perspectives of psychology, social history and popular culture in a way that deepens our connection to and fascination with the richness of fairytales. It is the connection we make to a story that gives it the power to excite our own reimaginings.
The visual language throughout Re-enchantment reflects the symbolic language of the story, for example the use of the shoe motif or hair, and responds to the content or interpretations of the story being considered.
You’re a Jungian therapist. Do you find the symbolism of fairytales affects the way your clients see the world, or how you practice?
Fairytales can help us make sense of inner and outer life experiences. I always liked what the novelist Phillip Pullman once said, “your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins when you realise you were delivered into the wrong family by mistake.”
In the therapy room I have observed that if we are able to see our own personal history in terms of story we are much less likely to be overwhelmed by negative life experiences. When we can imagine our selves as the fairytale figures in say Cinderella or Snow White, we gain new psychological insights into sibling rivalry, overwhelming envy, poisonous, devouring love and murderous hatred. We are introduced to the ways in which difficult life experiences can be endured and even overcome. Tales tell of the ensnaring witch who is defeated, the murderous husband who is killed, the spell of enchantment that is broken and the transformation that is possible.
How great do you see the impact of fairytales on contemporary literature, film and television?
I have been interested in the way traditional fairytales have a powerful hold on our cultural imagination. Adapted, revised and parodied they greet us in print and popular fiction, as a reality TV show to find an Australian princess, at the movies as Pan’s Labyrinth and Sex and the City, in advertisements for everything from Chanel to Moccona coffee and hair conditioner to Magnum ice cream. I am fond of the work of Tim Burton who often speaks about the power of fairytales in his own narratives and how all monster movies to him are a version of Beauty and the Beast. Visual artists, photographers and filmmakers are constantly reimagining these traditional stories. Fairytales are perpetually in the back of our collective minds. Knowing fairy stories provides us all with a rich vein of motifs and narratives available for creative reimagining.
Fairytales are of course cultural snapshots of the time and location of their telling, but they can also open out wider cultural questions for us today: Why are we caught up in the princess fantasy? Why do we project greed and overconsumption onto children? Why is cosmetic surgery of the foot on the rise? Why are older women demonised? Why is death our night-time entertainment?
As well as the Forum, the Re-enchantment site also features curated exhibitions. Why is that?
I draw together work by artists exploring particular themes. There are two online now: “Woman and Wolf” and “The Heroine Re-Imagined.” I am confident that there are hundreds of visual artists, photographers and filmmakers who are working with fairytales in some way or other. The Gallery provides a place for their work. This project is a conversation with others who are interested in fairytales. This is the heart of the reason why I wanted to do a project that is interactive.
Re-enchantment, writer, director Sarah Gibson, producer Sue Maslin, Inside Out Productions with the assistance of Screen Australia, Film Victoria, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the University of Technology Sydney; ABC On-Line, ABC 1, ABC Radio National; www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment
Human Theramin, Luke Pasquale Calarco and audience member
photo Pia van Gelder
Human Theramin, Luke Pasquale Calarco and audience member
AS IF HANDPICKED ESPECIALLY TO APPEAL TO MY SENSES AND ALIGN WITH MY ETHICS, THIS YEAR’S SYDNEY DORKBOT GROUP SHOW EXHIBITION AT SERIAL SPACE ASSEMBLED SIX CAPTIVATINGLY EARNEST WORKS. CURATOR PIA VAN GELDER ALSO HOSTED AN ARTISTS’ TALK THAT TURNED OUT TO BE A PRETTY SPECIAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON OF ENGAGING DISCUSSION.
Jiann Hughes’ interactive boxing breath-centric work, Below the Belt, is right up my alley: sensors, interactivity and an awesome costume to boot. Donning the red headgear, I’m strapped into an immersive solitary auditory environment that immediately blocks out the reverberant gallery sound. Appearing on screen, Tony (the boxing instructor from Mundine’s gym) puts me to the test. He’s only interested in one thing: my breathing. In a series of rounds, he manages to coach me through a couple of breathing exercises while dishing out occasional words of criticism or encouragement. Ability to control breath leaves you with a ranking of lightweight, featherweight or sometimes even better.
Below the Belt, Jiann Hughes
photo Pia van Gelder
Below the Belt, Jiann Hughes
So often breath-controlled interactives encourage peaceful experiences (such as the artworks of George Khut, Hannah Clemen or Elliat Rich). Below the Belt takes you into another realm of all-consuming fun reminiscent of You Are Here’s Pemulwuy Dream Team interactive boxing game, albeit with a very different motive. As Hughes puts it, the work explores “tensions between competitive contact sports and the inward focus of breathing practices that support[s] them.” Amid the fun, I am still consciously attempting to centre myself through my breath. Overall, Below the Belt could do with a little tidying at the edges. However building a work like this is challenging—especially in incorporating this form of interactive control—while ensuring the scenario is a truly believable one. Not for one moment was my attention distracted.
Next on offer is a different intimate interaction. The Human Theramin by Luke Pasquale Calarco is a construction made from a backpack stuffed with the essential old-school gadgets, aerial poking out the top, plus a power lead trailing behind. Wearing the backpack, Calarco turns himself into a touchable sound-producing instrument, generating a range of squeaks, squeals, drones and groans typical of a short-circuiting electronic gadget. Having navigated all the politics of physical interaction with a total stranger, audience members’ faces display a sense of wonder as they engage in the noise-making process. Observing from the sidelines, it’s like watching a bunch of two-year-olds with a newfound toy.
Drone 1, David Kirkpatrick
photo Pia van Gelder
Drone 1, David Kirkpatrick
David Kirkpatrick’s Drone 1, bearing several crucial messages, is a reflection of the state of current society. One oversized switch swaps the glow of a dozen or so tiny protrusions of electro-luminescent wire to radiating loops, positioned equidistantly in a 3D copper pipe grid. Look closer and you realise it is an apartment block in miniature—each room either an office (containing a desk, chairs and laptop) or a bedroom. At the flick of the switch, stick figures hard at work in their offices then lie still in their beds. Kirkpatrick describes Drone 1 as “the way we feel when moving towards a binary life,” and it’s almost impossible to oppose this statement. Which of us doesn’t feel chained to a computer almost every waking hour, with our only respite being sleep? Through further explanation in the artist’s talk, more layers of critique appear. “Copper is important to tell this story,” states Kirkpatrick. Constructed from finite resources, the materials he’s selected also draw attention to our way of life that is ultimately unsustainable in so many respects.
The other three works in this show are non-interactive and it’s worthwhile noting comments from the curator. She explains that visitors to the exhibition expect the works to be responsive. When nothing happens, they’re actually surprised.
The first of these is Michael Petchovsky’s Infomadream, which is a step towards socially, environmentally and economically conscious media art creation. For several years, I’ve been concerned about the immeasurable environmental impact of electronic components used in creating technology-based artworks. Infomadream is a gesture in the direction of overall awareness. This video installation utilises an open source operating system and video tools installed on some hard garbage (a laptop found on the side of the street). While the video wasn’t the most engaging work in the show, the ideas—particularly the desire for positive activism, which it helped to generate during discussion—sparked something far greater than the work itself.
Ross Manning’s Trapped Universe is the odd one out. Located in the main exhibition space, it deserved to be placed where quiet contemplation might occur. Without an interactive or time-based component, this work actually requires more patience of its audience. While it may have been overlooked on occasion, for those who were willing to sit and observe this undemanding work gently revealed an entire world of peaks, valleys and cascading rainbows.
Death by Stereo, Wade Marynowsky
photo Pia van Gelder
Death by Stereo, Wade Marynowsky
Death by Stereo combines all of the elements one would expect to find in a Wade Marynowsky work, coupled with the essential Marynowsky aesthetic: retro devices, bubbling pink foam and the almost overbearing chords of impending doom—as if you’d been suddenly transported into a 1950s sci-fi horror flick. This work is the least understated of the exhibition, and I imagine that’s its purpose. As Marynowsky indicates, Death by Stereo “comments on the way we receive constant tragic news bursts.” I’m not so sure this is the message I receive. But it does imprint on my mind that anything pink and bubbly must certainly be toxic and I should remember to steer clear in the future.
I’m revitalised by the works in this exhibition, particularly the ideas driving them and so evident in the accompanying artists’ talks and subsequent discussions that were nothing short of invigorating. I can almost glimpse a new era of media art creation that is socially, politically, economically and environmentally conscious. A new generation and decade of art-making, considerate of the resources consumed in its construction and presentation, produces a glimmer of hope.
Sydney Dorkbot 2011 Group Show, curator Pia van Gelder, Serial Space, Sydney, Feb 22-27; http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net
TO SAY MATTHEW DAY “EXPLODED” ONTO THE AUSTRALIAN DANCE SCENE ALMOST FEELS LIKE AN UNDERSTATEMENT. IT’S ONLY ABOUT 10 MONTHS AGO THAT HE PREMIERED HIS FIRST FULL-LENGTH SOLO, THOUSANDS, AT MELBOURNE’S NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL. IN THE MEANTIME, THE WORK HAS HAD TWO REMOUNTS—AT LAST YEAR’S SYDNEY FRINGE AND AT THE 2011 DANCE MASSIVE. DAY ALSO PREMIERED A NEW WORK, CANNIBAL, AS PART OF THIS YEAR’S SYDNEY GAY & LESBIAN MARDI GRAS. INCLUSION IN SHORT WORK PROGRAMS SUCH AS CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE’S DANCE HISTORY AND LUCY GUERIN INC’S PIECES FOR SMALL SPACES HAVE FURTHER CONTRIBUTED TO A SUSTAINED VISIBILITY.
At the recent National Dance Forum in Melbourne, Day spoke on a panel titled “The Next Generation.” As is often the case, though, with artists whose first works create something of a splash, the perception that they have come out of nowhere, materialised from thin air, is deceptive.
“I made my first dance pieces when I was like six,” says Day, now 31. “I made pieces for my sister and my friends all the time. We’d perform them in front of our families. But everybody does that, no? Nothing unusual, really.” Well, maybe not. Slightly more unusual, perhaps, is the fact that Day took up ballroom dancing when he was 15. And not only that: two years later, he and his dance partner, a daughter of world champions, came third in the Australian Championships (youth division) and were crowned Pan Pacific Youth Champions. His career as ballroom dancer, however, finished as quickly as it began when his dance partner decided to change partners. What then?
Day didn’t discover contemporary dance until he was 20, when he first attended the Sydney Dance Company open classes. Once hooked, he decided to pursue dance as a regularactivity and enrolled in the dance course at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) in 2003. After two years he called it quits and continued his studies at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) only to leave after the first year and relocate to Amsterdam in 2006. After a bit of a false start, narrowly missing out in the auditions for the prestigious School for New Dance Development (SNDO), Day ended up staying in Amsterdam for three years. In retrospect he considers that time an extremely important formative period.
“I was living in squats, always organising, always trying to make things happen. Pretty much everything was done on a DIY principle.” Together with his close friend, Australian dancer Noha Ramadan, Day put on queer performance events at which they also performed. One of them, Blue Monday, ran for three months, each Monday, and always featured a 10-minute duet by Day and Ramadan, usually performed to a couple of well-known pop songs and often made up only shortly before they went on. The aim of the exercise was to explore “instant choreography.” The premise was that “things didn’t have to be good.” It was more about “unblocking creative powers,” Day says. “Learning serious things while having fun.”
It was in Amsterdam that Day started up a rigorous physical regime consisting of yoga, swimming, running, cycling and strength work. He also spent endless hours in rehearsal studios by himself, developing a solo practice and incessantly reading cultural theory and philosophy with the works of Gilles Deleuze a declared favourite. Day says that what he took away from his Amsterdam years was the need to be resourceful, continuously making do with what was there and not asking for anything else. This lesson, he claims, stood him in good stead when he returned to Australia in 2009 to establish himself as an independent dance maker.
Shortly after his return, Day applied to the Next Wave Festival for inclusion in their 2010 program. His application was successful and in the following year he presented his solo Thousands. That’s when things started to take off for him. Thousands was largely received positively by critics, peers and audiences, drawing praise for its conceptual and physical rigour. Even though he had occasionally performed solo in the past, Day clearly considers Thousands his solo debut. “I would say Thousands is my first album,” he laughs. “I might have made a few singles along the way.” And how does he feel about the increased interest in his work? “It’s exciting. I’m aware that it’s partly because I’m new on the scene. But the interest in my work definitely makes me more interested in what I do and keeps me committed.”
Matthew Day, Cannibal
photo Gareth Hart
Matthew Day, Cannibal
After presenting Cannibal, his second full-length work, in Sydney earlier this year, Day is scheduled to start work on a new piece in October, which, together with its predecessors, will form a three-part series. Day sees Trilogy as an opportunity “to look at the same questions from different perspectives. What all these works will have in common is my interest in exploring the body as a site of infinite potential and constant transformation, creating intensely physical states of continual becoming.” The construction of Trilogy, Day says, is based on the idea that each piece evolves from questions produced by the previous one. Where Thousands, for example, explored microscopic movement, having Day’s body moving extremely slowly for an extended period of time, Cannibal presented the body in continual pulsing repetition, traversing the space. Day expects the third piece in the series, as yet untitled, to be somewhat more energetic, maybe euphoric even. “It’s some kind of release I’m after.”
Day thinks of his works as “operative rather than representational.” He explains: “It’s as if some kind of operation is taking place. The focus is on what is happening, not what does it mean? My choreography is not interesting as such, it works through its accumulative effect and how it unfolds over time.”
Judging by Thousands and Cannibal, both staged with great attention to detail in terms of their ‘look,’ it seems Day prefers a minimalist aesthetic. “Yes. I have always liked the analogy of shooting a gun with a silencer. The effect is just as powerful but it makes less noise. I like understatement. I like subtlety. At the same time I am interested in intensity and extremity.”
What is striking when listening to Day speak about his work is how articulate and assured he is. He exudes the quiet confidence of someone who knows he has done the hard yards and that the attention bestowed on him is the result of what he has invested to achieve it. It is easy to imagine that Matthew Day is in dance for the long haul. He is practically bursting with ideas: “Eventually, I would like to make duets and group works. I’d also be interested in creating a durational performance installation and possibly even curating a gallery event that brings together works by performance makers and visual artists.”
For the time being, however, Matthew Day is going to stick with the solo form: “There is an increased responsibility when working with others. I feel I need more space and time to myself so I can become clearer and find out more about my choreographic concerns. And also,” he smiles and for a moment it looks as if he is a little surprised by what he is about to reveal, “I have the feeling, I can’t put my finger on it yet, that further down the track there is a solo which I’m not yet ready to make.”
IT’S A SHAME THERE IS NOT MORE DANCE LIKE THIS: DIRECTLY IMPACTING, ABSTRACT, VISCERAL AND EVISCERATING, ATMOSPHERIC, FLESHY. CANNIBAL IS SO MATTHEW DAY; IT COULD NOT BE ANYONE ELSE’S. BUT IT IS NOT IMPENETRABLE OR SOLIPSISTIC. ON THE CONTRARY, ITS REVELATION OF THE PERFORMER IS A MOTIONAL ACT OF HUMILITY THAT SEEKS TO DISCOVER, NOT DISPLAY DANCE. THIS IS A DANCER I CAN KNOW WELL FOR A LITTLE WHILE AS HE RIDES THE WAVE OF TRANSCENDENT INTENSITY THAT IS CANNIBAL.
The work is Day’s second solo in a trilogy which “explores the body as a site of infinite potential and constant transformation” (program note). He is interested in “extreme physical states” and while the first solo Thousands (RT100) investigated the possibility and detail of stillness, this development explores unceasing and relentless motion.
In a white, white space lit brightly whiter, the dancer also clad in white begins to twitch. Presenting his back, his peachy, twitching buttocks enact a molten and bubbling genesis. It starts so small it is an almost-stillness. Other muscle groups join in with the gluteals, irritating each other, creating a variegated body, but also synchronising a symphony of small movements that fire other movements.
In the asylum whiteness, sound rumbles from behind and underneath, thickly shaking the space, vibrating this place with almost un-nameable, almost disturbing atmospherics: ominous, distant, mighty. My flesh is agitated into an empathetic twitch. Relentless sonic drives become horsey cloppings, rumbles ooze into circular metallic rubs that sit on top of softly thunderous sweeps, making me edgy, slightly nervous.
The powerhouse buttocks have sent the head into a deeper and more frenzied bob that makes it disappear behind its own body to leave the back monstrously rounded: a mountain with arms. The twitches have become sinking jabs and the dancer is joined by three shadows dancing grey on the white wall. They are whispers of the real dancer revealing that this monstrous back has a front, as Day resolutely ignores us, showing us his shell.
The twitch has matured. What was buried deep now becomes asymmetrical: larger, longer, smoother, casting its energies outward. A sequential patterning is revealing itself. It is this softly held crafting, this delicate understanding of emergent design, this love of scored improvisation that will save Cannibal from any hint of self indulgence. Segments originate, develop, alter and morph into sequences that develop their own personality. But all remain connected as if with a pulsing thread, each moment is part of the whole, each moment born of the one that came before, each moment only made possible by the work’s self-generating history. While Cannibal accumulates itself moment by moment, it does not build predictably to crescendo. It waves, weaves and wavers. Sometimes it almost saunters into disappearance.
There is a piquancy in knowing that this performance will never be replicated but Cannibal preserves itself into a meta-history by a knowing of what must be scored, what must be set, to balance and temper the openness. The crystalline patternings of the lights, of the set, of the sound, of the spatial pathway and of the idea allow this performance to fly from solid ground.
Day sweats. This is the moisture of an intensity that never stops, that winds this body through its pathway across and around the asylum. There is never stillness, always the twitch is present as a pulse, a generator, a memory, a trace, a fire, a dance, a rhythm, occasionally a joke. Sweat starts as a shiny bead, it turns into a sheen, a patina of effort, then Day drips and as he heads toward us, his eyes the only truly still part of his being, his face is red with exertion against all the white whiteness and his blood pumped lips are crimson and slack.
I can see a man in effort. I can see dance as an elemental thing, a force of the world, revealing itself.
Matthew Day is not concerned with using the body to represent narrative, yet, as with the best of post modernism, momentary tales and stories nonetheless emerge and fade—not clung to as ultimate significance, but as breathing apertures of fleeting and individuated poetics. The play of repetition and variations turns Day into a simian hanging thing, a dance floor diva, a dying runner convulsing with exhaustion, a delirious floor fucker, a stoned ballerina in fourth and, for a moment, he becomes loose legged jive guy as Elvis begins to spasm and dissolve.
Body to body, Cannibal was a silencing event, smashing word and image, making heat on a balmy Sydney night.
Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Cannibal, choreographer & performer Matthew Day, sound James Brown, dramaturg Martin Del Amo, lighting: Travis Hodgson, PACT, Sydney, Feb 17-26
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 31
Richard Bligh, Anne Browning, Song of the Bleeding Throat, The Eleventh Hour
photo Ponch Hawkes
Richard Bligh, Anne Browning, Song of the Bleeding Throat, The Eleventh Hour
IN HER 1977 ESSAY “MODERN THEATER DOES NOT TAKE (A) PLACE,” JULIA KRISTEVA SOUNDS THE DEATH KNELL FOR THEATRE AS A PLACE OF COMMUNALLY CONSTRUED MEANING, AS IT MAY HAVE BEEN FOR THE GREEKS AT LEAST. “MODERN THEATER NO LONGER EXISTS OUTSIDE OF THE TEXT,” SHE WRITES, AND WHILE SUCH A STATEMENT MAY SOUND ODD GIVEN THE FERTILE FIELD OF NON-TEXT-BASED THEATRE THAT HAS FLOWERED IN SUBSEQUENT DECADES, KRISTEVA’S POINT IS THAT THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE—OR ITS ABSENCE—HAS TAKEN THE PLACE OF THE SHARED SACRED AS THEATRE ONCE EMBODIED IT.
It’s impossible to think about the most recent productions by Angus Cerini and The Eleventh Hour without considering their relationships to language. Both are intensely written, almost manic embraces of the wild possibilities of words; both, too, subject the idea of theatrical language—the grammar and vocabulary of performance itself—to a rigorous pummelling. Yet while each offers a provocative feat of linguistic acrobatics, their end results are of quite a different order.
the eleventh hour: song of the bleeding throat
The Eleventh Hour has long displayed an admirable ability to excavate the depths of canonical texts; rather than dressing up old works in frilly new garb, the company’s best work drills deep into the possibilities suggested by the plays themselves and returns to us these unearthed discoveries in intriguing, engaging assemblages. Song of the Bleeding Throat is a first for the group: an original play written by regular company member David Tredinnick and produced with the same incisive attention to detail which has marked Eleventh Hour’s previous adaptations.
Tredinnick’s script is a tissue of quotations, to steal Barthes’ phrase; a dense interweaving of historical sources and fictional dialogue staffed by an array of real and imagined figures giving voice to these borrowed lines. Its first half centres on the domestic world of Thomas Carlyle, here a buffoonish caricature whose foils include an anxious, narcotic-ridden wife and a deadpan dog with natural urges that threaten his master’s preferred life of the mind. The often troubling philosophical rants of this key proto-modern man—tracing thought-paths of colonialism and individualism—are thrown into relief by his painful constipation and the constant trips to the toilet; this vein of scatological humour runs throughout the work.
The second half of the work presents us with Abraham Lincoln on his deathbed, visited by his assassin John Wilkes Booth and poet Walt Whitman. Again, these historical figures are turned inside out, becoming mouthpieces for racist comedy, ironic self-promotion or a trembling instability of character. It’s reminiscent of a fine tradition of American post-war fiction that tears the guts out of similar iconic personages and repackages the corpses as excrement-stuffed scarecrows—an irreverence that here makes for provocative and entertaining viewing.
It doesn’t always work, though. The sheer dexterity of the wordplay makes great demands of its audience, and at times ideas are lost in the barrage of language. Director Brian Lipson frequently plays up the carnivalesque pyrotechnics of the production’s physical and visual aspects while obscuring the intellectual threads that wend their way through the script; ultimately we find ourselves scratching at the wall of words to glimpse what, if anything, might lie beyond. The rewards aren’t obvious, but that stymied search for something of value might just be the point. It’s certainly a memorable struggle.
Ben Grant, Peta Brady, Save For Crying
photo Vikk Shayen
Ben Grant, Peta Brady, Save For Crying
angus cerini: save for crying
As linguistically gymnastic but far less confounding, it took me some days to recover from Angus Cerini’s Save For Crying, easily one of the most impactful productions I’ve witnessed at La Mama. Just as unexpected was a realisation that this astonishing, sui generis work is still recognisably a play: there’s a strong narrative arc, distinctive characters, a unity of place and constancy of thematic concerns. At the same time, not a single element of this work seems an unconsidered legacy of any theatrical tradition; those elements which may resemble classic theatre-making are anything but conventional, instead appearing as if invented for the first time.
Luv and Alfie (Peta Brady, Ben Grant) are a straggle-haired and blank-eyed pair living in some squalid nook; daily they venture out to try to raise a few dollars for a meal and are regularly terrorised by the vicious Ratspunk (LeRoy Parsons) who relieves them of their money while abusing and degrading them. All the while they speak a curious pidgin, a language of abbreviated or reconfigured phrases with its own musical cadences.
So far, so Pinter. Alfie and Luv’s precise situation is never made obvious. There are strong hints of disability, but also suggestions of institutionalisation, mental illness, homelessness and addiction. Ratspunk’s nature is equally problematic—petty thug or shared projection? State sanctioned overlord or evil angel? He’s a fascinating character. He wears a shiny headdress of black feathers which is both menacing and ridiculous; as a figure of violent power, he is also ironically someone just as oppressed as his victims. To complicate matters he is played by an Indigenous actor. But Ratspunk uses his blackness as a weapon—his marginalisation is recognised, which puts him in a more potent position than those who can’t define their own disadvantage.
Cerini takes us far beyond the confines of Pinter, however; just as comparisons with Beckett or Ionescu prove limiting here. The intricate, carefully constructed language of the piece works not to alienate its audience or make strange this world but something rather opposite. Its rhythms and odd logic bring us into this world rather than situating us as cold observers. While the diction leaves us unable to locate the exact circumstances of Luv and Alfie’s predicament, it’s in this that we become more like them. There’s a little humour in the piece, but for the most part it’s a deeply humanist love story centred on the heart-rending connection between two people. They’re not outsiders. There is no outside.
Lighting, set and costume are all exquisitely accomplished here, creating a perfectly formed world from the inside out. So too does Cerini’s direction possess its own well-executed grammar. Violence is represented through sound rather than direct action; sexual violence through stylised postures. Both are even more terrible for what isn’t shown.
Where Song of the Bleeding Throat tears pieces from a history of discourse and pastes them together to produce a burlesque of the act of speaking itself, Save For Crying comes closer to building language from almost nothing. One is deeply, darkly critical, while the other is constructive and, in its way, animated by a fierce hopefulness. Eleventh Hour’s work seems to me closer to the profane—a reminder that the language of great thinkers and men of state is not that of the mundane world we live in. Perhaps more interesting to me is Cerini’s reproduction of the sacred theatre, in which through the act of watching—individually and communally—we share in the meanings of what we see before us.
The Eleventh Hour, Song of the Bleeding Throat, writer David Tredinnick, director Brian Lipson, performers Richard Bligh, Anne Browning, James Saunders, Neil Pigot, design Brian Lipson, Alexis George, costumes Alexis George, dramaturg William Henderson, lighting Niklas Pajanti, Nicola Andrews; Eleventh Hour Theatre, Jan 27-Feb 12; Save For Crying, writer, director Angus Cerini, performers Peta Brady, Ben Grant, LeRoy Parsons, lighting Rachel Burke, set & costumes Marg Horwell, composer Kelly Ryall; La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, Feb 18-Mar 6
ACROSS 51 SHORT SCENES GERMAN PLAYWRIGHT ROLAND SCHIMMELPFENNIG CONJURES A COSMOS FROM AN EXPLODING LIGHT GLOBE—LIKE THAT FAMOUS BUTTERFLY IT TRIGGERS CYCLONIC, EVEN QUASI-SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS LIGHT YEARS AWAY, BUT IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR TOO, IN THE SAME HOTEL, WHERE RELATIONSHIPS FALL IN AND OUT OF SYNC AND SOLO LIVES HANG ON FOR DEAR LIFE. BEFOREAFTER PLAYS OUT LIKE HUMANISED CHAOS THEORY. WHEREAS ITS NEAR KIN, BOTHO STRAUSS’ BIG AND LITTLE SCENES (COMING TO THE STC THIS YEAR), LARGELY TRACKS THE LIFE OF ONE WOMAN, LOTTE, BEFOREAFTER IS MORE DIFFUSE, MORE CHAOTIC—A SERIOUS CHALLENGE FOR DIRECTOR, DESIGNERS AND PERFORMERS.
The moment of panic experienced when the globe shatters is made analogous with the disgust at seeing oneself naked in a mirror or the shock of realising you’re on the edge of infidelity or, more quietly, with having to face one’s aloneness late in life and trying to put it into perspective. These and other trains of thought are densely woven in BeforeAfter if loosened by the play’s episodic construction—you have to pay attention. But director Cristabel Sved and her design team have a very good go at keeping themes focussed and creating coherence if on occasion letting it unravel with a superfluity of effects. Some work well—actors invade intimate bedroom scenes, wielding cameras and casting close-ups onto the walls, but later the images are huge and ill-defined, their purpose uncertain. The projection of the classic animated cartoon Hoppity Goes to Town (Fleischer Studios, 1941)—about nature invaded by humans—juxtaposes a sense of innocent purpose with the near bizarre complexities of human life (one woman loses weight and height and another’s speech involuntarily speeds up and slows down). Elsewhere the stage is convincingly transformed into a glowing galaxy dancing with suspended and hand-held lights.
The biggest challenge was one only partly met—the tight ensemble playing that a work like BeforeAfter demands. Physically and spatially, actors and director do well enough, realising with agility some 40 characters, but they fail to find a shared voice and common rhythms. The largely brisk, naturalistic delivery gravitated against the play’s strangeness and its peculiar poetry if somewhat compensated for by the production’s various clever design aspects. Doubtless a short rehearsal period for such a large work would not have helped. Nonetheless, the ambitions of playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig and director Cristabel Sved made for an adventurous theatrical experience, and one quite out of the ordinary.
STC Next Stage: BeforeAfter, writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, director Cristabel Sved, performers Annie Byron, Justin Stewart Cotta, Zinozi Okenyo, Johanna Puglisi, Richard Pyros, Graham Rhodes, Sophie Ross, Tahki Saul, designer Justin Nardelle, lighting & audio-visual design Verity Hampson, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert, choreographer Johanna Puglisi; Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Co, Feb 4-19
THE VICTORIAN ARTS CENTRE’S CARNEGIE 18 PROGRAM PROVIDES FUNDS AND EXPERTISE TO DEVELOP EMBRYONIC WORKS FROM MELBOURNE’S VIBRANT MUSICAL THEATRE SCENE. TAKING ITS NAME FROM THE STAGE OF FOETAL DEVELOPMENT WHEN THE INNER EAR IS FORMED, THE PROGRAM SEEKS NOT ONLY TO PROVIDE A PLATFORM FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW MUSIC THEATRE, BUT TO QUESTION THE BOUNDARIES OF THE GENRE. IN UTERO, SO TO SPEAK, THE FOUR CARNEGIE 18 WORKS OF 2010—EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIBLE, RAWK, CONTACT! AND CURTAINS—ARE REMARKABLE IN THEIR VENEERS OF COMPLETION AND THE CHALLENGES EACH WORK PRESENTS FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT.
contact!
Composer Angus Grant found the ideal subject matter for his operetta Contact! in suburban netball—dramatic, quintessentially Australian and just a little daggy. The cast, consisting of a seven-girl netball team, their coach Bev and her son Bevan, induce a few Eureka moments as the traditional opera elements of chorus, recitative and aria are used to add expressive and humorous emphasis to netball colloquialisms and high school vernacular. The girls incredulously drone “what is she on” at the newly arrived Goth and prodigious goal shooter Daisy, and sing out the game’s ubiquitous “if you need” during simulated netball matches. Wendy, the coach’s daughter, expresses her girl-crush on Daisy in an aria reminiscent of one of Puccini’s early 20th century hits. Even the orchestra is in on the game, suitably attired in netball bibs.
Beyond a humorous subject for tried and tested musical methods, Grant foregrounds the seemingly endless rules of the sport, including the prohibition of contact. It might be said that, beyond the game’s status as a ‘Commonwealth’ sport, its abundance of rules and restriction of contact is what makes it most ‘Australian.’ As such, I would like to see the budding romance between Daisy and Wendy developed further, in stark opposition to Bev and her fixation on football players and teen pregnancy. With further character and plot development to back up Grant’s musical wit, both performers and audiences will be kept ‘on their toes.’
every angel is terrible
In stark contrast to Contact!’s serious music and light-hearted plot, Every Angel is Terrible uses saccharine show tunes to show up the contradiction between society’s sparkling exterior and the persistence of its greatest taboo, filicide. The writers and composers Maude Davey, Sarah Ward, Bec Matthews and Ania Reynolds tell their contemporary fable through Weillian cabaret tunes, Larson-esque choruses and Krieger-like diva moments. The composers are in good company with Weill, whose 1927 “scenic cantata” Mahagonny held up an unflattering mirror to “a public which goes to the theatre naïvely and for fun.” However, unlike Weill’s ‘naïve’ audience, contemporary theatre-goers have a century of challenging theatre behind them and so are largely immured to Every Angel is Terrible’s shock tactics. No great unmasking was apparent when the performers tricked the audience into imagining themselves killing a child and asked rhetorically, “but we wouldn’t do that, would we?” Considering the writers claimed to have no personal experience with filicide, their desire to unmask the killer lurking inside each of us betrays less their ability to see through the façade of our supposedly filicide-oblivious society than just another symptom of our media-driven obsession with it.
The writers’ claim to “listen to the children” comes through appropriately in their retelling of Hansel and Gretel, in which a social worker arrives at the witch’s house where Hansel is being fattened and ignores Gretel’s pleas for help. However, when Gretel bursts forth with her Dreamgirls-like “Everything I say is true” the writers attempt a sincere representation of grief that slips back into the sugar-coated hypocrisy they try to unmask. Overall, the audience seemed divided between those who thought the issue should be addressed and those who thought it should not be addressed in this way, which is not exactly a division. Can this versatile group of composers, aided by the sublime projection art by Cazerine Barry, find a way of telling these stories without resorting to hollow shock tactics and melodramatic musical clichés that only reinforce the voyeuristic gestures of the mass-media? While ‘listening to the children’ is not an option, engaging others whose lives have been directly affected by filicide might be.
rawk
Moving right away from traditional musical and operatic styles, Peter Burgess’ RAWK pioneers the soft metal musical. It tells the story of Tim who takes the message of his anti-capitalist rock-star hero, RAWK, seriously. He quits his job, hits the streets, deals drugs and eventually returns to his former life while RAWK himself exposes his manipulative marketing strategies through a series of acoustic guitar confessionals. The band, consisting of Burgess, Matthew Lewin, Markus Buckley and Arron Light produce a polished soft metal sound reminiscent of those anti-establishment paragons of the 90s, Rage Against The Machine and Tool. Pulling the musical back into the 80s, the melodic strains of Pearl Jam can also be heard in Tim’s more heartfelt moments. While the music is well composed and executed, the lyrics require finessing to give the characters depth. If, as Burgess expressed in question time, he would like to present this fable to school students, then he may need to draw on more 21st century musical influences lest he appeal solely to the two spotty rockers in each year level.
curtains
Hilarious, clever and gripping, David Chisholm’s Curtains–part three of a set of five extended works that “examine lost, dead or decaying musical forms”—is a take on the Broadway musical. Performers Yana Alana, Tina del Twist, Mikelangelo and Meow Meow mill about the stage, occasionally telling the story of, and performing in, a revival concert of the musical Revival in a “Marxist critique of Hollywood and Broadway culture.” No striking point is made about Broadway through the show’s not-completely-non-linear plot. Yes, we know that performers get chewed up and spat out by the entertainment industry. On the other hand, Chisholm’s musical dialectic of synthesised barrel organ representing the culture industry and the Silo string quartet representing the actors’ “humanity” is thought provoking because so insidiously affecting. Deftly bending this unusual ensemble around the Broadway musical style, Chisholm leads the audience to sympathise with Wes Snelling, crooning as Tina del Twist playing Dorothy Day playing a character in Revival. That is, until Yana Alana interjects with “Do you want some ham to go with that cheese?” causing layers of artifice to unravel and re-ravel once more. Constantly renegotiating the audience’s relation to the characters playing characters through layers of storytelling, Curtains traps the audience in a break-neck barrel organ comedy. With improvisation and pre-established characters playing a vital role, it will be interesting to see what is churned out when different sets of performers are fed into Chisholm’s barrel organ entertainment machine.
Taken together, the four works of the 2010 Carnegie 18 series challenge the audience to broaden their notion of music theatre, operetta and cabaret. More importantly, the combination of musical talent and thematic interest in each work provides scope for further development and performance.
Full Tilt: Carnegie 18, New Music Theatre Series, Contact!, composer Angus Grant, libretto Angus Grant, Kate Schmitt; Every Angel is Terrible, composers Maude Davey, Sarah Ward, Bec Matthews, Ania Reynolds, book Maude Davey, Sarah Ward; RAWK, music & book Peter Burgess; Curtains, music & book David Chisholm; Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Jan 19-25
THE NOW NOW FESTIVAL OF SPONTANEOUS MUSIC IS ALWAYS AN ADVENTURE AND OFTEN MOVES IN UNCHARTED MUSICAL TERRITORY OR, IN THE WORDS OF GUEST MC, SEAN BAXTER, IS “10 YEARS LONG [AND] ALWAYS BRUTAL.” THIS YEAR THE FESTIVAL RETURNED TO THE INNER WEST OF SYDNEY AFTER THREE YEARS IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, THE FORMAT CHANGING FROM ONE INTENSE WEEKEND TO SEVEN EVENING CONCERTS OVER EIGHT DAYS (FIVE AT THE RED RATTLER CLUB AND TWO OFF-SITE). THE ENDURANCE REQUIRED FOR THESE PLUS THE MARRICKVILLE AMBIENCE BROUGHT A DIFFERENT EDGE TO THE EVENT AND MARKED THE COMPLETION OF A TWO-TO-THREE YEAR TRANSITION INTO THE SAFE HANDS OF A NEW ORGANISING TEAM.
The festival got off to an excellent start with two very different but fine quartets. First up was Embedded, a new combo with Rishin Singh (trombone), Monica Brooks (accordion), Sam Pettigrew (bass) and Jim Denley (sax/flutes/various extensions) creating an intense concentration of acoustic sound from among the audience. From here the instruments combined to build a remarkable sound mass—frequency ranges coalescing into a group characteristic that provided solid backdrops for the various rebounding staccato effects produced by each player. A vibrating, dense jungle inhabited by Denley’s rubber extensions and Pettigrew’s (strangely loud) application of polystyrene to a resonant bass body combined with high squeaks from Brooks’ accordion and breathy attacks from the trombone to create a mesmeric world of sound.
Simon Ferrenci, Reuben Derrick
film stills Joe Glaysher
Simon Ferrenci, Reuben Derrick
Reuben Derrick (NZ), Simon Ferenci, Milica Stefanovic and Evan Dorrian settled into sympathetic communication very quickly with Dorrian and Stefanovich setting a funereal tone with single bass/bass drum strikes before Dorrian’s stickless, free-hand agitations pushed the piece along into more layered textures. At one point the cut-rhythm bass tugged at a funk feel only to be subverted by aquatic textures emerging from the clarinet as Derrick processed it through an amplified bin full of water. The trumpet’s distant calls evolved into a syncopated tussle between the wind instruments only to be replaced by the mournful beauty of a lone clarinet across the rhythm section, all ultimately replaced by Ferenci’s trademark metal-on-metal scraping.
This first night finished with Brisbane’s Sky Needle (Joel Stern, Alex Cuffe, Ross Manning and Sarah Byrne) pressing noise into the service of the song cycle. They misappropriated the form with splendid anarchy and without regard for tradition. All objects played by this group are their own inventions. One instrument was a cross between a bass guitar and a mobile angle grinder and another resembled an African thumb piano/dulcimer combination. Stern’s feet pumped for dear life to produce percussive wind sounds at the end of a couple of tubes and Byrne sounded like an out-of-control Siouxie Sioux. This is surely the future of pop!
On Saturday Peter Blamey was first up, suspending and dropping hair’s breadth copper wire from above onto six or so open circuit boards like some interpretive suicide leap. The circuits screamed and pulsed cataclysmically whilst Blamey sat in Frankensteinian calm extracting music from the incidental noise and discordant pulses occurring deep within the sonic material.
The next night’s highlight was the duet by Tony Buck (percussion) and Magda Mayas (prepared piano). Harmonics seeped from all that they struck, scraped and wrung out producing a luscious ebb and flow of complex layers. Lost in the evocations of this piece, I imagined at one point that I was hearing the everyday sounds of a small town, notated and reproduced in musical form. Eyes closed, I lost track of instrument identity sometimes and had to look back at the stage to understand exactly what was creating these sounds so full of cadence, resonance and melody.
This perception of blurring sonic boundaries between instruments was also a feature of Martin Kirkwood (electronics) and Peter Farrar’s (extended saxophone) set, a couple of nights later. There were sonic ‘illusions’ in this arresting piece wherein goat-calls appeared amid pure machinistic pulses, collapsing the tenor and the electronics into a curious unity. Farrar’s blown sounds, created by various plastic attachments and insertions, brought the integrity of the saxophone into joyful disrepute by creasing bits of drink bottles and other flotsam into vibrating buzzes and moans. Conversely Kirkwood’s pedals and boxes, some looking like a home electronics project, often achieved notes of pure acoustic clarity.
At the louder end of the music discourse was Melbourne drummer Sean Baxter demonstrating what he meant by sonic brutality with his renowned floor tom and feedback work (night five at Serial Space) which utilised various metal scraps bent and tortured by Baxter to both provoke and subdue varying levels of PA feedback. The following night he joined Hermione Johnson (piano), NZ’s Jeff Henderson (sax) and Mike Majkowski (double bass) on the Red Rattler stage with his full kit in a breakneck romp that turned up the temperature further in Marrickville’s summer steam. Following this on Friday we were treated to Scandinavian trio The Thing who are Mats Gustafasson (tenor & baritone sax), Ingebright H Flaten (double bass) and Nilssen-Love (drums). They took off from zero to hit full-speed a split-second later. In both these bands the listening was deceptively intense between the players. Walls of sound came at you with playing that was flat out but which dispersed incongruously until only remnants of the original energy remained. Accelerating unison playing and seamless tempo shifts attest to the level of attention these players exercise.
But for me it was the collaboration on night five, AV, between Norwegian Kym Myhr (guitar, autoharp and various electric devices and extensions), Sam Pettigrew (bass & extensions) and Nick Shimmin (film curation) that produced the most finely tuned and sensitive playing of the festival. Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s “personal” work, True To Life contained macro probings of a variety of plant-life and exchanged background/foreground positions with the musicians. The music seemed to move between creating a dramatic and foreboding soundtrack while at other times itself becoming the subject of strange narrative contexts evoked by the abstracted images. Listening by players and audience alike was perceptible and Myhr and Pettigrew’s acute sensitivity within their sound world was intriguing. It created a piece that explored an extraordinary dynamic range and compositional awareness as autoharp arpeggios, a ringing bowl and the strategic placing of small electric motors against a variety of resonant and pitched objects played within and across the assertions of Pettigrew’s fingering and long bowing bass sequences.
Earlier in the night there were some fine AV co-ordinations from Aemon Webb and Jon Watts which were as different from John Blades’ multimedia narratives on Saturday as those narratives were from the spoken mythic inventions of Gerard Crewdson (NZ) on Monday at the Camperdown concert. From the sinewy progressions of the trio Roil on Saturday to the exquisite minimalism of Thursday’s sampling trio Jason Kahn (Canada), Adam Sussman and Matt Earle, the Now Now 2011 was an exciting week of music and the range of noise presented was wide as always and of course, the Splinter Orchestra played a set too!
the NOW now 2011, curators Laura Altman, Mike Majkowski, Sam Pettigrew, various locations, Sydney, Jan 21-28; www.theNOWnow.com
SOUNDOUT IS THE NEW-KID-ON-THE-FESTIVAL-BLOCK, BUT BY NO MEANS UNFORMED IN TERMS OF AGENDA. WHILE OTHER FESTIVALS MAY NOW TAKE IN INFLUENCES FROM A RANGE OF MUSICS WITH EXPERIMENTAL FRINGES (POP, FOLK, BEATS), SOUNDOUT DIRECTED BY RICHARD JOHNSON, IS UNCOMPROMISING IN ITS PURE PURSUIT OF MUSIC IN THE MOMENT, SOUGHT THROUGH FREE JAZZ AND IMPROVISATION.
Johnson has established a rigorous structure in which 20 artists play in a range of groupings for a total of 16 hours over two days. If you attended the entire festival (which I, the artists, and a few dedicated punters did) you were treated to seeing the same people perform up to five times. The original programming, promising 40-minute sets with 8-minute turnaround times, quickly proved impractical as artists felt they needed to play for as long or (as was more often the case) as briefly as felt right—and thankfully some shorter sets allowed the audience to take a break. So while the event felt a little like an endurance test, there were many rewarding moments of which the following are but a few.
It was a joy to witness another instalment of the Great Waitress—Magda Mayas (Germany), Monica Brooks and Laura Altman. I saw them first at the 2009 NOW Now festival (RT89) and really appreciated their intense, quiet focus. This time they were louder and more forceful, Brooks on accordion producing fat humming drones, Altman on clarinet interjecting with high tones and overblows while Mayas, with her hands in the instrument, pulled strings attached to piano wires to create long, slow glissandi and big bent notes, evoking a Fellini-esque circus ambience.
Saxophonists Jim Denley and Rosalind Hall re-arranged the room to sit facing each other across a table set amid the audience. While Hall explored timbral shifts over long tones by placing a variety of objects into the bell of her saxophone, Denley, augmenting the mouthpiece of his sax with his trusty balloon extension, worked more with rhythm and phrasing. Their searchings around each other’s sounds created the sense of a challenging, yet cheeky conversation.
A playful approach also characterised a collaboration between Cor Fuhler (Germany), Dale Gorfinkel and Kim Myhr (Norway). Fuhler generated startling harmonics with magnets and ebows and then set toys crawling over the strings, while Myhr bowed ancient fairy tones from a zither. Gorfinkel added and subtracted bits from his trumpet/trombone hybrid, augmented with tubing and extra motors on which he placed spinning bits of styrofoam, his instrument strangely reminiscent of a platypus in its mismatched wonder. The overall combination of rich drones, agitated pizzicatos and friction squeals was as joyous as it was unique.
Late on the Sunday afternoon a primal drumming sequence from Gorfinkel and James Waples, with stuttered, broken chords from Brooks on piano, kicked in before the audience had come back from a break, creating a sense that we were welcome but not necessary to the proceedings: this was purely an exploration for the musicians themselves. After the initial energy burst of drumming fell away, Brooks busied herself running a glass over the strings of the piano; Waples explored a scratching sequence over his kits including cymbal spinning; and, after a long period of non-participation, Gorfinkel explored a tapping sequence on his trumpet. It was the purest set of the festival in its unabashed pursuit of sound-making actions with less concern as to how these might be shaped to appeal to an audience. It was a kind of crumbly music, with no binding principles beyond the authenticity of the actions themselves—a thought provoking session that had me pondering the tensions between process and presentation in improvisation.
The most invigorating shake-up was experienced in the blistering power jazz of The Thing (Norway/Sweden). With the bravado of stadium rock the trio delivered a sustained high-energy set—a seemingly endless stream of notes and complex rhythmic interplay crashing, clashing and sometimes combining. Occasionally it resolved into merely medium-energy free jazz, the saxophonist Mats Gustavsson treating us to fragments of nostalgic melody while the bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten generated warm fuzzy feedback hum through his amplifier until the drummer, Paal Nilssen-Love could no longer rein in his need to go faster, harder and louder and the band exploded, again—all orgasm faces and forces. The trio was joined by Tony Buck, also on drums, Mayas on piano and Mike Majkowski on bass and The Thing pulled back politely, creating something of a harmonic field over which the others added angular and pointillist elements.
Isaiah Ceccarelli, SoundOut 2011
photo Yasmin Masri
Isaiah Ceccarelli, SoundOut 2011
However the most surprising turn in events came in the 16th set (out of 20) of the festival with Denley and Richard Johnson on woodwinds and Evan Dorrian and Canadian artist Isaiah Ceccarelli on drums. Ceccarelli had been an intriguing presence, often sustaining an action through long sections of a set, providing a sense of consistency while others swirled around him. In this instance, after exploring the running of bells across his drum, he suddenly burst into song! In a beautiful baritone he executed interval leaps and chants, creating an improv opera that was playful, profoundly beautiful and surprising, energising everyone, most of all, perhaps, his fellow musicians.
Moments like Ceccarelli’s poetic outpouring and Gorfinkel/Waples/Brooks’ ‘crumbly music’ were interesting responses to the intensity otherwise generated by the SoundOut format. (Yan Jun from China on delicate handmade electronics and Monica Brooks on accordion also sought extremes in their exactingly minimalist set in which the in-house cricket was decibels louder than their output.) It was fascinating to watch musicians discover that some of their tactics were exhausted by their fifth appearance, forcing them to push further to find new methods of engagement with their own instruments and with the group. Experiencing all the SoundOut sessions was not for the faint-hearted, but the compression certainly brought something out in the musicians: this energy was felt by audiences attending even a single session. While the NOW now festival (page 38) covers a similar improv remit, it encourages a little more cross-genre play and is more spacious, spread over several evenings. The crazy intensity of the work-day units of SoundOut, its purity of focus and its location in our nation’s capital offer it genuine points of difference.
SoundOut 2011, director Richard Johnson, artists Cor Fuhler, Dale Gorfinkel, Evan Dorrian, Jim Denley, Kim Myhr, Laura Altman, Magda Mayas, Michael Norris, Mike Majkowski, Monika Brooks, Richard Johnson, Rosalind Hall, Shoeb Ahmed, The Thing (Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Paal Nilssen-Love), Tony Buck, Isaiah Ceccarelli, James Waples, Yan Jun; The Street Theatre, Canberra, Jan 29-30
Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe, James Rushford, Golden Fur
courtesy the aritsts
Judith Hamann, Sam Dunscombe, James Rushford, Golden Fur
THE COCHLEAR IMPLANT CONSISTS OF 22 ELECTRODES CONNECTED DIRECTLY TO THE AUDITORY NERVE. A MICROPHONE TRANSMITS AN AUDIO SIGNAL TO THESE ELECTRODES, ALLOWING THE WEARER TO BECOME AWARE OF THE SOUNDS AROUND THEM. GIVEN THE DIFFICULTY FOR COCHLEAR IMPLANT WEARERS TO DISTINGUISH TIMBRE AND PITCH, MUSIC IS A CHALLENGING AND SOMETIMES UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE. THE INTERIOR DESIGN: MUSIC FOR THE BIONIC EAR PROJECT, CULMINATING IN A PERFORMANCE OF SIX NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORKS, AIMED TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE.
In the concert, performed by Golden Fur and Speak Percussion, 11 loudspeakers were designed to mimic the 22 electrodes in a cochlear implant for an audience listening with and without implants. Composers and scientists have worked with wearers to investigate which sounds can be effectively perceived.
As well as the practical objective of producing music that can be appreciated by cochlear implant wearers, this project also raises questions about the nature of musical engagement. How does one go about composing music for someone with an entirely different experience of sound from one’s own?
A similar dilemma is faced by audiences who do not use implants. At times it was difficult to know how certain sounds were intended to be perceived, given that a number of the compositions used sounds specifically chosen for the way they would be experienced through an implant. For example, Ben Harper’s This is All I Need employs a tuning system based on the frequency spectrum of the electrodes in the cochlear implant. Rohan Drape’s Another in Another Dark uses extreme limitation as a means of focusing a listener’s perception. Instruments play various combinations of one or two note fragments at a slow tempo, with slight variations in duration. The result is something analogous to a suspended mobile, in that the experience of the work does not change over time, although the gradual shift of parts creates an illusion of changing perspectives.
Natasha Anderson’s Study for the Bionic Ear #1 moves between radically different sound worlds. The work begins with a stark and dry pallet of shaker, bongos and congas played with mallets. This is transformed with the introduction of piano samples—single note, contrasting rhythmic patterns sent through various speaker channels. In stark contrast to this highly rhythmic and energetic language, the final section uses bowed vibraphone, vibraphone tremolos, sine tones and samples of cello harmonics to create a highly spacious and atmospheric sound world.
Eugene Ughetti’s Syncretism A engages through a sense of theatricality and playfulness. Three percussionists with expanded drum kit set-ups play with speech, dynamic level and obscured stylistic references. The work is a pastiche of contrasting styles and techniques. Hand-held microphones are used to diffuse the sound of certain instruments into various parts of the theatre.
In a brief statement preceding the concert, artistic director Robin Fox drew attention to the fact that the works of these composers are rooted in an experimental aesthetic, concerned with challenging the parameters through which we engage with music. It follows logically that composers with this kind of approach, generally speaking, would be the obvious choice for such a project. However there were instances in the program where the conceptual agenda weighed the music down for the hearing audience.
It is a supreme challenge to compose music that will be perceived in an entirely different acoustic reality. Fox’s 3 Studies for the Bionic Ear achieved this most convincingly. In this work, sound was diffused through speakers in various patterns, an integral component in the language. These sonic patterns were accompanied by visual material that was highly integrated with sound, brilliantly drawing attention to subtle sonic shifts which may not otherwise have been noticed. What was most exciting was that the strength and clarity of the gestures produced by sound and visuals made it seem entirely feasible that this work would be just as engaging through a radically different mode of perceiving sound.
James Rushford’s Tusilage was also a standout work, due purely to the strength of its musical material. Performed by Rushford on viola, Judith Hamann on cello and accompanied by tape play-back, there was an eloquence and depth in its form, created through a sophisticated layering of material. Variations in the complexity and density of timbre were created through an exploration of the sonic potential of the bowed instruments and planes of pre-recorded sounds, allowing Tusilage to traverse vastly different states of energy and movement.
Interior Design: Music for the Bionic Ear, artistic director Robin Fox, composers Robin Fox, Natasha Anderson, Rohan Drape, Eugene Ughetti, Ben Harper, James Rushford, performers Golden Fur, Speak Percussion, Fairfax Theatre, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Feb 13
RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 39
Eric La Casa’s Spirale 4, Bogong Air
photo John Billan
Eric La Casa’s Spirale 4, Bogong Air
FOLLOWING AN OVERNIGHT DELUGE, THE KIEWA RIVER WAS A SWOLLEN BODY OF TURBULENT WHITE WATER. WE STOOD A SCANT METRE ABOVE THE TORRENT ON AN OLD LOG BRIDGE WITH SAX-PLAYING JIM DENLEY, WHOSE WHOLE BODY WAS STRAINING WITH THE EFFORT OF BLOWING AMID THE WATER’S WHITE NOISE. THE WATER HAD GRAVITY ON ITS SIDE, PLUNGING DOWN THE CHANNELS OF THE MOUNTAINS, WHILST DENLEY HAD HUBRIS ON HIS; OR SEEMINGLY SO, UNTIL HIS PARTING COMMENT: “THAT WAS JUST SO WE KNOW HOW PATHETIC WE REALLY ARE.”
This performance was part of the weekend long Bogong AIR Festival of site-specific sound art at Mt Bogong Village in the Alpine region of Victoria, staged by composer Philip Samartzis and his partner Madelynne Cornish, in conjunction with Melbourne’s West Space gallery. Artists included Slavek Kwi, Natasha Anderson, Jim Denley, Rosalind Hall, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Dianne Peacock, who all undertook a five-day residency in the lead-up to the festival “in order to develop responses to the acoustic and spatial dynamics of Bogong Alpine Village.”
Mt Bogong is Victoria’s highest peak and has long been a site of significance. The village is situated on the side of a valley and has a sense of the uncanny about it, produced by the unusual mix of natural and artificial elements. The village was built in the 1930s to support the installation of a hydro-electric system while Lake Guy, at the foot of the village, is part of a concealed network of pipes, tunnels, catchments and generators that handle water flows around the system. The buildings of the village were constructed at the same time, and are now largely empty outside of tourist usage: perhaps this produces something of the ‘ghost town’ feel.
Site-specific audio has recently been featured at the Rolling Stock event in Junee, NSW (RT101) and has also attracted a high public profile with Suzanne Philipsz’s Lost Reflection winning the UK’s Turner Prize. The outdoor performances of Bogong AIR set sound within nature, the tension of this combination heightened by the intense weather conditions, as indicated by Denley’s performance. On the day, the artist invited the audience to his solo piece with a caution that it entailed a 20-minute walk through rain and wind on a slippery path; after a moment’s pause, almost everyone set out to follow him. Indeed, getting wet did not prove fatal and the effort involved gave the experience a stronger character.
In her artist’s talk, recorder player Natasha Anderson remarked on the linking of music and a forest setting—apparently the recorder was a key instrument of the Hitler Youth and playing it in forests part of an ideological idealisation of nature. Anderson’s solo performance at the dam wall seemed unusually disjointed and awkward, but became more interesting in the context of these cultural references.
JIm Denley, Bogong Air
photo John Billan
Jim Denley, Bogong Air
Denley and Anderson, Hall and Hui-Sheng performed in pairs inside the vaults of the dam wall creating a satisfying and delicate work that explored the acoustics of the space. In a nearby forest clearing, Denley, Hui-Shang and Hall’s trio performance was curiously enhanced by the drizzle—the strong presence of the elements perhaps evoking something pagan. Architect Dianne Peacock created a video work based on the dam wall architecture, re-projecting it within the space. Interestingly, the creative process of filming functioned as a starting point for Peacock’s imagination, as she re-imagined the monumental dam structure as a concrete skyscraper to be played upon. Eric Le Casa’s composition for canoe, was a gorgeous festival highlight, placing two listeners at a time with iPods in the floating boat. The electro-acoustic composition comprised natural and artificial sounds related to water, responding to the unusual mix of those elements at the site. La Casa’s half-hour composition, if perhaps overly exhaustive in exploring its theme, ranged dynamically across passages of powerful materiality and delicacy, surprising shifts of perspective and intensity.
Visiting from Ireland to present work at the 10 Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania was Slavek Kwi, working under the name Artificial Memory Trace. In his talk, he linked the relatively anarchic space of experimental composition to his upbringing under the strict rules of communist Czechoslovakia; the distinctness of his experience evidenced by the passing comment that he never really got into trouble with the regime, and that the police only confiscated or destroyed his record collection a couple of times! Kwi’s audio brought a musical approach to field recording, utilising repetitive rhythmic material and sounds collected at the site blended with strobe lights and sculptural elements to make a surprisingly theatrical and energizing performance. The artist’s belief in the importance of perception and its role in art gave his work a strongly material quality that was playful and intense.
Curator Philip Samartzis presented Crush Grind, a work using sound and video recordings from a 2010 Antarctic residency. The audio component, previously heard at Heide Museum of Modern Art, features the exceptionally high quality recordings for which Samartzis is known worked together in a fashion that privileges content over process. This time around, Samartzis has included a video componentwherein almost static views of the Australian Base interior (minus people) are featured, with the intent of capturing the visual reality and mundanity of the station, while the high-resolution audio speaks of the scale and intensity of the southern continent. The work offers an intriguing insight into life on base and, ignoring the video, an evocatively crisp and spatially dynamic soundscape.
I hope Bogong AIR happens again and, if it does, you should try to be there. Site-specific sound is a fascinating area of practice that builds on sound’s unique acoustic phenomenology and aesthetics: it was presented here with integrity.
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West Space: Bogong AIR Festival, festival of site-specific sound art, artists Slavek Kwi, Natasha Anderson, Jim Denley, Rosalind Hall, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Eric La Casa, Dianne Peacock, Philip Samartzis, Bogong Village, Victoria, Feb 19, 20; www.westspace.org.au/projects/bogong-air-festival.html
COMBINING WORKS OF MUSIC AND FILM THAT WERE ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO BE SEPARATE MAY SEEM LIKE A STRATEGIC ACT OF POSTMODERN APPROPRIATION OR INTERTEXTUAL ENQUIRY. STEPHEN WHITTINGTON’S THE MUSIC OF LIGHT IS IN FACT A UNIQUE TREATMENT OF THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF US FILMMAKER STAN BRAKHAGE (1933–2003) AND OF THE MUSIC OF THE COMPOSERS WHOSE WORK HE PERFORMS WHILE SHOWING BRAKHAGE’S FILMS. ULTIMATELY, WHITTINGTON’S PERFORMANCE IS AN ESSAY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOUND, LIGHT AND HUMAN PERCEPTION, AN ESSAY THAT IS ITSELF A WORK OF ART.
In this 90-minute performance, Adelaide pianist, composer and lecturer Stephen Whittington shows several of Brakhage’s most famous short films, including Dog Star Man Part 2 (1963), Black Ice (1994) and Glaze of Cathexis (1990). Simultaneously, he performs at the piano the music firstly of JS Bach and then Alexander Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, Philip Corner, Anton Webern and Josef Matthias Hauer, and he replays a computer-mediated recording he made of keyboard music by Brakhage’s associate James Tenney. Brakhage, initially a poet, was influenced by Bach and studied music to inform his filmmaking and, in the program note, Whittington suggests that Brakhage’s films were visual embodiments of sound. Whittington also performs his own work, Passacaglia B.A.C.H. (2011), which he wrote for this performance, an entrancing piece performed without film accompaniment to allow viewers to focus solely on the music.
Stan Brakhage made hundreds of short films, some just a minute or two in length and some using radical techniques such as gluing objects onto the celluloid or scratching or hand colouring it. These were works of visual art more than cinema, often having the effect of an abstract painting unfolding in time. Those films that focused on places and people, for example The Wonder Ring (1955), which shows scenes shot from a train window—the world as perceived by the train—are primarily optical rather than narrative. The rapid succession of abstract shapes asks us to experience our visual awareness rather than read for meaning, and so to consider how we assign meaning to imagery. We’re invited to try to regain our visual naivety or innocence.
Brakhage’s film is avant garde in its intent and form, using the medium to analyse visual perception. Each composer also contributed to the dialogue on the essence of music, their avant-gardism lying in the investigation of the inner truth of their chosen art. The Music of Light is not a thorough analysis of Brakhage’s oeuvre, but considers aspects of his work and their relationship to music. Nor does the performance fully consider the oeuvres and impact of the composers. Instead, it is a synthesis of certain aspects of their respective work. This performance recalls some significant milestones in Western artistic development.
Whittington introduces Brakhage’s work and the music with readings—from Wassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1911), Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony (1911) and Johann Von Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810). Kandinsky, the so-called father of abstraction, explicitly addressed the relationship between art and music, and The Music of Light illustrates these writers’ theories. Whittington also read from Brakhage’s Metaphors for Vision (1963), which opens with, “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.”
Whittington states that the music was not intended to accompany the film, but that the performance comprised two streams in parallel. But the Brakhage works were intended to be silent and the music was intended to be heard on its own, prompting us to consider how combining them affects both visual and musical experiences. By blending visual, musical and textual discourses into a unique synthesis, Whittington creates an exciting new work that represents the way in which sound can induce visual awareness and vice versa. This cross-mediation of vision, sound and performed text opens each discipline to deeper phenomenological analysis through comparison and demonstrates the coherence between them, amplifying and confirming the nature of human awareness of light and sound and the way they are theorised.
The Music of Light is an illuminating and finely crafted performance. The program concludes with Brakhage’s Chinese Series (2003), made by the artist on his deathbed, and is accompanied by Whittington’s arrangement of Bach’s last work, also written on the deathbed, the Chorale Prelude: Before Thy Throne (1750). Whittington completes the parallel by describing the arc of the two artists’ lives, each leaving a final statement that reflected on life, death and God.
Stephen Whittington, The Music of Light, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2011 Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival, Feb 27
SANDY EDWARDS IS A DISTINGUISHED SYDNEY-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER AND CURATOR. I TALKED TO HER ABOUT HOW PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE ASSISTED, MENTORED AND EXHIBITED HERE GIVEN THE PAUCITY OF GALLERIES THAT EITHER SPECIALISE IN OR FEEL CONFIDENT TO EXHIBIT PHOTOGRAPHY AND ABOUT HER ROLE AS CREATIVE PRODUCER IN HER BUSINESS, ARTHERE, WHICH PROVIDES SERVICES FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS AS WELL AS MENTORING AND CONSULTATION.
What was the impetus for ARTHERE?
I’d been working at Stills Gallery for about 17 years. Stills is a beacon for photographers because there are so few prestige galleries that focus purely on photography in Australia. At Stills we have nine exhibition slots a year and even if you show two artists simultaneously, that’s only 18. At the same time we’re representing artists and that means regular exhibitions for them. Even though Stills is committed to providing spaces for emerging artists, I was constantly having to advise people where else to go. I also realised there was a general lack of understanding about how the gallery world works. I still have a really good relationship with Stills and work there part-time as a curator but I decided to make a sideways step away—hence this idea of helping people to find spaces and have exhibitions.
How do you establish your validity if you don’t have your own space?
That’s not so easy as a space speaks for itself. However, not having a space leaves you free to do things in different ways. A space means you have to be in attendance at all times or employ staff. The freedom of working from home and sometimes from makeshift offices means that I can do a lot online, meet people in person and then place their work in appropriate spaces around the city.
What sorts of spaces?
Everyone would like to be represented by a gallery because that’s in a way what you’re aiming for as a serious artist—the peak reward. This notion is supported by the political structure. It’s how works are purchased for gallery collections, bought by private collectors—how they’re seen.
My belief is that photography, being a varied medium, can attach itself to all sorts of meanings and forms of expression. Therefore it should have multiple possibilities in terms of where you see it. So I started looking at empty spaces, alternate spaces. It might be an embassy because an artist is a foreign national. It might be a café, a shopfront. Then the whole concept of pop-up galleries was presented to me, apparently already popular in the US; you have a space for the period of the exhibition and then you leave. Shopfronts are a natural for this kind of thing if they’re waiting to be rented. If you can persuade the owner or the lessee to let you use it then you can sometimes get a very good spot—visibility is pretty important. And then, of course, there are public and private galleries.
How do you find spaces?
I travel around a lot and I just see spaces. The first place we used was in Danks Street, Waterloo. The gallery scene there had been in existence for about five years. I noticed an arcade of shops that were not visible to the street. I approached the agent and he said I could have three of the shops for the period of an exhibition. So we had a three-week show and I put a different artist in each of the shops.
One of your shows was on the top floor of an apartment building.
The old Police Headquarters on College Street facing Hyde Park was being redeveloped into classy apartments. Photographer Pete Longworth had been employed by the developers to be their front-person to make the place and the location look beautiful to potential buyers. He’d provided them with a lot of photographs, but he’d also produced his own artistic interpretation of Hyde Park. So he came to me and we decided to have the exhibition on the top floor of that building with its fabulous views of the harbour and the park. That was really exciting.
In the last year and a half I have been moving away from the rental and pop up spaces and concentrating more on working with galleries, both commercial (Meyer Gallery, Sara Roney Gallery, Conny Dietzschold Gallery) and curating shows for public and institutional spaces (Customs House, UTS Gallery, Manly Art Gallery and Museum). The latest idea is Photography On Oxford, a project associated with the Head On Photo Festival. We plan to put photography in shopfronts along Oxford Street, Paddington as a mini street exhibition.
How do you manage the marketing given you’re dealing with a fair sweep of work—art photography, documentary…
The mailing list was built from the beginning. Obviously there are a lot of photographers, a general list of interested people, but then curators, collectors and a few other categories. What happens is that your relationships with people become really important and you have to develop and maintain them. I’m constantly telling the photographers I’m working with to grow their own mailing lists and to get to know their audience.
Jack Ryan throwing poppies into the Aegean Sea, When Old Foes Meet
photo Vedat Acikalin
Jack Ryan throwing poppies into the Aegean Sea, When Old Foes Meet
How do you select the artists you work with?
They come in waves. Lots of people come as they’re getting themselves together for the year. Photographers ask for consultations and that may roll over into what I call mentoring, to achieve a particular goal. It may be to get ready to approach a gallery or venue, or to secure the venue, or to follow the steps to having an exhibition once the venue is lined up. I’ve discovered that people who actually make the effort to come to me are already proactive. Not that everyone needs to be totally confident but that drive and the belief in what they’ve got is really critical.
People tend to be ‘other’ oriented. We want someone else to tell us that our work is good. To go to an established gallery and ask for an exhibition is quite daunting. A lot of my clients are having their first experience of the art world. But people who come to me whose work is not ready for exhibition go away with a list of tasks to further develop the work. I don’t want people to have to commit a lot of money in the beginning because they may not be in that place yet.
What proportion of your photographers are emerging artists?
It’s probably about 70 percent. However, I have people I’ve worked with before who are now onto their second or third exhibition. That’s really satisfying. Some artists, like Ben Ali Ong, whom I worked with in the early stages of ARTHERE, is now with Tim Olsen Gallery and doing really well. But it’s hard to get representation. If someone comes to me and says I want a gallery, I say, well, it might take a few years so we need to look at what the steps are. I find it hard to find galleries for people unless their work is absolutely standout.
And your own work?
I’m still taking photographs but I haven’t done anything in the way of an exhibition since 2004 when I had INDELIBLE at Stills. However, creativity comes in many forms and if you’re getting a lot out of what you’re doing, as long as you’re not burning yourself out, that’s very satisfying as well.
This seems to me a very creative enterprise. But can you make money from it?
I can. The only thing that’s problematic is that I’m making money pretty well purely from artists and, as we know, artists don’t have a lot of money. That’s why I have the different stages so someone can see me and, out of that meeting, they’ll get a lot of ideas and begin to focus. They’ll get the benefit of my knowledge about what’s required to be an artist—how it’s not just about working on your own. You need to have a context, a peer group; you need to see others’ work; you need to meet people. Otherwise you end up not being seen.
Tell me a little bit about your latest exhibition.
This is a good example of one that might never have got up. Vedat Acikalin is a Turkish-born photographer who’s lived in Australia for a long time. He’s worked as a press photographer in sports and world news. He photographed the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing in 1990 and felt very passionate about the fact that former Turkish and Australian soldiers who’d previously fought one another were actually meeting and becoming friends. The exhibition is called When Old Foes Meet. It’s documentary work and tells a very positive story of reconciliation. Vedat was determined to get this exhibition up. He found a space in Chifley Tower. It’s in a beautiful marble foyer in Bent Street and the exhibition will run through Anzac Day.
I should say that the other critically important half of ARTHERE is Cassie French of Pop-Up Publicity. She works on most of the shows and takes on others as well and is unique in Sydney, specialising in photography. And if your show is not out there in the media it just doesn’t get seen. We’re pretty much equal in the business and bounce a lot of ideas off each other. Bruce Nicholson is the designer and technical support person and Lisa Sharkey is involved in installation.
So do you see ARTHERE as eventually growing into part of the infrastructure or will it retain its subversive character?
The mainstream gallery scene is pretty rigid. I’m not saying curators don’t choose really carefully but from my observation there are lots of photographers out there who don’t necessarily get looked at. So I guess it’s subversive in a way to try to find other venues in the hope that it will move things around. This is a time when lots of people are looking for different models. ARTHERE is just one.
ARTHERE: Vedat Acikalin, When Old Foes Meet, March 28-April 29, Chifley Tower, Bent Street Lobby, 2 Bent Street, Sydney, Mon-Fri 7am-7pm; www.arthere.com.au
Photography on Oxford Street, shop windows photography exhibtion, May 9-29
Philip Brophy, The Sound of Milk, 2004 video still
courtesy the artist
Philip Brophy, The Sound of Milk, 2004 video still
ACCORDING TO THE LONDON TELEGRAPH (FEB 1, 2011), SCIENTISTS HAVE MANAGED TO MAKE A PAPER CLIP DISAPPEAR USING ‘CLOAKING TECHNOLOGY’ OF THE KIND THAT ALLOWS VULCAN SHIPS IN STAR TREK (1966-2005) TO SUDDENLY MATERIALISE BEHIND THE ENTERPRISE. THEY’VE ALSO BEEN EXPLORING THE USE OF METAMATERIALS—PROJECTING ‘BACKGROUND’ OVER A MICROSCOPIC OBJECT SO THAT IT WILL SEEM INVISIBLE. IT SOUNDS RATHER LIKE THE TECHNOLOGY DESCRIBED BY WILLIAM GIBSON IN THE FORM OF SCRAMBLE SUITS WORN BY THE PANTHER MODERNS IN HIS NOVEL NEUROMANCER (1984). AS CURATOR LIZZIE MULLER SUGGESTS, “SCIENCE FICTION DOESN’T JUST PREDICT THE FUTURE, IN SOME WAYS IT BRINGS IT INTO BEING.”
Of course many science fiction writers are very well informed about science. In extending the possibilities of current tools and speculating on sociological trends they play a vital role in preparing us for new technological horizons. It is this interplay of fact, fiction, reality and dreaming that has inspired Muller and her co-conspirator Bec Dean in their curation of the upcoming exhibition Awfully Wonderful, at Performance Space. Dean is a curator, writer and Performance Space Associate Director and Muller, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney, is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in interaction, audience experience and interdisciplinary collaboration.
low-tech excursions
The relationship between science fiction and ‘new’ media art has always been strong. However, what is intriguing about Awfully Wonderful is the downplaying of technology: the works are, on the whole, relatively low-fi, with the emphasis placed firmly on the fictive content. There’s no bio-art, laser technologies, holograms or robots; rather there’s photomedia, video, installation, sculpture and painting. Well actually there is a robot, but it’s made of cardboard—Simon Yates will be recreating the cyborg Maria from Metropolis in the style of his balloon-suspended walking characters. Muller says ironically that Yates’ Maria “is probably not dissimilarly as high-tech as the one that starred in the actual film,” the longer, recently rediscovered version of which will also be screened in Awfully Wonderful.
Eugene Carchesio, she sells $ilence by the sea shore 2011
courtesy Milani Gallery
Eugene Carchesio, she sells $ilence by the sea shore 2011
An unusual inclusion is artist Eugene Carchesio, who will be creating a wall painting specifically for the exhibition. Dean says, “I’m really interested in the small systems, languages and codes that Eugene proposes in his work…I think inside [this] painting is the potential for infinity within a closed form…Science, time and space are implicit and yet not overstated in his works. He is interested in numerology and cosmologies and all these different kinds of patterns and systems that are repeated and are not so easy to pin down or quantify.”
artist as lab rat
Bec Dean has also been interested in the work of Hayden Fowler for some time. Previously his absurdist scenarios in which people co-exist quietly with a variety of animals have been exhibited as video works, but in Anthropocene the artist himself will inhabit his installation accompanied by some lab rats. Dean explains: “[Fowler is] an artist who is interested in inter-species relationships and the kinds of connections that we might have with other sorts of life forms here on planet earth and maybe somewhere else too.” The use of lab rats alludes to biotechnology but Muller also suggests that the interspecies exploration is a “neo-Adam, neo-Eden thing…there’s this idea of biotechnology being the latest apple that we’ve stolen. What is that going to do to our relationship with the natural world? This is what Eden and Adam myths are about, the relationship to power, to knowledge, to god, to everything else that exists on the planet. That’s why sci-fi is such a great genre because it really goes at those great myths.”
time travellers
Time travel is explored through the technologies of moving image by both Sam Smith and Ms&Mr. Dean says Smith’s work “is about the kind of time travel that is inherent within any form of recorded media in terms of the way you can reverse it, play it forward, go back to a point or pause it. [This is] taken further by Ms&Mr who go back into old media and insert something new or intertwine stories [about themselves] before they’d even met. In both of those works the artists are very playfully engaging with the notion of time travel within media that is already extant, that we already have at our fingertips.” A related work by Jaki Middleton and David Lawrey will continue the artists’ explorations using the pre-cinematic device of Pepper’s Ghost to create pre- and post-apocalyptic dioramas, gradually shifting from prosperity to disaster before our very eyes. [See RT Studio]
earth’s atmosphere and beyond
The works of David Haines/Joyce Hinterding and Adam Norton engage a little more directly with notions of science. Haines/Hinterding are inspired both artistically and philosophically by the controversial psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich. They will be recreating Reich’s Cloudbuster, which was invented to produce rainclouds. Muller suggests that the cloudbuster has particular resonance now with “global warming and the possibility of geo-engineering fixing some of our manmade problems…the technological fix, but also technology as magic.”
Adam Norton, Mars Space Walk
photo courtesy the artists
Adam Norton, Mars Space Walk
Adam Norton has set himself a particularly ambitious task attempting to recreate the gravity of Mars in the CarriageWorks foyer. Using a complicated system of harnesses and ramps based on NASA’s Apollo space program devices, he will perform Mars space walks in simulated 38% gravity at the opening and every Saturday during the exhibition.
the other woman
Deborah Kelly has been commissioned to create a work responding to the representations of women in science fiction. After trawling through Australia’s largest archive of sci-fi pulp magazines, Kelly has taken a slightly oblique approach. Inspired by the writings of radical feminist Shulamith Firestone on issues to do with women taking control of their own reproductive lives, she is creating delicate collages in which sci-fi scenarios are recreated with organic materials like seashells. Muller says, “it is another take on sci-fi imagery that I think is as interesting as the big breasted 70-foot woman, pulp-type imagery and is also really interesting in terms of the connection between the organic and the machinic, which is where the cyborg idea comes from.” Thematically linked is a Philip Brophy video work, exhibited here for the first time, The Sound of Milk (2004), a dystopian tale in which males and females have become separate species. Ian Haig’s Chronicles of the new human organism (2009, with sound by Brophy and Philip Samartzis), in the form of a post-apocalyptic nature documentary, will also play in the dedicated screening room.
sci-fi science
A particularly exciting inclusion is a series of artefacts sourced from the Powerhouse Museum, assembled and interpreted by Jo Law and featuring an Edison phonograph from 1908, a Curta Calculator and Dr Bodkin Adam’s Electromassager. While these artefacts relate to the artworks in Awfully Wonderful and are particularly beautiful as objects, they also offer their own fictions. For example, the Curta calculator features in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as a prize collector’s item connected with smuggling and conspiracy. The Electromassager manufactured by the Ediswan company is a vibrator that emits a violet light intended to relieve female hysteria, and was owned by English physician Dr Bodkin Adams who is suspected of killing a large number of his patients after securing inclusion in their wills. In addition, in their obsolescence these objects offer further potential for the imagination. Muller says, “because they’re no longer current in terms of scientific truth, they’ve moved into the realms of scientific fiction and they have that same kind of provocative speculative aura as the artworks.”
In addition to the exhibition, there will also be a range of public programs including a symposium and an audio guide by scientists, in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Australia (RiAus, Adelaide) who advocate for a broader understanding of science. “We really wanted to have scientists talking about the works and the scientific possibilities behind them and have that as an aspect of the interpretation,” Muller says.
For Lizzie Muller and Bec Dean, Awfully Wonderful brings together their passion for art and their shared love of science fiction. Muller concludes, “I did literature before I did art, and I was really interested in science too…I loved Gulliver’s Travels and things that combined science, literature and experimentation with a form. That’s what we’re looking for—artworks that have kind of wormholed into another dimension.”
Performance Space, Awfully Wonderful, curators Bec Dean, Lizzie Muller, artists Philip Brophy, Eugene Carchesio, Haines/Hinterding, Deborah Kelly, Jo Law, David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton, Ms&Mr, Hayden Fowler, Ian Haig, Adam Norton, Sam Smith, Simon Yates, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, April 15-May 14
The RealTime-Performance Space informal discussion with artists, curators and guests about Awfully Wonderful will be held Monday May 9, 6.30pm. All welcome.
Richard Alleyne, Invisibility cloak enters the real world, Feb 1, 2011; www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8296338/Invisibility-cloak-enters-the-real-world.html
John Gerrard, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007, 2007, Realtime 3D
courtesy of the artist, Simon Preston Gallery, New York and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
John Gerrard, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007, 2007, Realtime 3D
THE LANDSCAPE HAS THE SPOOKY UNINHABITEDNESS OF THE COMPUTER GAME, AND THE SHIFTING VIEWPOINT OF THE SIMULATOR—BUT SLOWED DOWN TO A PACE AT WHICH PIXELS SCRATCH AT THE GAZE. ACROSS THE YELLOW-BROWN PRAIRIE RUNS A BITUMEN ROAD, EDGED BY POWER POLES AND LOOSE-SLUNG WIRES. THE VIEW SHIFTS TO REVEAL A MONUMENTAL SET OF FARM BUILDINGS, LIKE THE ANTITHESIS OF A SIMS GAME, AHEAD OF A MOUNTAINOUS FRONT OF CHOCOLATEY DUST. THE COLOURS, THOUGH REALISTIC, ARE RINSED WEIRDLY CLEAN. SILOS STAND LIKE SCI-FI WAR MACHINES, SENTINEL; THE SKY IS FEARFULLY WHITE.
Irish artist John Gerrard’s Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas) (2007) is part of his Animated Scenes series, four of which were shown recently at PICA. Constructed from thousands of still photographs, Gerrard’s ‘portraits’ are fully animated models, locked to a real-time schedule of changing light over the duration of the day. The viewer is drawn around both object and horizon in a stately, 360-degree orbit.
The images of dustbowl landscapes reference an astonishing history: the USA’s Black Sunday of 1935, when a dust storm 1,500 miles wide and half a mile high roiled and churned across much of Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. The result of over-ploughing, the storm carried the topsoil of 100 million acres—a phenomenon made possible by the internal combustion engine. The storm took four hours to pass in some places; there are few photos of the apocalyptic event. To recreate it, Gerrard used photos taken by US troops in Iraq, of literal ‘desert storms’ passing over military bases.
The second work, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) (2007) is even more epic and menacing, its group of farm buildings huddled in the far distance, insignificant before the advancing front. But as the view pans away from the storm itself, the threat vanishes. A dichotomy appears between the seething, chthonic cloud of grit and wind, and an idyllic, if sparse, pastoral scene.
The ubiquitous row of telegraph wires seems almost out of place here, as though there should really be no linkage between the cluster of distant equipment and the monstrous storm, or even indeed with the viewer. It’s a feeling that resonates with John Barrett-Lennard’s catalogue essay description of Gerrard’s works as floating in “a space between the real and imaginary, connected but apart from both.”
In his artist talk at PICA, Gerrard showed a photograph titled Figure Blocking Sun (Cesar) (2008). It features the silhouette of a man: an utterly black shape surrounded by a fine rim of backlight. Relating it to the Animated Scenes series, Gerrard spoke of the figure as void; of its form as an “oscillation between surface and portal.” As Barrett-Lennard points out, “however precise the rendering [of Gerrard’s images, their] reality is incomplete and a haunting emptiness remains.”
John Gerrard, John Gerrard, Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008
photo Tony Nathan/Imagelab, courtesy the artist and PICA
John Gerrard, John Gerrard, Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008
Gerrard’s Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas) (2008) presents an ominous array of low, grey-roofed buildings, whose eerie uniformity accentuates the silence of his works: no bird sings, no machinery hums. The term “grow finish unit” is a euphemism for an indoor pig farm, and the unnaturally still lagoon aligning with the sheds is, Gerrard points out, an effluent pond.
At the end of each shed are what seem to be extractor fan vents: large metallic cylindrical attachments, which, like squid suckers, lend an unsettling organic feel to the oddly warm cream and grey of the buildings. There is no opportunity to move the controls and enter. The paired feed silos that appear between sheds are strangely anthropomorphic, as though the viewer can’t help but place a figure here. Tellingly, it’s a figure that seems to ward off intruders.
Gerrard’s animations defeat the logic of the gaming engine he uses to create them, disabling the viewer from forging their own pathway through the work. The relentlessly orbiting ‘eye’ sometimes moves excruciatingly slowly, forcing reflection on these monuments to an environmental wealth that’s come at the price of desolation. The nodding oilfield Lufkin pumpjack of Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) (2009), like a huge, thirsty bird, is the most prosaic and familiar of the structures we observe, but seems the most irreal; perhaps because we are close enough to observe its subtle dislocation from the photographic image, the lack of minute detail rendering it smoothly alien. Gerrard describes it as “parasitically vasomorphic—reminiscent of the 20th century”—his own century, he says; a kind of self-portrait.
By eliminating surface distractions, John Gerrard’s ‘portraits’ distill both the human presence and the post-industrial ‘naturalness’ of the landscapes they recreate. It’s an uncanny blend of computer age and lost romanticism, which leaves the viewer oscillating in an intriguing void-portal space.
PICA: artist John Gerrard, production Werner Poetzelberger, modelling Daniel Felsner, programming Helmut Bressler, Matthias Strohmaier, additional modelling Christina Pilsl, additional programming Helmut Bressler; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Feb 17-April 3
GOING TO THE CINEMA TODAY IS A NOSTALGIC THING TO DO, AS HOME ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEMS OFFER A SIMILAR SORT OF IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE. THE MULTIPLEXES NOW RESORT TO ALL KINDS OF TRICKS TO ATTRACT AUDIENCES, FROM FIRST CLASS SEATS TO 3D GLASSES. IT IS AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THIS CRISIS FOR CINEMA THAT JESPER JUST’S SHORT FILMS ARE INSTALLED, CINEMATICALLY, AT THE JOHN CURTIN GALLERY IN PERTH.
Several recessed rooms offer a sumptuous simulation of the multiplex, their doors open so that we are able to wander between films, between moods. This is indeed moody, melancholy stuff, as old men cry and young men sing. Yet these intensely choreographed vignettes also work to deconstruct the cinematic conventions that conspire to affect us. Movements are slow, controlled and slightly out of synch with their narratives, representing in style the disconnection that is also the theme of the relationships they depict.
The men in No Man is an Island II (2004) sit apart from each other in a windowless bar covered with erotic portraits of women, before coming together in a choral cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” In Bliss and Heaven (2004) a truck driver dressed in drag breaks into Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” When he finishes and breaks into tears, it is difficult not to recall the pivotal scene at Club Silencio in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) where the host reminds us that the performance is only a recording, only to have the singer drop dead while her voice carries on echoing through the theatre. Just’s films are full of such allusions to cinema and its conventions for simulating feeling. The truck driver’s song is uncannily moving although the scene is a comic one, in a duplicity of affect that leaves us unsure as to the film’s genre.
While Just’s earlier work focuses on men, curator Chris Malcolm has included his later attention to women. The Sirens of Chrome (2010) uses an Angelo Badalamenti style track to score an encounter between a woman and a parked car. She rolls over it in a choreographed orgy of limbs, chrome reflections and hair. Again it is difficult not to fall into the trap of genre confusion that Just has set for us, as the close camera makes it appear as if the woman is being hit by a moving vehicle, and simultaneously as if she is moving to a trashy modelling routine. This kind of ambiguity accounts for the strength of the work, immersed as it is in cinematic allusion. The women in Just’s films are far more in control than his men, who instead break into song and tears in desperate attempts to break the cold deadlock that separates them from others.
The cinematic installation of Just’s films offers a way of meditating on the subtleties of the medium in a way that online versions of the same (mostly on YouTube) can’t reproduce. Their affects are tied up in the qualities of cinematography and music, the details of performance and mise-en-scène. It is also Just’s reliance on cinematographers, musicians and other technicians of feeling that marks his work out as part of a more conservative stream of contemporary art. This is what Terry Smith calls “remodernism,” that revivifies older artistic practices (here, cinema), and lends itself to a history of art in a way that the much more radical contemporary video and new media movements do not. In this sense Just’s contemporaries reside less in the new democracy of the camera than in Hollywood. Just’s art becomes a way of thinking through the spectacle of this culture industry that carries on despite its apparent demise.
Jesper Just, Something to Love, 2005, production still
image courtesy of the Artist; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; and Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen
Jesper Just, Something to Love, 2005, production still
It is appropriate, then, that Jesper Just helps us to be suspicious of the filmic conventions that are laid bare in his films. In Something to Love (2005), a black car moves through a car park, ominously suggestive, as if in some Swedish detective drama, before a man in tears disrupts the cool toughness of this cinematic cliché. The intersections and encounters in Just’s films return us to the point at which meaning and feeling come together, so that we are held in a state of suspense by their ambiguities, their combinations of cinema conventions, method acting and cover songs. These are remixes of a polished kind, lifting the tropes of classical Hollywood cinema into a slowed down and sublime version of themselves.
Mike Parr, Malevich (A Political Arm), performance for as long as possible
courtesy the artist
Mike Parr, Malevich (A Political Arm), performance for as long as possible
LOOK AT THESE TWO BOOKS. SAME ARTIST: MIKE PARR. SAME PUBLISHER: SCHWARTZ CITY. SIMILAR TITLES: MIKE PARR PERFORMANCES 1971-2008 (2008) AND THE INFINITY MACHINE: MIKE PARR’S PERFORMANCE ART 1971-2005 (2009). THE FIRST IS COMPILED BY THE ARTIST AND IS VERY MUCH OF THE ORDER OF AN ARTIST’S PROJECT. THE SECOND IS WRITTEN BY EDWARD SCHEER WHO TEACHES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES. HIS IS AN ACADEMIC’S PROJECT, THAT IS, WE APPROACH PARR’S WORK THROUGH THE INTELLECTUAL FILTER OF THE AUTHOR. BOTH BOOKS ARE LARGE AND RICHLY ILLUSTRATED. IN THESE TIMES, WHEN SO MUCH ON ANY GIVEN SUBJECT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH ELECTRONIC MEANS, IT IS SOMETHING OF A PUBLISHING MIRACLE FOR JUST ONE, LET ALONE TWO LARGE MONOGRAPHS ON THE SAME ARTIST TO COME OUT IN QUICK SUCCESSION.
The book is a form that to me inhabits the world of stasis (object) and the world of movement (text). And with these books and this artist, more than usual attention has been given to the experience of the reader who is simultaneously the performer of the object and the audience of the text.
As I mentioned, both books have the same publisher who is also able to handle distribution and has obvious connection to Parr’s dealer, Anna Schwartz. They also share the same editor, the always thorough Linda Michael and the same designer, John Warwicker of tomato, who has applied some stylistic crossovers but recognised the essential differences between the projects.
Parr’s book is a staggering 960 pages, printed on thin, absorbent paper that somehow manages the ink-heavy, often full-bleed illustrations extremely well. Scheer’s book is 200 pages with a high gloss cover and heavy coated stock that gives both images and text a more substantial feel. The closeness of the production team has ensured objects of great quality.
As the titles signify, a long chronological overview is important in both texts. And it’s being applied to a single strand of Parr’s practice: performance, or at least as far as that’s possible when one is dealing with an artist whose media extend to writing, film, video, drawing, photography, print-making, sculpture and installation. By privileging performance, one gets the sense that these other media (and even performance itself) are driven by a greater force, that of time itself.
This is certainly the guiding principle of Scheer’s text which is nothing short of a long essay on time, or more specifically on “duration” which he points out, “implies a specific construction of time.” He goes on to describe a “durational aesthetic” in Parr’s work and observes the changing shape of this aesthetic over what he sees as five distinct (chronological) phases of Parr’s work: the self-aggressive performances; the Black Boxes; the Self-Portrait Project; the Bride performances; and the political works. I found the focus on duration particularly nuanced and sustaining though more convincing in relation to the first and fifth phases, less so in those works dealing with the fixity of the arrested image such as the Black Boxes and the Brides.
Parr’s book is more catalogue raisonné than essay. He sets out to document his entire performance oeuvre. Each performance, including those that were never actualised, is fully catalogued in the back of the book. The front (major) section addresses most but not all of these performances according to photographic documentation and other appropriate forms of evidence, for instance “scripts,” letters to curators and controversial newspaper reviews. Parr has handled the notoriously difficult relationship between original performance and secondary evidence as a challenging opportunity to extend the reach of performance into its equally engaging after-effect.
One example is the treatment of the infamous “armchop” work from 1977, Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 from Rules and Displacement Activities III. Fourteen double-page spreads are devoted to drawing out the short, sharp blow of the tomahawk that Parr wielded to his meat-filled prosthetic left arm before a shocked audience. The images are frames from the original video footage. The 14 frames therefore represent less than a second in real time, but here we can slow time down or use it like a flip-book to reconstitute the original act. The following pages are occupied by six luscious colour stills taken by John Delacour illustrating the second, often overlooked part of the performance in which members of Parr’s family fit him with a replacement hand-knitted pink woollen prosthetic arm and Parr engages the audience in dialogue about what they’ve just witnessed. The documentation of this work concludes with a written statement by Parr exploring the provocations of the work for himself and his audience.
It’s interesting to compare how the same work is discussed in Scheer’s book. Occurring in the 1970s, all The Rules and Displacement Activities series fall within the first chapter of Scheer’s text. Here the writer introduces the importance to Parr’s work of the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung and Lacan. In the subsection to Chapter 1 titled The Time of Abreaction, the Cathartic Action performance is the primary example for elucidating Freud and Breuer’s work on abreaction and its part in catharsis. Scheer maps the theory onto Parr’s own life experience of how his left arm came to be surgically removed shortly after birth and how this trauma is restaged for an audience. But, as Parr does with the inclusion of the Delacour images and explanatory text, Scheer is careful to devote as much attention to the post-traumatic phase. In keeping with his overarching theme, Scheer expresses it in terms of time: “Abreaction involves a complex movement of time in which there is a climactic cathartic moment followed by an extended period in which the subject’s traumatic episode can be gradually reintegrated into consciousness, the time of healing.”
From the early performances in the 1970s to the more recent, more politically directed works such as Close the Concentration Camps (stitched face) and Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic, performance for as long as possible (arm nailed to wall), Mike Parr has expected no less from his audience than he has demanded from himself. In such works, the demands are so high that the audience/artist divide dissolves. Many choose not to make the commitment and for many reasons. Scheer has certainly ventured where others feared to tread and in doing so has given, at least this reader, the critical time and space to reflect on Mike Parr’s work away from the affect-laden closeness of the performance arena.
Mike Parr, Mike Parr: Performances 1971–2008, Schwartz City, Melbourne, 2008, RRP $199.00
Edward Scheer, The Infinity Machine: Mike Parr’s Performance Art 1971-2005, Melbourne, Schwartz City, 2009, RRP $49.95
{$slideshow}MY FIRST RESPONSE TO BILL HART'S IN THE GUISE OF THOUGHT DREW FORTH THE CATCHPHRASES “AWE-INSPIRING” AND “MESMERISING.” I MEANT THEM IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS.
Hart was once a numerical modeller with the CSIRO; he changed careers in 1993, becoming an academic at the Tasmanian School of Art. He is one of the most genuinely gifted e-media artists operating in Tasmania. Visiting his show at CAST, you first see a warning to let your eyes adjust to extreme darkness. Eventually, by the soft light of computer-generated, abstract images floating across the large screen in the centre of the gallery, I found my way to a capacious sofa. I was instantly drawn into a visual experience of sheer beauty—seemingly random words and shapes morphing and dissolving into other ephemeral words and forms. The process is gently paced; it is interesting to pick out the cursive text as it ebbs and flows and re-forms yet again, on and on, always different.
Hart’s artist statement refers to Noam Chomsky and his linguistic universals—the idea that at base level all languages are similarly hard-wired into the brain. I remember struggling with Chomsky at university and later noted how his theories seemed to have had their day. This Hart observes; he explains that different languages have different structures and concepts. So his work is a swirling, seething mass of “language, of vague and amorphous concepts forming and rippling, struggling to form or perceive a larger meaning.” And this is done visually, using quotations from related studies.
I loved the visual element: the beautiful mini-pixilations (my terminology) ever-changing in the most subtle and engaging of colours, and the soft light at the centre of the darkened gallery. I simply gave myself up to the utter pleasure of the experience, returning to the gallery at least four times, just as one might to a much-loved movie. On my third visit I realised there was a soft soundscape emanating not from the screen, but from speakers in the cathedral-like gallery space, featuring the gently murmuring voices of William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson. The work is about language and thought but I'm not sure what this dimension added.
In the Guise of Thought is an important show—as “awe-inspiring” and “mesmerising” as I initially felt. My words cannot do it justice.
Bill Hart, In the Guise of Thought, CAST Gallery, North Hobart,
March, www.billhart.id.au
THE CHINESE LUNAR NEW YEAR BEGAN FEBRUARY 3. IT’S THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT. TO CELEBRATE WE PARK AND STROLL SLOWLY (LIKE A PAIR OF DUCKS) TO THE POWERHOUSE MUSEUM; IN THE LIGHT RAIN, HEAVILY PREGNANT, I WADDLE. WE HOPE FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE, CLEAR DIRECTIONS VIA GOOGLEMAPS, A YEAR OF HEALTH AND WEALTH. AT THE POWERHOUSE WE DOWNLOAD OUR IPHONE APP FOR CHINA HEART.
There’s a map with various spots highlighted. Videos to watch like mini soap operas. Special objects from the museum are displayed in a glass case. As strains of the museum’s AbbaWorld karaoke filter in, we look at papercuts, toggles for men’s belts used to hold small bags of tobacco, a fan with low-flying ducks.
We begin the journey perched on a red leather seat. We’re guests at an engagement party—a mother-in-law gives a speech in English at first, turning to her native tongue when distressed. Her daughter, Lian, understands but in anger won’t translate; her son-in-law, a ‘good boy,’ is oblivious to her pain. A mysterious parcel arrives with a note that needs translation. After a fight with her mother (about a father who has died, who was never really around before), Lian suggests Chinatown, to find out more about the note (and her ancestors).
We head off looking for clues. The Southern Gates of Chinatown—no, not the golden arches of Maccas nearby—are the first stopping point. The clues are cryptic but the answers easy to find. As we head through Chinatown we are distracted again and again to follow our own hearts: late yum cha customers spill onto sidewalks with banquets piled high (we are told that “for romantics,” dim sum can mean “to touch the heart”); a dragon-twisted queue waits patiently for the Emperor’s Cream Puffs, a “supreme nutritious snack”—what are they? I want one.
Shops sell masks, cheap dragon puppets on strings and glittering lipstick cases while a dragon lies beneath the city linking the Chinese districts. We watch the narrative unfold in noisy streets, struggling to hear through the iPhone speakers. At Albion Place, women recount their experience of debutante dances and Dragon Balls at the Trocadero—we’re invited to imagine a building that no longer stands— remembering how the chutes above the roof would open out to rain streaming down on dancers doing the can-can.
We wonder at the lack of interactivity. It seems we are following a formula, being told by our iPhone what to do. Where’s the chance to talk back, to take photos, to interpret what we find, to tell our own stories? Perhaps as we proceed…
Men flip roti and make satay in the windows as we snake back through the streets to Belmore Park, the original site for the Chinese market gardens. The narrative turns from fiction to documentary as we weave into the Capitol Theatre, the eventual site for the markets (the facade decorated with fruit and flowers) and meet an English woman who, posed in front of historical photos, tells of her desertion by a Chinese man who returns to his country. Her story echoes the more recent accounts of the “astronauts’ wives” (Lian’s mother is one) who, through the 1990s, recount the years of bringing up their children in Sydney while their husbands ‘go into orbit’ in Hong Kong to work, leaving their families for years; a sad contrast with the symbolism of the two ducks on the fan, swimming together and mating for life. The juxtaposition of happy marriage and absent husband/father is played out throughout China Heart and gives the central video narrative its edge of melancholy as a couple prepares for their wedding. But walking through the city reminds us of the times we have loved, the food we have discovered, how the streets have changed, and we sit down and have a Valentine’s Day dinner, ordering pork buns and stuffed eggplant. The couple next to us order Peking duck, the waiter tenderly placing the skin onto pancakes.
China Heart
photo Damon Girbon
China Heart
Sitting in the Chinese Gardens of Friendship eating yum cha with a pot of tea, we watch Lian and her mother sitting eating yum cha with pots of tea. Then, looking out over the lotus pond, we watch Lian and her beau contemplate the same expanse of water (her father reappears on the surface offering closure). The nature of mobile technology offers the chance to experience the narrative in the exact location where the characters were filmed, and a kind of frisson emerges in the experience, the retelling via iPhone means making connections in real space. A group of teenage girls in magnificent Chinese dress wobble as they balance delicately on stone bridges over the water. At first we think they are the promised Chinese opera performers but as they edge closer, and we take their photo, they point to a sign that directs visitors to where they can play dress-ups and try on traditional outfits.
China Heart seems a starting point for a technology just beginning to emerge—a tourist guide-meets-ficto-historical narrative—that doesn’t quite use the possibilities of the app to full effect. It works more like a school excursion (join the dots; great for children) rather than an integrated media work. It’s a disjointed experience on your feet, but it helps if you revisit the journey online (all the videos and links are available to explore using a regular web browser). The possibilities—for linking histories, documentary, narrative fiction, interaction with users, maps and locations, museum resources, web links—are just starting to open up.
China Heart, writer, director, producer Annette Shun Wah, producer Josephine Emery, presented by d/Lux/MediaArts, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, the Powerhouse Museum and the Project Factory; Jan 30-Feb 13
You can still do the walking tour by downloading the free app or take the journey online via the China Heart website, www.chinaheart.org.au
This article was first published online April 5, 2011
Biographies are hard. I moved to Australia from Croatia, via Italy, in 2005. I have studied languages, philosophy, literature, theatre, have half a degree in Japanese (language and culture) and I’m a trained classical pianist. By profession: urban designer and geographer. I teach and research at the University of Melbourne on issues ranging from spatial clustering of creative industries to why children no longer walk to school on their own. I proudly sit on the Green Room Awards panel for performance, hybrid forms, circus and puppetry. As any emigrant, my life is full of inexplicable fractures of logic.
Exposé
I’ve been writing since about the age of three, but I think of language as a form of communication, not a fetish object. I like things that are not words, that cannot be words: dances, places, experiences, emotions. My engagement with RealTime comes out of this interest in writing about the unwriteable. One thing I try to instill into my students is that reflection of this sort is painful, but necessary, if one is not to be a typing (or dancing, designing, or singing) monkey. This year, I am also hoping to create some space for that long overdue conversation about performance and live art in Melbourne—but I will say no more.
I am also hoping for a break from language, and more space for designing: spaces, projects, events. This year, I will be going to Japan to study Japanese cities, and perhaps to Croatia to work on restoring socialist-era hotels. And after a long stint writing academically, I am making room for imagination. Last year I saw a number of inspiring approaches in Europe—projects involving people in the thinking of their city in hugely stimulating ways, such as Urban Festival. There must be room for similar work on this continent.
These are diverse articles. The Plotki was an honest recounting of what moving to Australia felt like. The Crikey article I include because it generated heat that caught me unprepared: people stopped me on the street to congratulate or admonish me. The Emerging Writers Festival Reader one was the most fun to write.
I work mostly as an arts journalist and producer, also maintaining my own creative writing practice. I was based in Perth for a while but am back in Melbourne now. Some of my favourite gigs have been with Melbourne Festival, Arts House and Gasworks Arts Park. I co-wrote Melbourne’s successful UNESCO City of Literature bid, and was excited to work as producer for the 2009 Art of Difference deaf and disability arts festival. My training is in creative writing, visual arts and journalism; I occasionally write for Art Monthly Australia as well as RealTime.
My fiction has been published in anthologies and journals in Australia, the UK and the US and I’ve presented countless spoken word performances in several cities. I’ve done artist residencies in Minnesota, Marrickville, Reykjavík and the high Arctic, and am now working on a non-fiction manuscript as well as some collaborative projects with visual and performing artists.
Exposé
I’ve always loved words—when I was a musician I wrote songs; when I did visual arts, writing was an important element; and eventually words took over completely. I did a postgrad in journalism in 2008 and got especially interested in the blurred spaces between creative writing and explanatory journalism. I do arts journalism because I’m fascinated by the process of creation. I love talking to artists about why and how they make work, and I love it when readers go “oh!” and can share that pleasure. I also like the challenge of reviewing work that I may or may not immediately respond to—it pushes me out of my world and into someone else’s space and ideas.
In my own work, I’m a kind of ‘fractured Romantic,’ obsessed with CD Friedrich-type landscapes full of jagged peaks and broken ships, and curious about my place in them. I’m interested in how the beautifully sublime quickly becomes treacherous when you commit yourself to walking there; and I’m equally fascinated with emotional landscapes, how we negotiate their peaks and their perils. One way or another, it’s all about desire.
Other writing
my ‘arctic blog’ and some recent work-in-progress can be found on my web site Light Blue
Bonita Ely, detail, DelugeDrown (2010)
Ink jet print on rice paper, ink, silk, wood. 1400 cm L x 92 cm W
image courtesy of the artist and AEAF
Bonita Ely, detail, DelugeDrown (2010)
Ink jet print on rice paper, ink, silk, wood. 1400 cm L x 92 cm W
environmental engagements
The Australian Experimental Art Foundation is about to open Three Rivers, a major survey of Bonita Ely’s environmental art. We’ve previously admired Ely’s work in the MCA’s exhibition In the Balance and the Campbelltown Art Centre’s River Project (RT100). The exhibition includes the artist’s most recent work, The Murray’s Edge, which focuses on the river’s headwaters in the Mount Kosciusko National Park. When combined with her earlier work, the result is a complex and “compelling study of the Murray River from the 1970s until the present” (press release). If you can’t get to Adelaide, you can listen to Ely talk about her long-running engagement with the environment in an online video titled The Murray’s Darling. Bonita Ely, Three Rivers, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, April 8-May 5; www.aeaf.org.au
making and remaking the city
Still on the environmental theme, keep an eye out for The Right to the City, a symposium and exhibition happening in Sydney. The project takes its title from David Harvey’s article of the same name, in which he argues that the “freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…one of the most precious yet neglected of our human rights” (press release). Curated by Lee Stickells and Zanny Begg (who reported on Tipping Point in RT100), the exhibition includes international artists such as Temporary Services (US), Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (France), Marjetica Potrc (Slovenia), as well as locals Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro (RT92, RT57), Joni Taylor, SquatSpace and Milkcrate Urbanism. There is also a symposium on April 9, featuring a keynote lecture by Professor Margaret Crawford from the University of California, Berkeley. If you can’t be there, an exhibition catalogue is being published and selected symposium papers will be published in the Architectural Theory Review. The Right to the City, symposium April 9, exhibition April 8-30, TinSheds Gallery; www.therighttothecity.com
The Waterloo Girls
photo Karen Therese
The Waterloo Girls
out and about
The practice of walking is one way of remaking the city that has become increasingly popular. So much so that there is now a Walking Artist’s Network where you can find artists who work with walking practices as well as a list of symposia and academic publications. Karen Therese’s name might be added as she kicks off the Performance Space season of “walks, promenades, marches and strolls” with The Waterloo Girls. The piece “traverses though the lives and places of four generations of women who grew up in Waterloo” (website). Later in the year, there’ll be walks with Paschal Daantos Berry, Deborah Pollard and Anino Shadowplay Collective (Philippines); Jennifer Hamilton; Big Fag Press, Jo Holder and Fiona McDonald; Sarah Rodigari; Diana Smith; and Lily Hibberd. Quite apart from the walks, it’s good to see Performance Space getting out of CarriageWorks and getting about Sydney. The Waterloo Girls, part of Walk, Performance Space, April 7-9; www.performancespace.com.au
Chrissy Norford, Benjamin Hancock, Eric Avery. Forseen
photo Regis Lansac
Chrissy Norford, Benjamin Hancock, Eric Avery. Forseen
double dance
It’s only March but 2011 is already shaping up as a major year for contemporary dance in Australia: Dance Massive has just concluded; it’s Gideon Obarzanek’s last year at Chunky Move; Rafael Bonchela is consolidating himself at the Sydney Dance Company, extending his contract; there’s a new national secondary curriculum in dance to be written; and we’ve just launched our RealTime Dance portal, which includes all our dance articles back to 1994. In the meantime Dance Bites, from Western Sydney Dance Action and Riverside Theatre Parramatta, continues to gain momentum. Their latest show is a double bill by Frances Rings (RT98) and Narelle Benjamin. Rings’ Debris was commissioned by the West Australian Ballet and Benjamin’s The Dark Room was initially created for the Australian Ballet, so as it’s likely you missed them the first time around now’s your chance. Forseen: Double Bill, April 6-9; www.riversideparramatta.com.au
Applespiel, Tiny Stadiums
photo courtesy of the artists
Applespiel, Tiny Stadiums
spatial and relational art
We’ve only just recovered from the Imperial Panda festival (see Caroline Wake’s forthcoming review in the May 9 e-dition), but there’s another artist-produced festival on the horizon. Presented by PACT and curated by Quarterbred, the Tiny Stadiums Festival is now in its fourth year. This time round it presents a selection of projects that consider “art and its relationship to public space” with the chosen works spanning mediums including video, performance, live art, participation, installation and duration (press release). The artists include Applespiel (RT100), Beth Arnold, Lucas Ihlein (RT84), Jen Jamieson (RT87), Dan Koop (RT101), Bennett Miller, Nat Randall, Amy Spiers and Lara Thoms (RT76). Tiny Stadiums, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, May 2-15; www.quarterbred.blogspot.com
Yang Fudong, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, (still), 2006, 35mm film transferred to DVD, music by Jing Wang
courtesy the artist and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China
Yang Fudong, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, (still), 2006, 35mm film transferred to DVD, music by Jing Wang
no snow on broken bridge
The work of Yang Fudong has appeared in a number of exhibitions over the past year: first in the 17th Biennale of Sydney (RT97); then in Mu:Screen, Three Generations of Video Art at UTS (RT98) and also in The Big Bang at White Rabbit Gallery (RT98). Now, he has an exhibition all to himself at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. The exhibition opens with No Snow on the Broken Bridge, a black and white multi-screen film that “explores the lives of the generation of young intellectuals who have grown up in a country hurtling toward modernisation” (press release). It also includes special screenings of Yang Fudong’s seminal five-part film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003-07). Yang Fudong, No Snow on Broken Bridge, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, March 18-June 4; www.sherman-scaf.org.au
DANCE MASSIVE, IN ITS SECOND INCARNATION, AGAIN PROVED TO BE INVALUABLE TO THE GOOD HEALTH OF AUSTRALIAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE, ATTRACTING PASSIONATE AUDIENCES, STRENGTHENING A SENSE OF COMMUNITY AND GENERATING INTENSE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE STATE OF THE ARTFORM AT A TIME WHEN HYBRIDITY RULES.
This unique dance event premieres new works, re-mounts acclaimed productions and invites local and international presenters to consider prospective touring and co-production. This is a dance event that is both marketplace (showing complete works rather than excerpts) and festival. The value for dance artists of seeing and discussing each other’s work cannot be underestimated.
Dance Massive has also commissioned RealTime in 2009 and 2011 to provide detailed responses to all the works in its programs, with some creations being reviewed by two writers or covered again in survey essays, for example on space or sound (p20). As newspaper reviewing declines, as evidenced in shorter and shorter responses, if offered at all, it’s important to have longer estimations of choreographers’ creations, both as documentation and dialogue.
RealTime Editors Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch teamed with Melbourne writers Jana Perkovic and Carl Nilsson-Polias to respond to the performances while Associate Editor Gail Priest put our words in print and online and produced the RealTime video interviews with Dance Massive artists. Significantly these interviews were made soon after we’d seen the work—unlike most media interviews that act as previews of works as yet unseen. We look forward to doing many more of these.
It’s of concern that the future of Dance Massive seems uncertain, not least because its cooperative progenitors—Stephen Richardson (Artshouse), Stephen Armstrong (Malthouse) and David Tyndall (Dancehouse)—are all moving on. As Richardson points out in the interview with Sophie Travers (RT101, p36) staging Dance Massive has involved a considerable programming investment from its partners. Dance Massive might not be sustainable for the partners in the future nor match the visions of their incoming directors. Another key event is the Sydney Opera House’s Spring Dance season—its propagator, Wendy Martin, is also on the move.
Australian contemporary dance has long needed a celebratory and analytical focal point, once provided by the Greenmill festivals (1993-97) in Melbourne and intermittently since by Australia’s international arts festivals. The loss of Dance Massive would surrender the opportunity for greater public awareness of dance, vital communication between artists across the country and opportunities for presenters to program innovative dance creations of the highest quality.
A selection of our Dance Massive reviews follows—others can be read on our website where you’ll also find video interviews with dancemakers.
With thanks to the Jasper Hotel and to the Dance Massive partners Arts House, Malthouse and Dancehouse. RT
FOR A FESTIVAL FOCUSED ON THE DANCING BODY, DANCE MASSIVE PROVIDED SURPRISING SATISFACTIONS FOR THE EAR. WHILE CUNNINGHAM AND CAGE, ALONG WITH RAINER AND FELLOW 60S AVANT-GARDISTS, FOUGHT AGAINST OR SOUGHT BEYOND AN ESSENTIALLY EXPRESSIONIST RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUSIC AND DANCE, THE LURE OF THE EMOTIONALLY CHARGED UNION OF SOUND AND MOVEMENT IS HARD TO RESIST. MOST WORKS IN DANCE MASSIVE OFFERED SOUNDTRACKS THAT, IN CONCERT WITH LIGHT AND DESIGN, PROVIDED THE EMOTIONAL WEIGHT AND ATMOSPHERIC TENOR OF THE WORLDS INHABITED BY THE DANCERS. HOWEVER A VARIETY OF METHODOLOGIES WERE DEPLOYED, IMPLICITLY INTERROGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOUND, MOVEMENT AND MEANING MAKING.
live on stage
Of course a direct and intense way to integrate music with dance is for the sound to be produced live, a tactic several of the works exploited. Its most breathtaking realisation was found in No one will tell us… Here the guitarist, Swiss musician Hansueili Tischhauser, literally played with the dancers, Rosalind Crisp and Andrew Morrish, prowling the stage, adopting and responding to their gestures, all the while musically shaping the tone of the improvisation. With effortless precision he used looping and effects pedals to create a range of atmospheres from elaborate carnival capers to sparse and haunting John Fahey-like meditations, to joyous propulsive blues grooves. Here Tischhauser’s presence, as well as his sound, was an equal performative force in the trio, and in the performance I experienced, everyone was on fire.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
Composer/turntablist Lynton Carr’s presence was similarly strong in BalletLab’s Amplification. Placed prominently on stage, Carr was lit for the entire performance, allowing us to witness his dexterity as he manipulated a vast range of vinyl into a cohesive soundtrack. Most often, and in keeping with the thematic of the work, it is a harsh and brutal score, the very gesture of ‘scratching’ implying force and abrasiveness, creating abrupt snatches of sound sampled from sources as disparate as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” to Nico & the Velvet Undergound’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” At its most lyrical we entered the world of illbient—loping bass beats and dreamy atmospheres; we are literally caught in the loop. Phillip Adams’ choreography exploits the energetic properties and often the cultural associations of the sound without in essence directly dancing to it (a ‘balletic’ “Rite of Spring” scene excepted). Amplification was first performed in 1999 when the presence of a live DJ would have been quite new. While some in the audience thought the turntablist sound dated or nostalgic (maybe I’m out of touch but isn’t mixing vinyl still a pretty current phenomenon?), the virtuosity of its execution and the dynamism that it injected into the work were exceptional.
Noisician Hirofumi Uchino was firmly embedded in the structure of Branch Nebula’s Sweat as a worker and artist. Ten minutes into the show, as an example of the work’s focus on labour, his entire sound system was rolled in and set up from scratch, part of an evolving transition from the ‘real’ to ‘theatrical’ space. For an artist whose genre is most often associated with aggression and extreme volume, Uchino and directors Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters exercised surprising restraint. Many moments of silence emphasised the power imbalance of the audience-performer dynamic. When we did get sounds, they were dark, verging on threatening without being melodramatic, occasionally funky with beats made from digital detritus, and on the whole avoided any figurative palette. Uchino’s disorienting static scattering around the room from a parabolic transmitter was particularly unsettling over the infamous dinner party scene. My one quibble is that in a show that allows each worker/performer to display their particular skill, there was no moment focused specifically on Uchino’s prowess.
Music for Imagined Dances, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey
photo Dean Petersen
Music for Imagined Dances, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey
imagined soundtracks, imagined dances
The first sonic statement in The weight of the thing left its mark, directed by Shaun McLeod, was the delicate song of a currawong, heard at such a distance as to seem recorded. We turn to the musicians Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, seated at a table at the edge of the space, and they smile. They cannot take credit for this quite magical moment in a piece that is all about being in the moment. What they do create is based on the same materials wielded by the performers: common cutlery and kitchen utensils. Flynn scrapes forks over surfaces, strikes a metal mixing bowl and decants dry grains between cups, all closely miked and processed by Humphrey to pull out the ring and the sing of the object. It is just sparse enough, just varied enough to make a delicate environment for play for the dancers whose bodies search through improvisational sequences. Out of place is the moment in which a wheat bag is cut, the grains pouring onto a corrugated iron sheet—the scale of the gesture indicating a significance that has little correspondence (either in a unifying or antagonistic way) with the onstage action.
Flynn and Humphrey also have an installation at Dancehouse titled Music For Imagined Dances, which is essentially a listening room that plays a random 25-minute selection of music (see RealTime interview). With a dynamic design by Nik Pijanti that places moving lights behind pin-holed sound attenuation material, the space is infused with shifting colours and patterns making an elegant, contemplative environment. However the range of pieces—from tracks composed by contemporary Australian composers (some for real dances, some imagined) through to iconic dance compositions by Stravinsky, Cage and Feldman, through to tracks by M.I.A, Nirvana and Radiohead—seems too broad. Music For Imagined Dances declares that all music can be danced to in your mind, which is of course true, but doesn’t some music conjure a stronger imaginative kinetic response? For me the material lacks the focus to engage us more deeply with its lovely proposition.
Matthew Day, Thousands
photo Jac Price
Matthew Day, Thousands
inhabiting the music
For Matthew Day’s Thousands, composer James Brown takes his place behind the audience, but his presence is by no means diminished. Offering a unified, almost monotonous sonic palette Brown concentrates on the visceral effect of the music, his hyper-panning of sub-frequency growl unsettling our very organs and giving us a real physical empathy with Day’s muscular tremors as he incrementally moves through a slow rotation over the course of 45 minutes. Even as Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” surprisingly emerges from the rumble, Day still does not dance to the music, rather it gives him something against which to fight harder—music as obstacle to dance.
Curated in a double bill with Matthew Day was Deanne Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes with sound by Michael Munson. Here, the relationship with the music is most intriguing at the beginning where Munson creates a spacious environment for Butterworth to inhabit rather than dance to, using cavernous chords with strong attacks and long delays. As the piece progresses, more rhythms emerge, offering Butterworth more drive to draw from. She slips between dancing to and living with the sound, the latter mode allowing for more nuance.
In Michelle Heaven’s Disagreeable Object, Bill McDonald’s soundscape also provides more environment than accompaniment. Interestingly, in a video interview with RealTime, Heaven mentions how the piece was initially created without music, working only with the rhythms of the movement. McDonald has respected this by creating a sense of nostalgia by using scratchy gramophone records and adding ominous tones that hover just below the action, maintaining the arch gothic ambience of the work. In addition the team has worked to highlight particular diegetic effects, miking the sounds of crunching, swallowing, snuffling. Heaven also vocalises the sounds of objects—a tap turning, the squeak of tea trolley wheels—creating a cartoon effect that adds extra quirkiness to this ingenious little gem of a work.
dancing partners
A particular sonic pleasure was the collaboration between Robin Fox and Oren Ambarchi for Chunky Move’s Connected. Each an undisputed master of Australian experimental music, together they created an epic score of tension-filled spaciousness between a series of ever increasing crescendos—Ambarchi providing lurching drones of fulsome harmonies, Fox delivering hard edge statics, underrumbles and tingly spatter. Structurally the role of the music here is what we have come to expect. It propels the dance, holding the energies in check and then releasing them, unabashedly manipulating our response through a series of smaller climaxes to the final one.
Robin Fox also provided the sound for Antony Hamilton’s Drift which was played drive-in style through the stereo of the vehicle in which you also viewed the work. Fox’s material, rich in bass, is somewhat challenged in this listening environment (although some audience members might have had a pumping car stereo system that could cope). A highlight is the inclusion of material from a collaboration with improvising bassist Clayton Thomas, with percussive, rubbery plunking and complex rhythmic interplay that sits uneasily but interestingly over the street-inflected dance. But the tone of Drift as a whole was perplexing—was that extended primal drum sequence with accompanying flailing dance in earnest? The irony was hard to read, disconnected as we were from the action in our metal capsules.
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
less is more
Huey Benjamin has created vast amounts of intricate and detailed digital material for the score of In Glass by Narelle Benjamin, much of it very beautiful, but constantly shifting, moving on. I longed for fewer layers, more space, more moments of repetition and pattern making, more dynamics (the soundtrack is compressed to the limit) in order to grasp the many territories and ideas that both Benjamins are working with. It felt as if there needed to be more trust in the dance itself, freeing the music from its parallel role of exposition and allowing it to bring more oblique lyrical space to the work.
Livia Ruzic’s sound design for Trevor Patrick’s I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water seemed subtle in comparison with the music-drenched works in Dance Massive but it was no less effective. In a heavily text-driven work, with Patrick’s recorded voice-over alternating between an older and younger self and full of poetic remembrances and curious philosophising on the nature of choreography and art-making, Ruzic’s spare additions of water droplets, fire crackle and subtle tonal washes were subliminal and dreamlike. She offered unobtrusive, egoless support absolutely vital to the ambience and momentum of the piece.
Finally, to the sparest sound design of all, found in Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW, where in fact, at some point in the creative proceedings the choreographer chose to do away with a sound designer altogether (see RealTime interview). The majority of sound was made by the performers themselves, either through rhythmic chanting of ‘ow’ words or in their laboured breathing after an extended sequence of high kicks, or disconnected phrases mimicked from a silent TV screen. The only recorded sound was a piece of non-descript pop music played from an iPod that triggered a pivoting jazz-dance sequence. Meanwhile, uncomfortable silences brought us back, time and time again, to our awkward present. But, of course, as John Cage counselled, there is no silence and, on the night I attended, traffic noise, sirens and a large blow fly kept us very much aware of ourselves, and the dancers, in the here and now.
future fusions
While the majority of experimental music and sound practice in Australia operates in isolation—without a body, without performative or overt gestural distraction—it is exciting to see more cross-over and cross-disciplinary exploration developing, evidenced by much of the work in Dance Massive. With the recent Australia Council Music-Dance initiative which is encouraging a bi-partisin approach to funding dance with music, or music with dance, hopefully the dance sector will become even more adventurous in its level of sonic experimentation (and vice versa) with the conversation between music, dance and performance becoming even richer, more complex, and more daring.
My schedule prevented me from seeing Happy as Larry (composers Nick Wales, Bree Van Reyk ), Not in a Million Years (Max Lyandavert), Sunstruck (Livia Ruzic), Becky Jodi and John (Hahn Rowe) or Dance Marathon (Ciara Adams, Richard Windeyer).
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Dance Massive 2011, Arts House, Dancehouse, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-27; www.dancemassive.com
Sarah Jayne Howard, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
photo Lisa Tomasetti
Sarah Jayne Howard, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
AS A LEGAL TERM, FORCE MAJEURE IS ALL ABOUT FREEING THE PARTIES TO A CONTRACT FROM LIABILITY SHOULD EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES INTERVENE. AS A COMPANY, FORCE MAJEURE HAS EXPLORED THE EFFECTS OF SUCH EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES BEFORE IN ALREADY ELSEWHERE AND NOW AGAIN IN NOT IN A MILLION YEARS. THEIR FASCINATION WITH THE EXTRAORDINARY IS HARDLY SURPRISING, BUT A TROUBLING QUESTION EMERGES: DOES THE EXTRAORDINARY SUBJECT MATTER FREE THE PARTIES OF THIS CONTRACT (CREATORS AND AUDIENCE) FROM THEIR LIABILITIES? DOES ORDINARY WORK EMERGE FROM EXTRAORDINARY SUBJECTS?
Geoff Cobham’s set for Not In A Million Years is a polystyrene playpen. One part Antarctica, one part Motoi Yamamoto salt sculpture, one part FedEx, the flakes of polystyrene give body to the impossible infinity of the world’s events. Somewhere in that spongy mess is the flake that will win the lottery, break the record for long jump or simply bungee. It is the bungee jumping flake that we meet first. A man rises from the front of the audience and begins reciting a story of how he prepared to deny every survival instinct in order to freefall for those few seconds before the elastic kicked in. The style of address is forced, even a little declamatory, as though we need to be convinced of the drama when it should be able to speak for itself.
However, for the rest of the show, the situation reverses and the fact of the events speaking for themselves is precisely the hurdle that Not In A Million Years struggles with most. Projected text tells us of one extraordinary event after another: a flight attendant who falls thousands of metres and lands unscathed in soft snow; miners who survive for weeks trapped a kilometre underground; a Lotto jackpot winner who becomes a fat, single recluse; a tightrope walker who hangs out between the tops of the WTC towers for the best part of an hour; a man who remains in a coma for a decade, then wakes, then dies shortly afterwards. In the face of all this extraordinariness, why embellish with dance?
Elizabeth Ryan and Vincent Crowley, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
photo Heidrun Löhr
Elizabeth Ryan and Vincent Crowley, Not in a Million Years, Force Majeure
The answer in Not In A Million Years is to not dance (much). Instead, the piece becomes a presentational turnstile of theatrical vignettes. We are given the facts and then taken into imaginary recreations of the events and their protagonists—the internal monologues of the coma patient and his wife, the banter between the miners, the exertion of the athlete training for a jump. Rightly, the feats of survival and the misfortune of the fortunate do not need embellishment, but is this way to learn of them?
Director Kate Champion and her collaborators have not unearthed these stories from detailed investigation, nor made verbatim transcripts. They found most of them online and the provenance is telling in two ways. Googling the stories can be more fascinating than the show itself because, as one watches the actual event on YouTube, reads the background, listens to recounts, understands the fallout, senses the ripples it sent into society, one can disappear into ever-broadening branches of research. Second, the treatment given to the stories presented in the show is so cursory and unembodied that it fails to connect to the audience on an emotional or empathic level.
Much of this failure is due to the paucity of theatrical rigour. The writing, the dramaturgy, the use of space and the acting are all below par. The text and voices are unable to find either the believability of naturalism or the transformative power of the epic. The monologues are occasionally shunted into a corner and given a wash of emotion, or they remain underdeveloped suggestions of a character. The rhythm of the piece as a whole remains steadfastly ponderous. Sometimes even the choreography fails to enliven the stories with anything more than cliché—the interminable waiting of the coma sufferer’s wife is shown by her pacing, longing shown in her hugging herself.
The vast array of films that tap into stories like these make it clear that they are not inherently above or below excellent representation—think of Herzog’s Wings of Hope, or the unabashed joy of James Marsh’s Man on Wire, or the tortured purity of Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Unfortunately, Not In A Million Years seems to have been seduced by the extraordinary to its own very ordinary detriment.
Dance Massive: Force Majeure, Not in a Million Years, director Kate Champion, performers Vincent Crowley, Sarah Jayne Howard, Elizabeth Ryan, Joshua Tyler, assistant director Roz Hervey, designer Geoff Cobham, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 26, 27; www.dancemassive.com.au
Alisdair Macindoe, Drift, Antony Hamilton
photo Byron Perry
Alisdair Macindoe, Drift, Antony Hamilton
AS FELLOW REVIEWER CARL NILSSON-POLIAS HAS SUGGESTED (see review), AANTONY HAMILTON’S DRIVE-IN DANCE WORK DRIFT APPEARS TO DERIVE FROM THE HEAVY METAL COMIC BOOK OEUVRE. A TRIO OF APPARENTLY HUMAN FIGURES IN VAGUELY FUTURISTIC OUTFITS OCCUPIES A STARK POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE. WITH GREAT EFFORT, AMIDST VERY REAL DUST-CHURNING WIND AND INTERMITTENT RAIN, THEY TRAVERSE A SMALL STRETCH OF EARTH, BREAK INTO VIGOROUS, ALMOST RITUALISTIC DANCING, AND THEN ENCOUNTER A BARE-BREASTED, SHAMANISTIC WOMAN WHO CONDUCTS HER OWN RITUAL BEFORE BEING BRUTALLY ABDUCTED BY THE TRIO. SHE FINALLY SINKS INTO THE EMBRACE OF THE LEADER AND THE QUARTET JOURNEYS ON.
With those ingredients (strange humans, wasteland, ritual, sex and a dash of violence) it’s not at all difficult to imagine a Heavy Metal version of Drift—particularly in the style born of the magazine’s origins in the French adult sci-fi/fantasy magazine Metal Hurlant and its visually sophisticated team of influential comic book artists, like Moebius. Much of the content of Heavy Metal (first published in 1997) still comes out of Europe and from the same artists. Hamilton duly exploits the sweep of the freeway overhead, echoing the clean lines of Moebius and his ilk and amplifying the sense of wasteland isolation with light (dim, yellowish) and sound (cosmic storms crackling out of the car radio). In our vehicles we quickly forget the nearby buildings, development sites and passing cargo ships of Docklands.
Squatting in the dust before us, huddled together like a single being, the trio appears to be near immobilised, locked into a staccato pulse from which they can’t escape. One (Alisdair Mcindoe) is costumed in dirty white, his size and the sheen of his flesh and matching clothing suggesting leadership and a degree of sci-fi-ish elegance while his companions (Melanie Lane, Jess wong) are short, dressed in grey and hooded, a kind of faceless Ninja-Jawa cross (Jawa, the scavengers in Star Wars). The trio break free, rise up, travel briefly, loosening up as they go, and then dance. Gone is their initial zombie-ish spasming—they gesture, thrust and swivel with Thriller verve, upper arms at times wide, hands dangling, to a beat that creaks like strained metal.
They’re a nervy bunch. As if sensing another presence they stop, move together, dance slo-mo to the off-beat of a treated double bass, plucked and slapped. A monkish chant and the ringing of small cymbals confirm the sense of ritual, but the deep growl becomes a roar and then a scream—the trio hide. A tall woman (Lily Paskas) with long black hair, black tattoos on her throat and lower back, bare-breasted, enters with a long, leaf-less tree branch. She slowly turns, twirling with increasing speed, holding the branch before her, behind and at arms length in an act of considerable endurance, faster and faster to the cruel sound of crashing static, staggering sideways but without falling. Now still, she attempts to plant the branch, pushing it into the shallow earth, finally sliding down its length, exhausted and letting it drop. Her ritual has presumably failed to generate growth. Amidst thunderclaps she is picked up by the two Ninja-Jawas in an elaborate, violent dance of containment that their leader then joins, the arms and legs of all flailing and tangling with Eurocrash speed and precision. The woman’s body is hoisted above shoulders, tossed and meshed with her oppressors until she sensuously melds into the body of the leader. Now a foursome, the group exits slowly, holding the woman, doubtless a trophy, high against one of the freeway pillars. Perhaps regeneration is now possible in this primitive proto-society.
On reflection, Drift could have been pretty exciting as a pop culture-art hybrid. However, the drive-in scenario kept us at a sizeable distance from the work, which only came close to us as the trio dragged the woman along the line of cars. Otherwise, Hamilton made little effective use of the epic potential of his site, especially its depth of field. Had his characters appeared around us, at our windows, behind our cars; had the female shaman arrived from the extreme distance; had the drive-in framing been subverted in some way; with these and more we might have experienced some of anticipated thrills and chills. Instead, Drift felt genteel, too adoring of its sources of inspiration and short on the irony that could have further reduced our sense of distance. Only when the assault on the woman commenced did the work generate discomfort—for the apparent misogyny not atypical of Heavy Metal. It was then that I wished for the other side of the magazine’s coin: for the woman to turn on the men with vengeful brutality. But that would have been another story.
Perhaps when the work appears for Campbelltown Arts Centre later this year, Hamilton, a recognised innovator, will have had time to better exploit his site, to generate a greater cinematic and comic book sense of perspective—a 3D world, not a distant, contained 2D-ish movie screen model. The trio dancing and the quartet struggle are exciting, the costuming is effective and the sound sometimes immersive (if struggling through car speakers). As narrative Drift is thin, but a more radical approach to its staging could make a big difference.
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Dance Massive, Arts House: Drift, creator, director Antony Hamilton, performers Alisdair Macindoe, Jess Wong, Lily Paskas, Melanie Lane, sound designer Robin Fox, additional music Robin Fox, Clayton Thomas, costume designer Paula Levis, video artist Kit Webster; Docklands, Melbourne, March 24-27; www.dancemassive.com.au
Dance Marathon, Dance Massive
photo Ponch Hawkes
Dance Marathon, Dance Massive
DANCE MARATHON IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPLEX, MOST SOPHISTICATED AND YET MOST DELIRIOUSLY ENJOYABLE PERFORMANCE WORKS I HAVE EXPERIENCED IN A LONG WHILE, AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH THIS REVIEW HAS COME ABOUT WILL ALLOW ONLY THE MOST SUPERFICIAL SCRATCHING OF ITS SURFACE. THE NEED TO PRODUCE A WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A PERFORMANCE WORK BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING BECOMES A GREAT IMPEDIMENT TO ANALYSIS IF SUCH WORK REQUIRES YOU TO DANCE ALMOST NON-STOP FROM 8PM UNTIL MUCH PAST MIDNIGHT. BETWEEN MY RAW EXPERIENCE AND THE REFLECTION ON IT THERE HAS BEEN TIME ONLY FOR SOME VERY DEEP SLEEP.
Dance Marathon, staged by Canadian interdisciplinary theatre collective bluemouth inc, functions on at least two levels, which have not entirely come together in my mind. The first is referential. It is staged as a version of the dance marathons popular in the USA in the 1920s and the 1930s. Starting off as Charleston-era one-person (largely female) showcases, the willingness of young dancers to compete in endurance dancing, seeking quick fame, prompted presenters to organise increasingly more elaborate marathons, weaving variety acts and celebrity appearances through the event, introducing complex rules of elimination, theatricalising personal dramas of the contestants and attracting large audiences. Short breaks were introduced for the dancers, allowing the overall length of the marathon to stretch to days, weeks, months. During the Depression era, dance marathons became the bread and circuses of the time, reflecting the large amounts of free time the unemployed citizens of America now had—but also offering that intriguing combination of promises: faint traces of fame and glory, cash and prizes, on the one hand, and work, food and shelter for a short while, on the other.
We may not know any of this, however, and still experience Dance Marathon as a satisfactory reference to a popular form, because the similarity with contemporary reality television is so stark. We enter; we queue to register; we fill out a form waiving health risks; we get a number; we complete a small dance card with personal trivia that will become crucial for the unfolding of the show; we talk to each other in mass anticipation. Our Mistress of Ceremonies introduces the rules: feet moving at all times, no knees touching the floor. We are randomly coupled and, I may add, this is all very exciting: we do dance, with great abandon, the way I rarely see Melburnians dance. There is no audience, although we are being filmed. Do we notice or care? No. As we have heard from reality TV participants, nobody does.
The evening includes dance lessons, games, elimination rounds, celebrity guests, skills showcases (Bron Batten does a mean tap dance), prizes. The logic of elimination is entirely congruent with both reality TV and the pedagogical rules of making all children feel included in a game: very few eliminations in the first three quarters, and a large cull before the semi-finals (bringing the numbers down from 65 to 6); contestants are eliminated on mainly irrelevant grounds, with great attention to preserving the diversity of faces; and the overall winner is decided in a micro-cart race. It is the most inclusive format that an elimination game could possibly assume. Just like those real people on TV sets, smiling under a cloud of swirling confetti, so are we feeling extremely gratified to be participating in something as lovely as Dance Marathon.
However, as a first-hand immersive experience Dance Marathon is the complete opposite of its own references: it is rewarding, pleasurable, even empowering. In a town of reluctant dancers, it was quite marvellous to see people with no clear dance skills throw themselves around next to highly trained professionals, the former unselfconscious, the latter unselfconsciously corny. Moments of provided entertainment quickly became something to participate in, rather than just watch—in a way similar to Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On, the emphasis on the silly imbued the audience with great freedom to act. A reading of a sad poem prompted waves of expressive dance. Every so often, in the middle of a dance number, a choreographed formation would emerge, and we would move aside to observe better these bluemouth inc dancers whom we thought were here just to play. Overall, Dance Marathon worked like a truly wonderful party, in which the organised entertainment blended in perfectly with the fun we were able to have all by ourselves.
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
photo Gordon Hawkins
Dance Matathon, bluemouth inc
The question worth posing is, why? This close to the experience, the answer can be only vaguely attempted. Dance Marathon foregrounded the elements of game with rules and challenges that stripped away a whole layer of agency from the participant, paradoxically liberating us from having to make choices, thus making us also safe from ridicule or awkwardness. Freud elaborates on the transition from children’s games to adults’ jokes, the latter being essentially more self-protective and tendentious. A joke protects its own pleasure before the intellect. A game, on the other hand, is pure pleasure codified—the purpose is not winning, but following the rules. Once inside the girdle of the rules, we are probably as free as we can ever be. It makes one wonder about the extent to which the emergence of immersive theatre—essentially games for adults—responds to some deep need we have today for simple pleasures.
On the other hand, it was very rewarding to see a huge mix of people—from the dedicated contemporary dance audience to people coming straight from swing classes, to those just having a Saturday night out—utterly enjoying, and understanding, an event that questions the theatrical form to this degree. It reminds one of the fact that dance, of all the ‘highbrow’ art forms, has the strongest connection to the street and to play—a point not made often enough. As Deleuze said somewhere, we do not have a body, we are a body. In other words, our body is not an object we put into practice, but the entity through which we experience the world. This is why Dance Marathon, however satisfying on the level of reference to bread and circuses, exists primarily as an extraordinary party, allowing us to dance with strangers, be blindfolded and drawn into complex choreographies, and even attempt a mass (unskilled) rendition of the dance sequence in Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964), as Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey progressively accelerate on screen—and all with great pleasure.
A perfect end to Dance Massive.
Dance Marathon appears as part of 10 Days on the Island, Launceston, April 1-3, http://tendaysontheisland.org. The dance scene in Bande à part can be found on YouTube.
Dance Massive: bluemouth Inc, Dance Marathon, performers, creators Clara Adams, Stephen O’Connell, Clayton Dean Smith, Cass Bugge, Lucy Simic, Cameron Davis, musicians Steve Charles, Peter Lubulwa, Eugene Ball, Carlo Barbaro. Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 26; www.dancemassive.com.au
THE INCOMPARABLE TREVOR PATRICK’S I COULD PRETEND THE SKY IS WATER IS AN UTTERLY MAGICAL, IMMERSIVE 33-MINUTE PERFORMANCE-CUM-INSTALLATION THAT EXPLORES RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PLACE AND MEMORY AND, WITH WICKED WIT, NEGOTIATES THE DISASTER THAT CAN BEFALL ANY PERFORMANCE, NOT LEAST DANCE.
We’re loath to give too much away. We can say it involves a clever stage design (Efterpi Soropos) comprising three large surfaces that act as screens. The projected videos by Rhian Hinkley, with evocative detail, transform these into ceiling, wall and floor and, later, the sea. Trevor Patrick is somewhere in here, first glimpsed as a ghostly presence on the wall—perhaps just a video image, a Bill Viola-ish spectre, an ectoplasmic return of the repressed. But we do have his voice, an older Patrick croaking out a series of 13 remembrances, each deliciously precise and framed by seductive, sometimes disturbing ambient sounds drawn from nature (Livia Ruzic), commencing with the mere drip, drip of water but soon growing into something more turbulent.
As with all things in I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water, the recollections float freely—the memory of a childhood ride in a rocking boat could have been on a swaying train. And as ever with Patrick, the writing is rich in detail and inherent poetry, suffused with droll humour. The particularity of place is striking in these remembrances—the idiosyncratic names of Australian towns seem odder than ever—although the reliability of recall is again tested: did such an event happen in this town or that one? Memory floats, suspended between possibilities.
The droll pace of Patrick’s speech mirrors the Australian voice of older generations. Or will we all sound like this some day? Inducing a dreamy forgetfulness, it relishes the crisp consonants of words like “Tumbarumba,” the fruity tongue rolls for names like “Gloria.” Sentences are rarely tied off briskly but rather extended with gross relish in words like “a-r-s-e” or the endless possibility of “Anyway…”
Suspension is the text’s insistent motif—on a chair, on a plank, in a boat, atop the artist’s father’s shoulders. Deft shifts in point of view are especially amusing—an old council chair remembers supporting an aunt’s “fat arse,” a carpet recalls the uneven weight of furniture and feet. The impressionistic image of Patrick on the wall sees him suspended and slowly rotating, his movement of strangely elongated hands and feet heavy, as if under water. Indeed, water increasingly invades his, and our, environment. Hinkley’s video art masterfully generates this transformation with images of great beauty, entailing subtle superimpositions and fragmentations: the ceiling rose is awash, the carpet colours spread into new patterns.
Patrick is subsequently revealed to be a human-animal hybrid in an exquisite stretch lace costume (by Peter Allan) that, in the shifting textures of Soropos’ lighting, evokes at different times soft, delicate flesh or a richly delineated scaly armour. The creature’s movement becomes more fluid, more dancerly but with not a little irony in the ensuing dialogue between Patrick and his older self. The text suggests not just the discovery of a pre-historic living fossil—suspended between species at a particular evolutionary moment—but also the performance itself as potential disaster (“eight of the audience are still unaccounted for”). This refers inherently to the riskiness of this performance but also to the challenges for all performers, not least choreographers (the crisis entails throwing out choreographic sections and other anxieties: “the longer a dance goes on the less likely its survival”).
There is no sense in which the work is confessional, beyond expressing with metaphoric intensity the stress of creation and performance for that very singular, strange species, the artist in the struggle for survival. There is a brief reference to Patrick as bow-legged and pigeon-toed when a child. Someone in his family assumes this will “right itself if attention is not drawn to it” and that “the blackboard will calm his restive legs.” But much of the imagery captures the look and feel of the past in terms of names, places, events (the Queen’s 1954 visit—“Nothing to see”), objects and lateral associations—crooked teeth and a lop-sided car grille.
I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water celebrates the survival of the artist with a great deal of beautifully clothed irony and hints of hard won optimism (“the audience never give up hope until the last of the choreography”), although the final image is as disturbing as it is beautiful. Similarly the grace of Patrick’s movement belies the physical endurance entailed in being suspended for the entire performance.
This marvellous act of suspension is supported by highly integrated video, stage, lighting and costume design and reinforced with the sustaining power of remembrance embodied in words in a work that anticipates a future reflective self while facing the creative crises of the present. In little more than half an hour, Trevor Patrick marvellously suspends himself, time and our disbelief with a scenario at once deeply familiar (the dance of memory) and utterly strange (the artist as beautiful alien).
Dance Massive: I Could Pretend The Sky Is Water, words & movement Trevor Patrick, costume Peter Allan, set & visual design Efterpi Soropos, set & design realisation Bluebottle, film production Rhian Hinkley, soundscape Livia Ruzic; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 23-26; www.dancemassive.com.au
Becky Hilton, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, Becky, Jodi and John
Vladimir: He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
Estragon: And if he doesn’t come?
Vladimir: We’ll come back tomorrow.
Estragon: And the day after tomorrow.
Vladimir: Possibly
Estragon: And so on.
Vladimir: The point is—
Estragon: Until he comes.
[Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot]
Becky, Jodi and John, from New York’s John Jasperse Company, is a Trojan horse, a masquerade, a depth beneath the façade. It is also what it seems, funny, witty, casual, undulating, perambulating, a play of surfaces. Beneath the mask of hilarity lies a serious piece. Or is it the other way round?
Film titles roll down, looking a bit like Episode 20 of StarWars telling us about the work. Let’s begin with an existential conundrum: this piece is about life. It was conceived by the artists in 2006, but that was some time ago and life has changed. What’s more, someone’s not here. But that’s okay, because we’ve called her on Skype. So here we have it, an absent presence, time out of joint, framed by the group, by the collective ‘we.’ That collective framing remains throughout, warming us with its camaraderie.
Becky, Jodi and John emerge; quirky limbs peek over the wallpaper frieze, their timing eccentric. Chrysa also appears on a monitor manifesting the same wallpaper. Domesticity abounds. She speaks into her webcam, her face looming against what appears to be her bedroom. Chrysa can’t be here, she had too much on to participate in this project. Well, she certainly made up for it, raising questions throughout, inserting propositions, even teleporting her stuffed animal for a disco solo later on.
“The trouble with us,” Chrysa opines, “is that we are too articulate.” There is no lack of articulation here. Jodi Melnick’s early solo is nothing if not articulate. Strong, clear events resound in the body, kinetic initiatives pass through her torso or pelvis, bouncing around like billiard balls, fine dancing without the aid of excess muscularity. There is an intense delicacy about her dancing.
Becky and John offer their own duet behind Jodi. They begin by rubbing their knees, looking like a Greek chorus of washerwomen but then the rubbing becomes something else, a dance forming a tangent with the everyday. There are many everyday moments; emails are read out, the threesome have a break and open up for audience questions. But these elements are completely integrated into the work. So they are no longer everyday.
The spectre of time hovers, endings loom. Becky reads an email from Jodi cataloguing all the problems that have developed in her body. Becky tells us why she stopped dancing. John refers to a critical response to his work which suggests he should perhaps stop making art, as if the time for art has come to an end.
Chrysa Parkinson (on monitor), Becky Hilton, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick
Physically, the duets, trios and solos are a pleasure to watch. Bodies engage through touching, pushing, softening, leaning, falling. Their touch is considered. John stands naked in front of Jodi. Her proximity to his nakedness raises questions; how will she touch him, where will she touch him? She meets his skin time and again. Heads roll of their own accord while a torso propels itself across space, a snifter of Cunningham. But these bodies are soft. They soften around a pushing hand, then plump up again. Jodi falls on the group, a percussive moment of choreography becoming humour. There is a casual feel about this dancing and spoken text, aided and abetted by Hahn Rowe’s music which is quirky and whimsical, relaxed, inviting laughter.
No-one takes themselves too seriously, but neither are these conversations just played for laughs. Anxieties about the body surface in Jodi’s conversation. There is a marked tension between her catalogue of infirmities and this capable, dancing body. Becky narrates a story about her son’s superhero fantasies. She returns dressed in a makeshift outfit in imitation of that worn by her then eight-year old child. Her breasts are bare, green tights are pulled up high and a footy flag (the Western Bulldogs) is tied around her neck. But for her breasts, she could be that child. There is an air of vulnerability about her nakedness, a sort of Bill Henson turning away from the gaze.
John recounts a colleague’s critical comments about experimentalism in his work. These are read out by Jodi. By way of response, John appears naked, holding a huge pile of pretend bricks. Unstable, they collapse, falling to the ground, the last one revealing his genitals. Is this a riposte, an experiment or a compulsion to return to the source of irritation?
The audience is at some point invited to ask questions, which are in turn deflected and treated obliquely. There is a distorted skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), a disguised reference to mortality that appears only through a change in perspective. Are these deflections an anamorphosis, distorted reflections on mortality? Chrysa misses her friends. Chrysa isn’t here. Chrysa’s elephant dances under the disco mirror ball. Maybe all this hilarity is a carrier, death’s Trojan horse. There is this scene I recall in a film about Congo’s ill-fated president, Patrice Lumumba (Lumumba, director Raoul Peck, 2000). Lumumba and his best friend lie tied and beaten up, waiting for the inevitable. They tell stories, reminding each other of earlier times. The two of them piss themselves laughing. Then they die. I’m sure they would have danced too, if they could.
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Dance Massive: John Jasperse Company, Becky, Jodi and John, creators, performers Becky Hilton, John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, Chrysa Parkinson (online), choreographer, director John Jasperse, music Hahn Rowe, lobby video Ben Speth, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 24-April 3; www.dancemassive.com.au
BEFORE WE COMMENCE, A POLITE REMINDER ON THE NATURE OF THE REAL IN THE THEATRE. ALTHOUGH EVERY ART FORM THAT SPEAKS OF THE WORLD IS TO SOME EXTENT MADE OF THE WORLD (THE TIMBER FRAME THAT STRETCHES THE CANVAS, AND SO FORTH), IN THEATRE THE SIGN AND THE THING ARE PARTICULARLY TIGHTLY ENMESHED. WHILE THE TYPED WORD ‘CHAIR’ STANDS FOR AN ACTUAL CHAIR, IT IS PRECISELY NOT A MATERIAL CHAIR. ON STAGE, IN CONTRAST, A THING IS ALWAYS BOTH A SIGN FOR A THING, AND THE THING ITSELF: A CHAIR ON STAGE IS A CHAIR THAT STANDS FOR A CHAIR.
Faker addresses us, the audience, as an autobiographical, even confessional work, but it is impossible to discuss it as such—once it enters stage space and stage time, ‘Gideon Obarzanek’ stands for Gideon Obarzanek, performing a sitting that stands for sitting, at a desk standing for a desk. It would be dramaturgically and critically naive to review ad hominem: this review can only talk about a staged character, ‘Gideon Obarzanek,’ not the person off-stage; and about the stage letter he receives from a theatrical pupil. The question of the percentage of ‘reality’ involved is, in this case, at the very least dumb, and at the very worst unethical.
The dramatic structure has ‘Obarzanek’ alternating between two activities: first, he reads out a letter sent to him by a young dancer, clearly smitten by ‘Obarzanek,’ who initiates a collaboration, hoping that he will “bring out the fabulous” in her, and then finds herself feeling progressively more vulnerable, let down, and growing increasingly more disappointed, hostile. The voice of the letter sounds clear notes of adoration, insecurity, need to be liked and desire to please, and although it is said to belong to a woman, it could easily belong to a young man. Asked to perform something she has not done before (“this task was designed in a way that I could only fail”), her insecurity starts coalescing into a perception of betrayal: “I stood there, humiliated.”
Between the paragraphs, ‘Obarzanek’ dances. Or rather, performs his pupil’s dancing: some excruciatingly clumsy moves with bad singing, something-she-has-never-done-before, a randomly arranged ‘conceptual’ sequence, and the solo he choreographed for her, the only one she liked: it required skill, she writes, and it belonged to her. The dancing is uproariously bad—we are certainly invited to laugh. Whether we are laughing at the dancer or at ‘Obarzanek’ is a very good question. Something-she-has-never-done-before is a case to consider: ‘Obarzanek’ sets an alarm, forcing himself into a long series of unprepared, unrehearsed, silly-looking movements. At this point it seems like he may be pushing himself through the humiliation he imposed onto the young dancer, tasting her powerlessness by having to endure until the alarm releases him. A few minutes later, the alarm goes off again, and ‘Obarzanek’ needs to interrupt the performance for a second to turn it off. He makes a quick, embarrassed joke to the audience, explaining the error with a short nervousness that is quite at odds with the precise, even angry focus with which the rest of the work is delivered. This incident reveals that there is no vulnerability to ‘Obarzanek’s’ performance. Rather, a sort of resentful fatigue, visible in the corners of his mouth and the detached raising of his eyebrows as he continues to narrate.
The two characters are full of resentment, with bitter accusations on one side and a strong defensiveness on the other. The hostility between them is high and charged with sexual tension—the dancer accuses the choreographer of choreographing on her another one of his “ongoing sensual-woman solos”. Every teacher-student relationship is intrinsically erotic, and dirty laundry flies in all directions. The dancer calls ‘Obarzanek’ “one of those pervy directors”; he exposes her weaknesses, of artistry and character, to a staggering extent. The rapport between a famous, older, male choreographer and a young, inexperienced female and clearly adoring dancer is one of enormous inequality, let’s make it clear, and the choreographer takes no precautions to protect his pupil, neither in the rehearsal process nor in the performance.
What intrigues is the differences between their voices. The female dancer is capable of softness, a conspiratorial intimacy: she apologises, she deliberates, she explains herself, she thanks him. The male choreographer shows no such concern: to her accusations of not living up to her expectations of him, to his status, all he offers is an admission that he, too, doubts himself. There is no empathy with the young dancer’s vulnerability, and no willingness to respond. Obarzanek as ‘Obarzanek’ performs wounded masculine pride to perfection. While the dancer admits to lying, to having nightmares, to doubting herself, to feeling humiliated, ‘Obarzanek’ never appears to hear the charges levied at him. What he admits, instead, is recognising the doubt in the dancer’s demeanour—a doubt he has grown to notice, and ostensibly fear, but not to address. A wide gulf separates his control of the stage from the vulnerability of, for example, Jerome Bel allowing Pichet Klunchun [in Pichet Klunchun and Myself] to question him on stage, in person, named.
Faker is not a dialogue. ‘Obarzanek’ appropriates his accuser’s voice, turning a critique of himself into a long monologue. The irony is unmistakeable: if he had great power over the dancer’s body as her choreographer, as the re-interpreter of his own choreography for her he colonises her completely; she remains on stage only in faint traces. It is almost as if he is taking away from her the only thing she took from him gladly: her solo. A solo which, performed against a Baroque chorale and churchlike lighting, seems to make a heavy-handed point about ‘Obarzanek’s’ qualities as a choreographer and dancer, a coup de grace in a fight that was unequal from the start.
If this is self-critique, it is one with in-built clemency.
ANTONY HAMILTON’S PREVIOUS FULL-LENGTH WORKS HAVE BEEN UNIFIED BY A PREDILECTION FOR THE ADOLESCENT OR NAÏVE. IN THE EXCELLENT BLAZEBLUE ONELINE (SEE RT85), IT WAS THE PLAYFUL MARK MAKING OF GRAFFITI MIXED WITH CARDBOARD BOX TRANSFORMERS. IN I LIKE THIS, HAMILTON, TOGETHER WITH BYRON PERRY, ENDED A PIECE ABOUT DANCE CREATION WITH A BEAUTIFUL IMAGE OF THEMSELVES AS PRELAPSARIAN BOYS UNDER A DOONA—FASCINATED BY THE MAGIC OF LIGHT, THE POSSIBILITY OF IMAGINATION. IN DRIFT, THE THEME CONTINUES WITH WHAT FEELS LIKE A PASTICHE OF HEAVY METAL COMIC BOOK TROPES.
On the other hand, the clearest point of difference between Drift and Hamilton’s earlier work is that this one eschews the theatre and takes place under a highway. Whether it is the epic scale of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in a disused quarry, or the intimate celebration of the Flinders Street—Elizabeth Street intersection by The League of Resonance, site-based works call on their environs and their architecture for framing, for meaning, for reflection. Hence, it seems utterly appropriate that a work set underneath a highway should also be a drive-in show, where we park side-by-side and tune in to the soundtrack’s frequency. In fact, there is a giddy thrill in being given a map and a radio frequency instead of a ticket.
And so, in the gravel and dust beneath the CityLink overpass, down past the Xanadu tent, beside the film studios, in the shadow of the crippled remains of the Southern Star Observation Wheel, across Railway Canal from the city of shipping containers, in front of a row of cars, Antony Hamilton and friends create a post-apocalyptic vision. In that sense, this is a work that responds to its space. The Docklands, and the Wheel in particular, are the perfect location for an examination of the end of history, the folly of civilisation and the browbeaten individual.
Drift has already begun when we arrive. Three dancers are crouching and fretting their way across the ground in single file. They are led by a man in a dust-coloured hoodie who is shadowed at every step and bounce by a pair of ninjas. Yes, they are almost certainly ninjas. A soundtrack of noise, hum and beeps on our radio begins to divulge string instruments, percussion, an incoherent voice or scream. Above us, the tops of concrete pillars flicker with an enigmatic light.
Alisdair Macindoe, Drift, Antony Hamilton
photo Byron Perry
Alisdair Macindoe, Drift, Antony Hamilton
We are watching from some distance, through the inherent frame of a windscreen with the necessary intermediary of glass at a landscape-cum-set that is vast in reach and scale. Yet, the dance itself is small and precise, with the physical strobe of jerking motions that Hamilton has incorporated so frequently in his work. Therein lies a problem. There is already a detachment in sitting behind glass, in being in the familiar space of one’s car and there is a distance between audience and the barely-lit dancers. One senses that Hamilton wants to play with this detachment in the sense of its consequent voyeurism—we have stumbled upon a strange world in a place we have no call to visit normally. Given that there is no follow-through either on the notion of gaze, or on our presence, this feels like a conceptual cul-de-sac. Instead, these distancing factors compound to obscure and detract from the choreography. Or rather, the choreography does not fully meet the demands of the location. In this sense, Drift does not respond to its space but merely uses it as a backdrop.
Nevertheless, there are glimpses of what might have been. After the ninjas have left, a woman emerges in nothing more than boots, undies and bejewelled bracelets swinging a large tree branch in desperate circles. The image is strikingly strange and drew some confused looks from a group of young men who happened to wander past. But the image that stands out is when the woman, trying to plant the lifeless branch in the barren ground, holds onto its bulk to stop herself from falling. A spotlight falls on her and the wind blows her hair dramatically to one side. The image of nakedness, lifelessness and futility is framed perfectly by the massive concrete pillars and suddenly the work responds to its epic setting with an image of epic decay.
Drift finishes with a disappearing act. The topless woman, the ninjas and their leading man have clashed but eventually come to terms and, together, hugging the contours of concrete, they escape from view and we are ushered to start our engines and depart. As we drive off, talk turns to deserts and princesses, shamans and evil warlords, Conan the Barbarian and the 70s. The adolescent pop culture of the drive-in lives on.
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Dance Massive, Arts House: Drift, creator, director Antony Hamilton, performers Alisdair Macindoe, Jess Wong, Lily Paskas, Melanie Lane, sound designer Robin Fox, additional music Robin Fox Clayton Thomas, costume designer Paula Levis, video artist Kit Webster; Docklands, Melbourne, March 24-27
Interview with choreographer Trevor Patrick about I Could Pretend the Sky is Water. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
IIN THE PERFORMING ARTS, MEMORY CAN BE SHORT. FASHIONS ARE FORGOTTEN, MISSTEPS ARE GLOSSED OVER, WHEELS ARE REINVENTED. IT IS THE BLESSING AND CURSE OF PRODUCING EPHEMERA. SO, WHEN A CHOREOGRAPHER UPSETS THE USUAL CYCLE OF MEMORY LAPSE BY RETURNING TO AN OLD WORK, WHAT IS THE RESULT? HOW DOES AN AUDIENCE PRIMED FOR IMMEDIACY RESPOND TO ARCHIVAL DISTANCE? WHAT DO WE SEE AND WHAT DO WE MISS?
Amplification is the work that launched BalletLab and Phillip Adams. Its premiere dates back to the far reaches of 1999. The same year, sanctions against Libya were dropped, something called Napster started and The Matrix opened. So, in some respects, Amplification is ancient history. Yet, here it is again, resurrected.
It is impossible to watch Amplification with eyes a decade younger—to see it now is to see it with the knowledge of what has come since. The problems this gives rise to are clear: the groundbreaking may now seem derivative, the accessible may now seem obscure and the noteworthy may now disappear into a fog of familiarity. However, the rewards are nevertheless there. Amplification holds its own if only because, while some of the style might seem dated, the expressive language remains distinct. Adams’ direction and choreography, in its metaphorical leaps and snowballing dramaturgy is unlike anything else at Dance Massive so far.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
It is possible to draw a worthwhile comparison here with German choreographer Sasha Waltz. Premiering only a few months later than Amplification, Waltz’s seminal Körper (seen recently at the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival, RT94) has informed not only a decade of contemporary dance but also marked a fundamental moment of artistic expression for Waltz herself. In the subsequent years, Waltz has produced two other works—S and noBody—in response to Körper, making a trilogy of sorts that reflects her development as an artist as much as it does the development of the themes. Similarly, just over a year ago, Adams produced a response to Amplification called Miracle (RT 93). And this year he produced a third instalment, Above.
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
The most enticing conclusion to be drawn from this is that Amplification is an incomplete work. One that provokes questions rather than providing answers; one that leaves you wanting more; one that Phillip Adams has not finished exploring. This also suggests an excellent reason for a remount—for the audience to revisit a work with knowledge of its progeny.
Indeed, as someone who came to Miracle before Amplification, it is only possible to view the older work refracted through the lens of the newer. On the one hand, the distillation and evolution of Adams’ choreography in Miracle becomes evident—for instance, his increased trust in the dancers as embodiments rather than functionaries of his expression. On the other hand, cross-referenced understandings can be reached—for example, the common motif of the saffron cloth makes an overlong ritualistic swaddling of a corpse in Amplification ring with the memory of Miracle’s extraordinary final image of levitation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a choreographer, the locus for Adams’ artistic interest tends to be the body itself. But rather than the encyclopaedic vein of Waltz’s investigation in Körper, Adams is particularly focused on the extremities that the body can conquer, endure or suffer, which leads inevitably to the final extremity—mortality (like live performance, the body too is ephemeral).
Amplification, BalletLab
photo Jeff Busby
Amplification, BalletLab
In Miracle, the body was a site for internal hysteria, a hindrance to be denied, a vessel to be exited. In Amplification, the violence enacted on the body comes from outside. The partnering work is fast and violent, bodies flung with disregard, Lynton Carr’s soundtrack an oppressive ceiling edging downwards. The space is never fully devoid of menace—the silhouetted torture scene is reminiscent of the disturbingly sterile violence of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia: BR.#04 Brussels (RT 76), yet there are moments that almost break into the absurd—threatening toy cars roll towards the dancers, one scene mimics the tropes of horror films, another alludes to the symphorophilia of JG Ballard’s Crash.
In the end, the clearest point of contrast between Miracle and Amplification comes not in their exploration of the living body but in their vision of the afterlife. Miracle ended with a transcendent sleight of hand, a weightlessly impossible vision of the body in harmony with space. In Amplification, the body retains its mass. The afterlife here is one grounded in the body’s inescapability and so, one by one, the naked bodies of the dancers form a soft eternal landscape.
DEANNE BUTTERWORTH AND MATTHEW DAY’S DANCEHOUSE DOUBLE BILL IS AN APT PAIRING, EACH PERFORMER EXUDING A PALPABLE SENSE OF COMPULSIVE PURPOSE WITH INTENSIVELY FOCUSED BODY-WORK IN SPACES TIGHTLY FRAMED BY LIGHT, SHADOW AND ENVELOPING SOUND. THERE IS NOTHING LITERAL TO HANG ON TO HERE—ONCE AGAIN IN DANCE MASSIVE WE ARE ALL VERY MUCH IN THE MOMENT.
dual repérage in threes
Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes works the length of the venue’s upstairs Studio. To our far right, the choreographer-dancer appears abruptly, in a flurry of extensions, silhouetted in front of a human scale rectangle of bright, softly coloured light. Butterworth’s relationship to this light source is pivotal: she constantly moves away from it to the centre of her stage, sometimes further, only to return to it, sometimes moving backwards into its acute frame. The dancer is not miming push and pull, but the magnetism is evident—sometimes in a mere walk, sometimes as if she’s danced by an unseen force. As if to amplify the work’s anxious, moth-to-a-flame vibrancy, a hand-held torch lightly tracks Butterworth, casting a flickering shadow on the long wall as she moves into the dark.
Michael Munson’s score resonates with the dance; initially short, deep chords and high piano twangs suggest the solidity of acoustic sources, providing a palpable physical sonic pattern against which the dancer’s restive body moves regardless.
As Dual Repérage in Threes evolves, Butterworth’s choreography takes shape, cumulatively building on a calculatedly limited set of movements with occasional, strikingly different images (sculpted posturing, balletic tip-toeing, feet ‘stuttering,’ rapid pelvic thrusts) breaking the routine. The dancing’s not minimalist as in, say, some Molissa Fenley works, but the recurrence and recombination of motifs can be hypnotic or, at times, hard to hold together. Arms lead the body in wide turns, swing over shoulders singly and then together, back and forth at speed; hands spin rapidly over each other; and, in a dominant image, the dancer’s upper body is constantly pulled down towards the floor, centrestage, hands reaching, half-cupped as if something sighted is beyond grasp—the strange potency of this gesture is heightened by the addition of a percussive element to the sound score.
Deanne Butterworth, Dual Repérage in Threes
photo Rohan Young
Deanne Butterworth, Dual Repérage in Threes
The work is played out in two sections—there is a ‘private’ third that only Butterworth experiences or we can imagine, as she suggests in her opaque program notes. As the first ‘act’ progresses, the pull of the light is amplified when it turns slowly, softly orange, Butterworth travelling elegantly sideways, then walking serenely towards it. On arrival, she oscillates between bursts of energy and calm, drifts back to the centre, again as if seeing…what? Sweet organ-like tones fill the space. Black-out. Butterworth stands over a flickering fluorescent light as she commences her second ‘act,’ in which the rectangle of light is a vivid orange, and the images into which she recurrently locks are more intense, more urgent while others—like squared-off poses, moments of rare stability—are added. A thin line of lilac light illuminates the space where wall and floor meet, drawing a crawling Butterworth away from her principal light source, perhaps into some kind of release. In a moment that seems to break even further from the work’s patterning, Butterworth is no longer compelled to bend low; instead she clenches a fist and reaches out directly to us. It’s a powerful almost implicating moment, if again an abstract one.
In the work’s climactic moments, Butterworth returns to the light, a deep musical pulse underlining a frightening escalation of the work’s key motifs—arms and hands spinning, body pulled down and forward over and over. I’m not sure precisely what I witnessed in Dual Repérage in Threes, but Deanne Butterworth’s adroit coding of her choreography (inflected with years of dance know—how, superb balance and rapid gear-shifting) and the work’s near obsessive—compulsive realisation made for a compelling experience.
Matthew Day, Thousands
photo Jac Price
Matthew Day, Thousands
thousands
After I’d seen Thousands during the 2010 Sydney Fringe Festival, I wrote: “We’re seated mere feet away from Matthew Day, alert to the increasing tension in his body as he balances horizontally, close to the harsh floor on a mere two points of contact, suspended for a brief eternity before unfolding into a rotating, standing series of subtle transformations for…I don’t know how long. Time is erased as Day seamlessly mutates into slow-mo, non-literal evocations suggestive of body-builder, dance clubber (bizarrely headless as he faces away from us, head dipped), martial artist, butoh dancer, sportsman… as well as suggesting the body young and then strangely aged. The precision, control and focus are breathtaking. This is not dance in the usual sense, but it takes all the skill, strength and creativity of a talented dancer-choreographer to realise this acutely delineated state of being.” (See RT100)
A second viewing of Thousands confirmed for me the work’s peculiar, tension-driven power. Day maintains his performance constantly on the pivot of transition, always moving in minimal increments, such that the tension required not to topple or speed up creates a bodily vibration that is at times exhausting to watch but which provides the work with its pulse. This time I was hyper-alert to the meticulous shifts in movement: an arm leads out left, the direction Day is facing, but the palm of the hand faces us while the rest of the body slowly but with determination turns to the right.
Matthew Day,Thousands
photo Gareth Hart & Next Wave Festival
Matthew Day,Thousands
As part of Dance Massive, Thousands was performed at one end of the Dancehouse Studio against a white wall and on a polished timber floor. In terms of space and focus this created a very different ambience from the Sydney performance at PACT. There, Day’s black outfit was in sync with dark floor and walls. Here, the sheen of surfaces and the scatter of shadows reduced a little the work’s sense of sheer singularity. (In the second part of his trilogy, Cannibal, Day, in white clothes and hair, works a large white space in which shadows play an essential role: see RealTime 102, April-May.) Nonetheless, lighting designer Travis Hodgson (who also lit Cannibal), using strong down-lighting, manages to fix our attention while floorlights create shadows to amplify momentary, chance associations with, among others, sporting heroism, Soviet Realism, Rodin and Buddha.
James Brown’s monumental score also generates associations. Its enormous pulsing rumble feels like we’re sitting atop a giant machine, then stuck in a tunnel facing an oncoming train, then the target of hovering helicopters. But Brown’s composition is never literal, its long throbbing, humming lines magnifing the sense of body tension, although not in calculated sync with Day’s staccato internal beat, until the disco passage where music and body become one, Brown making even more of the flying bass lines than usual in that idiom. Of course, Day never deviates from his own pulse, making for some of the most restrained club dancing of all time.
Rosalind Crisp’s No one will tell us…, Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW and Deanne Butterworth’s Dual Repérage in Threes, in their very different ways deliriously engage with the notion of the moment. So does Matthew Day’s Thousands, not with improvisation or an open structure as its foundation, but with the ‘high-wire’ on-the-floor skill of maintaining balance and precision at the slowest of motion in the strangest of dances.
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Dance Massive: Double Bill: Dual Repérage in Threes, choreographer, performer Deanne Butterworth, sound design Michael Munson, lighting Rose Connors Dance; Thousands, choreographer, performer Matthew Day, sound James Brown, lighting Travis Hodgson, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, Rebecca Pollard, Yana Taylor; Studio, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22, 23; www.dancemassive.com.au
I ENCOUNTERED SHAUN PARKER’S HAPPY AS LARRY WITH A VIVID FEAR OF REPEATING A RECENT EXPERIENCE OF SEEING A PERFORMANCE ON HAPPINESS DEVISED BY SOME THEATRE UNDERGRADUATES. AFTER AN HOUR OF WATCHING THEM FROLIC AND TUMBLE, GIGGLE AND DANCE, I BELIEVE THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE WISHED THEM DEAD. NOTHING CAN BE QUITE SO IRRITATING AS WATCHING A PERSON IN A PROLONGED STATE OF BEING DEEPLY HAPPY. WE DO NOT IDENTIFY, QUITE THE CONTRARY: WE FEEL EXCLUDED, DISRESPECTED, IGNORED. WE MAKE COMPARISONS TO ARYAN PROPAGANDA. WE FEEL ENVY.
Not without reason have the classic theatrical forms focused on showing us great tragedies, or ridiculing deeply flawed characters. That’s something to identify with easily: suffering and smugness. Herein lies the paradox of mimesis: another’s happiness is not transferable by identification, does not become my happiness. Show me a happy person on stage, I am likely to see only a self-satisfied bastard.
Happy as Larry shows us people in prolonged states of happiness for no less than 75 minutes, with no narrative arc or character development to introduce variety, and no recourse to the spoken word. However, within this field of monotony it focuses on the varieties of experience and personality, loudly proclaiming its employment of the Enneagram’s nine personality types to create an interesting range of joyful experiences.
We watch very different people enjoy very different activities: a ballerina delights in perfectly executing a classical figure; two young men copy each other’s movements flawlessly, their happiness being both shared and competitive; three women dance, laughing, lightly and not overly concerned with precision; a roller-skater learns to control his wheels. Adam Gardnir’s elegant set, a rotating blackboard slab, keeps the meter of the show, sweeping dancers upstage and bringing new scenes on. While most activities are representations of a simple, even childlike delight in bodily coordination, synchronised movement or skill, some are complex and intriguing. A narcissistic seducer, compulsively revealing his tattoo, dances despite Dean Cross’s chalked suggestion: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Miranda Wheen, on the other hand, appears on the scene only as a mediator of other performers’ journeys: she tries to contain the seducer’s movements, or picks up and steadies the roller-skater. Her satisfaction is palpable, and yet there remains a niggling trace of disappointment as the stage is never hers, her fulfilment never self-generated.
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
photo Prudence Upton
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
It is this democratisation of what could otherwise easily be a fascist insistence on unity of experience that guides Happy as Larry safely out of dangerous waters or sparking a riot in the audience. The rotation of interacting, interfering characters opens up a space for identification. While Parker spends too long hitting a single emotional note, thus provoking some boredom, he also repeatedly manages to bring us back by creating a fresh image of a kind of joy we have previously not considered—such as Cross’ deep, rich euphoria expressed through forceful sliding across the stage, leaving powerful and inarticulate daubs of chalk on the board, a possible representation of artistic creation. Moments of such recognition are powerful if infrequent, and it does make one wonder about how little time we spend thinking about what makes us happy, and how much worrying about what worries us.
The choreography and the technique are beautiful, and this is to a large extent a dance to enjoy for the variety of dancing bodies and styles. However, the dramaturgy is held together more by the rotating slab and the excellent soundtrack (available on iTunes, no less!) than by any sound sense of purpose. What backbone there is is provided by a recurring attempt to illustrate the fleetingness of happiness—from trying to draw a square around a balletic swirl to the ever-growing ridiculous chalk diagrams of Marnie Palomares’ limbs. Like Luke George’s excellent NOW NOW NOW (see p16), Happy as Larry allows the pursuits of the present moment to resolve in absurdity. Now is only ever now, and the detritus of these moments is not happiness itself, any more than the collection of props in a gallery could ever be a decent substitute for Marina Abramovic.
After many false endings, the final scene turns unexpectedly bleak: the choreography resolves into unison repetition of movements one could expect from football hooligans—raised fists, chest banging, machine-gun mime. This is repetition for its own sake, dark and not at all joyful, the very image of the death drive. Is this what happens when we try to retrieve irrecuperable happiness? There is not enough solid dramaturgy to know for sure. One by one the dancers leave the stage, leaving Dean Cross entangled in the balloons, themselves detritus from the beginning of the show which, I forgot to mention, involved a sequence of very simple stage trickery. Light switches drawn on the blackboard ‘operated’ stage lights and a flock of balloons was summoned with a snap of fingers. Happiness seemed a very simple thing at that time.
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Dance Massive: Shaun Parker, Happy as Larry, director/choreographer Shaun Parker, dramaturg Veronica Neave, musical director Nick Wales, composers Nick Wales, Bree van Reyk, production design Adam Gardnir, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 22, 23; www.dancemassive.com.au
ITALIAN CHOREOGRAPHER JACOPO GODANI IS CURRENTLY IN SYDNEY TO CHOREOGRAPH A NEW WORK, RAW MODELS, FOR THE SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY. THE PIECE FORMS ONE HALF OF A DOUBLE BILL, SHARED FREQUENCIES, THE OTHER HALF BEING RAFAEL BONACHELA’S LANDFORMS. ERIN BRANNIGAN SPOKE WITH GODANI IN THE MIDST OF HIS PREPARATIONS.
I’m very interested in the overall approach you take to the choreography, the lighting and the design, your authorship over the entire work. You studied Fine Arts and Dance. Were you doing these at the same time?
I was in Italy and, yes, I did start dancing on a very quiet level in the last two years of my studies in Fine Art, but then I finally managed to go to the Maurice Béjart School and I could slow down with the fine arts to dedicate more time to dance. I started [dance] really late so I had to work all day, every day.
It was straight out of that that you set up your own company in 1990?
A couple of years later. I went to work with a small contemporary dance group in Paris for one year and then eight months back in Belgium with a new group that was a bit post-Béjart. And in that group I asked if I could do a work, which went well and we went on tour with it. And then a director of a theatre in Brussels saw it and offered me a residency…
That was an exciting time in Brussels with artists like De Keersmaeker, Vandekeybus and Alain Platel emerging and experimenting in collective environments.
It was fantastic…Money for culture, support and, most of all, curiosity. They were not creating a market or an economy. I don’t think they were making money but, culturally I mean, they were one of the most important movements in Europe in those years.
The Rosas School (P.A.R.T.S) that came out of that moment—where an artist was able to set up a training institution—was very idealistic and follows De Keersmaeker’s particular vision. For that to happen now, here…
Impossible. I work with a lot of companies in Europe. A lot of people ask me, “Why don’t you have your own company?” I would love to but right now with the frequency of work I have and the intensity…I do everything myself—lights, costumes, staging and choreography. And I am participating in the creation of the music and sometimes I do video design as well. When you’re a professional artist, you know how to deal with many fields. You don’t need 20 years company formation for everything you do. But right now, if I were to think about which country to set up a base to ask for an amount of money to carry on a philosophy with a group of dancers, I wouldn’t know where to do that.
So you don’t have any of the responsibility of having to raise funds or be responsible for a company of dancers. And the benefit outweighs the fact that you’re starting afresh with virtually a new company each time? Or are you invited into companies where you know what you’re dealing with to a certain extent?
I’m invited into companies regularly but you know how it is, dancers come and go all the time, especially in big companies. And dancers have other experiences and forget about what they have gone through with you. So you have to restart anyway. In that way, it’s a bit frustrating.
I don’t know how many of the dancers can tell you having worked with Jacopo has been an important experience or not. I think within the context of the limited time we have together, I challenge them a lot really. It’s quite an interesting ‘weapon’ to work with, dance, first of all because of the openness there is to receiving information. The dancer is really one of the most dedicated interpreters in the art world. In this way you can influence—in a very positive way—people’s way of seeing things. And this doesn’t only involve ideas. It involves mental mechanics. Because of the bodily involvement I think this goes much deeper, much further than just simply experiencing something that opens your mind.
Jacopo Godani (R) rehearsing with SDC Dancers
photo Peter Greig
Jacopo Godani (R) rehearsing with SDC Dancers
This idea that there’s a much closer link between thinking and the body, this is something you must have found in working with William Forsythe who really requires dancers who are very engaged and independent. How was that time?
It was absolutely amazing. I still dream about it and I left in 2000 so it’s 11 years now.
You were with him for ten years.
When you find a company like his, you don’t go somewhere else! It was the best of the best. There was everything there from avant-garde classical dancing to, the next day, singing in a parody of a musical and then, next day [undertaking] research into wearing sneakers and developing improvisational skills. It was incredible what Bill achieved. Utopian probably. He managed to have a group of 40 people in an opera house where basically there was only space for big stuff and ‘entertaining’ things. But his genius was to be able to make big shows with avant-garde ideas at the same time.
And his dancers … intelligent, definitely, but also very spontaneous because Bill had no parameters. That’s where I learned somehow that we could be free.
At that time the common logic was to shape yourself in circles and lines and angles and go from one to the other, as the step requires. Bill was revolutionary because he made people move like animals, like human beings. Nobody moved like human beings at that time, no matter what contemporary dance style you were looking at. It was about ‘artificialising’ yourself. Bill started to use the body and make it look like a body even though it was dancing classical [ballet]. It was amazing when you saw that.
I was looking at the small video clips online from your works Anomaly 1 (2008) and Spazio-Tempo (2010). There are really quick shifts between still, sculptural moments and really frenetic work.
When you choreograph you can easily be absorbed by looking into mechanics and shapes. And then you let yourself go and you think, “Wow it’s gorgeous!” And I’m so tired of myself. I don’t want to fall into this trap. So now I’m trying to create a type of musicality that is not logical to the brain. I want to get out of a traditional way of seeing beauty and lyricism. I’m sick and tired of doing something like “Lift her and she curls and…Gorgeous!” The dance has to be made because there is an intellectual, physical, mental challenge to produce something creative from dancers’ bodies.
The approach [the dancers] have towards what we are asking is really important. For me there is no creative effort or engagement in [simply] reproducing something correctly. I put [the dancers] in front of the mirror and say, “Do it, look, what do you think? I’m not teaching you this. This is your job. You have to be able to take care of it yourself.”
Let’s talk about Raw Models, your work for Sydney Dance Company. What’s this new work and how does it fit into what you’ve been doing lately?
It fits because I have managed to find a way of moving on even though I’m guest choreographing. I just go from company to company bringing the ‘baggage’ of what I do before. [For instance], I do a small piece of 20 minutes and then I redo it to 45 minutes or something like that. I have four or five weeks here, which is a bit limited unfortunately, so I use the tools that I have access to.
Rafael Bonachela is one of the most important people I’ve met in many years. He’s very alive. We have a very similar energy. We’re very curious. We also like all that there is around the basic artistic production—the networking, the promotional point of view, the contact, speaking to people, interviews—all these things. A lot of artists I find very reluctant about this side of things.
So apart from the music as a starting point [a commissioned score by German duo 48nord], what is this choreographic ‘baggage’ that you’re bringing from your last gig?
I want to create a certain allure around this piece, which is not pretty, lyrical and pleasing. I like the fleshiness and the aggressiveness of humankind and the nature of us as animals. So I’m trying to develop a sort of physicality that is very rough and very eloquent at the same time, by assembling bits of information of all kinds. I’m not trying to make a collage of styles because that’s crap as a concept. I’m trying to develop a piece that has a sort of alien, animalistic universe.
The research that I do choreographically is also structural. I’m also trying to think about light and height at the same time. It’s about the perception of volume. It’s about how to light the space in order to expand it and shrink it and bring it forward and back, [to highlight] all that is involved in a three-dimensional stage space…trying to find a type of light that helps people perceive this.
Sydney Dance Company, Shared Frequencies: Raw Models, choreographer
Jacopo Godani, composers 48nord; Landforms, choreographer Rafael Bonachela, composer Ezio Bosso; lighting designer Mark Dyson, sound designer Adam Luston; Sydney Theatre, March 29-April 16; www.sydneydancecompany.com
IN A PROGRAMMING COUP FOR THE 2011 FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILM, THE GOETHE-INSTITUTE AUSTRALIA, SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE AND HOPSCOTCH FILMS HAVE SECURED THE AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE SCREENING OF WIM WENDERS' PINA, A 3-D FEATURE-LENGTH FILM TRIBUTE TO THE DANCE THEATRE REVOLUTIONARY, PINA BAUSCH, WHO DIED IN 2009. THE FILM'S WORLD PREMIERE WAS AT THIS YEAR'S BERLIN BERLINALE.
After being trained by Kurt Joos at the multidisciplinary Folkwang Hochschule and subsequently performing with major international choreographers, in 1973 Bausch was appointed, by Joos, as head of the Wuppertal Ballet, which she renamed Tanztheater Wuppertal, initiating both the revolutionary dance theatre phenomenon and the company she led until her death. The term tanztheater had originated with Rudolf Laban in the 1920s to express a desire to escape from the technicalities of dance into a greater range of expression: it was Bausch who fulfilled this vision, extending the possibilities of dance and embracing performative means outside of it.
Wim Wenders, Pina
For many of us whose first encounter with Bausch's mysterious works was at the 1982 Adelaide Festival, the profound experience of Kontakthof, Blue Beard and 1980 remains indelibly felt in body and mind—our recall confirmed by photographer William Yang's acutely empathetic documentation and the host of video material now found in online tributes. Wim Wenders, on September 4, 2009 at a memorial service for Bausch aptly said of her, “She showed us [a] way to overcome our fears and to not feel imprisoned in our bodies any more.”
Bausch's works often made enormous demands on dancers and audiences alike. They were performances informed by dance but not always danced, painfully compulsive in their repetitiveness and in their sustained images of cruelty, panic and passion. The unreal worlds they conjured seemed astonishingly real and increasing familiar as each Bausch reverie endured into timelessness and we grew to know the faces, bodies and moods of people who seemed to become more than performers.
Bausch's best works were nothing less than sublime—fearfully beautiful, intensely visceral, lyrical, alarmingly unpredictable, turning from anger and cruelty to compassion and communality with an inherent strangeness that eschewed sentimentality and story-telling comforts.
But Bausch wasn't alone in the 1970s and 80s as a radical artist: like her compatriots Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders (born 1945, Bausch 1940) and Botho Strauss—and in other ways, the hyper-story-teller Rainer Werner Fassbinder—she conjured strange worlds that didn't reflect so much as wilfully distort our own, giving them back to us anew.
Wim Wenders, Pina
Wim Wenders is now best known as a documentary filmmaker but his early feature films, like The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1971, with co-writer Peter Handke), Alice in the Cities (1973), Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), The State of Things (1982) and Wings of Desire (1987) are, like Bausch's works, the immersive creations of a laterally-minded, utterly distinctive and innovative artist.
Wenders was working with Bausch on the film when she died. Shot in the streets of the industrial city of Wuppertal (where Bausch worked and lived for 35 years) with members of her company, the film also includes especially recorded performances of some of the choreographer’s best known works: Café Müller, Le Sacre Du Printemps, Vollmond and Kontakthof.
Wim Wenders' website includes a Pina trailer and a 24-minute interview with the filmmaker. You'll find even more about the film and Pina Bausch at the pina-film website.
The one-off festival screening in 3D in the presence of director Wim Wenders (with Q&A) shows only in Sydney. Doubtless a cinema season will follow—but when? Catch it now, even if you've never seen a Pina Bausch work.
In the last In the Loop, we mentioned the exhibition Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, which got us thinking—we haven’t featured photography in a while. So this week’s In the Loop highlights what’s happening in the world of contemporary photographic practices.
Jon Rhodes,
Hobart, Tasmania, 1972-75
from the album Australia
1 of 53 gelatin silver photographs, 11.9 x 17.7 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1980
Jon Rhodes
Jon Rhodes,
Hobart, Tasmania, 1972-75
from the album Australia
1 of 53 gelatin silver photographs, 11.9 x 17.7 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1980
place, space and the image
The Art Gallery of New South Wales has just opened its exhibition Photography & Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now. The show presents the work of 18 artists, including Jon Rhodes and a few RealTime regulars such as Rosemary Laing (RT58 and RT85), Simryn Gill (RT42), Ricky Maynard (2009) and the much-missed Michael Riley (featured in RT50 and reviewed in RT76 and RT77).Their work, according to the press release, “encompasses ideas of place in relation to historical residue, ethnicity, the interface between people and nature, the sublime, as well as the road and the journey in Australian landscape mythologies.” There is also an accompanying film program, featuring classics such as Wake in Fright (1971), Roadgames (1981), Broken Highway (1993) and Beneath Clouds (2002, see RT48), as well as a symposium—the first in a new annual series dedicated to photography. Photography & Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now, AGNSW, March 16-May 29; www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
two kinds of tours
Elsewhere in Sydney, the MCA has just extended the touring exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005. If you haven’t already seen it, the show brings together almost 200 iconic images of famous public figures together with personal photographs of Leibovitz’s family and close friends. The images are arranged chronologically, rather than thematically, allowing for a “unified narrative of the artist’s private life [to emerge] against the backdrop of her public image” (press release). The MCA is also co-presenting, with Hurstville City Council, Angelica Mesiti’s The Begin-Again: A Contemporary Art Tour At Night as part of C3West (RT84). Presented over two nights, the work is billed as a “showcase of local stories” and features four large-scaled video installations and a live performance in Hurstville’s laneways and shopping centre (press release). Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, until April 26; The Begin-Again: A Contemporary Art Tour at Night, April 1-2; www.mca.com.au
Miss Alesandra, 2010 digital print
photo Jacqueline Mitelman
Miss Alesandra, 2010 digital print
national photographic portrait prize 2011
Community involvement is also a key part of the annual National Photographic Portrait Prize, which anyone can enter. The finalists are currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, with their images depicting birth (see Dean McCartney’s highly commended image of his minutes-old son), death (see Donna Gibbons’ image of her father on his death bed), and almost everything in between (childhood, adolescence, parenthood etc). The winning image is Jacquline Mitelman’s portrait of Suzi Alesandra, whom Mitelman has been photographing for over 25 years. Strangely enough, Alesandra bears more than a passing resemblance to that great theorist of photography Susan Sontag as photographed by Leibovitz. The exhibition will be in Canberra until April 26 before it goes on tour to Bunbury, Geraldton, Fremantle and the Yarra Ranges; there’s also an online gallery. National Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery Canberra, February 25-April 26; www.portrait.gov.au
The trees r talkin I, iPhonegraphy
photo Syliva Dardha
The trees r talkin I, iPhonegraphy
iphoneography
Last year the NPG curated Present Tense: An Imagined Grammar of Portraiture in the Digital Age (RT98), but surprisingly there was no mention of iPhoneography, a practice which is becoming increasingly popular. There are now thousands of photography apps for the iPhone, hundreds of blogs dedicated to the subject and more than a few exhibitions too. In Spain last year La Panera Art Centre curated iPhoneografia and in the US, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is about to open Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography. Locally, the West Gippsland Arts Centre is showing Wats On Ur iPhone?, which provides an insight into the “creative world of tiny technology” and features images captured and edited on artist Sylvia Dardha’s iPhone (press release). Wats On Ur iPhone? West Gippsland Arts Centre, March 14-28; www.wgac.org.au
Imogen Cunningham
Subway New York 1956
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
1956, 2010 The Imogen Cunningham Trust
Imogen Cunningham
Subway New York 1956
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
the american century
Not to be outdone, another regional gallery is exhibiting American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House. The House, where the founder of Kodak once lived, holds over 400,000 images, of which 80 have loaned to the Bendigo Art Gallery. The images include original works by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Capa, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. Taken individually, the images are remarkable for their artistry; taken together, they also provide an extraordinary visual history of life in 20th century America. American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House, Bendigo Art Gallery, April 16-July 10; www.bendigoartgallery.com.au
untitled
There are, of course, many other exhibitions on. Fotofreo is having its year off, but the Perth Centre for Photography is currently showing the work of Olivia Martin-McGuire and Mark Penhale. Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography is showing Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s Spencer is Drunk and Ian Haig’s experimental video Chronicles of the New Human Organism. The Australian Centre for Photography is exhibiting Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography as well as the work of Ray Cook and Sean O’Carroll. And for the voyeur in us all, the Justice & Police Museum is showing Collision: Misadventures by Motor Car, featuring police photographs of traffic accidents from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s. Olivia Martin-McGuire, The Sleepers, Mark Penhale, Shadows, Perth Centre for Photography, March 18-April 10, www.pcp.org.au; Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Spencer Is Drunk: Progressive Studies, Ian Haig, Chronicles of the New Human Organism, Centre for Contemporary Photography, April 15-June 4, www.ccp.org.au; Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography, March 18-April 30, Ray Cook: Money Up Front and No Kissing, Sean O’Carroll, Interspection, both March 18-April 17, the Australian Centre for Photography, www.acp.org.au; Collision: Misadventures By Motor Car, Justice & Police Museum, March 19-Dec 31, www.hht.net.au
Kristy Ayre, Luke George, Timothy Harvey, audience participant, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Kristy Ayre, Luke George, Timothy Harvey, audience participant, NOW NOW NOW
HERE AT DANCE MASSIVE, IMPROVISATION IS VERY MUCH ON THE AGENDA AND RESPONSES—LIKE THE QUALITY OF IMPROVISATORY PERFORMANCES OVER A SEASON—ARE WILDLY DIVERGENT. LINES ARE BEING DRAWN. WE’VE NOW SEEN THREE WORKS THAT DEAL WITH THE PROCESS IN DIFFERENT WAYS. IN NO ONE WILL TELL US…, ROSALIND CRISP IN COLLABORATION WITH HANSUELI TISCHHAUSER AND ANDREW MORRISH SHOWS US A BODY SO FINELY TUNED TO SENSATION AND ITS OWN HISTORY THAT ITS MOVEMENT IS LIKE MUSIC, LEAVING US TO VENTURE OUR OWN READINGS. THE FOUR PERFORMERS IN SHAUN MCLEOD’S THE WEIGHT OF THE THING LEFT ITS MARK INTRIGUINGLY PRACTICE ‘PURE’ IMPROVISATION WHILE NEGOTIATING PARTIALLY CHOREOGRAPHED PATHWAYS.
In Luke George’s NOW NOW NOW, we are invited to enter the moment as three improvising performers attempt to pin it down.
White. We remove our shoes to walk the soft, white felted corridor. The fabric extends into the theatre, even to our seats. Above us light is filtered through white Japanese paper. On all sides the white room is bounded by black.
The scene invites concentration. The purity of the setting also highlights the physical presence of the three performers—Luke George, Kristy Ayre and Timothy Harvey.
Costume. In the case of Luke George, this involves a change from his childlike mismatch (yellow shorts, a plastic breast plate, a string of beads dangling a small turtle, and an Indian feather headdress) to track pants and top. The others also change into primary colours until eventually all are in the uniform attire of your average dance ensemble. Not that this is your average dance ensemble.
Warm-up. Lined up, they shout a list of OW words to clear their heads: “Now, cow, vow, bow, chow…” The bland listing becomes warbling chorale.
Research. They move lazily to one corner to gaze at a silent video invisible to the audience. From time to time they pick up on particular movements and mirror them, sometimes together, sometimes apart. We fill in the gaps with imagined dancing. One moment I see a line of men in tails and top hats. They’re gone. Later the trio will utter disjointed phrases seemingly read from the monitor, including:
“I feel I’ve had some funny episodes.”
“I will absolutely indulge that.”
“The most amazing dancer of all time.”
These words and others are repeated and redistributed until they almost become a weirdly naturalistic conversation.
I note we must be 15 minutes in and still in full light.
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
photo Jeff Busby
Luke George, Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, NOW NOW NOW
Effort. The dancers perform a feat of endurance, jumping and kicking until the sweat streams. They move through awkward, frenetic and apparently unmotivated movements. This is some other kind of dance. I stop taking notes.
Long, utter, emptying blackout.
Interaction. Timothy Harvey approaches an audience member, offers her a set of headphones and an iPod relaying her instructions. She enters the space and for the next five minutes or so becomes a fascinating part of the action, performing small gestures, uttering words, snippets of song—a line from “Singin’ in the Rain.” The others pay her no special attention. She is simply there, part of the scene. Eventually she announces: “A special event!” then leaves. Nothing much happens. Perfect.
Another list. Shouted snatches of sentences. Indolent action followed by wild eruptions suggesting anger or pain, all inflected and articulated with dance moves, all short-lived till someone says, “Enough!”
Sequence in wigs. Synchronised dancing to disco music distracts momentarily from the otherwise engrossing unfamiliarity of the work.
Funny moments. Who said existentialism needed to be angst-ridden? The three appear to be suddenly aware of their surroundings, finding everything surprising or scary.
“Drapes! Drapes!” shouts one as if suddenly shocked by the curtains that frame the space. “Black!” yells another. Luke George is startled to find himself eyeballing the audience. “Downstage!” he gasps “Downstage!” as if crying for help. “Retreating, retreating,” he signals. The others take refuge in geometry, shouting “Triangle!” until George registers and finds safety again in the dancerly threesome.
They stare at us, until the moment when Kristy Ayre says “thank you.”
Applause. Something like an hour has passed.
Watching NOW NOW NOW feels like something new, though not altogether. In the improvisation stakes, it’s about the impetus, the ‘energy’ and whether the impulse hits home, rebounding in a form such that a large enough proportion of the audience can share or interpret it. What is that elusive thing we feel we know when we see it? In NOW NOW NOW, the sense of the live presence is palpable if using a meta-theatre aesthetic for its seduction. In its careful choice of expressive means, there seems more than a hint of possibility. Will it lead to what Helen Herbertson has hoped for, “a kind of re-flowering of really specific, detailed physical language” (quoted in Erin Brannigan’s Platform Paper, Moving Across Disciplines, Currency House, 2011)? On a path shared with Rosalind Crisp’s very different No one will tell us…, NOW NOW NOW takes some big steps in the right direction.
See also realtime’s video interview with Luke George.
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NOW NOW NOW, choreographer Luke George, performers Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George, design, production Benjamin Cisterne, dramaturg Martyn Coutts, Music Glass Candy. NOW NOW NOW was originally commissioned by Lucy Guerin Inc; www.dancemassive.com.au
Topology members must the happiest people—this is fun music that lifts your spirits. But it’s music with real depth. Difference Engine is a CD for entertainment and contemplation. Though newly released, the works in this compilation date from 1997–2003 and presumably the ensemble has thoroughly road-tested them—the superb playing evinces the musicians’ total familiarity with and immersion in the material.
All but one of the four works was written by ensemble members, the other being by Lynette Lancini, whose four-movement Centaur (2000) opens the disc. Three of the movements are named after gemstones and one after a flower, and the titles are intended to reflect their character. Obsidian opens with a rapid motoric theme that dramatically slows before returning to a stabbing pace. Jasper starts dreamily, with a steady piano ostinato threading through, blending lovely violin, viola, bowed bass, piano and sax lines that build in earnestness. The brief but evocative Heliotrope (the purple flower of mourning) begins with suitably mournful strings and sax over a steady bass, jumps to an up-tempo, angular fugue-like passage and then just as abruptly slows again, concluding with a soulful piano finale. Sapphire, the longest and most involving movement, opens with a jaunty folk-like riff on strings threaded with sweet soprano sax. Slowing to a gentle stroll, it develops increasing textural complexity and builds to an evocative crescendo. This 23-minute suite traverses much compositional and emotional territory —great writing that bears repeated listening.
Saxophonist John Babbage’s 2003 work φX174 (named, we are told, after the first-ever completely mapped genome of any organism) starts with offbeat, rhythmic strings and piano from which a lovely slow violin line develops, shifts to a rapid motoric form and then returns to a gentle stepping pace. The CD liner notes suggest the musical material is a representation of the DNA code, but it sounds fresh and energetic rather than overly calculated.
Bassist Robert Davidson’s 1997 Exterior (in two movements) is an excerpt from his much longer Four Places, and the ensemble includes Ron Colbers guesting on djembe, adding a very different feel to the music. The driving offbeat opening is followed by a mellifluous sax solo that segues into a hypnotic viola solo supported by bowed bass before returning to the opening theme. The work alternates forceful, rhythmic movement with wistful introspection as it unfolds. My favourite on this CD, Exterior evidently involves much improvisation, but feels carefully structured. Bernard Hoey is superb on viola.
The final work, Babbage’s 2001 Difference Engine, is in three movements: the first is arrhythmic and dissonant, the second begins brightly then slows, and the short third movement opens slowly and quizzically and concludes with a few brief piano figures that hauntingly die away under the pedal. The title refers to the calculating machine designed two centuries ago by the (unrelated) mathematician Charles Babbage—another musical metaphor for a scientific milestone, though you wouldn’t guess it without the liner notes. The work sounds expressionistic and is evidently based on the space between notes as measured in distance rather than time, yielding a series of “differences.'
These compositions sound as if they have grown out of experiments that have resolved themselves into a style. If this music had its roots in minimalism, it has evolved into something far more complex—a repetitive motif might be overlayed with a long, seductive melody; there are sudden shifts in tempo and dynamics, leading instruments swap roles, and there are multiple competing lines and tempi. Conlon Nancarrow and Frank Zappa leap to mind. The power in these compositions lies in their interweaving, polyphonic lines that create enchanting textures, and their bouncy energy. The style shifts though jazz syncopations, rock and other forms, and the mood alternates forceful statement with gentle crooning. Any mathematical dryness is offset by the rich tone colour and developmental peaks that tease the attention. Free of gimmicks, this music is lush, infectious, upbeat and accessible, yielding tunes that pop into your mind all day, but it’s also seriously demanding and rewarding, a difficult balance but well achieved. There is scope for solo virtuosity, but mostly this music requires and enables brilliant ensemble playing, which Topology delivers effortlessly.
This long-established five-piece has made its name through finding new musical territory that draws many flavours into a unique mix. Given their previous forays into everything from classical chamber works to pop, comedy and funk, Difference Engine seems very straight but it’s a superbly crafted and very satisfying CD.
Chris Reid
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
BRANCH NEBULA’S SWEAT WITTILY AND FORCEFULLY DISORIENTS OUR SENSE OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AUDIENCE. IT THEREBY COMPELS US TO REFLECT ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MIGRANT SERVICE INDUSTRY WORKERS. THE PERFORMERS, FROM A VARIETY OF CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS, INVITE US INTO THE EMPTY MAIN HALL OF NORTH MELBOURNE TOWN HALL. WE CROWD IN, RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS AS TO HOW WE SHOULD BEHAVE—AUDIENCE WORK—AS WE WITNESS THE PERFORMERS AT WORK, CONSTRUCTING A PERFORMANCE—WHILE THEY, IN TURN, WORK US.
Some performers demonstrate their mundane tasks (enacted both literally or danced abstractly) as they move amongst us and the dangers of infection are recited. One man approaches us with a stack of white dinner plates, spreads them at our feet and re-stacks them with clattering musical verve. He joins other workers setting out a long table for a banquet at the other end of the hall and, from a distance, expertly spins the plates to a waiting fellow worker who briskly sets them. Other banal tasks, like handling glasses are made artful—rolled in small arcs—or spoons picked up, rattled like a tambourine; work made art, defeating boredom.
As one, the performer-workers rapidly build the space that we are to inhabit with them—we are within their design. The emptiness is filled with a chunky sound system, speakers and a variety of light sources, all wheeled on briskly, pushing through the audience. Intense pockets of light and the visceral rumble and fine higher textures of Hirofumi Uchino’s live sound compositions permeate the space, edging the idea of work into displays of very different skills: dance, sound, song, martial arts and football—activities that appear to express the workers’ after-work actual being. These are imbued with an air of fantasy, of release, of brief moments of interplay, mutuality and even threat—how far can you go when you aim a football kick at a fellow performer standing perfectly still against a wall? This turns into a perverse kind of dance with the female ‘target’—legs and body arched—transmuted into a human goal. At work, perhaps one can dream. Or not—a woman cleans the floor obsessively with her hair. Another worker inhabits a garbage bag. Another is dragged about. The workplace is a mire of desire and nightmare.
The action of Sweat is spread around the space, pulling us to it, or we’re directed to make a choice, to fix on one of four performances. The work will soon focus on the banquet table and we’ll crowd around it. That defiant ritual over, the performers open out the space, filling it with unregulated energy before exiting.
the audience inside
Much contemporary performance and dance, and some cutting edge theatre, is preoccupied with disorienting audiences, and with a sense of purpose that is not merely experiential. Unusual seating configurations and moving audiences about during performances are a familiar part of the repertoire and subject to repetition and clever reinvention. What has grown more recently is a greater desire to place audiences inside the work. This parallels and borrows from visual art installations, interactive media arts, the return of 3D film and the proliferation of Live Art creations that heighten some senses by depriving us of others. In the latter case, the senses themselves are often the subject of the work.
However, this heightening of audience subjectivity relies in the first instance much more on spatial arrangements than on pervasive sound design (a fusion of cinema and sound art), innovations in lighting and the immersive attractions of the screen (nowadays such a frequent component of live performance). That said, this is a two-way process: Melbourne’s Ben Cobham and Bluebottle design with light; multiple-channel sound design places audiences inside virtual worlds; and screens can challenge our sense of perspective and conjure illusory spaces. Even so, light, sound and projections have to be housed and framed before they can trigger the desired experience.
making room for the senses
Increasingly design for the performing arts has to accommodate these experiential potentials. In Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass, within a darkened space mirrors doubling as screens for video projections are also transparent or, when not, can be used for shadow play. The two dancers are constantly multiplied, merged and disappeared, paralleling the mutating state of their relationship and the mirroring inherent in the choreography. It’s the simple (but doubtless complexly negotiated) positioning of the mirror-screens that frames the action, and holds the images. and the lighting of the dancers cannot afford to mess with the projections and reflections of this reverie into which we peer. There’s a lot of peering these days.
For Michelle Heaven’s Disagreeable Object, Ben Cobham and Bluebottle have constructed a transportable, small, narrow black box that can provide the tight sight lines needed to pull off surprising visual effects that in matching the performers’ movement realise the silent movie-cum-gothic horror ethos of the work while adding a more contemporary, eerie and finally spectacular depth of field. Cobham and collaborators, not least in their work with Helen Herbertson, are always adroit at disturbing our field of vision, flattening dimensions and creating evanescent fields of colour (like the floor washes on which Jenny Kemp’s Madeleine seemed to nightmarishly float).
interior designs
For a work as delightfully unstable as Luke George’s exercise in immediacy, NOW NOW NOW, there was also a great sense of fixity about Benjamin Cisterne’s impressive design—interior design no less, for a starkly stylish home, or a fashion store (a sense compounded by the eccentrically costumed opening display and odd posturing and strutting). We leave our shoes in the foyer and enter a space entirely walled with black drapes; floor and seating are uniformly covered in white felt; and the ceiling is adorned with four large panels of textured, white Japanese paper covered lights hanging over us and the performance space. We are well lit as the performers. We are one. We are at home: the tension between certainty and potential chaos kept in fine check. Real life on another plane.
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby
Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move
immersions and installations
Dancers occupy, shape and generate space. In Chunky Move’s Glow and Mortal Engine this was made more palpable—Frieder Weiss’ interactive video projections allowed the dancers to literally illustrate the spaces they made. They broke up grid lines, churned out curves and left behind impressions of their presence. A move could trigger a rush of insect-like animations that filled the floor-screen space and was suggestive of the power that radiates out from the dancing body.
In Glow the audience, seated in a rectangular frame, looked steeply down on the solo dancer as she moved against the floor-screen. The effect was, not surprisingly, both vertiginous and immersive, with connotations of laboratory or museum. In Mortal Engine, performed in traditional theatre spaces, the floor-screen was wide, accommodating more dancers, but tilted even to the vertical, so that again we felt we were looking into a highly active specimen case, as its dancer-creatures crawled over its edges and crawled, glided and tumbled across the surface. In both works the effort to disorient the audience is inherent.
In Chunky Move’s latest work, Connected, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek pursues some of the cause and effect patterning of Glow and Mortal Engine but with physical materials rather than virtual ones. Instead of the digital sculpting of images by computer artist and dancers, here it’s the interplay between dancers and a huge kinetic sculpture made of paper, string and timber that is central to the work. The stage space is conventional, but the scale of Reuben Margolin’s kinetic sculpture, already lit as we enter, makes the work unavoidable. As I wrote in my review, “If we weren’t seated we could be in an art gallery.” That tension, between theatre and gallery, is played out, even made literal, in the course of Connected. It’s a reminder too of the influence of the visual art installation in a wide range of performance works and dance, strikingly in Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness.
use me
As dance and contemporary performance continue their long, hybridising engagement with other artforms, the elements that create aural and physical space (projections, sound, light, interactives, animatronics, architectural and design sensibilities) loom large. Apparently inanimate or virtual (if always artist creations) they assume stage lives and realities of their own (recall the music and light entractes in Mortal Engine), ones which we increasingly inhabit with the performers, walking through the fourth wall to join them, or imagining we do due to a trick of light or sound. Sometimes it’s so simple. Of Rosalind Crisp’s No one will tell us…I wrote about “the exploitation of the theatre’s spaces via the distribution of movement and the excellent lighting [with] a life of its own. At times the guitarist is foregrounded, Crisp in the dim distance, insisting on another perspective on the dance; at others the light establishes a space, as if to say, use me.”
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Dance Massive: Branch Nebula, Sweat, co-creators: Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, performers, devisors, choreographers Claudia Escobar, Erwin Fenis, Ali Kadhim, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Angela Goh, noisician/live sound Hirofumi Uchino, dramaturg John Baylis; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 18,19; www.dancemassive.com.au
Interview with choreographer Luke George about Now Now Now. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with Chunky Move director/choreographer Gideon Obarzanek about his latest work Connected, in collaboration with visual artist Reuben Margolin. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with choreographer Rosalind Crisp about No One Will Tell Us…, in collaboration with performer Andrew Morrish and musician Hansueli Tischhauser. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey about the sound installation Music for Imagined Dances, with lighting by Niklas Pijanti & production by Jesse Stevens. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Interview with choreographer/performers Michelle Heaven & Brian Lucas about Disagreeble Object. Interviewed by Keith Gallasch for RealTime @ Dance Massive 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
For more RealTime coverage of Dance Massive go to
http://www.realtimearts.net/feature_contents/Dance_Massive_2011
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
BRANCH NEBULA’S SWEAT IS CONCERNED WITH TURNING OUR ATTENTION TO THE INVISIBLE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY—THE ONES WHO PULL BACK OUR CHAIRS, SWEEP UP OUR DEAD SKIN, WIPE AWAY OUR SKIDMARKS AND COLLECT OUR CAFETERIA TRAYS. COINCIDENTALLY, CHUNKY MOVE’S CONNECTED TOUCHES ON SIMILAR GROUND WITH ITS DIP INTO THE WORLD OF SECURITY GUARDS, BUT SWEAT TACKLES THE BRIEF FAR MORE DIRECTLY AND PROVOCATIVELY.
Nevertheless, it starts by turning our attention to our own behaviour. On entering the well-lit vastness of the North Melbourne Town Hall, there is nothing to look at but ourselves as we mingle and coalesce in atolls of strangers and acquaintances. It is the foyer writ large, a continuation of the antespace and yet, Sweat has actually begun. From the gathering comes the sound of a welcome. A young woman, dressed in black with a tray and an apron, steps forward to suggest that we really could have made a better entrée—too noisy, too slow and now we are running late. But punctuality is less important than quality so we are asked to leave and re-enter properly. It is a disempowering experience, like any scolding, which is followed on our second entrance by a pronouncement of the social contract we are entering into.
We are expected to stand and move as instructed, to do so autonomously when required, to empathise with the performers, to view them objectively on occasion, to applaud them at the end until we are told we can stop clapping and to be upbeat about the show afterwards, indeed, to focus on three central messages: [1] that we saw ordinary people doing extraordinary things; [2] that the piece challenged accepted forms but always remained accessible; [3] that it is a work of great importance to the future of Australia.
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Claudia Escobar, Sweat, Branch Nebula
The sheer tongue-in-cheek gall of these clichéd pronouncements produces knowing titters in the audience, delivered as they are with the host-like air of a waiter explaining the evening’s specials. But the tone shifts markedly as our host walks from one audience member to another and asks them first to dress her in the accessories of a cleaner and then to remove her other clothes. At last, semi-naked in rubber gloves and hairnet, she kindly asks a man to force her to the ground. He complies. The shoe of disempowerment is now firmly on the other foot and we have all been implicated.
This simple point of departure is reminiscent of the recent work of performance artists like Georgie Read, who play a consciously mercurial game of push-pull with the audience’s affection. Throughout Sweat, the performers invite our attention and the visibility it affords with flirtatious glances, sweetness and displays of skill. But they can just as quickly disappear into the resentful distance, punish us or deride our presence. This dynamic with the audience enacts the same power hierarchies that are being represented, where the performers are ordered to clean the floor with their hair, threatened with violence and abused in Spanish, all in the course of a few minutes.
Sweat constantly shifts in its use of space, employing an ingenious collection of mobile light sources to carve out discrete landscapes. And the audience, as instructed, moves about to stay in contact with what is happening. As an aesthetic policy it is interesting—forcing us to engage with different angles, different architectures, rejigging our perspective. On the other hand, the meaning-making of it is sometimes less evident or necessary. When we are asked to choose a corner to stand in and, thereby, a performer to favour, the act of choosing is a potentially loaded act. What are our criteria? Why do we choose a man and not a woman? Why do we look around to see what we are missing? Yet, the subsequent scene feels redundant in its reformulation of previous content and the movement of the performers from corner to corner negates the weight of our choice and elides the kind of interrogation it could provoke.
Ahil Ratnamohan, Sweat, Branch Nebula
photo Heidrun Löhr
Ahil Ratnamohan, Sweat, Branch Nebula
However, this is a quibble with one short moment in the middle of Sweat. In its final set piece it regains most of the traction with which it began. A group of audience members is invited to sit at table where the performers, dressed as sweatshop workers, politely serve them wine, spaghetti, tomato soup, peas, pineapple, frankfurts—the kicker being that these items are ladled very carefully into completely inappropriate places. The end result is part Grand Bouffe, part Abstract Expressionism. The smiling ceremonial quality of the rebellion is so disarming and so cleverly worked in with our own understandings of theatre etiquette that the audience victims are left laughing rather than humiliated. The humour relies also on our empathy with the performers who, in becoming so clearly and endearingly visible, make mockery of the established codes of service and their concordant entitlements and disenfranchisements. The performers leave the space with gusto, with an animalistic exuberance. At last, they have been seen.
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Dance Massive: Branch Nebula, Sweat, co-creators Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters, performers, devisors, choreographers Claudia Escobar, Erwin Fenis, Ali Kadhim, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Angela Goh, noisician/live sound Hirofumi Uchino, dramaturg John Baylis, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 18,19; www.dancemassive.com.au
MICHELLE HEAVEN’S DISAGREEABLE OBJECT IS IMMEDIATELY REMINISCENT OF ONE OF THE ENIGMATIC SCENARIOS OF GOTHIC NEW YORK ARTIST AND BALLETOMANE EDWARD GOREY (SEE THE GILDED BAT, THE CURIOUS SOFA). AT TURNS WHIMSICAL AND STRANGE, THE PIECE ALSO HAS THE FASCINATION OF A MINIATURE SPECTACLE IN WHICH THE AUDIENCE’S VISION IS UTTERLY PRIMARY.
The action takes place in a narrow space constructed within the Meat Market venue. Inside this small room, tightly packed into a bank of seats, we peer into the gloom, gradually making out a small woman (Michelle Heaven) seated on a tiny chair and eating noisily from a metal dish. She leaves to be replaced on the same chair by a very tall man (Brian Lucas). Both are white faced and wearing black—she bustled, he in tails. Both bear the signs of evil intent in permanently devious expressions. Occasionally, as he falls prey to her poisonous intentions, the deadpan mask of Lucas stretches to a ghastly grimace. They make a striking couple.
For all their Edwardian elegance, there’s something decidedly feral about these two who might be the mad servants living below the stairs. The act of eating is central and happens in greedy grabs. She also appears part mad scientist (what is she dispensing from that tap on the wall we wonder?) threatening at every turn to destroy this claustrophobically symbiotic relationship. He has perfected the art of escape and almost wins out when in one funny and deftly choreographed sequence she attempts to force him to eat an outsized poisoned pea. From here, things escalate in every way!
Michelle Heaven, Disagreeable Object
photo Ben Cobham
Michelle Heaven, Disagreeable Object
The choreography is precise, perfectly tailored to meet the needs of this gothic little tale, which traverses what might be days or decades in just 33 minutes. There are a lot of enigmatic entrances and exits. Occasionally, the pair breaks into odd little angular dance sequences, though ever contained and always returning to their devious personae. Heaven wheels her squeaky mobile serving tray/laboratory trolley in and out, concocting her evil potions in swift little moves. At other times she appears in surprising suspension in the gloomy distance. From here she seems to angle and float as if possessed by some other force. Ben Cobham’s design and lighting plays cleverly with perspective and shadow to elegantly enhance the gothic ambience of the work in surprising ways. At times you wonder if you’re seeing straight. Similarly Bill McDonald’s score reminds us of the manifestations of this genre in melodrama and silent movie.
A disarming and diverting miniature, concluding with a very grand flourish, Disagreeable Object is nonetheless ambitious in scope. Dramaturgically tight, choreographically inventive, imaginative in design and performed by two consummate artists, I for one am grateful for its release from the Dance Massive crypt allowing more of us to experience its particular pleasures (though peas will never be the same). May it continue to see the light.
Elsewhere in the Meat Market, in another semi-retro experience, we don 3D cellophane glasses and enter a darkened booth to experience UK artist Billie Cowie’s Revery Alone, as part of his Stereoscopic showings. On a floor screen, a dancer uncurls from her prone position and reaches upward towards us. The work’s simple trickery still fascinates as we catch the fleeting realism of that elusive entity—the dancer’s gaze.
Disagreeable Object, choreographer, performer Michelle Heaven, collaborator, performer Brian Lucas, collaborator, designer Ben Cobham, composer Bill McDonald, costume design Louise McCarthy, production and operation Bluebottle, Frog Peck, James Russell, Arts House, Meat Market, March 16-19; Billy Cowie, Revery Alone, Stereoscopic, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 16-19; www.dancemassive.com.au
![Nicola Leahey, Jessica Jefferies, [sic], Dancenorth](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/46/4690_ashley_dancenorth_sic.jpg)
