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Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…

photo Patrick Berger

Rosalind Crisp, Hansueli Tischhauser, No one will tell us…

ROSALIND CRISP’S NO ONE WILL TELL US… IS A VERY STRANGE EXPERIENCE, ONE ALMOST BEYOND DEFINITION AND NOT EASY TO DESCRIBE. AND EVEN IF I DID, THE VERSION OF THE WORK THAT SEDUCED ME WOULD NOT BE THE ONE YOU’D SEE IN ANOTHER PERFORMANCE UNDER THE SAME TITLE.

Rosalind Crisp has been living creatively by a strict improvisational code, central to her long-term project, danse (see realtimedance for details and video excerpts) and best described in words from her website:

“Rosalind’s work is about the body. The body is the subject. The compositional causality of her movement is unpredictable. There is no assumption about what will follow what. Through practice, the dancer is held awake by the imperative of taking or noticing each successive decision as it is made” (www.omeodance.com).

Within the proscenium arch of Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, Crisp in red silk shirt, slacks and bare feet wanders the stage with movements that epitomise her mission: there are no straight lines or smooth curves, no predictable dance moves. She is stiff legged, leaning back, head directed away from where her feet take her, one leg suddenly moving off with its own momentum, the body in tow, the dancer’s gaze now to the ceiling, now into the wings. There’s also a quick dip at the waist, like a bow, as if to acknowledge us.

I have to resort to analogy. It’s as if Crisp is a child, or autistic, deeply distracted, attentive everywhere but on calculated movement. And because her body is in tight vertical alignment she also appears clown-like, an accident waiting to happen. So when Crisp is propelled aimlessly off-stage, as if lost, the audience giggles, and laughs when she descends the stairs and darts back onstage, as if panicked. (It’s interesting that in a post-show RealTime video interview, Crisp said that before the performance she’d thought about the previous night, how she felt she’d been too close to the other performers and too fast. Tonight she thought she would explore her body’s surfaces and this slowed her in a way she enjoyed.)

Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us...

Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us…

photo Patrick Berger

Hansueli Tischhauser, Rosalind Crisp, No-one will tell us…

Beyond analogy, Crisp’s movement is astonishing in its sheer otherness, the beauty of its constant disconnects and the way it adds up without any overt patterning. Yet it is deeply informed by the history of dance and Crisp’s body of work—an inherent dancerliness is evinced in sudden, precise extensions, fluent turns and spins, deep swoops, elegant articulation of limbs and hands, but with the commas and conjunctions eliminated, the standard syntax of dance erased. It’s magical. It’s years since I’ve seen Crisp perform. I admired her vision then. Now I witness its embodiment more acutely and affectingly realised. But that’s just the beginning.

In the video interview, a smiling Crisp identified No one will tell us… as the “bad cousin” or “dark side” of the danse project. It’s the outcome of inviting some other virtuosi to perform with her: improviser Andrew Morrish and guitarist Hansueli Tischhauser. The latter stands on the floor below the stage with his guitar and a range of foot pedals that allow him, among other things, to lay down long rhythmic pulsings against which he can improvise moods or melodies, working with Crisp, or pushing her in new directions once she’s joined him on the floor. He conjures up a driving march and suddenly Crisp opens out, big steps, arms flung wide. Tischhauser is no mere accompanist: sometimes he’s comically the archetypal rock guitarist, sometimes he’s physically in sync with Crisp, duplicating aspects of her movement.

Andrew Morrish comes and goes, a kind of host, silver-suited, mercurial, finding space between guitar phrases to inform us that he has no narrative to offer, no explanation for the show (“I’m like you”), but happily riffs on the tale of a pair of children who always play and never speak (“they’re not like us— children,” “they have appetites, we have preferences”). He’ll return to this later (“This is not a love story”). And he’ll do his own idiosyncratic solo dancing prior to a collective performativity invades the trio. There’s an odd aptness to Morrish’s chosen theme, countering the innocence of Crisp’s first appearance and the subsequent playfulness between her and the guitarist. The children in Morrish’s spare tale eventually run away rather than be forced to speak, are caught and “pretend to be normal”: “They were surviving.”

As No one will tell us… unfolds Crisp appears to transform, struggling as if from a chrysalis into a new being, looser, faster, lyrical—but in no ordinary sense and as unpredictable as ever. Big moves, strides, surges, elicit sharp breaths and gasps from the dancer are buried in the guitar’s roar but fully felt in the silence that follows, the body revealing its own rather than the music’s momentum. The later dancing is larger, sensual and finally riotously funny without ever losing Crisp’s determined and beautifully realised purpose.

No one will tell us… is, however, unusually theatrical for a Rosalind Crisp work. Partly it’s a given with the mix of talents, with Crisp’s search for another way to address her danse project vision; but it’s also inherent in the exploitation of the theatre’s spaces via the distribution of movement and the excellent lighting that also has 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. The theatricality is also embedded in the consistent good-humour of the performances, doubtless a variable, but strongly felt on this night, lending the work a particular coherence while not undercutting the seriousness of the larger flights of dance and music.

No one will tell us (the artists) what to do, (the audience) what it means, (anyone) what it is. Well, it’s dance, dance theatre even, like never before.

See also realtime’s video interview with Rosalind Crisp

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Dance Massive: No one will tell us… choreographer, performer Rosalind Crisp, Andrew Morrish live music Hansueli Tischhauser, lighting, technical director Marco Wehrspann; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 15-17; www.dancemassive.com.au

RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 12

Paul Romano, Luke Hickmott, The weight of the thing left its mark, Shaun McLeod

photo Heidi Romano

Paul Romano, Luke Hickmott, The weight of the thing left its mark, Shaun McLeod

DIM LIGHT GRADUALLY REVEALS THREE PEOPLE MID-STAGE SEATED AT A SIMPLE WOODEN TABLE, A LARGE PILE OF CUTLERY GLEAMING ALONG ITS LENGTH. ONE OF THE THREE SLUMPS FORWARD ONTO THE TABLE. ANOTHER HOVERS CLOSE BY. A NAKED LIGHT BULB SWINGS. AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPACE A WHEAT SACK IS SUSPENDED FROM A ROPE. THIS PORTENTOUS SCENARIO LURES US WILLINGLY IN TO THE WEIGHT OF THE THING LEFT ITS MARK, A WORK CONCEIVED BY SHAUN MCLEOD TO “WALK THE LINE BETWEEN CHOREOGRAPHY AND ‘PURE’ IMPROVISATION,” REVEALING “(THE) PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT INHERENT IN NEGOTIATIONS THAT TAKE PLACE BETWEEN PEOPLE” (PROGRAM NOTE).

A cacophony of metallic sounds ensues as the cutlery is variously manipulated both onstage and enhanced by sound artists, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey seated in the shadow of the dangling sack at the other end of the space.

As the wielding of knives and forks moves from tentative to provocative, one woman (Olivia Millard) is driven to leave the suffocating tension of the table. Adrift from the rest, in a discombobulated dance that leads nowhere, she appears purposeful but ineffectual as if performing half-remembered moves, inhabiting a broken body not her own.

Sometimes I think dance is all about the variously faltering and fluid manifestations of evolution’s trace memory. But enough of the weighty projection…

Light shifts and, with it, attention. I lose myself for a time in the ethereal ambience of the sound. Like the onstage performers, Madeleine Flynn explores the myriad possibilities of cutlery. Her close-miked clinks, clanks, scrapes and drops are processed by Tim Humphrey into resonant frequencies, textural and tonal swathes of sound, subtle feedback and fleeting musical phrases.

Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott, Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, The weight of the thing left its mark

photo Heidi Romano

Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott, Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, The weight of the thing left its mark

Back in the room, the performers (family members, conflicted committee, coven?) eventually assemble in a line across the stage wielding knives, forks and spoons in a series of manoeuvres, some more suggestive than others—such are the risks of improvisation. The tight focus of the opening begins to fall away in unfocussed display. Cutlery is deployed in a variety of unlikely conjunctions then flung to the floor. But for all their materiality, their multiplication in volume and enhancement in sound, the symbolic power of these objects begins to diminish. At one oddly anticlimactic point Flynn slashes the wheat bag open, releasing the grain. Its moment is lost.

As meaning floats, signifiers drift by. The men threaten, then submit to, even carry one another while the women play small games of attraction/repulsion. The bodies are uniformly loose, unevenly weighted and without apparent purpose. Curiously, at times performers opt out of the action, then return (if only this were possible in real life). Gradually the mind conjures from these flailing figures something other than human nature—some other species negotiating space and decision-making, occasionally submitting to domination by one of the pack (another improvisational pitfall). Then again I might have been watching too much David Attenborough.

None of the movement really hits its mark it seems until a couple of larger tools—a spade and a pitchfork—appear in the hands of the performers. This upping of the ante offers an opportunity for some stronger reactions from the ensemble, though again, males dominate somewhat. For the first time we hear spoken observations or instructions from one of the women (Sophia Cowen) on the relationship between the object and the body holding it: “It’s heavier in the left hand,” she says and refers us to the “torso” of the fork. Finally, the young man (Luke Hickmott) who had stood apart from those gathered at the table at the outset breaks loose again. He holds the spade like a musical instrument, then aloft, then suddenly feels its weight and falls. It leads him into a perilous spin and back to the table. In this physical movement I begin to feel something of the metaphorical weight at the centre of this work.

The weight… is most certainly a thoughtful work with many ambient pleasures but, later the same night, watching the pervasive invention and sheer choreographic distinctiveness of Rosalind Crisp’s equally improvisatory No one will tell us…, I understood what was missing.

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Dance Massive: The weight of the thing left its mark, director, choreographer Shaun McLeod, performer-choreographers Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott, sound Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, lighting Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist, Upstairs Studio, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 16, www.dancemassive.com.au

See also an interview with musician/composers Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey about their installation Music for Imagined Dances also part of Dance Massive 2011.

Alisdair Macindoe, Marnie Palomares, Connected, Chunky Move

photo Jeff Busby

Alisdair Macindoe, Marnie Palomares, Connected, Chunky Move

CHUNKY MOVE’S RECENT WORK HAS BEEN CHARACTERISED BY DANCERS SURROUNDED BY THE DIGITAL. IN MORTAL ENGINE AND GLOW, GIDEON OBARZANEK PAIRED THE LYRICISM AND VULNERABILITY OF THE HUMAN FORM WITH THE SPECTRAL BLING OF INTERACTIVE VIDEO GRAPHICS. CONNECTED IS A LO-FI THIRD CHAPTER. WHERE THE EARLIER PIECES EXTRAPOLATED ON THE HUMAN FORM WITH PROJECTED PIXELS AND LASERS, CONNECTED DOES SO WITH STRINGS AND WOOD IN THE FORM OF A GIANT KINETIC SCULPTURE BY REUBEN MARGOLIN.

Entering the space, the first thing we experience is the dominating presence of this sculpture, resembling an incomplete loom of dangling warp. Two dancers enter and, as one tumbles across the floor to the fuzzy glitches and scratches of Oren Ambarchi’s score, the other begins carefully completing the sculpture, clicking magnetised shards of paper to connect the suspended threads into a grid of diamonds. The tumbling dancer soon becomes two, then three, then four, rolling and undulating across the floor but the deployment of numbers cannot conceal the niggling sense that we are being merely diverted while the main course is prepared.

When the grid is completed, the sculpture becomes a latent contraption of elegant beauty. And when the dancers’ bodies are then hooked up to the other ends of the threads, the image is made all the more wondrous. Like a diagram of light rays, the strings emerge from the human subjects, refract through a wooden lattice, bounce across the ceiling and drop down into the reflected image of the grid. In that moment, the connection of human to mechanical becomes both abstracted and essentialised.

The physical connection itself is not inherently revealing nor even interesting. When a person rides a bicycle, they are connected to a mechanical contraption of exceptional elegance and their vertical force translated into horizontal displacement, but this relationship reveals nothing more than the strength of their quadriceps. The bicycle does not express. On the other hand, Margolin’s sculpture, in the frisson between its mathematical rigidity and kinetic fluidity creates the potential for a mechanical poetry. As the dancers shift their bodies forward and back, their movement is translated into the undulation and contortion of the grid. It becomes an infinitely variable abstract canvas for our associations—a bird’s wings, an enveloping cloak, an open ocean.

Alisdair Macindoe, Marnie Palomares, Connected, Chunky Move

photo Jeff Busby

Alisdair Macindoe, Marnie Palomares, Connected, Chunky Move

As such, the sculpture augments the expressive potential of the dancers by extending the reach of their neurons into new fibres (one imagines the ineluctable fun the dancers must have had in rehearsal, exploring the potential for expression and variation, like babies still conquering gross motor skills). When the sculpture is attached to an intimate duet between a man and a woman, the reflected shudders and waving of the grid seem to describe an elusive mathematical representation of love. When the duet evolves into sexual thrusting from the man, the grid responds with some unimpressed crinkling—a neat bathetic joke.

The grid as a reflection of the human form also makes manifest the very scientific thought that created it. It is an expression of the rational mind, a reminder that what we invent is inevitably in our own image, no matter how apparently disembodied. The programming of Connected in parallel with Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass, brings this aspect into clearer focus. Where In Glass treats reflection as a shady psychological force, Connected celebrates the altogether different shadiness of the scientific and mathematic by making it symbiotic with the corporeal.

Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move

photo Jeff Busby

Stephanie Lake, Harriet Ritchie, Joseph Simons, Connected, Chunky Move

However, just as this celebration begins, it grinds to a halt. The eponymous connectedness is dispelled when its potential is only beginning to be realised and, instead, the sculpture is unplugged from its human drivers and plugged into a wall socket. As an automaton it becomes even more mathematical and pure, losing none of its beauty, but the dancers become irrelevant (cast your mind to the poetic force of Heiner Muller’s Stifters Dinge). To his credit, Obarzanek acknowledges this irrelevance with a surprising shift into semi-verbatim theatre that transports us very literally into the inner life of art museum security guards. There is perhaps a vein of social critique here, or for that matter an opportunity to emphasise the intricate beauty of what we have seen with the banality of this episode, but it feels instead that the promise of the first half is left underutilised and that Obarzanek concludes by dancing around rather than with the concepts he provokes.

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Dance Massive: Chunky Move, Connected, director, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, sculpture Reuben Margolin, performers Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Harriet Ritchie, Marnie Palomares, Joseph Simons, composers Oren Ambarchi, Robin Fox, lighting Benjamin Cisterne, costumes Anna Cordingley; Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au

Connected will appear at Sydney Theatre, May 10-14; chunkymove.com

See RealTime’s video interview with Gideon Obarzanek

See online interview with Reuben Margolin

Paul White, In Glass

photo Ian Bird, courtesy Sydney Opera House

Paul White, In Glass

PLENITUDE IS A GOOD WORD TO DESCRIBE NARELLE BENJAMIN’S IN GLASS—NOT IN THE SENSE OF ABUNDANCE, PERHAPS NOT, BUT CERTAINLY IN THE SENSE OF AMASSING, OF MULTIPLIED SAMENESS. THE GORGEOUS, PRECISE BODIES OF KRISTINA CHAN AND PAUL WHITE ARE QUITE ABLE TO COMMAND THE STAGE IN SINGULAR, BUT IN GLASS MULTIPLIES THEM THROUGH GENTLY ANGLED MIRRORS, FILM AND INTERPLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW—MAKING AS MANY AS SIX OF THE SAME DANCING COUPLE AT ONCE.

They mirror each other, too, sometimes in perfect synchronicity, sometimes with a calculated lag; then they split into duets with a recognisable male-female dynamic. This shifting between synchronicity and sensual dialogue evokes intriguing parallels with psychoanalytical thought, as the two dancers seem to achieve a completion of sorts in paralleling each other’s movements: through learning to imitate and respond to each other they seem to grow conscious of themselves, each other, the world, their relationship. Without going too deeply into Lacanian psychoanalysis, the notion of the mirror stage, in which reflection of one’s self allows self-conscience to emerge, is a notion dear to all performance—recurring in theories of performativity from Judith Butler among others. For a while there, the multitude of reflecting Chans and Whites exists without leader or follower: a perfect tribe of dancers, an image of primordial unity. There is some logic to this interpretation: the mirror stage is but a moment in our lives, and irretrievable—and Chan and White spend the later, larger part of In Glass out of sync, seeking each other. If the mirror starts as a vehicle for happy unison of the many, it soon turns into a visual maze, a passage through a glass, darkly.

Much of the dramaturgical responsibility in In Glass rests on Samuel James’ visual design, which adds a layer of video to the already complex reflecting images. Through the projections, the mirrors shatter, dancers’ limbs multiply into insectoid, almost abstract arabesques and a forest landscape engulfs Chan’s and White’s bodies as they slip behind glass. Chan, a comparatively small woman, repeatedly wanders off into the forest, as bare-footed and lost as that child in McCubbin’s painting. When she reappears on stage, she is prostrate, asleep, as if she had been spirited away without any agency of her own. In these moments In Glass appears to tell a story of star-crossed lovers, or even (to remain psychoanalytical) of that impossible thing we seek in everyone we fall in love with—the faint memory of our pre-conscious unity with the world. The repetition of loss, search and encounter echoes itself in slight inflections, as reclamation of lost ground, which never turns out to be quite the same.

Benjamin’s choreography reaches its apex with the introduction of two smaller, oval mirrors, which allow the dancers to multiply only some of their body parts, and merge into fabulous beasts. Paul White becomes a three-headed Narcissus (or Cerberus), licking and kissing his own reflection. The moment is exquisite: as the light from the mirrors scans through the audience, occasionally blinding us, we are brought into the same space as White, now as sublime as a psychotic monster. Kristina Chan’s transformation into a many-limbed Hindu deity is equally captivating: White stands behind her with the mirrors, multiplying her arms. Both dancers reflect and multiply in the larger mirrors behind them, forming a gigantic pastiche of human matter, not unlike an organic Rorschach blot. In these moments, what has so far been their internal quest grows larger, universal, archetypal. The performers could be gods or animals.

However, such moments of confronting strangeness are too rare. For the most part, In Glass insists on a certain mellow beauty which, however satisfying on a purely aesthetic level, keeps its tone too even, too centred, to build a genuinely satisfactory dramatic arc. The beauty of individual scenes is undeniable; the purpose or intent of the entire endeavour much harder to ascertain—video and choreography become sequential eye candy, creating the pleasant effect of dance wallpaper.

I am reminded of early 20th-century dance, its insistence on harmony and pure expression of the body, and, even more, of Gertrude Stein’s ‘landscape plays.’ All of Stein’s principles—the interest in reaching the unconscious, the continuous dramatic present, the play that one can contemplate as one would a park or a landscape, the seeming homogeneity of content which, actually, goes through subtle variations and loops—are present in In Glass. Stein eliminated the dramatic narrative on purpose, proclaiming that it always made her terribly nervous. In Glass comes with no such manifesto, but it does seem to be trying to create a landscape of its own sort. And it succeeds: even if we are not sure what it was saying, we do believe we have heard it say something.

The greatest part of the experience of any dance work is retrospective, the memory of a body at a constant vanishing point. As such, it is hard in a review that follows so closely after the event to say with certainty what this experience was. Perhaps that three-headed Narcissus will crystallise into an indelible image in a week’s time? It is too early to tell.

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2011 Dance Massive: In Glass, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, dancers Kristina Chan, Paul White, composer Huey Benjamin, visual design Samuel James, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Karen Norris, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au

RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg. 17

Harriet Ritchie, Stephanie Lake, Marnie Palomares, Alisdair Macindoe, Joseph Simon, Connected, Chunky Move

GGIDEON OBARZANEK’S CONNECTED COMMENCES WITH CONTEMPLATION AND A BLOW. IF WE WEREN’T SEATED, WE COULD BE IN AN ART GALLERY, GAZING UP AT A HUGE SCULPTURE THRUSTING TOWARDS THE CEILING OF THE MERLYN THEATRE. IT’S A MACHINE OF SOME KIND. WE PONDER ITS PECULIAR TIMBER AND STRING BEAUTY. WE ITCH TO SEE IT ACTIVATED. ONE PERFORMER APPEARS TO BE COMPLETING IT—MAKING CONNECTIONS. ANOTHER TWO PERFORMERS STAND SIDE BY SIDE; A BURST OF SOUND AND ONE IS FLUNG SIDEWAYS ACROSS THE STAGE. CONNECTIONS ARE MADE: DEVICE-BODY, SOUND-BODY, GALLERY-THEATRE, ART-WORK. THESE WILL MERGE AND ACCUMULATE IN A GROWING WEB OF ASSOCIATIONS.

A circular component of the sculpture suggests a spinning wheel and the adjacent threaded frame a loom, from which dozens of strings rise tautly to a tilted rectangular grid high above us. From there, these myriad lines descend to waist height where they are intricately linked by one or, later, more performers into another grid. This is quiet work, construction; not dance, but patterned labour.

Simultaneously, intriguing human connections are being formed—ricochets from that initial sonic blow or waves coursing from one dancing body to the next. These are forceful and unstable; appearing to spring almost involuntarily from one part of a dancer’s anatomy and rippling out into the whole and beyond into other bodies. In one passage the movement is near slow motion, evincing a kind of brutality underlined by the propulsive power of the music; in another, bodies jerk with staccato suddenness. Duos and trios appear enmeshed in the fine lines of unseen forces, like puppets on strings for all their dynamic attentiveness to each other’s transformations, evoking the imponderables of cause and effect or Chaos Theory’s maximisation of small impulses into major moves. (Sculptor Reuben Margolin reveals his fascination with waves in an interview with John Bailey and Gideon Obarzanek, in a video interview with Keith Gallasch, reflects on causality in Connections). The dancing is fascinating; I yearn to experience again its shock waves and deregulated fluency.

Work on the sculpture is complete—fine white, identical, magnetised paper shards link all the strings. The new grid is neatly horizontal. Four dancers are harnessed to the strings that emanate from the ‘loom’ and are hooked to the backs of costumes. With the pushing that pulls, the performers collectively lean forward and with great effort and concentration slowly hoist the grid high and then lower it, the mass of strings quivering with each exertion and machine stress. But it’s not mass effort that reveals the sculpture’s beauty or its subtleties. That labour is allocated to one dancer (Alisdair Macindoe) by another (Marnie Palomares) affixing all the connecting lines to his body, so that when he leans into his work he momentarily appears like a participant in an ancient Indian ritual or a performance artist whose skin has been pierced with hooks to which some great physical and spiritual burden applies. Here, astonishingly, when Palomares makes slight adjustments to Macindoe’s bearing—the angling of a shoulder, the turn of the head—it’s these that have the greatest effect on the sculpture, re-shaping the suspended grid into a floating mound or deep hollow, rippling with dancerly fluency. It’s as if, in his near stillness and beyond mere mechanics, the dancer’s spirit has passed into the art machine—such is the nature of puppetry. if here a radical inversion of the usual scale of the art.

When Palomares stands beneath the lowering grid, she faces up until it reaches her lips for a kiss between human and machine and secondarily its operator in an oddly romantic moment (Macindoe’s attention is not on Palomares but on the work effort—though he does vibrate reciprocally). However oblique the connection between the two the kiss suggests the intrinsic humanity in artistic creation—this sculpture is no mere object.

But in a sudden and surprising shift of focus, the dancer is unharnessed, the sculpture’s wheel is electrically activated and the artwork makes its own moves. It becomes, in effect, a stand-alone installation guarded by the dancers as a team of suited gallery attendants. We’re in an art gallery: but it’s not about the art. Live voices and voice-overs provide brief verbatim accounts of how people from diverse backgrounds are employed by security companies to become guards in galleries. The art there seems incidental to them, while their sense of isolation and the menial nature of their labour (“You don’t make anything; you just look at people”) is felt in neatly patterned group movement as well as words. However, there’s something in the air. The dancing sculpture and the sublimely soaring music re-shapes and undresses these sad souls, stripping them down to shirts, forming them into exquisite living mandalas, opening and closing like flowers, and finally resting beneath the descending grid with which they become one.

This osmotic liberation might seem corny from a distance, merely metaphorical, let alone likely in this instance, but in the moment it had an enveloping romantic logic, resonating with the surprisingly generative disjunctions in the scale of cause and effect witnessed earlier.

Connected is an engrossing creation, intensely and rewardingly collaborative, passionately danced to exacting choreography (in the first section some of Gideon Obarzanek’s best), superbly lit (Benjamin Cisterne makes the sculpture appear self-illuminating) and thrillingly scored (I can’t find the words to do justice to the haunting, compulsive compositions of Robin Fox and Oren Ambachi). Reuben Margolin’s kinetic sculpture alone is reason enough to see Connected. But that’s just the first wave of this labour of love and the work that is art.

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.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE CONTEXT MAKES! IN 2008, SUNSTRUCK FELT LIKE A WORK ABOUT THE DROUGHT— THE THICK, ENDLESS, DUSTY THING EVERYWHERE AROUND US ON THIS OLD ROCK OF A COUNTRY. THIS RAINY BUT APOCALYPTIC YEAR, I HEAR SOMEONE ASK IN THE FOYER, PRE-SHOW: “THIS IS NOT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, IS IT?” I SENSE FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR AN IMMINENT WAVE OF THEATRE AND DANCE, LEAVING US AWASH WITH DRAWING ROOM DRAMAS IN WHICH THE AID-WORKER DAUGHTER INTRODUCES HER BOYFRIEND, A SURVIVOR FROM A SUBMERGED ATOLL, TO HER CLIMATE SCIENTIST FATHER…BUT SUNSTRUCK IS NONE OF THESE.

One of the great benefits of Dance Massive is that it brings some important dance works that may not have received the attention they deserved to a receptive and curious audience. Having been among the relatively few who saw Sunstruck at the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, it is very rewarding to now see it delight a whole new audience.

At the time, I compared it with the paintings of Russell Drysdale, to Camus’ protagonist who kills an Arab, blinded by the sun. The simple geometry of these works was concordant with the simple geometry of Sunstruck: the single source of light, the single circle of chairs for the audience, the black of the two male performers’ clothing. The series of gestures, interlocking (yet seemingly independent) movements that the two performers engage in—the youthfully strong, mannish Nick Sommerville and the older, fluid, catlike Trevor Patrick—build to create a universe of silent masculinity, in which one can only self-express whilst blinded by the sun. At the same time, the heat, the absence of rain, as much as it delivers them into ecstatic abandonment, also appears to strike them down. Or is this just a beginning of something new?

In 2008, I saw a personal journey in Sunstruck, a sort of dictionary or compendium of particularly masculine Australian body language—there was great restraint, silent grief, competitiveness, care and extraordinary liberation of body and emotion which, unsurprisingly, ended in weeping. A great deal of the choreography, indeed, is very close in form to mime—staring at strong light, combing hair, smoking a cigarette. However, this time I saw what Helen Herbertson talks about in her director’s notes—a death, a childbirth, the ecstasy of existence, the heavy load of being alive. It was a journey of a tribe rather than of the individual.

But it is hard to describe Sunstruck, because it is not technically ‘about’ anything—it is an experience, rather than a work of representation. The crucial aspects of the work, though, are also the easiest to overlook: the great dark space, greetings from the artists, receiving a warm drink, sitting in a close circle. The atmosphere it creates—of quiet meditation, but a communal one, not unlike sitting around a campfire—is the container for the experience. If after the show has ended we all remain seated in our chairs, quietly enjoying the tangible community we now are, that would be why. We have seen different things in Sunstruck, but we have all shared a cup of the same tea.

Dance Massive: Sunstruck, concept collaboration Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham, devisor, director Herbertson, design, light Cobham, performers Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 14-16; www.dancemassive.com.au

THE SHEER PLENITUDE OF NARELLE BENJAMIN’S IN GLASS IS ALMOST OVERWHELMING—THE CONSTANT FLOW OF HIGHLY ARTICULATED DANCE, AN INSISTENT SOUND SCORE AND A MULTIPLICITY OF IMAGES, REFLECTED ON AND OFTEN SIMULTANEOUSLY PROJECTED ONTO THE THREE MIRROR SCREENS THAT FRAME THE PERFORMERS. I SENSE THAT SOME KIND OF ELLIPTICAL NARRATIVE IS ALSO UNFOLDING IN THIS SEMI-DARK WORLD THAT TRANSMUTES BETWEEN REVERIE AND NIGHTMARE BUT, AS WITH DREAMING, I CAN’T BE SURE. THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I WAKE TO THE SUSPICION THAT I’VE WITNESSED A GHOST STORY.

The associative nature of In Glass, where everything is half-seen through refracted light (epitomised by the recurrent image of broken glass) demands interpretation if at the same time appearing to refuse it. The work is imbued with a sense of loss, of being lost, of separation anxiety. It commences with a shadowy male figure searching with a torch and finding the body of a woman—asleep, resting, dead? Later, in a projected image, we see her run through a forest to the point of collapse and utter stillness. Later again, she will wield the torch in his absence. Back in the first scene, the female dancer appeared onscreen behind the broken glass, as if peering down at her partner’s searching: some kind of regenerative cycle, of souls together and apart, seems to be functioning.

The pattern appears to be: separation, discovery, merging, separation and re-discovery, with the everyday banality of search by torchlight offset by the mythic imagery of a tree that sprouts (the performers’) limbs, perhaps evoking the Hindu goddess Kali, at once creative and destructive. A similarly transcendant quality is found in passages that meticulously evoke Eastern temple dancing, reinforced by Huey Benjamin’s chiming score, here at its best when most delicate. The acute angularity of this deeply earthed movement and the escaping flights of finger dancing are ravishing. As so often in In Glass, the dancers are completely in synch, side by side or mirroring each other, enforcing a sense of oneness that will be lost and reclaimed over and over.

In less calculatedly transcendant passages, the moments of merging entail a range of dynamics, from swirling gyrations, one body in tow of the other in exacting floor work, to intense back-arched parallel prostrations suggestive of mutual passion and stress. At other moments, the dancers lean forehead to forehead, slide together neck across neck and glide to the floor, or elsewhere slump with alarming suddenness as if the effect of emerging is too much. At other times there is a sensual entwining, as if in sleep.

Because Paul White and Kristina Chan are dancers of inordinate finesse and skill, and because Narelle Benjamin has shaped for them a rich dance language, In Glass, moment by moment, is often deeply engaging. But that plenitude of invention becomes exacting—images race by, too fast often to find anchor in our psyches. Yes, the cycles of the work are evident as are the broader patterns of the choreography, but potentially engaging motifs are either lost or under-developed.

The notion inherent in In Glass, of having to deal with reality through refracted images of self and other, indeed “through a glass darkly,” reaches its apotheosis when White introduces two oval-shaped mirrors. He frames himself (mirrors either side of his head) with grinning mock narcissism, licking his image. He then angles the mirrors over a seated, cross-legged Chan (now costumed in gold) so that her articulation of arms and fingers transforms her into a multi-limbed goddess. However, Chan’s own reeling solo engagement with a mirror image is far less aetherial: a screen projection reveals an aged, slumped female body. It’s an unusually literal, indeed banal moment, one for which White has no obvious equivalent. When he stands alone, arms stretched out, sinuously aquiver, it’s not clear what state of being he has entered. Towards the end, when the central screen breaks in two and is angled against itself, the sense of mirroring intensifies yet again, but totally as illusion—Chan disappears. The relationship is and never was—life as ghost story.

But whose story? Although we share the points of view of both performers and each seems equally watcher and watched, there is an increasing sense that the work is focused on the man’s loss of the woman (her limp body on stage and in the forest, her transformative golden attire, her limbs dancing like Kali, the man’s greater effort in drawing him to her).

Narrative uncertainties aside, the constant multiplication of the performers’ selves on the transparent mirror-screens heightens the sense of uneasy dream. Samuel James’ images compound it: fractured glass, the dancers in various perspectives (an astonishing one, as if seen from overhead, has them sucked into a deep void), the deep green forest, a ghost tree, the sparkle of ocean waves stripped into vertical lines, two beautiful circles of fragmented light moving one counter clockwise to the other, like the dancers, together but apart. Karen Norris’ lighting adroitly sustains our view of the dancing without diluting the screen imagery, although contending with the too small performing space in the Beckett Theatre.

Although In Glass sometimes eluded me with its irritating plenitude of invention, it proved nonetheless memorable—if in the way that one struggles to recall certain dreams. The dancing is wonderful, the screen work embracing and Benjamin’s somewhat Jungian metaphysics intriguing.

NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO, REUBEN MARGOLIN MET A MAN IN SWITZERLAND OBSESSED WITH JIGSAW PUZZLES. THE MAN LIVES IN A MANSION WHERE MORE THAN A DOZEN ROOMS ARE FILLED WITH THE THINGS. THOUSANDS OF PUZZLES—OF DIFFERENT TIME PERIODS AND GENRES, SOME SELF-MADE. HE TOLD MARGOLIN THAT IN HIS VIEW, EVERYTHING IS A JIGSAW PUZZLE. EVERYTHING FITS WITH SOMETHING ELSE. NO, SAID MARGOLIN. EVERYTHING IS A WAVE.

At that point, says Margolin, “it occurred to me that whatever you’re really into, you start to see that everywhere. So the more I’ve gotten into waves, the more I see patterns everywhere.”

Waves are Margolin’s world. From his studio in Emeryville, California, the 40-year-old creates intricate kinetic sculptures that employ thousands of moving parts to embody the waves that occur across the natural realm. He visited Melbourne recently to deliver the sculpture he’s devised for Chunky Move’s Connected, a work which will see dancers harnessed into one of the artist’s complex moving wave-machines.

It’s hard to spend much time in Margolin’s company without finding yourself subtly affected by this notion of waves. “Anything that cycles can be expressed as a wave, and everything cycles. Everything goes around and around. The best way to describe something that cycles is a wave.”

He points to a door and calls it a wave. I have no idea what he means. “It opens and shuts, it opens and shuts,” he says. “But it opens and shuts more in the daytime and less at night. If you plotted that, the best way to understand that door opening and shutting is as a wave-form.”

The path that has led Margolin to where he is today would seem anything but wave-like: he enjoyed the challenges of geometry in high school and began studying maths at college. In his second year he switched majors to geology (“because I wanted to go camping”). The following year he changed focus again, to anthropology; finally, deciding he wanted to be a poet, he graduated in English. Not long after, he studied classical painting in Italy and Russia.

And yet, Margolin says, he was always making kinetic art. At eight he would craft little duck puppets and marionettes and try to sell them at craft fairs. “I’ve always liked making things. I keep coming back to the fact that I like cutting a piece of wood with a handsaw. That’s about as good as it gets. There’s nothing more grounding than having a two-by-four on a sawhorse and just cutting. It’s great.”

While still pursuing a possible career in painting, Margolin became obsessed with a caterpillar. The unique undulations of the creature fascinated him, and he wondered how they could be reproduced. He ended up spending five months devising a small mechanical sculpture inspired by the caterpillar; he’s now made three different versions, but says that he still hasn’t quite nailed it. “I think I will. Maybe I’m still working on it. Maybe every sculpture still has a little bit of caterpillar in it.”

Margolin met Chunky Move’s Gideon Obarzanek at a PopTech conference in Maine in 2009. Impressed by the choreographer’s presentation of previous works exploring the intersection of technology and dance, the sculptor approached him and suggested a collaboration. “I was actually thinking of a very small weekend adventure with some strings and sticks but Gideon kept pushing it and we kept working together and it grew to be a much more ambitious, world-touring production.”

Connected is a departure from Chunky Move’s more recent high-tech projects due to the mechanical materiality of its sculptural centrepiece. Margolin’s wire-and-string creations don’t engage with the ethereal invisibility of electronics. Apart from the occasional motor, the forces that produce his waves are simple physics.

“I’m just sort of low-tech. It’s what I’m good at. Making small bits. It’s just fun to do. I feel like more and more as a culture we’re moving towards things that are digital. If you can do something not digital that is beautiful and elegant, to me that’s just super interesting.”

It’s important that the operative mechanisms of Margolin’s sculptures are on full display, too: “One thing that’s always been important for me is not to put a box around it. And not even to have a big plane that blocks your vision of how it works. Making it as transparent as possible. So it’s all there. You can see exactly how it’s working. But it’s complicated enough and there are enough parts that it becomes something else, hopefully.”

With much digital art—including Chunky Move’s acclaimed Glow and Mortal Engine—a sense of wonder is produced by the mystery behind the technologies creating what we see. Margolin’s sculptures operate differently. There’s no mystery. We can see everything. And yet the sheer number of moving components is what exceeds our capacity to understand what we’re being offered. “Nature is just so wonderfully fluid. You see waves that are perfectly formed and variable and magnificent in water and wind and flames and trees. Everywhere. The only way to kind of go in that direction is to throw a lot of little parts at it.”

Margolin’s exploration of waves has also resulted, perhaps organically, in a broader philosophical view of the patterns of life. “I think that having studied the wave I have a little bit more tolerance than most people that there’s going to be some good times and there’s going to be some bad times. There’s going to be times when I have no money and times when I have money. Times where I’m really happy with what I’m doing and times where I’m not.

“Because these things that I study, waves, are everywhere, and they also have their ups and downs, that is going to happen with mood, with relationships, with politics. I feel more tolerant when things aren’t going well; that’s okay, I’m down, but I’ll probably go back up. And later, hey, I’m up here, but will probably go back down again.”

And yet, surely, the counterpoint to the wave is the interruption, the shock that breaks any cycle? Margolin demurs: “If you had what you’re calling a large shock or rupture, what if you had another one the next day? And another the next day? You’re looking at one peak or one valley, and you just need to relate that to all those peaks and valleys of that amplitude, that scale, and there’s another wave that’s in there. I’m not sure that there are these giant, discontinuous events, or whether they only look discontinuous because you’re not far enough away to see them as a larger pattern.”

Dance Massive, Chunky Move, Connected, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 15-20; www.dancemassive.com.au

Kerrie Poliness, Blue Wall Drawing #1 2007/11
Work in progress, Monday 10 to Friday 15 January 2011

LANGUAGE IS NOW LITTERED WITH WORDS WHOSE STATUS AS NOUN OR VERB APPEARS CONFLATED. TO ‘TEXT,’ TO ‘MESSAGE,’ TO ‘EMAIL,’ TO ‘GOOGLE’ AND EVEN TO ‘FACEBOOK’ ANOTHER PERSON DESCRIBE ACTIVITIES THAT MOST OF US PERFORM EVERY DAY. THE SAME COULD BE SAID OF THE WORD ‘NETWORK,’ WHICH LENDS ITS SEMANTIC LOAD TO BOTH THINGS IN THE WORLD AND ACTIVITIES THAT WE ENGAGE IN WITH SEEMINGLY INCREASING FREQUENCY. HOWEVER, AS THE WORKS IN THE MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART’S LATEST EXHIBITION DEMONSTRATE, DESPITE THE EFFICACY WITH WHICH THE WORD PERMEATES SOCIAL DISCOURSE, NETWORK IS A COMPLEX, SLIPPERY TERM. AS A DESCRIPTOR, ITS USE IS SO WIDESPREAD THAT IT ACTS TO EMPTY OUT MEANING RATHER THAN CREATE IT. ‘WHAT IS IT?,’ ‘OH, IT’S A NETWORK.’ BUT WHAT EXACTLY DOES THIS MEAN?

What is often obscured in the use of the word ‘network’ is the important role played by the work in the network. It is the work that activates the net and creates a sense of dynamic tension—of being caught up in a net and working to making sense of one’s place in the structure of it. Of making connections or resisting connections or playing against those connections. And there is no connection without activity. The net will catch nothing if there is nothing against which it can work. It is this dynamic property that makes the network difficult to visualise. Its translation to the visual most often ends up as a form of aesthetic cartography, like a family tree or a data map. The rhizomatic territorialising energy of the network gets lost in what Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter describe in their catalogue essay as the “ever-present Will to Visualise.” It is against this drive that the exhibits in Networks Cells and Silos have to operate. Some manage it more effectively than others.

Kerrie Poliness’ Blue Wall Drawing #1 dominates the back wall of the exhibition space and could easily be dismissed as an attempt to map the geometries of networked space. However, understanding how the work has been constructed reveals an engagement with the conundrum of invisibility of the work in networks that is far more interesting than the finished work itself. The artist works by establishing a series of laws or principles that serve as a guide to a team of agents who construct the drawing through collaboration. To the gallery visitor, this work is invisible, having taken place in advance of the viewer’s engagement with the drawing. In this sense, the work as a whole only becomes available to the viewer who is willing to do some work, to activate a connection that is off screen, so to speak, and become in turn a collaborator in the network of agents involved in the construction of the work.

Similarly, Mikala Dwyer’s Outfield forces the viewer into an active relation with the work by bringing together a strange array of objects whose own relations to each other are only made obvious by their placement in a circle, the metaphoric symbol of unity. The totemic qualities of many of the objects suggest ancient rites and cosmological significance while simultaneously resisting categorisation, forcing the viewer to draw on their own connective strategies to generate meanings.

Heath Bunting, The Status Project: A1072 Able to provide a natural person date of birth 2010

Other works play with and disrupt the drive towards data mapping which characterises the aesthetic visualisation of networks. Heath Bunting’s Status Project 2006-2011 is the visual realisation of an ongoing project aimed at charting the relations between characteristics of “natural” and “artificial persons” and their characteristics to produce “maps of influence.” These complex maps chart such webs of data as religion, political identification and ability to provide a current postal address to produce maps like ‘A terrorist 2010.’ Their complexity reveals the absurdity produced by the abstraction of data from actual lived lives, tapping into the empty zones of audit culture that dominate modern bureaucratic life. Printmaker Justin Trendall’s ‘Darlinghurst 1’ weaves together a textured space of actual sites and their semiotic traces into a map that looks uncannily like embroidery while Sandra Selig’s contribution, titled heart of the air you can hear, protrudes from a corner of the gallery like gossamer macramé, a wistful reminder of the fragile temporality of the networked connection.

In all, 20 artists are represented in the exhibition and their inclusion is itself a commentary on the nature of networks. The variety of mediums used, from the screen based work of Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament to the paintings Ilkurlka and Kamanti by Indigenous artist Tjadawu Woods, demonstrates the promiscuity of the network’s effect on artistic consciousness. The inclusion of older works from the MUMA collection, such as John Dunkley-Smith’s Perspectives for conscious alterations in everyday life #5 (1990) and Roger Kemp’s Metamorphosis (1973) attests to its longevity. Curator Geraldine Barlow’s choices help us to draw unexpected insights from unlikely juxtapositions both within the individual works and from their eclectic correspondences with each other. The exhibition is also reflective of what Director Max Delany has described as MUMA’s curatorial focus, “the unfinished business of modernity and historical reconstruction, as well as the direct experience and creation of our contemporary condition, in all its complexity.”

This theme plays itself out in the architectural design of the museum itself. Occupying the ground floor of a curved 1960s era educational building, the museum is a combination of existing structures and new purpose built gallery spaces. One of the more intriguing aspects of the design is the exposed support structures between the gallery spaces, giving the visitor the sense of ongoing construction, like being behind the scenes on a film set where one is unsure where the real action is taking place. Rather than acting as a distraction to the works, the spaces between galleries work like interstitials on television, keeping up the sense of flow and contributing to the dynamism of the exhibition. The slightly curved walls and the rectangular spaces also make the visitor attentive to appearances, or rather the appearance of appearances.

Outside the museum, Callum Morton’s Silverscreen 2010 is wedged between the museum and the Art and Design building, its scaffold-like properties also reinforcing the sense of ongoing construction. This monumentally scaled steel edifice functions as both a visual connection between the two buildings and a passageway through them, leading from the bustle of adjacent Dandenong Road to the serenity of the internal sculpture garden. Its similarity to the rear side of a drive-in screen or a billboard forces us to ask—is it art or is it commerce?—a question no doubt familiar to the occupants of both buildings.

The co-location of MUMA with the Faculty of Art and Design makes a great deal of sense and on my visit the gallery was filled with small groups of newly minted art students, sprawled on the floor in front of works, talking animatedly about their relative merits. They too gave an air of construction to the scene, themselves works in progress, making new connections with the works and with each other. The networks that they will inhabit, create, resist and deploy will undoubtedly inform them and their practice as they develop their own creative sensibilities, the expression of which may well find its way onto the walls of MUMA some day in the future.

Networks (Cells & Silos), curator Geraldine Barlow, Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus, Feb 1-April 16; www.monash.edu.au/muma

AS THE SUN SETS BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS OVERLOOKING SULLIVAN’S COVE, A GREY BALL, FOUR METRES IN DIAMETER, BOUNCES INTO THE AIR. ITS AERIAL EXCURSION IS FOLLOWED WITH LAUGHTER AND SHOUTS BY A CROWD OF ADULTS AND CHILDREN CLAMBERING FOR A CHANCE TO CHANGE THE GLOBE’S ERRANT PATH. THE SCENE WOULD NOT BE OUT OF PLACE IN A TELECOMMUNICATIONS ADVERTISEMENT, EXCEPT FOR THE STATIC, FEEDBACK, CAREENING SINE WAVES AND EXPLOSIONS BLASTING FROM A NEARBY STAGE IN RESPONSE TO THE BALL’S MOVEMENTS. JON ROSE’S INTERACTIVE BALL PROJECT EPITOMISES MONA FOMA. AS ROSE PUT IT, “PEOPLE HAVING FUN MAKING EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC.”

Providing a playful environment in which people can enjoy contemporary music is essential to MONA FOMA curator Brian Ritchie who seeks to share the visceral excitement he felt upon hearing Edgar Varèse’s groundbreaking 1931 percussion piece Ionisation at age 10. “It was the first piece of contemporary classical music I heard,” Ritchie recalls. “It absolutely blew my mind.” With the rhythmic pounding of Ionisation providing one of the quieter moments of Speak Percussion’s opening program, Ritchie’s curatorial rationale was put to the test.

speak percussion

Entering Princes Wharf Shed No.1 at Sullivan’s Cove through the airy seaside courtyard, wandering to the main stage past the Interactive Ball Project, Indigenous artist Brook Andrew’s inflatable art work The Cell, the irresistible aroma of catering by MONA chefs, and a row of table-tennis tables, it was hard not to feel enchanted and receptive. “You have to make the environment comfortable, so people don’t feel excluded, like they’re on the outside,” Ritchie explains. Approaching Speak Percussion’s setup on the main stage, it became evident that Ritchie was not using a figure of speech. Six batteries of gongs, bongos, toms, bass drums, cymbals and assorted non-traditional percussion instruments encircled an audience lazing expectantly on pink, purple and black beanbags. Percussion ensembles have a long history of playing “in the round,” or spaced around the audience, but rarely include some of the best festival food and an artistic jumping castle so close at hand.

Moving around the space or perched contemplatively on their beanbags, the rapt audience sat through the epic four-hour program (spread over two days) with the informality of a rock festival and the hush of a concert hall. This is just as well, as Speak Percussion’s sound engineers did not compromise the performance’s amplification for a potentially rowdy audience. As a result, the gently undulating marimbas and distant-sounding gongs of Liza Lim’s City of Falling Angels invited close listening, drawing the audience into what Speak Percussion’s Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti describes as Lim’s “hyper-emotional” musical language. The world premiere of Flesh and Ghost, Anthony Pateras’ study in crescendi, explored the space between gently clattering glass and roaring cymbals. The shocking assault of Xenakis’ Persephassa was as physical as it was aural. Xenakis’ ear-splittingly loud bongo rhythms darted around the space, wrapping the audience in a pointy, threatening cocoon that, thanks to the otherwise welcoming atmosphere, scared away only a few children.

Fifteen performers, 450 instruments (which almost missed the ferry), and eight Tasmanian, Australian and world premieres later, Ritchie was willing to declare the “huge risk” of Speak Percussion’s program a success. “The audience were carried by it, they didn’t baulk. We purport to be something: edgy, presenting new music, and sometimes you have to deliver.”

glocal collaborations

Though Sullivan’s Cove was settled in 1804 to defend against foreign exploration, at MONA FOMA the precinct functions as a launch pad for the discovery of local and international musical traditions. In particular, collaborations between Asian vocalists and Australian instrumentalists provided two of the most exciting contributions to the festival’s timbral palate in performances by Chiri and Cambodian Space Project.

Chiri’s Bae Il Dong perfected the Korean Pansori vocal style by singing at a waterfall for seven years. Ranging from swallowed, rumbling bass tones through an explosive, fraying tenor range to a howling falsetto, Bae Il Dong’s vocal skill was complemented by Simon Barker’s Pansori-inspired drumming and Scott Tinkler’s trumpet improvisation.

Cambodian Space Project’s Srey Thy honed her voice through five years of singing in Phnom Penh karaoke bars. With an Australian backing band she finally brings the bold tone and gorgeous prolonged nasal stops (“m,” “n” and “ng”) of Khmer singing to Australian audiences. Srey Thy’s expert execution of Khmer rock and roll classics and original songs paid a worthy homage to 1960s and 70s Khmer rock and roll pioneered by the singers Pan Ron and Sinn Sisamouth.

Drawn in by the playground of Princes Wharf Shed No.1, the audience was then encouraged to strike out across Hobart to the city’s many historically fascinating festival venues. Walking or, if you are lucky, riding one of Arts Tasmania’s free Vanmoof Artbikes past the heavy 1820s stone buildings of Salamanca Place, c1900 Federation houses and modernist Government buildings, you’re left to ponder the importance of place to art production. Again, contributions from Asian performers and artists provided the festival’s most striking engagements with context.

Hong Kong New Music Ensemble’s hypnotic Sound Cloud (Gong III) installation and performance filled the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Bond Store with dozens of Arduino-powered blinking lights and piezo buzzers. As the 1826 warehouse was originally used for storing tobacco and spirits, it was fitting that composer Samson Young used the space to evoke Chinese miners’ experiences of smoking opium in the late 19th century Tasmanian tin fields. As piezo note clusters gently undulated, the slowly blinking lights signalled flute, violin, clarinet and sheng performers to play sequences of pre-determined notes, their vibrato melding with the gentle harmonic beating of the piezo sound cloud. Encouraged to wander through the space, the audience made the most of the profoundly differentiated sound experiences of the furthest corners of the dim, dusty, low-roofed warehouse. Even humming along on its own, without performers, the installation was eerily hypnotic. One boy, perhaps channelling the claustrophobia and very real dangers of 1870s mine shafts, exclaimed “it’s death-defying in there,” adding that he “even saw a ghost.”

Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s In Silence presents a desecrated piano within the desecrated, heritage listed brick church that is the inner-city gallery Detached. Black wool is woven around the charred remains of the piano and high up into the vault above it. Shiota’s installation springs from a childhood memory of seeing a burnt-out piano in the remains of a neighbour’s house fire, a sight that has made her feel “overcome with silence” ever since. While the sight of the silenced piano carved a sacred, silent space in Shiota’s imagination, her woollen desecration of the church, no matter how still and picturesque, shows memory’s power, as an active, disruptive noise, to silence the present.

shards of glass

In contrast to Shiota’s burning stillness, Tasmania’s saxophone quartet 22SQ complemented the silent geometricity of Hobart’s Baha’i Centre with their exquisite control of dynamics and rhythm in works by Philip Glass. The SSQ2 performance was followed by Brian Ritchie’s interview with the composer. Like many of his 60s contemporaries, Glass looked away from institutionalised art music and towards Hindu and Buddhist philosophies to find new ways of composing and listening. In the interview it was evident that his earlier interest in the musical implications of those philosophies had passed over to their pedagogical traditions. Glass regaled the audience for half an hour on the importance of gurus in education and the importance of learning counterpoint. When a woman asked “Why do I love your music?”, Glass abruptly responded “What do you care?” In a way, he had already given her the answer, but it might not have been the one she was looking for. Far from a thesis on the importance of repetition to the human psyche his answer was (in my paraphrase): “Because I studied under Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar, and because I studied counterpoint for two to three hours a day for three years.” While Glass took comfort in yarns about Shankar and India, those who sought comfort in Glass would have been disappointed, both in interview and performance.

If, as Brian Ritchie told Gail Priest (RT100), “music is the comfort food of the arts,” then the audience was out to gorge itself on Glass’ performance of his own solo piano works at Federation Hall. His expressive rubato (speeding up and slowing down) was a welcome departure from others’ metronomic interpretations of his works, though his faltering polyrhythms and fudged passages often snapped listeners out of their contemplative reveries. Observing that “not much has changed” since its composition, Glass concluded with a moving performance of the anti-war poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” accompanying a recording of the poem read by its author Allen Ginsberg. Indicative of Glass’ performance as a whole, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” did not strike me so much as a rousing call for peace as a dejected ode to the past.

inspiring exploration

Back at Princes Wharf the paroxysms of art-joy continued. Fabio Bonelli (aka Musica Da Cucina) painted a musical image of his two aunts living in Sondrio—a town in Italy that doesn’t see the sun for several months a year—using funnels, cups of water, silver forks and a clarinet. Pateras/Baxter/Brown barraged the audience with their prepared instrument sagas. Owen Pallett deftly manipulated violin loops to create clever, Mozartian, episodic pop miniatures. Amanda Palmer sang about her map of Tasmania. South Australia’s The New Pollutants performed a chilling live score to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with vocalist Astrid Pill and cellist Zoë Barry. Neil Gaiman read a story with live accompaniment by FourPlay, and audiences queued for hours to see BalletLab’s trio of dance works. By inspiring the audience’s exploration of new musical experiences, not demanding it, MONA FOMA hit its mark.

MONA FOMA – Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art, curator Brian Ritchie, MONA, Hobart, Jan 14-20; www.mona.net.au

panda strikes again

Since their sell-out events in 2008 and 2009 (RT90), we have been eagerly awaiting news of the next Imperial Panda festival. This year it’s bigger and better than ever, thanks to funding from Arts NSW and the City of Sydney and the indefatigable team of Rosie Fisher, Mish Grigor, Zoe Coombs Marr and Eddie Sharp. The action started on the weekend with the premiere of Gareth Davies (of Black Lung) and Charlie Garber’s (of Pig Island) show Masterclass, but there are two more solid weeks of performances, exhibitions, events, talks, drinking and dancing to go.

Other new shows include What Is Soil Erosion? by Claudia O’Doherty, also of Pig Island (RT85), and Rhubarb Rhubarb’s Some Film Museums I Have Known. Suitcase Royale will also be premiering their Test Flight #1 and one member, Miles O’Neil, will be stepping out on his own in World Around Us. New to Sydney, but not entirely new, is Coombs Marr’s show And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life (RT98).

Brown Council are presenting A Comedy again (RT98; RT100). One Brownie, Frances Barrett, is also curating Man Up: A Night of Male Impersonation. Elsewhere Tim Webster and Sarah Rodigari are presenting In Periscope (RT98) and overseeing a weekend of activities at Firstdraft Gallery. If that doesn’t persuade you to come on down, then surely the promise of a Cab Sav party will! Imperial Panda, various venues, Sydney, March 4-20; www.theimperialpanda.com

When the Pictures Came, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute

come on, come out

A little more sedate perhaps, this year’s Come Out Festival is billed as an event for children, young people and families. Some shows are for schools only (such as the Living Library), but there is a range of other events that will appeal to innovative arts seekers. If you have a dinosaur enthusiast at your house, or even if you don’t, you might enjoy Erth’s amazingly life-scale puppet show Dinosaur Petting Zoo (RT84). Other highlights include Restless Dance Theatre’s new work Take Me There, which Jonathan Bollen will review in our May 9 e-dition. There’s also the Border Project’s collaboration with Windmill Theatre, Escape from Peligro Island, which is billed as “choose-your-own-adventure theatre” an audience interactive format the Project has been honing for a while (see RT84).

In another interesting collaboration, Tasmania’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre have been working with the Children’s Art Theatre of China Welfare Institute to create When the Pictures Came. The play blends “the animations of award-winning film maker Zeng Yigang with black-light puppetry and live performance.” Cross-cultural exchange is also evident in Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui, a new Aboriginal play that brings together European fairytales with the Palaneri or Dreaming characters and stories of the Tiwi Islands. Come Out Festival, Adelaide, March 25-April 1; www.comeout.on.net

multiplatform media magic

Fairytales also feature in the ABC’s newly launched Re-enchantment, which will be available almost everywhere. Billed as an “immersive journey into the hidden meanings of fairy tales,” Re-enchantment is an “interactive multi-platform documentary project exploring why fairy stories continue to enchant, entertain, fascinate and horrify contemporary adult audiences” (press release). Featuring Bluebeard, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood, Re-enchantment doesn’t so much strip away the mystery and magic of these tales, but rather shows “how threading together various interpretations and versions of a story from the perspectives of psychology, social history and popular culture, [can] deepen our connection to and fascination with the richness of fairy tales” (website).

The project was launched last week at the Adelaide Film Festival and also in a session on transmedia documentary at the Australian International Documentary Conference. You can already encounter it online (www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment) and from tomorrow you see it on ABC1 and ABC2, which will be screening 10 x three-minute interstitials. Or you can listen to oral retellings of different interpretations of the stories on Radio National. There is also a two-day symposium, Fairy Tales Re-Imagined: From Werewolf to Forbidden Room, at ACMI in mid-March before the premiere in Sydney on March 24. For more information go to the website and keep an eye out for Kirsten Krauth’s review in RT102. Re-enchantment: An Immersive Journey into the Hidden Meanings of Fairy Tales, www.abc.net.au/tv/re-enchantment; Fairytales Re-Imagined: From Werewolf to Forbidden Room, ACMI, March 10-11, www.acmi.net.au/fairy-tales-reimagined.aspx

photography and/as performance

Now the Monash Gallery of Art is presenting Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, the first major exhibition to focus on the Australian relationship. The artists include Gordon Bennett, Juan Davila, Cherine Fahd, Bert Flugelman, Hayden Fowler, Tim Johnson, Ash Keating, Ben Morieson, Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Robert Rooney, Linda Sproul, Slave Pianos, Stelarc, David M Thomas, Peter Tyndall and Justene Williams. In addition, the gallery is presenting a series of talks. Curator Stephen Zagala, Mike Parr and Anne Marsh will have already discussed whether “photography kills performance art” but you can still catch Stelarc’s presentation, “Circulating Flesh: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera” on March 19 and then Zagala on the theme “Performing Identity” on March 23. Bookings essential. Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, curator Stephen Zagala, Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria, Jan 28-April 3; www.mga.org.au

THE MATERIAL OF FILM AND VIDEO IS LIGHT, SO WE USUALLY CREATE DARKENED ROOMS IN WHICH TO EXPERIENCE ITS ART. 4A’S CINEMA ALLEY HOWEVER MAKES USE OF THE NIGHT, ERECTING A LARGE OUTDOOR SCREEN IN SYDNEY’S PARKER STREET FOR ONE EVENING EACH CHINESE NEW YEAR FESTIVAL. NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR, THE EVENT TRANSFORMS THIS CHINATOWN BACKSTREET INTO AN OPEN-AIR CINEMA AND SCREENS A SELECTION OF CHINESE VIDEO ART CURATED BY 4A DIRECTOR, AARON SEETO.

4A’s own laneway project, Cinema Alley is also a result of the gallery’s focus on community engagement, extending outdoors from the gallery and, this year, including screenings from their 2010 Animation Project with the local community.

A major work in this year’s program was Jun Yang’s A Short-Story on Forgetting and Remembering (2007), made in the short film (or even short story) tradition of a first person narrator. Unable to sleep, the main character wanders the streets of Taipei at night, reflecting on a city built for an alternative history of China. “Everything here seems to be temporary, or at least built on something temporary.” CCTV images suggest a life recorded in pixels. Neon signs flicker, both confident and illusory, stuck in an endless performance of modernity. The film ends with the background sounds of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner providing a popular reference point for this sense of mass amnesia and never-ending quest for the new.

A less conventional exploration of memory, Factory (2003), by Taiwanese Chen Chieh-jen complicates the experience of time through experiments with pace, absence and repetition. Shot largely in a disused textile factory, the film intercuts images of old equipment and abandoned rooms with footage of the female former workers, back at their machines now seven years after the factory’s closure—the ghosts of a labour market after the tide of global capital has moved on. The interweaving of archival footage of factory workers produced by the Taiwanese government in the 1960s adds to this folding of time, of different eras experienced simultaneously in the apprehension of places and objects.

Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s accelerated montage, San Yuan Li (2003), records the encroachment of Guangzhou’s urbanisation on a once rural village. The result of collaboration between 12 artists, all of whom collected footage, the film is an example of the documentary urge currently shaping much contemporary Chinese art and film—the drive towards archival projects amid so much change and destruction. The 45-minute San Yuan Li appeared in Cinema Alley in a shortened version (produced by Ou Ning) along with a brief explanation of the project. Shot largely from below, looking up between buildings to slits of sky, this rapid juxtaposition of the rural and urban conveys a sense of the unnatural in the speed of China’s urban development.

Yuan Goang-Ming’s Floating (2000) was the simplest of the films screened, a short work about disorientation in which the camera is fixed on a repeatedly capsizing boat. We spin with the camera and, like an IMAX film or a ride at an amusement park, the film confuses our bearings. Wang Qingsong’s Skyscraper (2008) was screened for the third time in less than four months in Sydney—previously in Arena at Hazelhurst Gallery (RT100, p44) and Eye of the Dream at Customs House—but its final scene worked especially well in this context. The fireworks that burst into a celebration of China’s faith in modernisation looked particularly familiar (and just as ironic) in the Sydney night sky.

Ultimately, these accidental reverberations stole the show: the neon of Taipei amid that of Sydney, the urban canyons of outer Guangzhou viewed from one within Chinatown. The move from the gallery and out into the open extended the work not only to new audiences but also to new ways of viewing. The focus of this year’s program on cities, histories and transformation made for a particularly rich array of resonances, stitching Sydney into the experience of the films and the films within the experience of Sydney. This nesting of different local spaces drew out the connections between them, suggesting their formation within shared global processes. Time and space were compressed and, for an evening, the soundtracks of urban Asia added to the white noise of Sydney.

4A Cinema Alley 2011, curator Aaron Seeto, artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei, Jun Yang, Chen Chieh-jen, Wang Qingsong, Yuan Goang-Ming, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Feb 11; www.4a.com.au

BELVOIR’S THE WILD DUCK, WRITTEN BY SIMON STONE WITH CHRIS RYAN “AFTER HENRIK IBSEN” AND DIRECTED BY STONE, IS A POWERFULLY ENGAGING WORK, TAUTLY SCRIPTED, SUPERBLY ACTED AND COMPLEMENTED BY AN AUSTERE DESIGN THAT EVOKES A ZOOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION IN WHICH WE WATCH HUMANS CAGED BY OBLIGATIONS AND TABOOS LITERALISED AS A LARGE GLASS BOX FURNISHED WITH NOUGHT BUT CARPET AND, ABOVE, A DIGITAL READOUT OF THE DAY OF THE WEEK AND TIME.

Although Stone uses the title of Ibsen’s 1884 play, his is quite another Wild Duck. He cleverly fast-forwards the plot to the present, pares back much of the original, invents new scenes and thins out the melodramatics (replacing them with some of his own, not least musically). In some ways Stone gets to the essence of the original but, finally, cannot retain its gravitas or its cathartic power. His play is moving, but that’s another matter, and even then is undercut by a lamentable final scene in which, some time after the death of their daughter, the grieving parents meet but fail to regain their relationship. Ibsen with apt bluntness, reminiscent of Puccini, didn’t bother with such a coda.

Stone sticks broadly to the plot of the original while reducing its sociological density. There’s a narrower range of characters and social types, and less emphasis on status, work and the debate about moral idealism. Ibsen’s family fears poverty—the photography business is not faring well; the need to keep working is part of the stage action. In Stone’s version, the pressure is mildly present but doesn’t become a key issue—surprising in today’s volatile economy. But Stone is not Ibsen—the psychological drama is more important for him than the social forces that frame it and which are so essential to Ibsen. It’s a big difference.

The stripping back similarly reduces the complexity of the original characters. Hjalmar, the husband, is played by Ewen Leslie with a restless, nervous energy, repeatedly bouncing a tennis ball, rolling on the floor, physically playful with his daughter, easy-going. The fond family scenes with overlapping dialogue establish an idyllic state. However, unlike his forbear there is little of the self-aggrandisement, self-pity and moments of irritability that anticipate Hjalmar’s subsequent inability to handle the revelation that his wife Gina (Anita Hegh) was once the lover of Werle (John Gaden), the local works owner and merchant, that his daughter (Eloise Mignon) is Werle’s, not his own, and that Werle had subsidised the set-up of the photography business and the salary of Hjlamar’s ruined father, Ekdal (Anthony Phelan).

Leslie’s fine performance and Stone’s writing compensate to a degree, but Hjalmar’s weakness simply becomes a given when the crisis hits. More problematic is the characterisation of Werle’s disaffected son, the meddling moralist Gregers (Toby Schmitz) who suspects his father drove his mother to suicide and betrayed Ekdal. He soon discovers the truth about Werle and Gina and sets out on a relentless crusade to liberate Hjlamar and family from a life of lies. Schmitz’s Gregers is icily remote, with a physical rectitude contrasting with Hjalmar’s casual bearing. His best scene, one of Stone’s inventing, is with Leslie, when Gregers opens up, revealing his failings in love. Later he simply doesn’t have the weight of Ibsen’s creation. In two scenes in the original he attempts to persuade Hedvig to kill her wild duck as a sacrifice to appease her alienated father. In these moments Gregers’ insensitivity and, worse, moral irresponsibility, are frighteningly evident. But his force is not sustained in the Stone version.

A significant reason for this is Stone’s updating of Hedvig—she’s more intelligent, bold, ambitious and already knows that she is going blind (a condition inherited from Werle). A modern child on the edge of adolescence, Hedvig decides of her own volition to kill the duck with her grandfather’s gun—she doesn’t need Gregers’ rhetoric as a prompt. Mignon is an excellent Hedvig but a more complex exchange with Gregers would have allowed a greater sense of someone on the borderline between child and adult—the decision to kill the duck comes too easily. (In the original she takes up Gregers’ proposal at first, but repudiates it, if momentarily, at their second meeting.) The outcome is a reduction of Gregers’ role as rigorous engineer of destruction in this human laboratory. In the original he’s subsequently deeply shocked, such is his naivety, when the family falls apart instead of building a new life based on truth. A foil (Doctor Relling in Ibsen) or some other challenge to Gregers’ moral fundamentalism would have been welcome in Stone’s version.

The character closest to the original is Ekdal, a former military man, forester and businessman who went to jail for illicit property dealings, shaming himself and his family. Emotionally damaged, sometimes barely present and haltingly articulate, at other times alert and observant, Ekdal has created a refuge in Hjalmar’s attic where he houses (and shoots) rabbits and birds. In a very funny, if foreboding scene, he teaches Hedvig how to load and fire the gun with which she will inadvertantly kill herself. Stone has invested Ekdal with characterful language (“I’m as full as a fat girl’s sock”), insights (“Not much of the forest left—it’ll have its revenge”—words almost straight from Ibsen), amusing recollections (playing The Tempest’s Miranda in school) and anger over Hjalmar’s behaviour (“Everyone’s got a story like this. It’s as old as the hills.”). Anthony Phelan’s performance as Ekdal is one of the best seen in Sydney in recent years—richly expressive and detailed, drifting in and out of himself, deeply present, fondly cradling the wounded duck, naturally pacing his delivery between its quacks, the actor’s characteristic gravelly rasp enhanced by intimate radio-miking.

John Gaden as the pragmatic Werle—accepting his imminent blindness but eager to move on into a new marriage, to smooth relations with his son and those he feels obliged to assist—is quietly effective; the scene in which he and Ekdal meet, both men disoriented, is particularly touching, age taking them beyond bitterness or blame. Anita Hegh plays Gina with the requisite ease in the beginning, then denial and finally shock at Hjalmar’s bitter response to her long-ago failings. As with Hjalmar and Gregers, Gina’s role is reduced in this version, even more severely, in terms of class, language and coping with her overly sensitive and ineffectual husband. However Hegh conveys the visceral effect of abandonment in her absolute collapse and later in a brutal tussle with Hjalmar. Her determination not to return the marriage does allow a rare show of strength.

While, for the most part, I was swept along by the tide of Stone’s brisk, vivid scripting, deft characterisations and the production’s potent sense of immediacy (the glass walls and radio-miking were only initially distancing), in the end I felt half satisfied, moved but not, admiring but critical, impressed but not awed. On its own terms, Stone’s The Wild Duck works well and has won praise from reviewers for revitalising the original, but the writer-director has set himself a formidable challenge—to remake rather than interpret a classic play. It’s ambitious—the outcome must be tested against the original.

I’m not suggesting that Stone reproduce more of the original play than he’s already done. I was struck by his inventiveness—new scenes, a modern Hedvig, a degree of topicality. But I wanted him to go further, to be more ambitious, give his characters more complexity and dynamism, achieve a greater sense of our lives now—to match Ibsen. Why else would you create a variation on a great play?

Belvoir’s The Wild Duck confirms Stone’s directorial and writing strengths, abetted by fine actors (with outstanding performances from Phelan and Eloise Mignon), Ralph Myers’ complexly simple set and Niklas Pajanti’s stark lighting. But, inspired by, adapting and updating Ibsen, Stone has not matched the strengths of the original play in his short, compact variation. His play’s embracing immediacy cannot, in the end, disguise its inclination to melodrama and a certain thinness of conception. That said, it’s a production to be seen and debated: the rewards are many.

Belvoir, The Wild Duck, writer Simon Stone with Chris Ryan after Henrik Ibsen, director Simon Stone, performers John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz, designer Ralph Myers, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Niklas Pajanti, music & sound design Stefan Gregory; Belvoir St Upstairs Theatre, Feb 12-March 27

DANCE MASSIVE IS AVOIDING THE F-WORD. ACROSS ITS PRINT AND PUBLICITY, THE BIENNIAL PRESENTATION OF A CONCENTRATION OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE IN MELBOURNE IS CALLING ITSELF A “COLLECTION.” A “PROGRAM,” AN “INITIATIVE.”

To discuss “the Massive” I met with Steven Richardson, Director of Arts House in Melbourne. Richardson was instrumental in founding Dance Massive, urging the Australia Council following his time on the Dance Board to consider a concentration of dance programming both to attract international attention to new work and to provide a place for the sector to meet and share experiences at a national level. Arts House, a complex of venues run by City of Melbourne, plays a central coordinating role for the Dance Massive program, although Richardson admits that, “surrendering half of our six month program to make this work is not ideal.”

Without an artistic director for Dance Massive, Richardson tells me, there is no festival infrastructure and all programming is supported by existing State and Federal resources allocated to the three Melbourne venues where the work is presented. “There hasn’t been the funding to create a central framework. When the idea first came up, we considered trying to create a national program by coordinating venues around the country. It quickly became apparent that this was going to be impossible. It would take 15 years for us to find the same two weeks across every dance venue nationally. So we decided to start in our own backyard.”

The coincidence of Malthouse Director Michael Kantor and producer Stephen Armstrong investing in contemporary dance and physical theatre programming and the energy of David Tyndall as the new(ish) Director of Dancehouse created sufficient momentum in Melbourne for the project to take off in 2009. “It’s hard to apologise for the focus on Melbourne,” Richardson says, “There is arguably the healthiest ecology for dance here, with a concentration of institutions, companies like Chunky Move and lots of independent artists and audiences.”

In its first edition Dance Massive programmed 14 works from across Australia across the three venues. The program was well attended and received positive feedback and critical acclaim. Dance Massive was also pronounced a success for the way in which it raised the profile of dance in the media and created a meeting point for artists and companies to see each others’ work and network during a concentrated period. The same venues have joined to create Dance Massive 2011, and several of those artists included in the original program are making a return appearance. “We each have our own curatorial framework, our own audiences and remits regarding programming,” says Richardson. “but there has been some very interesting cross-fertilisation between the venues since the first Massive,” he adds. “There has been surprisingly little tripping over each other too; we are all interested in contemporary work, but our curatorial approaches are slightly different and we have worked hard to ensure that the work falls where it needs to fall.”

Richardson is referring to the fact that the program is broad, both in terms of its definition of dance (including a physical theatre company such as Branch Nebula), its inclusion of generations of makers, (from Trevor Patrick to Luke George) and its accessibility (from the popular dance theatre work of Force Majeure and Shaun Parker to the relatively obscure independent work of Deanne Butterworth and Matthew Day).

Whilst the first Massive included only Australians, there are artists from the UK and Canada in the 2011 program. “The international work is directly linked to Australian artists,” Richardson explains. “The bluemouth piece from Canada, Dance Marathon, is populated by local artists because it is built upon local participation. It was an important agenda item for Arts House to include a participatory element this year and the Dance Marathon project has been receiving incredible reviews wherever it plays around the world.” On the other hand, Billy Cowie, from the UK, has made his piece around an extraordinary Australian performer.

Richardson acknowledges that certain States and Territories are not represented in the final program but is adamant that Dance Massive is curated through the call for applications combined with the practical resources of the venues involved. “We would need a lot more money to support more companies to travel from interstate.” Richardson is aware of the absence of Indigenous work in the program. “It is not missing through any lack of trying,” he states,” The call is a rather brutal process, which can only consider the work that is out there and ready to go at the right time. Although we did get over sixty applications from the call this year, we also went out to our networks as presenters in order to find the best possible work.”

Richardson goes on to talk about the National Dance Forum associated with Dance Massive as a place where conversations around Indigenous and regional work can take place. “We have been able to include more spaces-in-between this year,” he says and cites the two international residencies and the dance on film program as initiatives that seek to address the aspiration of all three venues to create a place where dance artists and enthusiasts can meet. The National Dance Forum, led by Ausdance and the Australia Council and taking place over a long weekend during Dance Massive, will involve international choreographers such as Pichet Klunchen from Thailand with national dance artists in a series of forums, conversations and provocations designed to inspire art form development, in a similar fashion to that achieved during the National Theatre Forum in 2010.

Arts House will host the 2011 Tanja Liedtke Foundation Fellow, Katarzyna Sitarz, during Dance Massive. Sitarz will direct a residency at Arts House that will involve local independent artists and will take part in a new collaborative project directed by Lucy Guerin. Also during Dance Massive, the Australia Council’s IETM program, directed by David Pledger in Brussels, will send Norwegian choreographer Heine Avdal of deepblue company to undertake a residency and build relationships with Australian dance artists.

The venues and companies worked together to create a hit list of international presenters to invite to Dance Massive. Around a dozen high profile programmers from Europe, Asia and the US will attend. Dancehouse will also target a handful of French presenters in a special initiative. “It is important for the work to be shown in full, in the best possible theatrical conditions,’ Richardson says. “We also try to attract national and regional presenters,” he continues, “Although that is never easy. Last time we had half a dozen regional presenters attend and this year we hope for more.”

Richardson is optimistic about the impact of the 2011 program and is particularly looking forward to the two new productions by Chunky Move as well as the site-specific presentation, Drift, by Anthony Hamilton and the sound installation by composers Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey. “I am hoping some of these projects will turn a few heads about what the nature of dance engagement can be,” he says.

Despite his enthusiasm, Steven Richardson is sanguine about the future of Dance Massive with no illusions about the third edition planned for 2013 being a shoo-in. “Once we get through March, we will start thinking about what we want Dance Massive to be,” he says. “Perhaps there is another model out there; something more nimble or more relevant to current practice.” Dance Massive is not a festival, or a showcase, that much is clear, but what it is and what it could be, seems to be tantalisingly up for grabs.

Throughout Dance Massive, RealTime reviews and interviews will appear online at www.realtimearts.net.

The considerable Dance Massive program includes works by Chunky Move, The Shaun Parker Project, Narelle Benjamin, Michelle Heaven, Helen Herbertson, Balletlab, Deanne Butterworth, Matthew Day, Antony Hamilton, Force Majeure, Trevor Patrick, Luke George, Branch Nebula, overseas guests Billy Cowie, John Jasperse Company and bluemouth inc, and the welcome return to Australia from France of Rosalind Crisp and Andrew Morrish.

Dance Massive: partners Arts House, Malthouse Theatre, Dancehouse; Melbourne, March 15-27; download the program at www.dancemassive.com.au

responsive objects
philipa rothfield, shaun mcleod, the weight of the thing left its mark

IN THE 1950S THE FILMS OF DOUGLAS SIRK WERE CONDEMNED AND DISMISSED BY SOME REVIEWERS AS LOW BROW, POPULAR FANTASIES FOR WOMEN—OVERLY DRAMATIC, HYPER-EMOTIONAL AND SENTIMENTAL. IN THE SATURDAY REVIEW, ARTHUR KNIGHT DESCRIBED IMITATION OF LIFE (1959) AS “LIFE AS [AUDIENCES] WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE IT, AND IT MAKES GOOD MOVIE MATERIAL—AT LEAST FOR A MATINEE.” THE MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN’S REVIEW IDENTIFIED THE FILM’S DUAL FORCES, DESCRIBING IT AS “HIGH-CLASS PULP FICTION” AND SUGGESTING THAT, “ITS ONSLAUGHT ON THE EMOTIONS IS ALMOST ENTIRELY SYNTHETIC…ITS ATTITUDE TOWARD ITS RACIAL PROBLEM IS DEBASED AND COMPROMISED.”

However, Sirk’s melodramas were embraced in the 1980s and ‘read against the grain’ as rich and revealing film texts that were simultaneously reflecting and critiquing the culture of their production. By developing intricate narrative patterns encouraging identification and catharsis, Sirkian melodramas were seen to function as ‘safety valves’ for patriarchy, siphoning off cultural anxieties.

Douglas Sirk was an art historian when he began his career as a director of German theatre and cinema during the 1920s. Influenced by the style of German Expressionism, particularly its projection of a character’s psyche onto an artificial external space, Sirk brought this vision to Hollywood, and this aesthetic defined the melodramas he directed for Universal Studios. He was also inspired by the politicised theatre developed by Brecht and used techniques of ‘distanciation’ to provoke an active, critical spectator. As a result, the universe created in Sirk’s melodramas deliberately breaks with realist conventions, creating artificial worlds. An excessive mise-en-scène is constructed with a use of frames within frames to separate characters; mirrors and reflective surfaces to suggest split, or multiple identities; spaces that are segregated; and vivid colours to highlight character traits. The melodramas explore time in narrative, prioritising accidents, interruptions, coincidence, fate and particularly the trope of being ‘too late.’

Sirk’s films feature a fascination with failure. Magnificent Obsession (1954) features an array of plot twists and parallel worlds beginning with the resuscitation of the rogue playboy and jet boat pilot Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) at the expense of the life of the respected Dr Wayne Phillips. The film details the anguish and affection of a burgeoning romance between Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman) a character who introduces herself to Bob as “Mrs Wayne Phillips.” While trying to escape Bob’s clutches, Helen is hit by a car, resulting in a blindness that can only be cured by Bob’s return to his earlier career—neurosurgery. Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) uses the same stars to explore the controversy of a ‘May/December’ relationship, with Jane Wyman as Cary, the older woman battling resistance to her affair with Ron (Rock Hudson). The image that resonates most from this film is the reflection of Cary framed in the screen of a television her son and daughter have bought her for Christmas, hoping to distract her from unbridled passion.

Films like Imitation of Life (1959) use ‘spatial narration’ to define the importance of space and power in the cinema. Sirk’s spaces carry reference to class, status, wealth and dominance, symbolising exclusion, division, restriction and segregation. This is clear in the opening shots of Imitation of Life as Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) searches for her child on the boardwalk. Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) are looking after Susie (Sandra Dee) in the shade beneath. When they share an apartment, Annie and Sarah Jane are relegated to the broom cupboard, a space that Lora describes as:
“a little place off the kitchen…but you could hardly call it a room.” In their country home Lora and Susie have access to the more formal public rooms, while Annie and Sarah Jane are confined to the kitchen and the rear of the house. Sirk highlights the dislocation and segregation with an image of the rebellious Sarah Jane speaking with a Southern twang as she delivers crawfish to guests, carrying the plate on her head.

While Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas were misunderstood on their release, his film work continues to exert a significant and lasting impression on contemporary visual culture. The impact is evident in remakes like Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) and on the small screen in the series Mad Men (2007-), but these revisions are never quite as aesthetically vibrant, narratively complex or as incisive in their cultural critique as Sirk’s progressive ouvre. Douglas Sirk’s films are so loaded they almost split apart at the seams.

Courtesy of Madman Entertainment and in celebration of our 101st edition, RealTime is offering a lucky reader a ravishing cinematic giveaway: a 9-DVD box set of the great films of the 1950s master of aesthetically and socially incisive Hollywood melodramas, Douglas Sirk. To compete for the Sirk DVD set go to: www.realtimearts.net/sirk_survey.html

Keith Bain teaching at NIDA Open Day July 1993. Sophie Heathcote in the foreground (NIDA Archive)

$64.95 MIGHT SEEM A LOT TO PAY FOR A 320 PAGE BOOK THAT’S ABOUT TEACHING A MINOR PART OF AN ACTOR’S CRAFT—AN ILLUSION NOT HELPED BY A MUNDANE CLASS PHOTO OF KEITH BAIN DOING JUST THAT AT NIDA ON ITS FRONT COVER. BUT THAT WOULD BE TO WILDLY UNDERVALUE THIS BOOK’S CONTENT. FOR WHAT EMERGES IS THE REVELATION THAT MOVEMENT IS ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL TO THE ACTOR’S ART; AND THAT THE NOW 84 YEAR OLD KEITH BAIN WAS ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL TO THE DISCOVERY OF THIS IN AUSTRALIA.

Indeed, one might argue that our justifiable reputation for ‘physical theatre’ would never have developed if Doris Fitton had not summoned Bain to her Independent Theatre in 1959 and commanded him to begin a movement class. At that time, neither Bain nor the imperious Fitton had any idea what he was going to teach. What’s more, Melbourne’s APG claque would certainly disagree with Bain’s (and NIDA’s) centrality in all this! But Bain was there when Reg Livermore pioneered his first solo in 1961, when John Bell needed him for The Legend of King O’Malley in 1970 and when Jim Sharman tackled Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971.

The claim is further justified by the wide range of adoration offered by Bain’s former students in the book—ranging in time from Reg Livermore to Matthew Whittet, and in their influence on the national scene from directors John Bell, Jim Sharman, Rex Cramphorn, Gale Edwards, Moffatt Oxenbould and Baz Luhrmann to actors on the world stage such as Mel Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett.

Do we believe the hyperbolic Blanchett when she declares in her introduction to the book that “His teachings are the foundation of my technique”? And “Keith Bain was and is the biggest single influence on my work as an actor”! It only adds up when her scattered quotes are brought together to include this: “He would brook no laziness, but would support your failure, because in this failure he could sense advancement round the corner; the attempt at what was currently impossible.”

The key to that achievement, of course, was that Bain was a brilliant teacher per se—and his thoughts on that subject should find a ready audience amongst teachers everywhere. Geoffrey Rush brackets him in pedagogy with Parisian clown-master Jacques Lecoq in their ability to “plant some personal awareness of what the parameters of creativity might potentially become in you.” This is despite Bain’s unvarnished description of the young Rush as “the most awkward looking, gangly, pimply student with the strangest physicality that you ever saw—and a power of concentration you wouldn’t believe.”

Bain had become a school teacher in emulation of the glamour he associated with the pre-WWII arrival of such authority figures in a remote town like Wauchope—where am-drams (amateur dramatics) and ballroom dancing were the major forms of relief from simply surviving the Depression. Fortunately, he was lead astray from this noble career when, at 27, he decided to become a dancer—not just one sort, but a polymath developing his improvisatory skills under the tutelage of expatriate ‘modern’ dance sage Gertrude Bodenweiser while earning money on TV variety shows or down at the Trocadero Ballroom (revived this year by the Sydney Festival) where his craving for freedom of expression in the samba, paso doble and cha-cha lead to his becoming The Man who was Strictly Ballroom. For the dancer and teacher was also a dab hand at engaging his students at NIDA—including the young Baz Luhrmann—with a bit of old-fashioned, country yarn-spinning.

Indeed, the now white-haired Luhrmann declared at the book’s launch that Bain had taught him that learning was a life-long affair. Which makes it all the odder in the book that NIDA’s former bosses John Clark and Elizabeth Butcher fail to take the opportunity offered to explain why they backed both Movement and Bain by taking him on (part-time) in 1965. At least Katharine Brisbane—doyenne of Aussie theatre critics from 1967 until the 80s—used her current hat as publisher of the book to issue a mea culpa at its launch for never once crediting Keith’s contribution to the productions she was reviewing on stage. “We in the stalls knew nothing of his work.”

Bain himself is aware of this gap, using the book as an opportunity to remind directors that, as another former student, Miranda Otto, puts it so succinctly, “Movement goes on all the time”—not just when the text calls for a dance or a fight. Every entrance and exit has to look spontaneous, vital emotions have to find physical expression, and Movement can uncover deeper degrees of truth, subtlety and spectacle. Perhaps the most readable of the teaching chapters is that on Space—a philosophical disquisition as much as a textbook case. As NIDA staff member Kevin Jackson comments, “[Bain] introduced us to the notion of being a god, being truly alive in the magic space on-stage.”

As to Bain’s own skills at on-stage transformation, I can’t do better than quote actress Jeanette Cronin: “Those noble shoulders would collapse under the weight of indignity, that majestic chest would contract into a cave of sorrow, the proud neck could no longer support that once bright visage, the dancing eyes now drooped like raindrops. That wicked mouth lost its wit. He showed us a little finger could be sad; a mouth can contain the fury of a thousand frustrations.”

But then Keith Bain had experienced the “miracle of transformation” very early. It came “when I watched someone as grounded and normal as my barber father offer his hand to my mother and lead her on to the dance floor. Somehow, as if on a breath, their two bodies connected into one new unity as they moved into the figures of the dance.”

Amazingly, Bain also had time off-stage to be, in his own words, “a bloody busybody,” forming and chairing many of the major national and international dance bodies that now exist. But the book covers too little of the process whereby Keith brought together the warring tribes of dance through the simple expedient of a Dancers’ Picnic, quietly organised under the aegis of UNESCO’s International Dance Day. It has more noisily (but more narrowly) lead on to today’s National Dance Awards.

In the last issue of RealTime, Amanda Card reviewed Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon’s Australia Dances (RT100), a book that had its genesis in the 1950s. Movement is obviously a stop/start matter. Bain began his book in 1993 when he received a Keating Fellowship for that purpose. The writing since has been by him while shaping of the book belatedly fell to the Keith Bain Book Team, notably his successors at NIDA, Julia Cotton and Anca Frankenhaeuser, under editor Michael Campbell. The beauty of this is that Keith Bain can use the word ‘luck’ a lot, while the beneficiaries of his belief in drawing “the best version of themselves” from so many students and casts can fall in behind Hugo Weaving and offer up their versions of Weaving’s, “He is a sort of guru to generations of us.”

Keith Bain on Movement, edited by Michael Campbell, Currency House, Sydney, 2010, hard cover, $64.95

I am starting a band with my long time creative partner Christine Johnston, I’m not a musician…But that’s okay. Christine has for many years said “You would look great in a band; I want to start a band and put you in it!” The response from my fellow practitioners was “What the f…k do you play?” I replied, “I’ll create my own position in the band!” So I’m now a proud member of what we call RRAMP. I thought it worth mentioning this project as a work that has pushed my performance practice into yet another and sometimes challenging direction. Lisa O’Neill, performer, choreographer, director

EXPLORATIVE BOUNDARY-CROSSING EXPEDITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS DELVING INTO THE AQUATIC, THE FORESTED AND THE INTER-GALACTIC. Aphids 2011 program launches with a BIG BANG, as heart-throb Kamahl serenades and croons mysteries of the universe in VOID LOVE, a concert and soap opera about deep space and astrophysics. Coral spawning, sex and death on the reef are placed under a voyeuristic lens, as Aphids develop CORAL WORK in flotation tanks and on the Great Barrier Reef. Mixed reality gaming infiltrates the coastlines and parklands of Southern Victoria with ATELIER EDENS, an R+D lab developing transmedia experiences and live performances in site-specific and natural environments. Willoh S Wieland & Thea Beaumann, Aphids

Two ideas I am working on in 2011: My Favourite Doll—video & still photography portraits of young children, boys and girls, with a human-form toy they project personal attributes onto, in some way examining the ‘wish-animism’ that is a normal part of infantile self-object development. I am fascinated by how we gain our sense of personal identity, along with all the cultural and gender-specific role-playing that forms it. Splitting—a multi-image video work, with psychic division as a starting point, portrays two female characters from two different eras inhabiting the same physical space and subconsciously reacting to each other. Cordelia Beresford, cinematographer, video artist

Every night, as we fall asleep, we leave the earth for just a while. In Sweet Dreams the singers of Song Company take flight into a different realm, a world of dreams, just by singing, and whilst singing, by creating images with their shadows and some of the wonderfully simple and self-made creatures of our collaborator, ecological systems designer Stephen Mushin. Think of it as ‘back to the cave.’ Or back to nature. Or back to our childhood. Sweet Dreams. The program will premiere in October before going to South America, then returning to Australia for the company’s final season in December. Roland Peelman, Artistic Director, Song Company

Currently I’m making a work with the Royal Flanders Ballet in Antwerp. In April-May I’ll be with the Ballet Du Rhin in France creating a new version of The Rite of Spring, experimenting with a sound engineer on the compartmentalisation and placement of sound throughout the theatre, including the wings, the back of the auditorium and from the stage itself amongst the dancers. For ADT I’ll make a work incorporating a live illustrator mark-making in charcoal throughout the performance in direct conjunction with the dancers. I’ll also be developing a new work that experiments with the dancing body and live processed video and photographic imagery. Garry Stewart, Artistic Director, Australian Dance Theatre

This year I’m moving to a far away island to pursue love. I thought that Melbourne and its relationship with depression was on the cards but I was stolen. I effortlessly think about somebody all day and every moment boils down to seeing them again. For example, I write grants and they all read like dodgy schemes to go overseas! Still, I do have a couple of new art projects (both computer-game/performance hybrids) but the real challenges in my life are: selling all my belongings, re-starting my life and shedding hang-ups. In 2011 I encourage readers to feel 18 again. Skye Gellmann, physical theatre artist

Our year got off to a great start with Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot at the Sydney Opera House as part of Sydney Festival. Jeff Khan joins our team and I’m looking forward to working with him and Bec Dean on a truly interdisciplinary approach to our program. I’m really pleased we’re shaking up our programming model a little. We have two seasons at CarriageWorks—Uneasy Futures and Exchange—but heaps more on throughout the year. Watch out for WALK—it’s off-site and on-the-streets—and a whole range of projects ranging from Applespiel’s residency to the premiere of My Darling Patricia’s new work. Daniel Brine, Artistic Director, Performance Space

Field Theory: the second year of an experiment in sustainability and exchange. We’ll send out 800 handmade gifts. You can put $100 towards art projects that otherwise wouldn’t have seen the light of day. The last year of field theory has allowed for a colour audit of a megamall, an online soap opera about astrophysics starring Khamal and IVF family portraits. Jason Maling, Deborah Kelly and Willoh S Weiland thank you from the bottom of their hearts and pockets. Those in the know have seen glimpses of prismatic auditor socks and flammable magnets in the crevices of homes, streets and legs. 2011 will see four new projects and several gift sweatshops come to life. Lara Thoms, field theory

Di Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, (Kelly Doley not pictured), Brown Council, work-in-progress

“This footage is really dark and shaky, but you can just make out the water surrounding the base of the ladder. The water is electrified, so if I fell, I would have been electrocuted…you just had to be there…” Chris Burden. We are excited to be developing A Random Selection of Video Tapes, an exhibition for Artspace in November. Inspired by Burden’s lo-fi documentary about his practice, we will explore documentary filmmaking and performance art documentation to see how they shape our cultural memory. We are especially interested in investigating the notion of ‘truth’ within such documentation and the role of the artist as its harbinger. Brown Council, video and performance artists

We’re excited about:
Only communicating in lists
4 shows we think will be irresponsible
4 Rough Draft creative developments
Not pursuing ‘the truth’
Not worrying about rationality
Sometimes being unreasonable
Not navel gazing
Having nothing constructive to say
Having a beer
No small talk
Theatre that’s:
Not sweet
Not edifying
Illogical
Confused about morality
Might not have big narratives
Not out to make Australia seem normal
Not about making the audience feel educated and intelligent

Contrary. Elusive. Sceptical. Delirious. Bitter. Bothersome. Arousing. False. Tawdry. Light. Archaeological. Foolish. Lewd. Innocent. Debauched. Volatile. Noxious. Spectral. Wanton. Illustrative. Pretty-Ugly. Profane-Sacred. Poor. Sad. Filthy. Tom Wright, Associate Director and Polly Rowe, Literary Manager, Sydney Theatre Company, for Next Stage

My year will start at Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in Paris performing My Dearest, My Fairest, a love story told through music and played only on toy instruments. Celebrating its 10th year, this piece originated at Berlin’s Schaubühne and has since played in opera houses throughout Europe, the bars of Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv and, most memorably, Peter Lehmann’s wine warehouse in the Barossa. From the near ruin of the beautiful Bouffes du Nord, an Asialink scholarship takes me to its very antithesis—the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre where I will be their artist in residence. Joanna Dudley, director, performer, singer

2011 is going to be busy indeed: I’m currently touring Indonesia. My Vinyl Arcade project is going gangbusters, starting the year in the Australia Council window, then as an installation at Imperial Panda festival in March before being shipped off to Austria for the Donau festival in Krems in April. dualpLOVER is touring ravesploitation act Captain Ahab from LA in Feb. Justice Yeldham has a European tour, and I’m building him new instruments at Cydonia glass studios. I’ll be debuting Mix Tape at Tinsheds in June, a curated exhibition of exposed audio tape/interactive installation. And finally my fingers are firmly crossed that my proposed tap dogs meets merzbow ice-capades project gets off the ground. Lucas Abela, sound performer

2011 is shaping up really well. I’m excited to be working with architects Peta Heffernan and Elvio Brianese on the production design of a hybrid large-scale work for MOFO 2012 in Hobart—a wonderful commission for our 21st anniversary year. A 12-month design development period is tremendous. The work is based on the writing of Constantine Cavafy and will have a fusion of Greek and Egyptian music. Kimisis—Falling Asleep, from our 2010 program, is touring to Darwin, and an American producer is developing USA presentations for later in 2011 and 2012. Constantine Koukias, Artistic Director, IHOS Music Theatre and Opera

2011 starts fast for Insite Arts as producers of MONA FOMA in Hobart in January. 2 Dimensional Life of Her by Fleur Elise Noble will tour internationally with trips to New Zealand, Denmark, USA and the UK. Saltbush, a co-production between Insite and Compagnia TPO [creator of immersive, interactive theatre for children] from Italy, will tour to Adelaide Festival Centre, ArtPlay, Castlemaine Festival and then Korea. Mirazozo by Architects of Air will return to Australia after a successful season on the forecourt of Sydney Opera House. In between we’ll be showing a new work—The Drawing Project by Fleur Elise Noble. Lee Cumberlidge, Insite Arts

In 2011 some things fascinating me are: Depression-era folk furniture, Neolithic jewellery and objects, greenwood carving, gleaning urban timber, Modernist abstract sculpture and remnant vegetation on battlegrounds. In February I have two exhibitions: Polygon Wood at Greenaway Art Gallery opening on the 16th; and a group show at Artroom 5 opening on the 20th. I will then get packed up, ready to travel overseas to take up my Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship. With my destination in the laps of the application gods it seems I will spend the latter part of 2011 in either the USA or Portugal. Bridget Currie, visual artist

I am absorbed by futures and fictions with Lizzie Muller and a host of Australian artists: time travel, walking on Mars, shrinking things with ray guns, civil wars fought along the gender divide, cloud seeding, interspecies relationships, survival kits, fembots and more. Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art opens in April. Throughout the year Performance Space is walking with artists around various Sydney locations. Later, we are exploring the body, its viscidities and exchanges. Now I’m sitting in the office with Jeff Khan talking more about the future—2012: a decade after we made first contact (really!). Bec Dean, Associate Director, Performance Space

Hurtling out of a commission for the gala opening of the Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre—a new work using layers of animation mapped onto multiple screens with dancers navigating their way into and around a forest of light. Floating into a month preparing images of new digital art works for an exhibition in May. Flying to Melbourne to work on Winterreisse directed by Matt Lutton with Paul Capsis, Alistair Spence George Shvetsov and dancer James O’Hara. Approaching the third phase of creative development of Kings and Queens, a physical theatre production with painter Patrick Doherty, writer Reg Cribb, composer Jonathan Mustard, actors vocalists and dancers. Chrissie Parrott, choreographer, producer

Back to Back Theatre’s new work Ganesh versus the Third Reich premieres this year. Constructed as a play within a play, the first narrative is the epic hero’s journey of Ganesh travelling from India to Nazi Germany to reclaim the Swastika (the ancient Hindu symbol) from Hitler. The second narrative is the moral and ethical journey that the makers of the play undertake in presenting the first narrative. The further Ganesh travels, the more enmeshed its protagonists become in the politics of appropriation. If you are a small theatre company from Geelong, Australia is it okay to rewrite Asiatic and European history? Should authors be allowed to craft fairytales, satires and comedies about anything? Back to Back Theatre Company

I’m most looking forward to a show that kicks off PICA’s exhibition program this year. John Gerrard is an extraordinarily accomplished Irish artist who has been using real time 3D, a technology mainly used in video gaming, to create eerily realistic animated video works that depict bleak but compelling agri-industrial scenes in America’s Great Plains. For this show, John’s first in Australia, we’ll see chilling imagery of infamous dust storms in Texas and Kansas during the 1930s, daily circumnavigations of a fully automated pig farm in Oklahoma and the relentless movement of a lone oil derrick in Colorado. It’s strangely powerful stuff! Amy Barrett-Lennard, Director, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art

What is ahead for Stalker? The best indicator is a snapshot of today—several of us researching a new work called Encoded. We are discussing developing photogrammetry techniques to enable real time virtual cameras to interact with live performance. It all comes from the use of photos to generate point clouds that we can then animate. The BIG question from today was how to embody such heavy use of technology in a physically meaningful way. After all Stalker has been a physical theatre company for well over 20 years! But we did start the day with yoga, and catapult training! David Clarkson, Co-artistic Director, Stalker Theatre Company

After 15 exciting years of Chunky Move I am leaving at the end of 2011 with a bang! Turning on some sweet middle-aged moves in my solo show, Faker, at Dance Massive in Melbourne and am most excited about premiering two large-scale works: Connected—kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin, lots of mathematics, composers Robin Fox and Oren Ambarchi, five extraordinary dancers, lighting Ben Cistern, costumes Anna Cordingly; Assembly—Richard Gill, Nick Schlieper, Victorian Opera, 50 singers, 8 dancers, chants, Gesualdo, Ligeti, a cappella, mass, crowds and power.…Oh, and if you are in Melbourne, a huge party in December!” Gideon Obarzanek, Artistic Director, Chunky Move

In 2010 we explained the GFC from what we reckoned. In 2011 we’re working out “Who’s The Best,” out of us…from what we reckon. And what the audience reckons. The show/competition will be at STC, then touring Oz. We’re all excited to hear the scores. After that we might have a crack at figuring out Death. Probably from what we reckon, and maybe some other sources too. For us this year’s all about drag, imposters, impressions, bad acting, The Biggest Loser, birth, auditions, shamans, epitaphs, avatars, and those nightmares where you have to give a speech but haven’t got any pants on… Mish, Zoe, Nat, Post performance collective

Tracing lines beyond the map. Deleuze and Guttari’s rhizome engenders an operational velocity that is ever apparent, though sometimes perhaps only to myself. There are lines and tracings that flow through Revelation and other aspects of theoretical, literary, curatorial and programming work with which I continually engage, both above and below the maps of culture. Presently deep in exploring trauma and film academically, this may well contribute to interesting decisions subsequently. As ever, I feel the need to be fighting the powers of boredom and stasis, searching for new films and expressions that challenge and stimulate, striving to present the limitless potentialities that can be reached. Jack Sargeant, Program Director, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, author, nihilistic bon vivant

I’m in Reykjavik sitting at the kitchen table. Outside are the silver waters of the bay. One moment, the low sun shines, next a blizzard blows in from the mountains, or a thick fog from the sea. It’s a sublime, cosmic theatre—ideal to watch while preparing my version of The Seagull (Belvoir, June-July). The idiom and milieu will be distinctly Australian—my bones longing for Australian summer—but the turbulent Icelandic weather seeps in. I’m thrilled to be returning to Chekhov in 2011—to the dramatist of what Giorgio Agamben calls “the time that is left.” Benedict Andrews, theatre director

I am looking forward to building a rich practice outside of my project-based work and hope to find myself in a room with other performers as much as possible this year. There are a few things on the boil that I’m most excited about: Whelping Box with Branch Nebula and Clare Britton—a two-hander that takes on dogs, men and gods; regrouping with the raw joyous energy of Whale Chorus (Janie Gibson, James Brown); and finding ways to tour Hole in the Wall (with Clare Britton), something we want to see mature after a successful premiere in 2010. Matt Prest, performance maker

2011 promises big things for Stompin! We are exploring our inner rev-head with the premiere of I ♥ Cars at Ten Days on the Island. Set in a car mechanic’s workshop, this show is a site-specific, multi-art mash-up that explores our love affair with cars and the way they literally connect and separate us. Stompin’s incredibly talented team of artists, including Adam Wheeler, Emma Porteus, Philip Peck from Bluebottle and Dan Speed, will collaborate with 15 young, non-professional performers from around Launceston to create a performance event that shifts between abstraction, representation and documentation. Stompin says art/youth/community 4ever. Sarah McCormack, Executive Producer, Stompin

Polytoxic, l-r Fez Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Natano Fa’anana, Lisa Fa’alafi, Mark Winmill, Amanda-Lyn Pearson

2011 will bring us a whole lot closer to realising two new works, kicking it off with a scratch showing of The Rat Trap at the Brisbane Powerhouse’s World Theatre Festival. Based around a twisted tale of blood ties, revenge and rodents, it’s a chance for all six Polytoxics to meld our gutsy physicality with aerials, theatricality and even some WWE wrestling moves. Also on the cards is further development of a smaller work, Lost Dances, which arose from research into lost, suppressed and archived dances of Samoa; a partnership with Queensland Theatre Company; a residency at the Brisbane Powerhouse; and our usual antics. Polytoxic, dance ensemble

2011 will be a year for regaining my physical and mental faculties after two years of art making and dissipation in the fine but exhausting city of Berlin. I’ve sublet my Neukölln flat, god bless it, to establish a new nest in Katoomba. A collaborative project, between myself, my partner and the Goddess of the Hearth. This Rabbit year will be one of quietude and completion. The focus: finishing a large scale writing project (a book of ghost stories) too often neglected in favour of the more obnoxious demands of performing. The body will get out there too: the epic cycle Songs of Rapture and Torture will be performed in its pent-amorous entirety; new works, developed and performed overseas, most recently at InBetweenTime, will see Australian premieres. Until then, I’ll be writing, bottling preserves and learning new skills domestic and esoteric. Sarah-Jane Norman, artist, writer

Looking forward to adventures…turning a most impossible ear toward the lost opera Minotaur—the Island (Chamber Made Opera, Ten Days on the Island)…to salt winds on the Bruny Island ferry…to living with ‘the company’ and ‘lunching’ with the audience. I am squinting toward horizons where wild paths of works flicker far into a year. And, after Falling Like a Bird (Ladyfinger) soft landing in Italy on an escapade, if the little puppet sisters of A Quarrelling Pair (Aphids) fly off to fight again about their rooms, their milk and whether hearts are big or small. Margaret Cameron, poet, performer, director

Precarious (digital video, 65 minutes) evokes the aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl 25 years on. This road movie takes the spectator on a journey from the shores of the Black Sea to the frozen heart of Chernobyl, passing through desolate, snowy landscapes littered with abandoned villages. Squatting in this icy wasteland, the ghostly sarcophagus of Reactor #4 is a constant reminder of the threat still lurking. Winter exerts its hold, ice keeps the hidden radiation at bay, but the spring thaw will once again release the surrounding rivers’ toxic flow. Accompanied by testimony from a group of veterans of the disaster, Precarious bears witness to the folly and resilience of humans and to nature’s fragility. Merilyn Fairskye, artist: photomedia, video, installation

The nexus between contemporary art and environmental sustainability will underpin Arts House in 2011 in two programs—Six Degrees and nude works. Six Degrees brings together the notion of six degrees of separation (sometimes known as Human Web) and the idea that if global temperature increases by six degrees Celsius the world will be uninhabitable. These two ideas underpin the Arts House Six Degrees project, inviting sound artists to collaborate and respond to climate change. In August, nude works is a mini festival of contemporary performance and live art that is elemental, stripped back and essential. Nude works may not all be performed entirely naked! Steven Richardson, Artistic Director, Arts House

We are excited about birthing our new performance, Whelping Box: from fighting dogs to mythological beings, in collaboration with Matthew Prest and Clare Britton. The project also extends to a stand-alone video, with Denis Beaubois and Steve Couri. We head to Melbourne in March to find new audiences for our recent work, Sweat, at Dance Massive. Next we brave new territory with a site-specific creative development when Concrete and Bone Sessions infiltrates the local skate park at night with nine artists utilizing BMX, skating, parkour, martial arts, dance and gore. Later in the year we explore artistic and familial connections when we head to Europe. Lee Wilson & Mirabelle Wouters, Artistic Directors, Branch Nebula

I spent day one, 2011, in Jakarta, a city of 15 million people that runs on subsidised petrol and hums with the sound of as many motorbikes. Jakarta sprawls as far as you can imagine, with massive shopping malls and countless kampungs crammed with warungs selling food, cigarettes and pulsar. I hope 2011 remains true to its first day. I am looking forward to working at Tin Sheds and hope to find ways of linking artists here with those from around our region. We need to turn the world upside down or we are all stuck in a Jakarta traffic jam. Zanny Begg, Director, Tin Sheds Gallery

“I do understand the anxiety and indeed fears that Australians have when they see boats…” Is Prime Minister Julia Gillard imagining herself to be an Eora woman witnessing the arrival of the First Fleet? If so, what an astonishing piece of theatre! Heiner Muller said, “As long as freedom is based on force, and the creation of art is based on privilege, works of art will tend to be prisons…” At the VCA Grant St. Theatre, Feb 17-20, Doomstruck Oedipus, Why Are You Here? Parts 1-2-3 will be asking, among other things, What is the role of performance in Australian society today? Ben Speth, theatre director

The sharp trill of an alarm clock launches Clocked Out into 2011. After 10 years of the same dream, forays into the wide alley searching for foreign objects, cleaning up the messy spills of Dada, we finally say enough is enough. It’s time to Wake Up! to the everyday sounds around us. [Wake Up! debuts March 23, 6:30 pm @ Queensland Conservatorium.] Also in 2011: watch out for our Ensemble in Residence series at Queensland Conservatorium, The Trilling Wire Series at Judith Wright Centre, the Radio Plays project at Queensland Music Festival, and a new collaboration with Continuum Sax! Erik Griswold & Vanessa Tomlinson, Clocked Out

2011, despite being an odd number, seems to have a lot of symmetry to it. It’s been 10 years since we created Same, same But Different and with it Force Majeure. 2011 sees us complete our collaboration with Sydney Theatre Company—Never Did Me Any Harm—a work about contemporary attitudes to raising children, something of a minefield we’ve discovered! Also looking forward to participating in the Adelaide Film Festival’s The Hive lab; presenting Not In A Million Years at Dance Massive; conducting our own lab, CULTIVATE; directing a play, FOOD (hopefully for Belvoir); and welcoming new CEO Lisa Havilah to CarriageWorks with open arms! Kate Champion, Artistic Director, Force Majeure

This year My Darling Patricia will premiere Posts in the Paddock. In 1900 relatives of mine were murdered by Jimmy Governor. The film and novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, are based on his life. Actor LeRoy Parsons (Jimmy’s great-great grandson) and musician Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor will join My Darling Patricia on stage. Australian history is full of silences. We want Posts in the Paddock to allow Indigenous and non-indigenous artists to speak into that silence together. For us, it’s the culmination of three years of research and consultation. Also really exciting: our Malthouse commission, Africa, on tour with Mobile States and to STC’s Next Stage. Clare Britton for My Darling Patricia

2011 sees me in the middle of my three-part solo series, Trilogy. It explores the potential of durational and intensely physical choreographic forms to encounter the body as both a site and agent of continual becoming. In each piece the figure is restrained by an extremely minimal choreographic structure that the internal forces of the body rebel against, producing visceral micro-choreographies of rhythm and vibration. The first piece, Thousands, will return to Melbourne for Dance Massive and Cannibal, the second work, will have Sydney and Melbourne seasons. In October I’ll begin working on the final piece in the series. Matthew Day, dancer, choreographer

“Minotaur is a place—the island of Minotaur. The music is tense—just out of reach—fracturing and breaking into bits—travelling through corridors. The objects are the island, and are moved around the space like flotsam from a shipwreck. The characters are: Ariadne with a sound puzzle box, Venus in a man’s suit, Pasiphæ in a white hand-knitted dress, Theseus dressed as a matador, Dædelus, Monteverdi in a medieval dress, the small Minotaur with fur boots, Icarus with a gull’s head and a harpsichord. ‘She could have music depending on the wind.’” From text by Margaret Cameron & David Young. Chamber Made Opera, Minotaur, Bruny Island, 2011 Ten Days on the Island

2011 marks a clear shift in my practice. After mainly working as a solo artist for many years, my focal point will now be collaboration with other dancers, both on group works and on solos. I’m especially excited about the premiere of my new work, Mountains Never Meet, at Riverside Parramatta in August. It’s a collaboration with young footballer and performance maker Ahilan Ratnamohan and eight untrained male performers from Western Sydney. Exploring the connection between sport and art, the work aims to playfully challenge our notion of what dance is and who can be considered a dancer. Martin del Amo, dancer, choreographer

2011 starts with Embedded (trombone Rishin Singh, accordion Monika Brooks, double bass Sam Pettigrew) opening the Now now Festival and till death us do part. February: Bogong AIR Festival, playing in the high country of Victoria. West Head Project: releasing our first CD, a closely woven fabrik, on Splitrec. Blip (with bassist Mike Majkowski) release calibrated and tour the East coast. March-April: collaboration with Tess de Quincey. August: MURAL launches a CD at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, recorded there in 2010. November: first trip to Chile. I hope lotsa bush music in between. Jim Denley, improvising musician

Not travelling, or tooling ninja-style on productions, I’m bunkering down into the literal moon crater of COFA this year. These next two years I am trying to establish an understanding of digital animism, a haunted and blooming soul of video. I need to explore this state where the multiplication of video transcends itself and hidden meaning appears. VIVARIA will tour in Mobile States and I’ll be in Campbelltown making a fictional documentary on the imaginarium of shopkeepers. Every few weeks I can emerge to add life to the gestures of puppets and the enigma of performance art, still the wildest state of living. Sam James, video artist/projection designer

2011 will see my next feature film, Falling for Sahara, starring an entire cast of African refugees, premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July…all very exciting. At the moment I’m writing a play about Vietnamese weddings for Belvoir and creating a four-hour dramatic mini-series for FremantleMedia about capital punishment, which we hope will go into production in late 2011. Khoa Do, filmmaker

2011 is a year of recovery. In the aftermath of the floods I’m provoking questions about the role of theatre in our society. How do we respond to the social trends, demography, geography and the uniqueness this brings to our storytelling? It’s not enough to just devise a program and expect people to come to it anymore. Engagement, Diversity and Excellence have become my mantra. I’m looking at creating an Indigenous Program, developing a Studio Program to give artists space and resources to create work, take the next step and explore their craft, and also trying to unashamedly increase the audiences for theatre in Queensland. Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director, Queensland Theatre Company

Granted an Australia Council two-year dance fellowship, my independent practice is presented with a renewed oxygen supply for more in-depth experimentation and an expansion of my interest in planned future works. Research, apart from many weeks investing in solo and group work and more frequent scuba diving, will also involve attending conferences and interviewing experts on environmental and species un/sustainability interfaced with exploration of our everyday perceptions of these realities. I’m taking my dance reflections out of the sub/urban and into the ocean and back again. Performance Space has invited me to undertake a stage one performance ‘research touchdown’ this coming May as part of their Uneasy Futures season. This new work is called Fathom. Dean Walsh, choreographer, dancer, Sydney

Dwelling Structure: a new music work that premieres in May. For this operatic project without singers, the sound of the house is the main protagonist in a collection of time-use episodes. Greatly inspired by textual development with writer Cynthia Troup and visual assemblage by Neil Thomas and very happy to be part of the Chamber Made Opera house. As David Foster Wallace, our new fave author, writes in Infinite Jest: “almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trench-coated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.” Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, musicians, composers

2011 looks bright, with some great projects coming to fruition early in the year. My ANAT Synapse residency with the Bionic Ear Institute culminates in a concert of newly commissioned works for the bionic ear on Feb 13 and two exciting new dance works. Connected, with Chunky Move and Drift by Antony Hamilton feature my sound designs in the Dance Massive festival in March. A new album with double bassist Clayton Thomas is ready; I’m still editing the 3D shoot of the laser show, reading a lot about holograms and giant Theremins, planning tours…the rest is highly classified. Robin Fox, sound and visual artist

Halcyon has always been about championing composers, so we’re thrilled to be launching our inaugural young composers project, First Stones, where participants will develop a new song for voice and chamber ensemble; the new works will be on show in Halcyon’s final concert for 2011. As well, we’ve commissioned a major chamber work from Sydney composer Andrew Schultz, to be premiered later this year in a program with George Crumb and Joseph Schwanter, and in March, Jenny, Andrew and Alison are Artists in Residence at Bundanon to share and develop ideas for the new work in relaxed and inspirational surrounds. Alison Morgan & Jenny Duck-Chong, Halcyon, new music ensemble

This is the year of time and practice, particularly primary research and its application. This means first hand interviews with informers for our work, engaging directly in the struggles that we reference, spending open ended time in pivotal locations, sending probes into our own bodies and cutting things out…I’ll be labouring on Hydra’s theatre work Prompter Live Studio and a new project based around a SymbioticA residency exploring empathy, abstraction and broken narratives. I’ll be curating performance for a peer exchange project called WASTE with an accompanying zine from Mother [has words], looking, sans sentiment, at what discarded conceptual efforts suggest. Sam Fox, director, Hydra Poesis

Fiona McGregor, Vertigo, 2009, still from performance video / multi-channel video installation

Water—fundamental to our existence; the functioning of our bodies, the life cycles of our environment. Its scarcity across much of Australia has become one of the most urgent issues facing our society; its rare, violent overabundance causes chaos and destruction. It nourishes and yet can be used to torture both body and psyche. Through November Fiona McGregor will produce Water, a suite of installations and durational body-centred performances across all the Artspace galleries, both evoking the magical, poetic qualities of water and exploring states of relationship with it—saturation, absorption, deprivation. Blair French, Executive Director, Artspace

An ‘environmental’ triumvirate in 2011. Firstly, Site Listening, a term I coined to encourage the activation of the ears and reduce the dominance of our visual perception, will be a focus with a Queensland version to be unveiled as part of the Queensland Music Festival. Secondly, my project with Werner Dafeldecker, The Cold Monolith (based on our work in Antarctica under invitation from Argentina’s Dirección Nacional del Antártico), will be presented on Germany’s SWR radio and also as an installation at festivals. And finally I’ll be working all year on a series of audio/media works based on problematising contemporary understandings of [the Japanese aesthetic philosophy] Wabi-Sabi.
Lawrence English, room40

Ever wondered what a genre film director like Enzo G Castellari would have created if he were a choreographer? My debauched lifelong obsession with the avant-garde works of genre celluloid trailblazers found its way into my latest dance work, DRIFT. DRIFT fell from its loftier concerns of “architecture, the body and their intangible relationship” to “devising dystopian pagan rituals of the future!” The project began as a quest to discover Melbourne’s atmospheric derelict urban haunts. Like a location for film instead of theatre for dance, the location is a vessel for a nostalgic romance with B-grade sci-fi post-apocalyptic fantasy.
Antony Hamilton, choreographer, dancer

In 2011, Close Encounters takes off. A large-scale interactive sculpture raised 2.9 metres: at a distance it appears as if a luminous UFO is hovering above the undulating festival audience, transmitting messages to the crowd as they move through the site. When walking underneath it, Close Encounters acts as a portal connecting you to the sky. The work provokes participation through text messaging and LED technology, inviting punters to ‘text’ the number displayed. By responding to the text provocations, a collective conversation begins—the audience co-creating a real time narrative as the festival unfolds. Jordana Maisie, new media & electronic artist

We’ll be creating a new stop-motion world in 2011. Interactivity and performance will get a look-in as we gear up to create a new multi-viewer experience to premiere towards the end of the year. We can’t wait to visit MONA [Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania] where our 2010 work You Were In My Dream will be showing August–September, and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in May. We’ll be running stop-motion workshops, dreaming up new film ideas, sculpting miniature scenes and making faces. Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, media artists

so what might be ephemeral practices? / launch of hard soft john barbour survey publication main gallery vernon ah kee tall man bonita ely murray river punch elizabeth newman + nicki wynnychuck installation nasim nasir women in shadow kit wise projections james + luna cheryl l’hirondelle mind the gap osw (bianca hester + terri bird) / noel sheridan project space ray harris videos ane damcho drolma one moon christine collins drawing installation nien schwarz residency + installation / odradekaeaf window box february through august curated by ray harris + matthew huppatz / wura-natasha ogunji videos / launch of new performance/installation/project space. Domenico de Clario, Director, Australian Experimental Art Foundation

Prediction for Luke George: You will reignite collaboration with your spiritual-art-brother Miguel Gutierrez (NYC). Late February is a powerful time for you both. You will meet and dance every day through a CultureLab Residency in a Melbourne House of Arts. Joining the power of your minds/bodies, you will develop supernatural perception and the ability to slip between multiple performance modalities at the speed of light. Through a completely illegitimate process, you will research what is the biology and neurology of performing. You will invoke a space that resists opinion and evaluation and invite an audience to exist within the live-ness of this dance. Luke George, dancer, choreographer

In November Marrugeku will partner with Atamira Dance Collective to present the third International Indigenous Choreographic Laboratory in Auckland. The labs (Sydney 2009, Broome 2010), explore resonances and differences in contemporary Indigenous dance-theatre from Africa, New Zealand and Australia. New influences, processes and cultural pathways are explored and their relationships to traditional practices. Each laboratory is steeped in the local cultural context and artists work from their own experience of being Indigenous artists or working in Indigenous contexts. IICL3 will be lead by New York based Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire and Maori choreographers Louise Potiki Bryant and Charles Royal. Rachael Swain, Dalisa Pigram, Co-artistic Directors, Marrugeku

■ ■→ IDEAS of bodies orientated CHAOS, falling, finding seeing; critical characters turning spaces; &#9632 musicality, hand movements past improvisations → artist’s language lucid notices watching them watch images. ■

■ Constructed lit surfaces connecting ■ ↔ ■ obscured frames; movement, blurred by motivation choreographies, embodied learning shared documented. Participation transitions, contact forgotten speed passing danced behind >>>> backs >> diagonally making circles weighting intention>>>>>> reviewing dramaturgically absurd interventions ■

↓↑With content of arms pelvis head ears eyes facing pointing fingers mapping directions thrown front toward distant tangents of irritation; slowly, swaged ■ Of imagined time future training permissible beyond >>>>> counting >>>>>> audience’s inspirations ║ reaction fast ↔ finding forgiven feet, shins, knees, thighs, torso ║ surface ↓↑ fading expectation blacked out. •∞

Whilst my passion for natural systems, morphology and cultural histories has grown apace, my desire to work with galleries and museums has gradually diminished—displaced by my enthusiasm for environmental projects that directly engage public space and community. 2011 will see me on the high seas again, working from my boat Sisu in the Abrolhos Islands (WA) to develop CrayVox, a work for the Space(d) Biennale; then mounting VoxAura, the River Sings for European Capital of Culture in Turku, Finland; and onto Istanbul for ISEA with a sound installation entitled Weeping Willow. Add in a couple of large scale public sculpture commissions and that’s my year! Nigel Helyer, sculptor and sound artist

In 2011 I’m embarking on a feature documentary/on-line project with Melbourne colleague John Hughes to tell the story of the Filmmakers’ Cooperatives which operated in most state capitals in the 70s and early 80s, until in the mid 80s a centralised government bureaucracy effectively closed them down. The project will examine the history of the Co-ops and their aesthetic concerns in a period where filmmakers were deeply engaged with social/political issues. This is an important and overlooked moment of Australian film history which will not only entertain but also be useful to new generations of filmmakers, and essential in any comprehensive appreciation of Australian cultural history. Tom Zubrycki, filmmaker

Concerts with eRikm, Valerio Tricoli, Thomas Lehn and Stephen O’Malley in Europe. PIVIXKI in Canada and NZ, solo in Chicago, tour with Fusinato, Thymolphthalein LP on Editions Mego. New work for percussion quartet and flute that HAS to be better than the music for Kwaidan. Making the solo piano record that I’ve always wanted to make and re-issuing the last one the label shafted me on. Practising Doepfer every day, writing elaborate songs that WON’T be better than Scott Walker, doing my first film in six years, listening harder, reading wider, seeing deeper, remembering to live. Antony Pateras, composer, performer

After Prague (2003), Athens (2005) and Wellington (2006), Perth hosts the site-specific work of New Zealand’s Carol Brown (choreography), Dorita Hannah (design) and Russell Scoones (sound). Three years in development, Tongues of Stone features 15 dancers carving their way through the city, from the underground central station to the open foreshore. Reminding us of the disappearance of Perth wetlands, Tongues of Stone brings to the surface silenced memories. In a quest to make visible the lightest of art forms, STRUT joins the Barcelona-based Dancing Cities Network and brings its voice to worldwide conversations between dance, architecture, public space and social change. Agnes Michelet, Director, STRUT dance

To be excited about one dance project over another at Campbelltown Arts Centre is too hard. Kathy Cogill and Latai Taumoepeau trying to define what Intercultural work is? Beautiful. There’s a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow. There sure is. Lizzie Thomson with local amateur actors reworking old musicals. Beautiful. Not to mention Antony Hamilton out on his own with us in cars listening to the radio. Who’s Donna Miranda? You just WAIT! In the meantime, Nat Cursio comes to town to curate a motza. Emma Saunders, curator, dance program, Campbelltown Arts Centre

Decibel are still going strong, in 2011 making a book, releasing recordings and running a subscription concert series. These PICA concerts will take place in the main gallery space so we really get a chance to explore ways of combining sound art and more traditional composition. There is so much great new music being made in Australia right now, and we are excited about playing, recording and writing about it both here and overseas! Cat Hope, director, Decibel, new music ensemble

Performance is the key to my creative thinking at this moment and it has dominated my thinking for the past 10 years. It never ceases to amaze me, that in 2011 Indigenous artists are still constructed as the ‘other’; performing in a space that is only allocated to the ‘Performative of Aboriginality,’ rather than just being artists who are Aboriginal. Why…? I will continue to make work that questions the reasoning behind why there is a lack of visionary thinking and courage to do it differently!
r e a, media artist

It’s about the emotional nerve. Working with artists from across the arts who inspire through their passion and individuality, and with the need to realise their respective visions. 2011 promises a rich palette—a performance of the complete Berio Sequenzas; collaborating with Jon Rose on his Pursuit project; an overseas visit to observe other new music festivals and organisations thanks to a Churchill Fellowship. Also exploring the music of Hannah Kulenty through movement with choreographer Amanda Phillips as well as celebrating the 50th anniversary of Grainger’s death with cellist John Adderson and Vincent Plush. Underpinning all of these activities, I continue to delve into the visceral, intellectual depth of pianism. Gabriella Smart, musician, Artistic Director, Soundstream Festival

2011: the year of collaboration! I’ll be digging alongside Ian Milliss as we embark on our Yeomans Project—about the cultural (and agricultural) phenomenon of Percy Yeomans (an Aussie visionary who invented a special ploughing system in the 1950s). I’ll also be digging through the archives with SquatSpace, as we work towards a 10-year retrospective project at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2012. Apart from that, my gardening collaboration with Diego Bonetto will continue decomposing itself, at the Sydney College of the Arts. And through all of this, I’ll keep on getting inky at Big Fag Press. Lucas Ihlein, artist

Started the year working with Hitlab NZ to deliver an augmented reality work for the next Adelaide Film Festival…excited because it uses technology just on the edge of deliverability so we have to keep trying to solve the maze of what we can imagine and what is actually possible. Using coral specimens from a trip I made to Lord Howe Island last year to the southernmost coral reef and drawing data feeds of bleaching alerts from NOAA. The health of reefs is urgent so I thought about the sugar bowls of the Abolitionist movement and decided to do my first work for mobile phones. Lynette Wallworth, media artist

In 2011 version 1.0 are presenting new work all over the place—including Bathurst, Launceston, Sarajevo and our hometown of Sydney. What I’m most looking forward to is The Table of Knowledge at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre in Wollongong, exploring an infamous corruption scandal involving developers and former staff of a major local government. It’s got sex, kebabs, massive overdevelopment and conmen played by balloons. The show opens in late August and will be visually spectacular and outrageously hilarious, with a cast of dodgy characters and stories too crazy to have been made up. No one said political performance couldn’t also be deeply fun! David Williams, Chief Executive Officer, version 1.0

In 2011 Urban Theatre Projects moves to a new Arts Centre in Bankstown; develops The Quarry in collaboration with Belvoir, directed by Alicia Talbot and written by Raimondo Cortese; and Effie Nkrumah and Alan Lao premiere the funny and politically incorrect show Ama and Chan. Roslyn Oades’ Stories of Love and Hate reappears as part of STC’s Education Program and a workshop program travels to Adelaide care of Vitalstatistix. Rosie Dennis runs a masterclass; Alicia and Michelle Kotevski return to London to develop a new commission from LIFT [London International Festival of Theatre]; Ahil Ratnamohan and linguist Daisy Wouters develop Michael Essien I Want to Play as You, in Brussels and Paris. Alicia Talbot, Artistic Director, Urban Theatre Projects

Dedicated to innovative new music, Ensemble Offspring will present a program of unique events in 2011 beginning with a fresh angle on the Minimalist tradition in our Why Patterns tour, featuring the vast canvases of Morton Feldman. In May we’ll join the NOW now crew in Sydney for a rendition of the Cardew epic, Treatise. In June, Professor Bad Trip will introduce Sydney audiences to the exhilarating drug-induced sounds of Italian composer Romitelli. And not satisfied with merely performing new works, our ongoing Partch’s Bastards project will premiere newly devised musical instruments capable of wondrous tones in September. Damien Ricketson & Claire Edwardes, Artistic Directors, Ensemble Offspring

We’re excited about our new show for Come Out 2011. Take me there directed by Dan Koerner uses startling video technology and a pumping, original score by Ian Moorhead. At once poignant and hilarious, it not only transports the performers but the audience as well into a strange world where there is freedom to be wherever you want, whenever you want. Restless continues to be fiercely committed to combating discrimination within Australia’s artistic scene. The company has embraced a deeply inclusive rationale, working predominantly with people with disability across dance, tutoring, directing and choreography. Nick Hughes, Company Manager, Restless Dance Theatre

The art of play. I will continue my collaboration with Chiara Guidi from Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio at Campelltown Arts Centre, working towards the creation of a work for and by children. Looking for opportunities to present: Impasse an installation collaboration with Denis Beaubois and William McClure. Over-lay: a performance collaboration with Paul Gazzola. The Raven Project with Frank Mainoo will become a “film club” presentation exploring the interplay between performance and film. Currently working with Shfa on Hoopla Festival and later in the year on Viva la Gong Festival in Wollongong. Jeffrey Stein, performer, creative producer

In our 12th year, Bonemap continues to develop new work within the influences of the ‘north’ and an ongoing questioning of the processes and overheads required to practice against the backdrop of a groaning natural environment. Although our practice, processes and methodology are continually rediscovered afresh, we are increasingly regarded as senior artists by the community and asked to recount seminal events in the manufacture of a culture that is becoming less transient. The creative sector continues to inspire development in the deep north as a new wave of exciting projects takes shape in the Cairns region including a $240 million performing arts centre, Indigenous museum and cultural precinct (see www.movedancetnq.com). Russell Milledge & Rebecca Youdell, Directors, Bonemap

Dreams Rising, a new hybrid work about transformative aspects of dreaming and memory, will be developed as part of The Opium Confessions series at The University of Sydney with showings for invited audiences in April. Concerned with the nature of visionary experience, it will draw on poetic and scientific approaches and, in collaboration with Radio National, weave together personal accounts of people from diverse cultural backgrounds in Sydney for whom such experiences have been life changing. Science offers an understanding of dreams and visions in terms of technical brain function, yet our culture has other dimensions, deep histories that honour the reality of visionary experience and find powerful forms of meaning in it. Tess de Quincey, Artistic Director, De Quincey Co

Across Australia, Asia and Europe, my lecture tour series, Testing the City, addresses ideas drawn from the new mega cities in emerging countries. The tour follows last year’s lectures on dismantling old, prevailing city planning ideas. In the northern summer, the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art [DICA] hits the road again, our non-profit space on the back of a donkey travelling the streets of Beijing. The institute lives by the charm and rhythm unique to the donkey’s soul. In this sense, DICA is the most inhuman and radical fulfillment of the avant-garde. Plans are brewing for an exhibition of young noise artists and a second travelling library. Michael Yuen, artist

ELISION is collaborating with SIAL-RMIT on a large-scale project, CONSTRUCTION, the follow-up to composer Richard Barrett’s Dark Matter. The project explores ideas of spatialisation in acoustic and electronic form examining relationships between “utopian” and real architectures—a long tradition stretching from Plato’s ‘Republic’ to Bacon, Campanella and onwards which is juxtaposed with real cities layered by violent disruptions of war, conquest and rebuilding. Also in the wings is a creative development with David Pledger’s NYID and American composer Aaron Cassidy. I’m enthused about this exploration of composition as a ‘choreography of gesture’ placed within Pledger’s concept of the body itself as a listening mechanism. Daryl Buckley, ELISION

2011 is going to be a great year for the company, touring our latest works and making new ones—taking us right across the country, deep into regional Australia and overseas. Human Interest Story opens the new Heath Ledger Theatre at the Perth Festival and plays at Belvoir in September while Untrained’s three-month Road Work regional tour will feature courageous locals. I’ll be developing a work commissioned by Belvoir in April with actors, dancers and the 2011 Tanja Leidtke fellowship recipient. We’ll take Structure and Sadness to the US in October and, back home in November, I’ll begin work on a brand new piece as yet unknown! Lucy Guerin, Artistic Director, Lucy Guerin Inc

2011: a year of multi-focus challenge. A film project, Virtuosi, will take me around the world filming extraordinary dancers, and a major performance project ,Variant, will be premiered in Sydney. There is real magic in the mix—Variant realises a dream cast of performers who push the boundaries in everything they do and are, quite simply, astonishing. The physical and emotional palette within Variant is the most diverse and exciting of my career. It will challenge the perception that dance is merely a ‘cult of a body-type’ and will turn the idea of what is normal on its head. Sue Healey, choreographer, filmmaker

CHRONOLOGY ARTS (new music collective) presents TACTILITY. Sound is an awesome medium, one of the most ephemeral, but this year we’re taking a leap away from the immaterial as we team emerging composers with emerging fine art practitioners, conceptualising in true symbiosis between members of six teams consisting of composers with a painter, two photographers, a sculptor, video artist and another artist—each creating right now to be ready to present ephemeral temporal art with solidified components upstairs at the TAP gallery, Sydney, at the end of March 2011…Huge Creative Risk. That’s the way we like it. Chronology Arts, new music

Last year Yumi Umiumare and I launched a new and timely work inspired by the sites of our spiritual heritages in Japan and Malaysia. This contemporary performance work will be uncompromising, innovating deep rituals from our cultural background. ZeroZero is a development springing from the long-term partnership embodied in our renowned series, How could you even begin to understand? of which Jonathan Marshall wrote: “butoh and its multifarious manifestations of a body…draws on traditions of the ecstatic body—[How could you…] is the closest to a shamanistic trance most of us are likely to see…another masterful work.” Tony Yap, dancer, choreographer

Between channel surfing half a dozen crime dramas and simultaneously playing news clips on YouTube, narratives collide, genuine articles mix with the artificial, all confused into one. We want to see beyond surface representations. We want to see the car crashes and smouldering bullet holes on the streets. We want the police and the press to arrive, figure out what happened and present their verdicts to us. We will do this in public spaces, experimenting with the space between audience and event, between abjection and seduction, between producing popular narratives and exploring how they determine social relations and the dynamics of public spaces. Malcolm Whittaker for Team Mess

When I’m not wearing my RealTime blazer, I’ll be involved in an eclectic range of projects. Stuart Buchanan from New Weird Australia has invited me co-curate Volume 10 which focuses on the voice in experimental and ‘interesting’ musics. For version 1.0 I will contribute some sexy sounds to their tales of corruption in Table of Knowledge. Then I’ll sonify our corporeal fluids for Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor’s installation about organ transplantation, The Body is a Big Place at Performance Space. In between I’ll be delving further into vocal improvisation, learning to make a kaiseki banquet and writing a haiku or two. Gail Priest, sound artist

This year I will travel to Europe as the recipient of the 2010 Robert Helpmann Scholarship. I will spend four weeks researching ideas for a new dance work with UK choreographer Wendy Houstoun, continuing the relationship we began with the Fondue Set in No Success Like Failure; four weeks with German choreographer Antje Pfundtner, initiating a collaboration to make a new duet; and four weeks with Belgian-based NZ choreographer Kate McIntosh, sitting in as she creates a new group commission. Three months with three strong women. Then one month in Berlin attending workshops and dance performances. Viel spass! Jane McKernan, dance artist

2011. Meow Meow delves into the lush land of French New Wave cinema, works with Oscar winner Michel Legrand, Pulitzer Prize winner Sheldon Harnick and UK director extraordinaire Emma Rice in Kneehigh Theatre’s adaptation of Jacques Demy’s Classic 1960s French jazz romance “that just happens to be sung”—The Umbrellas of Cherbourg opens on the West End in March. Meow performs Cocteau at opera festivals in the US, continues punk-art-love globally with Amanda Palmer, Lance Horne, La Soiree and exotica with Thomas M Lauderdale; converts Floridian Republicans to the Meow Meow Risque Revolution; dreams of Malthouse Melbourne, Schubert, Schoenberg and presents a surprise announcement at the Edinburgh International Festival. She continues to carry her own luggage and experience crowd surfing as the closest she can get to “a good lie down.” Meow Meow, artiste

Double bassist/improviser/composer Mike Majkowski’s list of things to do (so far) in 2011 (and the list is growing): continue SOLO double bass work (mix & edit recent recordings, record some more—aiming towards a new release); BLIP (duo w Jim Denley) tour to promote the release of a new record, Calibrated; complete the 2nd album, Frost Frost, by ROIL (trio w Chris Abrahams & James Waples) & get it released; more recording with ROIL; complete STRIKE’s debut album (trio w Jon Rose & Clayton Thomas) & get it released; get some gigs with the neo-marrickville-mega-babes (new group w Monica Brooks [drums] & Jon Watts [electric bass])…with Mike singing & playing electric guitar. Mike Majkowski, improvising musician

At the CD launch for Topology’s album Difference Engine, the band welcomes the charming Emma Baker-Spink to perform its Brisbane Songs. Then a few large productions with The Australian Voices exploring the Australian landscape in Sky Songs through new works by Rob Davidson and Gordon Hamilton; a show of new cross-cultural works featuring William Barton composing and performing alongside the band, with Dheeraj Shrestha’s sublime tabla; and a new work for John Babbage in collaboration with Natalie Weir and Expressions Dance Company. The quintet will then create another new engrossing one-hour piece followed by revisiting and redeveloping its hilarious Kransky Sisters collaboration. Topology, new music ensemble

The NOW now is alive and well, thank you very much. And for now, The NOW now will continue to present borderless music twice a month, in Sydney, throughout 2011. Pushing musical binaries so hard they snap. Making a space for the music of the present and the in-between. Always listening. The NOW now is here, now, with you, where it will always be and The NOW now would like to leave you with a Derek Bailey quote: “Of course there’ll be another NOW along shortly, but it won’t be the same NOW. It won’t be this NOW, the NOW now.” The NOW now

2011. January: in cia studios developing Accidental Monsters of Meaning (about surviving consumerist society). February: helping Albany put on a new community dance production. March: Accidental Monsters lands in the WA Museum—11 days straight, four hours a day, five dancers perform in perspex boxes. April: off to Taipei Artist Village for a two-month residency. May: creating in Taipei. June: catching up on uni—studying a Master of Arts in Sustainability. July: seek grants for next year’s artistic endeavours. August: more study. September: more study. October: more grant writing. November: off to Kyoto Arts Centre for a 3-month artist residency. December: cold, icy and inspired in Japan. Aimee Smith, dancer-choreographer

Arlo Mountford & Nick Selenitsch, Movement work #1, Wood, turntables, magnets, metal tacks, motion sensors, 2011

One of the most exciting projects for me in 2011 opened recently. Fellow Melbourne artist Nick Selenitsch and myself have been collaborating on works for a show in the RMIT Project Space—Movements—in which two kinetic sculptural works play with the human instinct to anthropomorphise basic phenomena—like thumb tacks propelled across a surface by magnets or steel balls collecting on a gallery floor. Also on the horizon are two major animated works that include reworking YouTube videos. And there will be a whole lotta saving the cashola for a studio residency in Japan at the beginning of 2012! Arlo Mountford, artist

Current project is Tongue of the Invisible, commissioned by the Holland Festival for jazz musician Uri Caine, singer Omar Ebrahim and musikFabrik which premieres this June in Amsterdam and Cologne. There’s a text by Jonathan Holmes after the Sufi poet Hafez and the work explores an ecstatic world of Improvisation as unpredictable play, Song as longing for the Divine, Musicians as listeners, drunk with desire, and The Concert as a tavern, a meeting-place between world and ’other.’ “This door is the mouth of love,/ Whether it leads to the mosque or the wine-shop/ Souls inhabit the dust of its threshold.” (Holmes). Liza Lim, composer

We are most looking forward to playing hard and getting our hands dirty in 2011 with: transumer inspired street intervention workshops at Adhocracy, Adelaide; a new series of quick and dirty public actions titled Do we need a permit for this?; developing national “go fcuk it up day” to launch in time for CHOGM when Perth becomes the centre of world political debate; showcasing t2 at pica, where audiences will be invited to undertake tiny acts of resistance against their built environment. 2011 is looking a little bit brutal & full of love, but we will have killer smiles and sly mischief on our side! PVI Collective

In 2011 an art gang I’m part of, which emerged out of the DLux TILT festival and Newcastle’s Electrofringe, will be ten years old. We’re boat-people.org, we’ve been making work around the ideas of race, nation, history and borders since John Howard conjured us into being with his 2001 border panic election. A decade on, we’ve made all kinds of public spectacles of ourselves and others, maybe including you, in (the hope of) the public sphere. As we reach double digits there’s much more mischief to be made around the troubled themes of our interesting times. Sign up, join us! boat-people.org. Deborah Kelly, artist

We are developing a project for the inaugural San Francisco/Sydney Biennial curated by Justine Topfer (SFAC Gallery) and Meg Shiffler (Director, San Francisco Art Commission Gallery). The exhibition is titled Envisioning Urban Change: Proposals for an Integrated Urban Life and will include three projects about each city created by local artists. The first stage of the project opens in San Francisco in April, the second stage will be exhibited at CarriageWorks, Sydney in August. Our project focuses on Sydney Harbour, exploring people’s relationship to it, the state of the water and how we imagine the harbour’s future. Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, artists

It’s hard to pick a highlight (how lucky am I?) but none of us in the FULL TILT office have quite come down off the ceiling yet after the extraordinary success of the new music theatre series Carnegie 18 which we showcased in January at the Arts Centre. But from this vantage point we can see the 2012 Carnegie 18 program rapidly approaching! If 2011 gave us an opera about netball, vaudevillian grotesques and rock musicals, then bring on the next round of little gems for 2012. I’m really looking forward to the next new batch! Applications close in May. Vanessa Pigrum, Program Manager, Creative Development, The Arts Centre, Melbourne

MAJOR ARTS FESTIVALS LIKE TO THINK BIG, PROGRAMMING A HANDFUL OF BIG WINNERS (WELL RUN-IN BY OTHER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS), ONE OR TWO OTHER WORKS OF SCALE (RELIABLE BRAND NAMES, RELATIVELY LOW RISK) AND A BIG RETINUE OF SMALL SHOWS. NOWADAYS ADD TO THIS A BIG SCHEDULE OF SOLO SINGERS AND BANDS AND OTHER ENTERTAINMENTS THAT CO-EXIST WITH THE FESTIVAL IF APPEARING TO HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S VISION. THESE LARGELY PLAY TO A VERY DIFFERENT AUDIENCE, BUT PRESUMABLY PROVIDE GUARANTEED INCOME. THE 2011 SYDNEY FESTIVAL WAS AN OCCASION WHEN SOME BIG SHOWS DIDN’T COME GOOD AND LITTLE WAS BIG—THE PROGRAM’S SMALL-SCALE WORKS, TO VARYING DEGREES, OFFERING INNOVATION, PROVOCATION AND ENGAGEMENT.

The Netherlands company Kassy’s Good Cop Bad Cop snuck up on me. Here was an immaculate domestic setting, ideal for a sitcom or a David Williamson play, with three casually attired performers loitering onstage pre-show and occasionally striking unusual poses while staring intently at nothing in particular. What unfolds is a gentle fable-cum-soap opera about the lives and loves of domestic animals, acutely observed, cleverly avoiding standard mimicry (the actors dropping in and out of animality) and complemented with an onscreen commentary from the characters in a more human vein, but never too complicated so that the human-animal divide is constantly erased. Instead of anthropomorphism we’re offered a comic vision that looks both ways—distancing us from animal behaviour, to regard it anew, while pointing up our need to project intention onto animals and simultaneously confirming our own animal-ness. Beautifully paced and performed with loving attention to detail, Good Cop Bad Cop was a welcome surprise.

Animal life, human and other, was also the subject of Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood’s Food Chain, a larger scale work with bigger ambitions. A huge tree, reaching up beyond the proscenium fills centrestage, immaculately ‘sculpted’ it appears at once real and false as does the world around it, transmuting from forest to museum diorama and back again and then, nightmarishly, into one. A pair of apparently taxidermied bears come to life and terrorise a pair of campers—she is eaten, he is wounded when the increasingly human bears shoot him—and a female museum attendant who, in projected shadow play on the wall of a tent, has sex with one of the bears. Subsequently, Salome-like, she dances with his head. In this fantastical world, the bears chat about human behaviour like smutty armchair zoologists, use the scent of their female victim to attract her wounded partner and transform into moustachioed, beige-suited, but no less violent men. The outsider in the scenario is a tree-dwelling man in a bad monkey suit who, leaving his isolation, lectures the smaller forest animals on how to deal with bears but veers wildly instead into how to accept your fate in their jaws—prefiguring his own subsequent demise.

While the bear behaviour is nicely executed and the stage design is embracing, the structure of Food Chain is loose, the pacing sluggish and the comic neo-Darwinian tooth and claw savagery taxing. Redemption comes in a beautiful and unexpected coda as the entire cast form a positive version of the chain of animal life, one of mutuality. This is the descent of species in which cooperation is vital and eternal: singly and then wondrously linked the performers perpetually lower themselves down the tree, disappearing ever so briefly behind it only to appear again at its top with the most subtle directorial sleight of hand.

Gob Squad’s much anticipated Super Night Shot also adopted animal guises, in the form of cheap masks as four performers ventured into the world immediately around the Sydney Opera House, each with a camera, to make a quickie movie in an hour which was then immediately shown unedited and sound-mixed live for us on four large screens. At the centre of a highly synchronised venture was the chance outcome of approaching strangers to find one who would kiss the performer wearing a rabbit mask. The resultant blend of technological assuredness and the happenstance of improvisation was engaging, and quite free of profundities. The work simply celebrated DIY spontaneity, technologically and performatively, with a Live Art back-to-basics vision challenging the sophistication and complexity of the big end of the entertainment world.

Wayne McGregor’s Entity is a large-scale work that also uses screens, three big, wide ones framing the dance space and mounted on mechanical devices that dancers could raise or lower by hand as required. Onto these were projected equations and data scrolling furiously if dimly. The dancing was also furious—fast and acutely articulated, balletic but constantly and miraculously off-centre in the Forsythe manner. Striking solos and duets with odd holds and sudden acrobatic inversions or rare slow unfoldings multiplied virally across the stage until the mass of dancers dissolved and a new set was initiated. I was seduced moment by moment but the sense of a totality evaded me.

McGregor’s fascination with the science and psychology of the creative process makes for good reading but the subject is not convincingly embodied in Entity: “By forcing breakdowns of coordination in his dancers, McGregor hoped to gain an insight into the relationship between their physical and cognitive functions. To this end he submitted the dancers to perturbations, assigning them tasks like counting backwards while dancing, and making them wear prisms over their eyes to distort their spatial awareness” (Luke Jennings, program note). Certainly the dancers evinced a remarkable certainty of purpose against the odds of speed and complicated shaping but Entity’s rhythmic sameness (countered somewhat by the melancholy string score of the first section but underlined by the driven pop pulse of the second), the iterated theme and variation structure and the vapidity of the screen deployment gravitated against coherence and interest. The relationship between dancers and projections was nil, the raising and lowering of screens insignificant—a prime example of ‘background new media.’ Australian artists Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Garry Stewart integrate dancers and stage materials, whether objects, projections or devices, with thoroughness and creativity.

More projections came in the form of wonderful footage from the Australian National Film and Sound Archive from the early 20th century Corrick family circus that showed film—beautiful, funny, strange—as part of their repertoire, 1901-14. Whether or not this was just value adding or seminal multimedia work is not clear, but despite attempts by Legs on the Wall to connect stage action with film image, My Bicycle Loves You was not a convincing merger of live bodies and projections. This was partly a problem of scale, the images sometimes huge, filling the stage as a superfluity of screens flew in and out. At other times the correspondence, at human scale, was right, with a ghostly suggestiveness. But the production’s problems were not simply to do with a disjuncture between body and image but with a chasm between the past and now, between contemporary characters and their mysterious antecedents. There are moments when those in the present watch the past, but the connections are thin, as are the relationships between the seven characters in the contemporary setting, an apartment block where their lives intersect, each person with a problem or a fantasy life that remains largely unexplored. As physical theatre, My Bicycle Loves You was unusually tame for a company like Legs on the Wall, and the relationship between routine-based scenes and the overall scenario often seemed tenuous. The show had its physical high points (not least from Alexandra Harrison and Tom Flanagan) and a great band led by Ben Walsh, but its structural disjuncts were too large to accommodate its ambitions.

Bigger Than Jesus, written and performed by Canadian artist Rick Miller was a minor festival highlight, a bit like Richard Dawkins doing his atheism number as stand-up. Mixing forms (comedian, lecturer, preacher) and media (live video, rough puppetry, superimposed stage and screen images), Miller vented his hostility to organised religion with glee (the demotic Blakean preacher being the best of it) and cunning (an hilarious Last Supper featuring among the guests a John Lennon doll and a Homer Simpson PEZ dispenser as Judas). In the end it’s clear that Miller is not only fond of Jesus but in a curiously narcissistic finale becomes physically one with a projected painting (Dali I think) of his crucified other. With the debates over atheism, religious belief and fundamentalism still raging, Bigger Than Jesus is a timely entertainment if sagging mid-way in its jet flight to Jerusalem routine and in the datedness of some of its screen technology.

The less said about the festival’s big ticket show, The Giacomo Variations, the better. An underdeveloped, clunky cut and paste life of Casanova interpolated with occasionally apposite songs from various Mozart operas, it featured a very good soprano and a fine tenor (both required to do extraordinary physical acts while singing—usually of a sexual variety), an adequate actress and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra sounding fine. John Malkovich as Casanova meandered through the narrative with none of the brisk, varied delivery of his long-ago Dangerous Liaisons movie performance as a similar rake. It was indeed strange not to have a festival with a centrepiece (as awkward as that concept can be) like the Hamlet or the Wars of the Roses of recent Sydney Festivals.

At the very small end of the festival spectrum was Rosie Dennis’ Driven to New Pastures, a subtle exploration of the impact of commercial residential developments on public housing in the suburbs. Except for its opening, where Dennis adeptly delivers a clever cliche-saturated sales pitch for a new nature free, maximum privacy and security development, protest is avoided. Instead Dennis recounts the events that will shift an older woman out of her home and into isolation. She is joined onstage by June Hickey, from Minto in outer Sydney, playing someone like herself who has been faced with this prospect (if with a different outcome from the one reported on stage). Hickey has an easy presence, listens, reads, dances with Dennis and speaks a little—perhaps she should have shared some of Dennis’ words (it seems she didn’t want to memorise lines, but there are other means) to give the show a finer balance, a break from the sense of monologue. Dennis’ writing and its fine grained improvisational feel is as pleasurable as ever and the simple theatricality of the work—the turning on and off of lamps for example—is effective, if faltering a little in an atypical scene in which one of the building’s inhabitants stages a rocket escape from the plight of displacement. Driven to New Pastures is an admirable work; I would like to have seen it closer to home with the audience who first experienced it, in a church hall in Minto in 2010.

Returning to the subject of projections deployed in performance, Fleur Elise Noble’s 2 Dimensional Life of Her is a performative screen work par excellence. Huge sheets of paper swathe the intimate stage space onto which are projected a large living room in a couple of layers on one side and, before us, a black and white world of marionettes who appear to tear through the screens and finally set full-colour fire to the set. Noble arrives in the flesh (having hitherto functioned unseen as a puppet master or as a projected cleaning lady) to admonish her creations and send them off sailing. An essay on creativity, control, manipulation and ways of seeing, 2 Dimensional Life is witty, technically deft and engrossing, offering more dimensions than its bigger festival counterparts. Now, after its 2010 Mobile States tour and Sydney Festival appearance, it’s to travel to festivals around the world.

Sydney Festival 2011: Kassys, Good Cop Bad Cop, Seymour Centre Downstairs, Jan 26-30; Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood, Animal Farm Collective, Food Chain, design Moritz Muller, Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Jan 26-30; Gob Squad, Super Night Shot, Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 25-30; Random Dance, Entity, concept, direction and choreography (with the dancers), design Patrick Burnier; Legs on the Wall, My Bicycle Loves You, story by Beatrix Christian, Patrick Nolan, Anna Tregloan and company, director Patrick Nolan, designer Anna Tregloan, projection consultant Tim Gruchy, Sydney Theatre, Jan 11-15; Bigger Than Jesus, performer Rick Miller, creators Rick Miller and director Daniel Brooks, Wharf 1, STC, Jan 18-29; The Giacomo Variations, writer, director Michael Sturminger, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-22; Driven to New Pastures, writer, performer Rosie Dennis, performer June Hickey, Downstairs, Seymour Centre, Jan 11-16; 2 Dimensional Life of Her, creator Fleur Elise Noble, Downstairs, Seymour Centre, Jan 9-13

Streetdance, Lone Twin, image1 Darryl, image 2 Judie and daughters, image 3 Aunty Verna and grand daughter, image 4 Kaye

ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVE MOST ABOUT CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE IS THAT IT GETS ME OUT AND ABOUT TO PLACES THAT I MIGHT NOT OTHERWISE GO. GATHERING GROUND, FOR INSTANCE, TOOK ME TO THE BLOCK IN REDFERN, MARALINGA [RT77, P46] TO THE ETTALONG WAR MEMORIAL CLUB AND FAST CARS AND TRACTOR ENGINES [RT70, P41] TO THE BANKSTOWN TOWN HALL. TONIGHT I AM ON THE M5 DRIVING TO MINTO, IN SYDNEY’S SOUTH-WEST, HOME TO THE RUGBY LEAGUE TALENTS OF JARRYD HAYNE, KRISNAN INU AND ISRAEL FOLAU AS WELL AS THE POLITICAL TALENTS OF WHITLAM, LATHAM AND NOW LAURIE FERGUSON.

Fifty kilometres from the CBD, Minto is a world away from shiny, shiny Sydney: geographically isolated and economically disadvantaged. Nevertheless, it is currently undergoing rapid transformation, as Campbelltown’s Live Art Curator Rosie Dennis told Gail Priest in her interview in RealTime (RT100, p5)—public housing is moving out and private investment is moving in. Though it was not necessarily conceived as such, Minto:Live has become a part of this process of economic, social and cultural renewal. The project started in November 2010 when Dennis and several other artists literally set up shop in the Minto Mall. When curious residents came in, they found a range of activities on offer, including dancing with Lone Twin and Julie-Anne Long, crocheting with Nicole Barakat and publishing with Mickie Quick and Kernow Craig, all of which were to have performance outcomes of some description. Tonight, the final of three performances, is about sharing those outcomes.

It’s six o’clock and a crowd is milling in the mall car park. Volunteers hand out programs and a man in a cycle rickshaw distributes envelopes labelled “MINTO THE TYPEFACE.” Inside are postcards telling stories that Quick and Craig have collected from Minto residents. The stories are small, but the cards are large—handy in the heat, if you need a fan. Fanning a fire in front of Tyrepower, is Uncle Ivan Wellington. He carries the ceremonial smoking leaves slowly and carefully through the crowd. The smell seeps into our clothing. Then it’s time for Sweet Tonic—a choir of senior citizens—who sing three songs, including John Williamson’s “A Thousand Feet Have Been Through Here.” Walking across the asphalt to a concrete ramp, we spy a council worker in an orange vest slowly circling his hips—this is Street Dance.

Facilitated by UK performance duo Lone Twin with Campbelltown Arts Centre dance curator Julie-Anne Long, Street Dance features eight Minto households (13 people in total) dancing not only in the street but also in their front yards and favourite parks. In the opening dance, Ivan pitches his shoulder as if digging a hole, before stomping on the earth and jumping up a ramp. Standing at the top is Judi, whose dance is like semaphore without the flags. She and her two daughters stand still but move their arms with purpose and their wrists with delicate flicks. Up the stairs, Daryl is standing at the end of the cul de sac, rubbing his hands, half in anticipation, half in purification it seems. He extends an arm as if to hail a bus, offers his hand for a handshake and pats his pockets as he searches for his keys. Further along, a family of four puts on a Bollywood special in their front yard: two little girls in gold bounce around the lawn, before their father and mother emerge from the house to enact a skit about drink driving.

In the park across the road, a grandmother is walking around a large tree, kissing her fingertips and extending her arms. When a small girl joins her, they do another loop of the tree and then head off up the hill. From behind, the older woman looks like she is doing an elegant breaststroke while her granddaughter’s movements are more akin to a paddle. Next we stop by Kaye who does a dance of farewell (to planes) and welcome (she seems to want to share a secret). Around the corner Judi and her daughters turn on the car radio, boogie to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” jump into the Nissan and roll off into the night. Finally, at the end of the street Chris and Kiara do the washing—shaking and folding invisible sheets. Street Dance works with a subtle and complex combination of the familiar and the strange: on the one hand, creating a choreography of every day gestures, on the other, reminding us that the nature of our day depends on gender as well as geographical and social location. Similarly, though it could be described as an attempt to make the suburban strange, it also has the opposite effect, making me realise that suburbs are strange enough, with their stamped concrete and security cameras. In these moments, Street Dance actually works to make these Truman Show streets feel slightly less surreal—like an ordinary place to play and perhaps dance.

Following Street Dance, we head to another park, where three women sit in armchairs working on Barakat’s Common Threads. One sits with a pile of old rags making rope, which the others then use to crochet. The result is what one of them describes as a “string sculpture in action” and it looks like large doily. Further up the hill, we sit on picnic blankets and listen to the sounds of nine trumpets. TrumpetSWest’s first piece is slow, sweeping and sombre while the second is jauntier, as the lead player meanders in front of the melody.

The longest contribution to Minto:Live and the one most self-consciously framed as a performance (set in a natural amphitheatre, staged on a blue mat) is Hetain Patel’s Ten. The show alternates between storytelling, music and movement, as Patel talks about being born in England to Indian parents. Formerly embarrassed by his background, he has since come to embrace it and, in an effort to become more connected to Indian culture, taken up the tabla drums. This segues into the musical sections, where he and his two local collaborators (Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talaloloa and Charlie Fruean) clap out complicated 10-beat rhythms. Talaloloa then offers a Samoan slap dance and Fruean a Maori haka in return. In the final third of the show, the men start to borrow verbal and physical phrases from each other so that Patel performs a haka and Talaloloa, in his gently clipped vowels, talks about mixing red paint. Ten is an elegant and interesting piece, if slightly too long, particularly for neighbourhood children who are busy bobbing about, disrupting the audience’s sight lines and thus reasserting the community aspect of the event over its performativity.

Perhaps they are anticipating the wheelbarrows full of ice cream further down the hill, where three large video screens play the Minto Waterhole, a film created by Class 3/4J at Sarah Redfern Primary School with the help of Howard Matthew, Caitlin Newton-Broad and Sanjay Hona. The film is an endearing mix of live action and animation, which depicts a secret water world full of puppet creatures, lurking somewhere below Minto—a magical thought on this hot summer night.

Minto:Live concludes with a smoking ceremony of another kind: Gwendoline Robin’s Instant No.6899. Dressed in what looks like a white space suit strapped with explosives, Robin slowly puts on her helmet and wraps silver tape around her neck. The anticipation is almost too much for the children behind me, who think she might be a suicide bomber. She lights a fuse and then her suit explodes, setting off small grass fires. “She’s dead!” the children cry, but then as Robin walks down the hill with a stream of smoke in her wake, they revise this to “She’s the walking dead! She’s a zombie! She’s on fire, she’s a fire zombie!” This stream of images is itself one of the evening’s many small pleasures and as we walk back towards the mall, we smile with the knowledge that Minto is teeming with imagination.

Minto:Live, curator Rosie Dennis; Welcome to Country, Uncle Ivan Wellington; Sweet Tonic; Street Dance, Lone Twin with Julie-Anne Long and residents of Minto; Common Threads, Nicole Barakat with residents of Minto; TrumpetSWest, Freddie Hill and company; Ten, Hetain Patel, Charlie Fruean, Nikki-Tala Tuiala Talaloloa; Minto Waterhole, Caitlin Newton-Broad, Howard Matthew with Sanjay Honas and students of Sarah Redfern Primary and High Schools; Instant No. 6899, Gwendoline Robin; Minto, Jan 20-22

EARLIER THIS YEAR PLAYWRIGHT SUZIE MILLER NOTED IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD THAT OF THE 80 MAINSTAGE WORKS SCHEDULED FOR 2011, ONLY NINE (OR LESS THAN 12 PERCENT) WERE WRITTEN BY WOMEN. THE NEXT DAY THE PAPER PUBLISHED A PREDICTABLY INFLAMMATORY LETTER TO THE EDITOR FROM A MAN WHO WROTE THAT WHILE HE “REJOICE[D] IN FINE PLAYS BY WOMEN” NONE COULD BE CONSIDERED GREAT AND THUS THEY DID NOT DESERVE PROGRAMMING.

It’s a familiar argument and though Miller and the letter writer appear to be on opposite sides, they have more in common than they might care to admit, for they both define writing so narrowly it’s as if post-structuralism never happened. Surely, if we’ve learned nothing else, writing is about more than the words on the page; in the context of performance, we write with bodies, light and space as well as words. Taking this broader definition, it is clear that there are in fact many women “writing” for performance. Indeed, contemporary performance in this country is unthinkable without them—imagine the Sydney stage without Frumpus, the Fondue Set, My Darling Patricia, Post and Brown Council, to name just a few. Yet these names never feature in these annually rehearsed, rehashed arguments.

My frustration with the conversation was exacerbated by the fact that I had recently been to Liveworks at Performance Space where I had seen a number of strong works by women, who in fact dominated the program. Not that there weren’t some men too—Jiva Parthipan, Jason Maling, Paul Gazzola and Jason Sweeney on screen—but it was the women who caught my eye, working in a variety of combinations (solos, duos and groups) and forms (lectures, dances and comedies).

One of the strongest shows in Liveworks is Talya Rubin’s Of the Causes of Wonderful Things, which might also be called The Curious Case of Esther Drury and Her Five Missing Nieces and Nephews. In an atmosphere of carefully curated chaos—the stage is littered with lamps, chairs, piles of dirt and projectors—Rubin cuts back and forth between several characters including Esther, the police officer investigating the disappearances, Esther’s sister Claire who is in a relationship with an abusive French puppet called Frankie and Esther’s neighbour Mr Hiroshimoto. Rubin plays expertly with perspective, creating tiny scenes in a glass box, larger scenes projected onto the wall and some truly surreal interludes, such as when a donkey mask named Samuel takes to the stage in a town talent contest. With a judicious edit, this already unsettling and affecting show could become something truly special.

Paper People shares a similar aesthetic: the room holds a small stereo, a pile of white feathers, a wooden chair, a couple of microphones, cushions and a doll. We follow the performer around the room as she leans against a wall, rubs a doll against her breast, lectures us on audience participation, throws a red cushion in the air, eats a bowl of chillies and finally stitches herself to a man in the audience with red wool. The entire room holds its breath as someone hands him a pair of scissors and he cuts them apart one thread at a time. Paper People evokes a strange sense of intimacy, indeed the strangeness of intimacy itself: what it is to look into someone’s eyes (the performer is constantly looking at the audience with a mixture of invitation, resignation and resentment), share a favourite song, desire someone’s full attention and yet fear it, lest you prove lacking. Not that she does, and we leave the space wanting more.

Slightly less successful though no less suggestive is Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel, which begins with her character “Sophie” confessing in a faux French accent that Nicola couldn’t make it tonight. To compensate, Sophie gives us an overview of Nicola’s planned performance, complete with chalkboard drawings and references to Kazuo Ishiguro, Cornelia Rau and Rau’s alter ego Anna Schmidt. This is about the only interpretive clue on offer as Sophie continues to tell rambling stories in English and German before dancing with projections of herself and finally to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” Read with Rau in mind, At the Sans Hotel might be seen as a sort of “schizoanalysis” of her tragic case; read more broadly, however, it could be seen as a riff on what happens when we forget ourselves (in every sense).

While Gunn focuses on forgetting, Jane McKernan is more concerned with remembering. Resplendent in red shorts and flesh coloured stockings, she spends most of Opening and Closing Ceremony outlining a potted history of gymnastics and its less glamorous cousin “physie,” touching on Beijing 2008, Brisbane 1988 and the nature of community along the way. During this time she has been adding a tail, two ears and some whiskers to her costume and once it is complete, it’s showtime. McKernan lunges and stretches her way down the stage while a voiceover shares her inner thoughts about being a dancer and mother as well as her own childhood memories. In the final moments, she performs a triumphant routine to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Opening and Closing Ceremony is a gentle and humorous meditation on what it is to be shaped by gender, culture and nation or, more specifically, physie and Brissie in the mid-1980s.

Similar themes emerge in Colombian artist Claudia Escobar’s manola, which consists of a series of striking but not always legible images. The show begins with a bag inspection, continues with Escobar wandering the stage with a brick on a rope and boiled eggs in her mouth, and finishes with her sipping through a straw from a condom full of milk. It also includes Ahilan Ratnamohan as a transvestite Miss Colombia and then as a guerrilla fighter who captures and tortures Escobar, who whimpers, “I can no longer fantasise about my death.” In the dying minutes of the performance, she whispers “this is a secret between you and me;” but for the most part the secret remained hers and, because of the untidy scenography and underdone dramaturgy, was not something I could fully share.

Fiona Winning and Victoria Hunt are also concerned with the legacies of colonialism. Their Dancing the Dead deals with Hunt’s Maori ancestor Hinemihi, also the name of a tribal meeting house which was built in 1881 and survived the 1886 volcanic eruption, only to be sold for £50 to Earl Onslow in 1892. Onslow had “her” dismantled and transported to his estate in England, where she still stands. The most interesting parts of the lecture come when Hunt herself stands and explains how she might create a dance about Hinemihi: showing us how she might represent her spirit trapped in the rafters or the energy of the volcanic earth. This “performed conversation” between Winning, Hunt and members of Hunt’s extended family is not only useful background information for Hunt’s future performance, but also a careful memorial in its own right: one that conveys Hinemihi’s absence as well as her ongoing and dancing presence.

On a lighter note, Karen Therese uses the performance lecture form to cause her audience acute discomfort by talking about nothing but comfort. The show starts with Therese sitting behind a desk, wearing a blonde wig and sharing some of her ideas on her subject. She has also consulted with friends and, more interestingly, a corporate management book that identifies the “comfort zone,” the “danger zone” and, in between, the “optimal performance zone.” Therese spends the rest of the lecture detailing how she’ll achieve the optimal zone in this particular performance. (Brian Fuata sits stage left with words of reassurance and a cup of tea.) The show finishes when she pulls several people from the audience on to the stage and asks them to dance to Beyonce’s “Halo”—dancing in public, in this case the very definition of discomfort.

Perhaps the highlight of Liveworks is Brown Council’s A Comedy. For four hours, the four performers (dressed in dunces’ caps) place themselves at the mercy of the audience, as spectators select which comedy trick or trope they’d like to see next from a list that includes stand-up, the dancing monkey, cream pies and magic tricks. This is all done to a soundtrack of ‘boom-tish’ effects and the musak of late night talk shows. In staging a four-hour comedy, Brown Council bring a much-needed levity to durational performance, which can tend towards the solemn, even po-faced. But duration has a habit of turning even the humorous into the tortuous and, as the night wears on, we reveal ourselves to be petty, silly, mean and violent. When the piece finishes with an almighty food fight, it feels like a finale to Liveworks, even though it’s only Friday night. Two days later, A Comedy remains my favourite for its intelligent conception, excellent execution and the collective exuberance it unleashed.

In its own way, attending Liveworks was itself a durational performance and like any endurance effort there were some discomforts. The timetable was difficult to decipher and the timetabling itself somewhat strange—the theatres were rather empty on Thursday and Friday afternoons, and it wasn’t until Friday evening that the event really started to hit its stride. Then on Saturday, it seemed that there were more takers than tickets, meaning that some people missed out. Perhaps if the event were moved to take in Friday, Saturday and Sunday, more people might get to see these works in progress (as many of them were). This, in turn, might encourage them to come back to Performance Space not only for more “progress reports” but also for more adventures in live art. And when these adventures are “written” (devised, designed, directed and performed) by women, they have the potential to shift the conversation not only about women’s writing but about the nature of writing itself.

Performance Space, Liveworks: Fast & Furious, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 11-14, 2010

I ALWAYS FEEL EXULTANT WHEN I WALK INTO CARRIAGEWORKS DURING THE DAY AND DISCOVER SOMETHING CREATIVE HAPPENING. SUNLIGHT SHAFTS THROUGH, LIFTING THE BEAMED ROOF; PEOPLE EDDY FROM ROOM TO ROOM, VIVIFIED BY WHAT THEY’VE SEEN. THIS IS THE PLACE AT ITS BEST: ACTIVATED BY ART THAT INQUIRES, REGENERATES AND INTERACTS. USED ONLY FOR FINITE PURPOSE AND MATERIAL GAIN, CARRIAGEWORKS FEELS DEAD.

There is probably no event on its calendar that has greater potential to animate the place than Performance Space’s Liveworks, so it was disappointing to arrive Thursday midday and find CarriageWorks virtually empty. The Vorticist nonetheless was booked out—a one-on-one performance with a strong reputation honed over years. Artist Jason Maling was ambivalent about the context, deeming it “perhaps too theatrical,” but submitted the work because he wanted to be rid of it. At Liveworks, his usual process of building an archive was reversed, to become its deletion.

Dressed in waistcoat and tailored trousers, Maling leads his audience of one through a maze of corridors and stairs to a small, secluded space. You sit on the floor with him either side of a low table covered in handcrafted arcane tools and relics on paper from previous visitors. A tête-à-tête ensues with the artist. Intimacy is intrinsic to any one-on-one and the form can take this for granted and be conceptually lazy; so too artworks that request a story or secret from the audience. Yet The Vorticist, which started with this premise, ended with much more. What is this thing? Who were all these people before me? A trace installation of scrolls from years of such encounters, accumulated in a space above the foyer.

Jiva Parthipan’s performative lecture, Last Remaining Relative, recounted the artist’s recent emigration to Australia, interwoven with a series of anecdotes about international travel and art. Parthipan has been on the move his whole life: departure at age ten from war-torn Sri Lanka; decades in London; work around the world as an artist. Now he is in Australia under the visa category “Last Remaining Relative.” Constantly thwarted and harrassed by bureaucracy due to his race, Parthipan could have treated the subject harshly, encouraged into didacticism by the lecture format. Instead he was an engaging, witty, informative speaker, his true stories attaining an Orwellian absurdity. Pungent asides about the local bureaucracy finished the work perfectly. Some of the most eloquent moments were articulated with Parthipan’s body alone when he left the lectern to impersonate a tiger, then later a monkey. His performance set the political bar high at the festival, and no-one else topped it.

Thirteen by Linda Luke and Vic McEwan began in the foyer in the afternoon. A performance installation about homelessness drawn from Luke’s personal experience, titled Hoodie, was Part One. To McEwan’s gentle, eerie soundtrack, Luke slowly moved across the floor, half hidden and constrained by a hood. The wheeled contraption she employed part way through became an improvised skateboard, the perfect second prop. Luke was utterly in character, but the lack of audience drained energy from the work. Again through no fault of the artists, the work’s tent installation felt a little contrived as CarriageWorks management disallowed the artists from inhabiting it full-time for the three days the performance ran. I regret not making it to Part Two.

Thrashing Without Looking by Martyn Coutts, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms, and Willoh S Weiland was an interesting combination of light-hearted enjoyment and psychological challenge for those who fear the unknown or loss of control. It provoked all sorts of thoughts about the modes of disembodied communication we engage in now—televisual, internet—how trust and agency are still called upon and how intense and liberating is the sense of touch. There were moments of alienation, boredom, confusion, anticipation, humour and the ending was surprisingly tender. I didn’t want to leave.

I Luv Amanda Crowe, a work about teenagers in 80s suburbia—a strangely dominant trope in Australian performance—floundered through lack of content, courage and form. Surely adolescent desire connotes fear, tenderness, pathos, embarrassment, but all the embarrassment expressed by the performers seemed to be more about the work than its actual subject matter. Even the superlative Georgie Read couldn’t save it. The performance begs a question that came to mind frequently throughout the festival around the programming of works-in-progress.

By contrast, Brown Council’s A Comedy came to Liveworks honed by years of the quartet’s explorations of modes of comedic entertainment in performance. The masterstroke lies in their recent meld of traditional comedy with endurance via a slightly sporty aesthetic. They pushed this even further at the last minute by deciding to create a single four-hour performance instead of one hour slogs back to back. Everything is distilled: the girls’ plain black outfits; their coloured dunce caps, cannily distributed among the audience as well; the bare stage; the casual demeanour of the three performers up the back chatting and eating peanuts while their fourth is in the hot seat. The peanut gallery, of course.

A Comedy was built on five tricks, vaudeville classics such as cream pie throwing as well as stand-up. Others like the dancing monkey go back millennia and, merely by being humanly conveyed, revealed their sinister side—banana gorging, face slapping: our gluttony and lust for violence and desperation to please. There was a tremendous command of material from every one of the performers—Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diane Smith—the discomfort and hilarity building by the hour. Utterly compelling, with much food for thought.

Into/Out of Me by Brigid Jackson posed the question: To what extent does my body belong to me? Occupying a small dressing room for just under two hours, with Benjamin Cittadini manipulating sound, Jackson began on the floor, blowing up and tying off plastic bags. She gradually moved to stalking in a tight circle, making the occasional incision on her chest, dripping milk into the blood with an eye-dropper. Taped to the mirrors around the room were little sachets of hair, nail clippings, blood. In the program the work was described as an exploration of the boundaries of bodies and what is left behind, the latter less personal than the former. Yet the body remnants around the room remained disconnected, the performance itself not coherent. Like the hospital gown they didn’t articulate beyond signalling that Into/Out of Me was about the body. Nevertheless the audience seemed hungry for this sort of intimate, visceral performance, in a festival otherwise sadly devoid of it.

David Cross’s Hold, from Performance Space’s Nighshifters program, was a perfect companion piece to the Liveworks. Entering the installation I was awestruck by the size of the inflatable, a weird hybrid of ship and castle. Climbing into it was daunting and exciting, the appearance of what seemed a fake hand something to be avoided. Then, on the crest, a choice has to be made: fears surmounted, the audience’s agency absolutely intrinsic. The sheer audacity and sculptural beauty of the work opened further, enhanced by the dilemma of how to negotiate trust with a stranger and the question of reciprocation. A beautiful twist occurs in the middle, the whole experience profoundly moving. Cross performed a companion piece on Saturday morning in the blazing sun opposite the farmers’ market. In a sense Hold’s microcosm, it again tackled reciprocity and engagement this time with a small contraption worn on the artist’s head, activated—or not—by a partner. One hand, one eye; the necessity of action. Confronting from the inside, entertaining from the outside. The simplicity of these elements and the artist’s immense effort produced a complex work that, like Hold, made an endless variety of connections.

Cross’s work benefited greatly from its accessible positioning and in the range of people it reached. With so much of Liveworks dependent on audience interaction —Thrashing, Thirteen, A Comedy, to name a few—it seemed a shame to let performances languish in the barely attended daytime working week slots. Saturday afternoon by contrast had so many events on simultaneously you were bound to miss many. Even then, many people I know who attend cultural events every weekend didn’t know about Liveworks. Full price tickets for works-in-progress, some barely begun, created more hindrance to healthy numbers.

There is the danger of insularity. Indeed, the lushest party was the restricted artists’ event at kick-off; by contrast, after Night Time on Sunday night, full and buzzing, the foyer sadly emptied. Can the performance world accept its marginal status to the point of complacency? And how much longer can CarriageWorks be so unaccommodating and expect to survive culturally? Moved to straddle a whole weekend and offered to a broader audience, Liveworks could blossom. CarriageWorks itself, in spite of its resistance to date, could still be the best place for it. What seems ancillary—fairly priced good coffee; bars and restaurants worthy of the neighbourhood, open late as befits a mature culture; a decipherable and well distributed program—could be linchpins. The possibilities are endless.

Performance Space, Liveworks: Fast & Furious, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 11-14, 2010

IN AN ERA OF INTERNATIONAL ARTS AND FILM FESTIVAL GIGANTISM, SMALL FESTIVALS HAVE TREMENDOUS COMMUNITY AND THEMATIC APPEAL, THE POTENTIAL FOR SHARED EXPERIENCE AND CLARITY OF PURPOSE. TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND IS AN EXEMPLAR OF SUCH FESTIVALS. CURRENT ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ELIZABETH WALSH HAS BUILT SUBSTANTIALLY ON THE ORIGINAL THAT WAS MAGICALLY REALISED BY ROBYN ARCHER, THE FIRST ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND (FOR WHOM WALSH WAS PROGRAM MANAGER, 2001, AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2002- 2005). I SPOKE WITH WALSH ABOUT HER FORTHCOMING THIRD AND FINAL FESTIVAL.

The festival has embraced more and more Tasmanian communities every two years, more island cultures around the world and tackled the very idea of ‘islandness.’ What’s been the focus of your approach?

What I really wanted to do with the 2011 festival was to get artists to engage for longer out in the community. So there’s a whole range of residencies all over the state. Theatre Newfoundland Labrador Youth Theatre is making work here with Launceston’s Second Storey. Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera will be on Bruny Island [with Minotaur—The Island, a ‘reconstruction’ of a lost Monteverdi opera] and The Gertrude Association, also from Melbourne, will work with the King Island Cultural Centre [in a new media residency with an installation and workshops]. It’s about engagement between artists in communities that aren’t urban-centric—the festival itself isn’t urban-centric. It’s all over Tasmania allowing people out there to have the one-on-one experience of meeting an artist. This development over these three festivals has been the thing I find the most satisfying. It really changes the way in which people approach the festival—being more than just an audience.

Often around projects or ideas that engage Tasmanian companies and artists through commissions which, where possible, have a broader creative presence than just providing performances. I’ve developed collaborations over these three festivals between young people passionate about music and professional music groups. There was the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra and the Strung Out Project in 2007, then access was provided for TYO in 2009 to Ethel [a string quartet from Manhattan] and in 2011 there’s a collaboration between the Australian Youth Orchestra’s Wind Quartet and the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra along with tutoring by the principal oboist of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra—potentially changing the creative output of younger artists.

It’s like a longer conversation and finding new ways to develop it. It’s not just a flash in the pan.

The festival’s geographical scope seems to broaden each time too. How many towns did you ‘inherit’?

In 2001, for the first festival Anthony Steel’s report recommended eight and I think with Robyn Archer we actually did 32; 2007 was 52, last festival was 56 and this time round we’re going to 62.

(LAUGHS) Absolutely. If we didn’t go to certain areas, I’d be lynched. It’s one island and there are only half a million people here but the communities are very different in terms of their interests. It takes one good music teacher and suddenly you have an interest in string playing. It takes one person who’s interested in dance to wind up at a school like St Helen’s or someone with a passion for the visual arts, like Sally Marsden on King Island, and suddenly you’re able to not only support what they’re doing but also build opportunities in the community.

I don’t like using the term “community development,” because I don’t think that’s what it’s about. A lot of my work has been around putting artists in environments where they have opportunities to work in different ways in terms of situating their work. So Chamber Made Opera is going to a little hall on the end of Dennes Point on Bruny Island. I haven’t asked them to make work in a different way; I haven’t set up an environment where they’re necessarily going to change the creative experience that they’re engaged with. But certainly being there will change things—buying a loaf of bread at the local shop will change their own and locals’ experience. It’s about putting artists into different environments, changing not only them but the environment they’re in. If the world were full of more of those experiences, we’d be a better place. People take up the opportunity to meet and engage with artists like Ross Bolleter (RT91, p14) collecting old pianos on and off for three months for his work Ruined for the 2009 festival. How often do you get to meet a composer? It opens up the work to a broader audience and, I hope, people’s imaginations and inquisitiveness.

So, sometimes the artist might be working directly with people, sometimes it’s just being there that’s critical?

I’d like to think that Ten Days is not just a ticket price. It’s about evolving a whole range of different entry points for people, providing commissions that are the beginnings of conversations for artists and audiences and contributing to the broader sense of identity of this place. There have been particular projects that have been very important in this respect.

The Port Arthur Project [see rt review] in 2007 involved 27 commissions at Port Arthur with the University of Tasmania and Port Arthur as partners. In 2009 it was Trust, where we worked with the National Trust and, again, the university on commissions in five National Trust properties. And this time round we’re working on site-specific installations with the NRM North [Natural Resource Management Group] in the northern part of the state in five locations that are as diverse as a field, a community hall and a restaurant. The interest here has been about developing a conversation around built and natural heritage. We have so much built heritage here—that kind of “Georgian-ness” of the place. But my exploration’s been more about how contemporary Tasmanians articulate that history in a way that’s for now. Not that I’m saying don’t restore those beautiful homes or don’t touch the wilderness but, rather, how do we view these as they’re presented to us—for example as images for tourism.

Has the concept of a festival of island cultures from around the world evolved over the years?

It’s a fabulous idea. The genius of Archer, picking on the thing that seemed to be a disadvantage! Often small islands off continents—like Newfoundland and New Zealand—are the brunt of jokes, seen as backward and behind. What’s been interesting in the conversation generated by Ten Days on the Island is that it hasn’t been filtered through the main cultural hubs of the world. Not everything has to have been through New York or be the biggest thing or part of the star system that operates within more urban festivals. It liberates you to go out and really have a look at what people are doing in other places. Once upon a time would a show like Vestuport’s Metamorphosis for the 2009 festival have ever come to Tasmania? And that came from digging around in Iceland!

There are also links with international academic Island Studies about island dwellers experiencing not the same but very similar things: in the leaving of islands, in notions of the sea, in politics determined by the size of a place—Ivan Heng’s work from Singapore is significant here.

I see also there’s a Korean work for young people—Halmang, Myth of Jeju Island—about the mythology associated with an island off Korea.

And it’s been fascinating to find all that reggae material in the Pacific [Pacific Reggae: Roots Beyond the Reef]—an extraordinary kind of movement. So it’s not just islands or one kind of idea—the festival teases out a whole range of different kinds of connections that aren’t necessarily obvious. That’s the great thing for me as an artistic director—having several festivals gives you time to go digging and find those things that are not just literally the obvious connection.

Dance Marathon by bluemouth inc (Manhattan-Toronto) represents the evolution of a particular kind of theatre form. Dancing, moving, having a partner and the dance marathon premise of the film They Shoot Horses Don’t They, these are the mechanisms through which the company explores a different kind of relationship between performer and audience. It’s fascinating.

Orwell’s Animal Farm, as adapted by Ivan Heng for Singapore’s Wild Rice, is an extraordinarily well-made piece of theatre in which the actors play the animals, transforming into them onstage. The dogs are fantastic: they’re just stupid. The show’s quite fantastic.

Daniel Barrow’s Every Time I See A Picture I Cry just won the Scobie Award for contemporary art in Halifax, Canada. Daniel works with layers of acetate on which he has illustrated the world of the narrative he’s about to tell. He manipulates the acetate using an overhead projector to animate the story. It’s exquisite. Right out there. It’s about a janitor sifting through the city’s garbage in order to create a phone book and a chronicle of the life of every citizen in the town. At the same time he’s being stalked by a serial killer. Another fascinating work and an exploration of a different form altogether.

Chronicles of Long Kesh, a theatre work from Belfast’s Green Shoot Productions, uses documentary style interviews as its basis. It’s tough material—we’re talking about the blanket protests and Bobbie Sands starving himself to death—and it’s hard to perform. But the structure comprises 10 or 15-minute vignettes, some only two minutes. These are interspersed with the songs the prisoners in The Maze used to sing to each other. One of the IRA guys was a choirmaster. Interestingly, it’s another story of an island—The Maze. Could that have happened in another place, that story? Guantanamo Bay is an island. When I saw the show, I couldn’t speak for half an hour afterwards. We know something of the story and ‘The Troubles’ but it’s something else to be in the dark with a great piece of theatre.

The 2011 festival program looks very good—ample shows, diversity of practice, location and invention.

The scale of our program is small, our budget is tiny. Maybe Darwin is smaller. But I look at the program and think, actually this is good—all sorts of ideas and experiences across the island. A lot of it’s about working partnerships. It’s great that after three festivals I can leave and think, We did good here.

Festival-goers should also look out for Stompin’s I ♥ Cars; Erth’s Dinosaur Petting Zoo; Djupid (The Deep) from Iceland and Scotland; version 1.0’s Bougainville Photoplay Project; Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s Australia-China collaboration, When the Pictures Came; New Zealand String Quartet; Craig Walsh’s Digital Odyssey; Julie Gough’s The Crossing; Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation, about the golden age of Singaporean cinema; Puso, by Philipino artist Richie Ares Doña; and Welsh visual artists Heather and Ivan Morrison working with locals, puppets and an old truck in Mister Clevver.

german film: radical docs

One of the immediately fascinating components of the 2011 Festival of German Film program is Radical Docs, presented with ZDF/ARTE and described as exploring radical attitudes to life. In films about art The Radical Gardener (director Hermann Vaske) observes an artist striving to live up to the ideals of Andy Warhol, Malcolm McLaren and Meinhard Neese, while Super Art Market (Zoran Solomun) reveals the attitudes and lifestyles generated around the art markets of Berlin, New York and London. The lives of children in an Austrian commune are investigated in Children of The Commune (Juliane Großheim), while gated communities in America, Africa and Asia are revealingly scrutinised in On the Safe Side (Corinna Wichmann, Lukas Schmid). The full festival program, including more Radical Docs, will feature recent releases and a Retro program of significant films of the last decade. As ever, the festival is eagerly anticipated. Audi Festival of German Film, Palace Cinemas: Sydney April 6-18; Melbourne, April 7-18; Brisbane, April 7-12; Adelaide, April 13-18; Perth, April 14-18; program available March 15 www.goethe.de/australia

muffling muff

Whatever you might think of Melbourne Underground Film Festival director Richard Wolstencroft’s politics, the laying of charges against him by the Australian Federal Police for screening the Canadian film LA Zombie at the 2010 festival was nonsensical. In a recent press release Wolstencroft wrote, “Our only intention was to play this important work of cinematic art to an appreciative adult audience after its screening was cancelled by the Melbourne International Film Festival due the OFLC’s [Office of Film and Literature Classification] absurd decision not to grant it exemption to screen…Two months later my home was raided by police searching for a copy of LA Zombie. Why an artistic director who runs an established film festival like MUFF should have such draconian tactics…applied to him over a work of art in our day and age is another problem altogether. I had made sure two months earlier that I didn’t have a copy and that our only copy had been destroyed.” On January 20, Wolstencroft was issued with a summons to which, bizarrely, was attached “a diversion notice, agreeing to settle the matter without a felony on my record and with a donation to charity.” Had a formal charge been laid a gaol sentence and fine might have ensued. With pro bono help from leading lawyers, the MUFF director is working out what to do—let the issue drop or face the demands of challenging the AFP action. Wolstencroft has received letters of support from the film’s director Bruce LaBruce, Camille Paglia, Jack Sargeant and the directors of Locarno and the Raindance Film Festival. See Jack Sargeant’s account of the background and the key issues in RT99. Mystery MUFF: Freedom Of Speech Event and Fundraiser, Red Bennies, Chapel Street, Melbourne, Feb 27, www.muff.com.au

Cover of Oz magazine, part of Lampoon—An Historical Art Trajectory (1970-2010)

provocations: poster-cover-collage

Sydney’s enterprisingly mobile Arthere, run by photographer and curator Sandy Edwards and exhibiting in often unexpected venues, is staging an exhibition of Jim Anderson’s poster and cover art from the 60s and 70s at the Tin Sheds Gallery. As one of editors of Oz Magazine with Richard Neville and Felix Dennis in London from 1968-73 Anderson was charged with “Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals” and publishing an obscene magazine. For this exhibition the artist “has re-imagined some of those Oz covers (School Kids Oz, Homosexual Oz, Special Pig Oz) that the British Establishment found so offensive at the time.” Also on show will be Anderson’s more recent collages which he calls ‘lampooneries.’ Showing on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Oz Conspiracy Trial and in conjunction with the 2011 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, the show promises a riot of colour and provocative opinions across half a century. Lampoon—An Historical Art Trajectory (1970-2010), February 18-March 12, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, www.tinsheds.wordpress.com

the poster & the cultural revolution

For a different perspective on the politics of poster art of the 60s and 70s as propaganda, an exhibition at RMIT Gallery explores “the relationship between the political poster art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its impact on contemporary Chinese art.” The show draws on the vivid original posters from the University of Westminster collection, works from collaborating artists Liu Dahong, Shen Jiawei, Li Gongming and Xu Weixin, and oral histories reflecting on the art of the Cultural Revolution. China and Revolution: History, Parody and Memory in Contemporary Art, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Jan 21-March 19, www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

expanding dance worlds

With Dance Massive on the horizon in Melbourne, it’s great to see other programs announced, including Dance Bites from Western Sydney Dance Action & Riverside Theatres in Parramatta and the contemporary dance program at Campbelltown Arts Centre from curator Emma Saunders (p8). Dance Bites commences with Fiona Malone’s new large-scale work Picture Perfect (Feb 16-19) which follows a woman in her quest for physical perfection—how far will she go? Other works in the program will come from Narelle Benjamin and Frances Rings in a double bill, and collaborations between Martin del Amo and Ahil Ratnamohanm and Lisa Griffiths and Craig Bary. In Perth MOVEME.ORG.AU, a new promotional body for contemporary dance is hosting six productions across the year, including Buzz, WAAPA’s Link, Strut and Daneil Micich. Dance Bites, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta www.wsda.org.au/projectscur.htm; www.riversideparramatta.com.au;
MOVEME.ORG.AU, Perth

mardi gras: common noise

Once upon a time, the Sydney Mardi Gras ran a seriously engaging discrete arts festival as part of its annual celebrations. Now in one small step for man, as part of Mardi Gras 2011, Chronology Arts has engaged five emerging composers (Andrew Batt-Rawden, Nicholas Ng, Marcus Whale, Lachlan Hughes, Max Bendall) to write works for Common Noise—an art-music concert delving into sexuality and masculinity through music. The performances include sections of senior composer Colin Bright’s Book of Cock song cycle. Common Noise, Supper Club, Oxford Hotel, Sydney, Feb 19 & 23, 7pm,
www.chronologyarts.net, www.mardigras.org.au

blade runner re-worked

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982) continues to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration and theorising. Why you might replace Vangelis’ score (superior to the composer’s other output) with your own and edit scenes from the film is a mystery that will only be solved by seeing.

Berlin-based filmmaker and sound artist Zan Lyons perform with viola, foot pedals and laptop while simultaneously remixing and reworking the film. The performance comes at the end of GoMa’s film program, A New Tomorrow: Visions of the Future in Cinema, which coincides with the exhibition 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. Cinematheque, Gallery of Modern Art (re-opening, post flood, Feb 13), Brisbane, Feb 26, 27, http://qag.qld.gov.au/cinematheque/current/21st_century_cinema

expanding the australian sound sphere

The Australia Council is inviting Australian musicians, sound artists and media artists working in sound to apply for a 3-month residency in the AlloSphere at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The Allosphere is a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a three-storey near anechoic (echo free) cube. It allows for synthesis, manipulation, exploration and analysis of large-scale data sets in an environment that can simulate virtually real sensorial perception….The AlloSphere is an instrument similar to the telescope, in that it enables scientists to see data in new ways in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media. But it is has also been compared to a musical instrument or orchestra…” The Australia Council, through its Music Board and the Inter Arts Office, is the first organisation in the world to support a formal artist residency at the AlloSphere, in partnership between with the University of California Santa Barbara. Allosphere Residency, www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/grants/allosphere_residency; www.allosphere.ucsb.edu

GENRE FILMS, PARTICULARLY COMEDIES, HORROR AND TEEN FLICKS, HAVE ALWAYS BEEN QUICK TO INCORPORATE THE LATEST FADS. JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH FEATURED ONLINE CHATS, YOU’VE GOT MAIL REVOLVED AROUND EMAILS AND ROMANCE, JULIE AND JULIA FOCUSED ON A BLOGGER, WHILE EASY A, JUST RELEASED ON DVD, INCORPORATES VIDEO BLOGS TO HELP THE SPREAD OF GOSSIP, A MODERN EQUIVALENT OF THE SWIRLING NEWSPAPER MONTAGE.

In general, though, filmmakers have been slow to explore social media phenomena: the increasingly important daily impact on many lives of using websites like Facebook (FB) and Twitter. Perhaps it’s the text-based nature of these online worlds that makes it difficult to weave into dramatic narrative. But two recent films, Hollywood’s The Social Network and the low-budget doco Catfish, explore the history and ramifications of lives being created, lived and loved online.

Musicians have been quick to incorporate social media into their songs. YouTube is awash with clever ditties about FB loves and hates and the joys of Twitter. Australian singer/songwriter Kate Miller Heidke’s ballad “R U Fucking Kidding Me?” details a failed relationship with a nasty ex who now wants to be a Friend on FB. But contemporary fiction writers (at least those published in the mainstream) seem to have let the internet and its social ramifications bypass them completely. Literary critic Geordie Williamson argues that for most fiction writers the internet doesn’t even exist, despite the reality of a substantial subculture compulsively checking their email, iPhones, FB and Twitter accounts every couple of minutes (especially those in their teens and 20s):

“You only have to start reading with one eye for the internet to see how ignored it is by the profession that once explored the radical implications of Marx, Freud and Darwin’s thought, and which blasted totalitarianism, dramatised sexual revolution, thought the unthinkable about nuclear war…Faced with the web, though, fiction has retreated into silence. Old-school modernism toned down for middlebrow tastes (with a dash of post-colonial exotica, perhaps) seems the default mode for much self-described literature these days, that or a flight into the past, into the safety of the historical.” (“Only Connect,” The Australian, Sept 2, 2010).

James Andrews, looking at socially networked content engaged with film and television, argues that the whole system of ratings should be rethought in terms of the outcomes of the programs, that “the most popular shows are not those with the most viewers but…[those] that create the most conversations online… When I watch the show 24 I’m chatting about [it] on Twitter and FB with thousands of other fans…the question is, how do you produce media for a multi-minding, multi-screen audience?” (“Socially Networked Content: Why TV and Film Need Social Media,” FastCompany.com, Sept 2, 2009).

Filmmakers have been quick to experiment using FB and Twitter to promote and distribute their films, setting up FB pages and encouraging users to ‘Like’ their films, post their own reviews online and re-tweet the latest news. But they have been slow to take up the possibilities in their film narratives. Karin Altmann, head of the script development company ScriptWorks, comments:

“I read a lot of scripts for various bodies and I am stunned at how few of them even make a gesture in the direction of using social media as a tool for their stories. It’s especially weird considering how young so many of these writers are. You’d think they’d be all over it…It’s actually quite hard to do—because of the ever-present question of what do you actually put on the screen? A whole lot of text and graphics? And as for the script—what do you put on the page? That’s what makes a film like Easy A so interesting. It focuses on the effect of social networking on the character and then on the way she uses it to solve her problem, rather than worrying about seeing the graphics” (Conversation via FB, Jan 27, 2011).

But the climate is changing. Along with Easy A, in the last months two very different films, The Social Network and Catfish, employ FB as a structural framework, helping to propel the narrative at great speed, while the Australian film Wasted on the Young, soon to be released, incorporates text-based cultures into the visual fabric of a teen film. The enormous critical and popular success of The Social Network, a film that looked bland on paper before it was released, reveals an audience hungry for explorations of these virtual worlds.

Interestingly, the film is written by Aaron Sorkin (creator of The West Wing) who is on the record as saying that the social connections of FB don’t interest him; his only connections with others online are through email (Mark Harris, “Inventing Facebook,” New York Magazine, Sept 17, 2010). Perhaps that is why The Social Network has garnered such a huge following. Its narrative is peculiarly old-fashioned in many respects, centring on a protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg, who engages in spectacularly fast-paced witty dialogue (like something from a 1940s film), but is unable, ironically, to make emotional connections with others. The film successfully sets up the disconnect between his aim for the website (to help bring people together, or more accurately, boys get laid) and his inability to even acknowledge the feelings of his girlfriend. But it’s clear the Zuckerberg character has been embellished. Novelist Zadie Smith argues: “The real Zuckerberg is much more like his website…Controlled but dull, bright and clear but uniformly plain, non-ideological, affectless” (“Generation Why?”, The New York Review of Books, Nov 25, 2010). Not enough characterisation for a hit film, Sorkin rightly guessed.

Smith also observes that while, in his non-fiction form, Zuckerberg concentrates on the word “connect” with an almost missionary zeal, the reality of the connections people make on FB are less interesting, primarily superficial, so much so that the novelist ended her relationship with FB altogether, finding the experience of going cold-turkey from such an addiction difficult. MIT professor Sherry Turkle, in her new book Alone Together, argues that the uptake of digital technologies is making society less human: “Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interaction, in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world” (Paul Harris, “Social Networking Under Fresh Attack As Tide of Cyber-Scepticism Sweeps US,” The Observer, guardian.co.uk, Jan 22, 2011).

Ben C Lucas, in his soon to be released film Wasted on the Young, which screened in competition at the 2010 Sydney Film Festival, nurtures this theme, exploring the (virtual) headspaces of rich high school students in Perth who survive in strangely alluring yet empty competing worlds where adults don’t exist. Lucas melds text-based digital cultures seamlessly into the visual style and narrative of the film: “…the ‘isolation through technology’ thing played a big part in Wasted but that’s only because it’s the way people talk…It’s a basic part of our day to day but the underlying principles of bullying, of abuse, of exploitation of the technology, are as old as civilisation…the tools change, maybe enhance it, but the way we treat each other remains. If we had ignored or excluded texting and instant messages from Wasted it would have felt less authentic, in my opinion. Graphically we tried to involve it in the environment of the film so that it would just feel like another form of dialogue—part of the world.” (Conversation via FB, Jan 24, 2011).

With so much fictionalisation of character happening online, through avatars, the audience response seems to be an anxiety about whether the characters, or the film itself, are real. Much of the debate around The Social Network in the US centred on the extent to which Mark Zuckerberg’s character had been made up for the purpose of the film. At the Q+A screening of Catfish I attended, much of the audience time was spent questioning the filmmakers as to whether or not the documentary was a cleverly disguised fiction. With the recent release of docos like Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop and Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here, it’s getting increasingly (and wondrously) difficult to see where the borders of fiction and fact blur. And it’s not surprising, given the content of Catfish, that the audience is sceptical.

Catfish centres on a New York photographer, Yaniv Schulman (the film is co-directed by his brother Ariel), who meets an eight-year-old girl, Abby, on FB, becomes her Friend (attracted by her precocious ability to paint) and is gradually introduced to her family and friends (via FB), eventually falling for a spunky older sister, Megan, whom he gets to know over the course of eight months, through an exchange of text messages, status updates and jpegs. When various forms of communication start looking dodgy (Megan posts him songs she’s supposedly written that turn out to be just downloaded from YouTube), Yaniv decides to grab his satellite navigation system and head to Michigan to meet her, arriving unannounced.

What he finds reveals as much about the nature of FB, and the desire to connect, as the surprising naïveté of Yaniv. (THE MEDIA HAVE BEEN WARNED NOT TO REVEAL FROM HERE ON IN SO STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVE TO.) The family he has got to know are, in essence, a construct. Abby and her mother Angela do exist but Mum has populated FB with an entire world of avatars—family members, friends, all with unique voices and stories, that she maintains late into the night after Abby has gone to sleep.

It’s a fictionalised narrative of her own, to entice Yaniv’s affections and escape her own difficult circumstances; she is the primary caregiver of two adult males with severe disabilities. FB allows her to ‘make herself up’ and manipulate the world around her so it makes sense, much like the filmmakers’ angle in screening the outcomes. It’s to Yaniv’s credit that, rather than confronting the woman and pushing his agenda of hurt and betrayal, he allows her longing and sadness to unfold. In a sense he has been fictionalising too, imagining Megan, creating a world around her that he wanted to exist, even Photoshopping her image into pictures of his own, creating a virtual romantic couple.

What’s most surprising, given the nature of the film’s central theme—just who can you trust in a screen-based digital world?—is the filmmakers’ apparent surprise at the audience challenges to the documentary’s veracity; in Catfish, everything is mirage. In The Social Network the reality of the enterprise—the cold, hard cash—is the focus. In the end, neither film is about realising your (romantic) dreams, but about how marketing hype and the conversations that follow can make you a star. And then punish you for it.

Wasted on the Young will be released March 3. The Social Network is set for release on Blu-ray and DVD on March 2, 2011. Catfish is screening currently.

Wasted on the Young, writer, director Ben C Lucas, producers Janelle Landers, Aidan O’Bryan, cinematographer Dan Freene, editor Leanne Cole. The Social Network, director David Fincher, screenplay Aaron Sorkin, based on a book by Ben Mezrich, producers Dana Brunetti, Ceán Chaffin, Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin, original music Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, editors Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall; Catfish, directors and cinematographers Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, featuring Yaniv Schulman.

EXIST-ENCE IS AN ANNUAL TWO-DAY FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE ART, LIVE ART AND ACTION ART CURATED, PRODUCED AND PRESENTED BY BRITTANY GUY, LAUREN CLELLAND AND REBECCA CUNNINGHAM IN BRISBANE. LAST YEAR THE THIRD FESTIVAL TOOK PLACE IN THE SHOP-FRONT AT THE JUDITH WRIGHT CENTRE OF PERFORMING ARTS, BUT WENT LARGELY UNHERALDED.

The event receives no funding and, although the space was generously donated, the creators of this event expend their time and labour gratis. Likewise artists pay for their own materials and perform for free. The modest admission fee covered front of house and technical assistance, but equipment was loaned by the big-hearted Kim Machan—the same Kim Machan who created the Multimedia Art Asia Pacific festival (MAAP) that went off-shore to China through lack of funding here.

Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself, because Exist-ence is professionally presented, from the appealingly bound program that includes a useful guide to global performance websites to the continuous live streaming of international artists on the walls of the space, and represents an independent, accessible and welcome renewal of exploration and exposure to this artform in Queensland for another generation.

The Exist-ence initiative is reminiscent of the ferment of ideas and investigation of new forms explored in the 1990s in Brisbane by artist driven venues such as The Crab Room and Cherry Herring. Nick Tsoutas at the Institute of Modern Art, Joseph O’Connor at Metro Arts and Jude Abernathy at Van Gogh’s Earlobe all provided support and space for independent performance artists. Luminary Queensland performers who cut their teeth in such spaces during this period are now well known: Christine Johnston, Lisa O’Neill, Brian Lucas… What surprised me was that while performance art continues to thrive as a discrete practice, especially overseas, I had wrongly attributed its demise in Brisbane to its having been subsumed under the rubric of contemporary performance. New circus, for instance, seems to have completely amalgamated performance art into its praxis.

At Exist-ence there was the expected atmosphere of a jamboree and some quietly subversive touches. You could avoid the rather pricey front bar and earn free drinks by screaming into the interior of a suitcase that was placed on a table with finger food that you were invited to eat “at your own risk.” An inter-generational contribution that nicely sutured the seeming hiatus in the handing down of a ‘tradition’ came from Jan Baker-Finch who believes “in the two-faced truth, in the Either, the Or and the Holy Both.” She improvised dance with enviable suppleness and, dressed in a series of fantastical costumes fashioned from ever recurring green garbage bags, made personal interventions with the audience. Dan Koop from Melbourne in his performance Wish you Were Here, sat at a table offering to personally hand deliver post card messages within five kilometres of the Judith Wright Centre. Throughout the hand delivery process DJK International mapped the route by sending live delivery update reports, ironically, via Twitter. Part corporate spoof, part re-humanising latter day communications, it was a sweet idea and in great demand—I sent my first Humanogram to a couple expecting their first child who were both bemused and delighted by Koop’s deadpan ‘delivery.’

Describing her art and life as inseparable, the striking figure of Velvet Pesu was a living sound sculpture who phenomenally endured during most of a long night. Concentric Circles on Red was an experimental piece combining audio made from inventively recycled materials secreted as part of her costume with her own superbly improvised vocals. She stood like a tall tree in a forest with the hauteur of an Elizabethan aristocrat or Aztec princess, wearing a shark’s jawbone and a ruff made from recycled venetian blinds. A visual artist and experimental filmmaker, Pesu looked up towards what looked like handmade film thrown on the ceiling by an antique projector. The artist possesses the only remaining bulb for the machine, and I was moved by this detail, significant of her wholly committed, unique way of life. I was less convinced by Nicola Morton’s claims to be “a writer-artist-future-time woman” declaring “the end of capitalism.” If only. But this might be a grumpy response to what appeared suspiciously like one of those getting to know you drama exercises I temperamentally abhor. We were asked to perform yogic breathing while twirling like Sufis and sticking bright dots all over our neighbours. Ugh.

If Morton attempts in an admittedly light-hearted fashion to hypnotise the audience, Rebecca Cunningham is attracted to the meditative, trance-like state she enters during a performance. In a study in red weight, she wore a red dress and wove a garland of red roses round her neck. To the roses were added successively layered necklaces of red wool and washers, bondage tape, stones and what appeared to be razor wire and ribbon that left scarlet indentations on the artist’s bare shoulders. As she kneeled and rhythmically rocked in a penitential posture, weighty stones clashing and grinding the bouquet to bits, I was inclined to read these signs in terms of the kind of psychological-political analysis of sexuality in a patriarchal world familiar from feminist discourse. However, Cunningham disavowed any such intentions, referring me back to the text accompanying her action: “what has come before, what is ahead, no matter. Living in the here, living in the now is where I want to be. With you living in the here, living in the now… There is no them, there is no then. Only we, only now.”

Cunningham’s brave action appeared to recapitulate aspects of an earlier Mike Parr-like body art where the focus on the abject appeared self-obsessive, but it also seemed positively to reiterate the axiom that innocence, consciously or not, longs for experience, longs to be different from itself. Taken along with her text, Cunningham’s display of overt masochism seemed a vivid reminder of the Zen notion translated by 1960s writer Alan Watts into the proposition that we are in fact a sort of resistance in the middle of the flow of life. As life impinges on you, you hurt, and so you know that you are here. Perhaps it was the shock of alterity that induced us to share the moment. Cunningham’s piece at any rate seemed to bear out Parr’s original observation that “the eye of the audience is submerged in the body as in a wound.”

Melody Woodnutt is a descendent of pirates and claims to have stolen her arts education while flirting with arts institutions internationally. Bravo! Recently returned from a residency in Iceland, her work Lines and Flux reflected her stay there. Part visual installation, part live art, her piece centred on a nomadic, ecological way of thinking that was reminiscent of 70s preoccupations overlaid with Woodnutt’s “meditation on lines, borders, boundaries and the path of (least) resistance.” The work enacted the temporal installation of an environment on the border of land and sea. There was a pile of heavy stones, one of which a member of the audience was tasked to interminably weigh. Earth was poured from sandbags in the ‘interior,’ eventually to be mixed by Woodnutt dragging a fishing net between her toes, eliding borderline distinctions. More metaphorical were the string and tape that excluded the audience beyond another border between themselves and the performer, but also highlighting the glut of the eye which easily penetrated all barriers. In Woodnutt’s moveable dialectic, it is the crossing of borders and boundaries, or the place where they intersect which is important. The ‘I’ consciously situates itself between the two. As Derrida puts it, “we have to cross the border but not to destroy the border.”

Derrida’s prohibition, of course, is blithely ignored by the forces of global capitalism. They are the ones who literally mix up the world. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Woodnutt, her work could not have been ignorant of the economic basket case Iceland became as one of the first victims of the capitalist meltdown. As we saw on television, Iceland (tied in with a Scottish investment bank that likewise foundered) fell hook, line and sinker for the shibboleths of economic rationalism and invested its national savings in global hedge funds. Viewed from this perspective, Woodnutt’s performance proved all the more politically astute.

The future for Exist-ence includes plans to bring out international powerhouse La Pocha Nostra in September for the fourth international Exist-ence festival and, with a little luck, Black Market International in 2012. Boringly, such big dreams depend on funding. However, they will persist in any event. At the moment the curators are looking for a space to promote performance art, live art and action art in Brisbane on a regular, perhaps bi-monthly basis. Any offers out there?

Exist-ence, a festival of performance art, live art and action art curated, produced and presented by Brittany Guy, Lauren Clelland, Rebecca Cunningham; live performances created and performed by Jan Baker-Finch, Dan Koop, Nicola Morton, Velvet Pesu, Melody Woodnutt; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Nov 26-27, 2010; http://existenceperformanceart.wordpress.com

IF A POSITIVE SPIN CAN BE MADE OF THE FLAGRANT MONOPOLISATION OF WHAT WE USED TO CALL ART-HOUSE CINEMAS IN THIS COUNTRY, IT IS THE INCREASED RESPONSIBILITY THAT AUSTRALIAN FILM FESTIVALS NOW HAVE TO EXHIBIT DIVERSE, UNIQUE AND VITAL FILMS FROM ALL PARTS OF OUR WORLD. WE KNOW WE WON’T SEE MUCH BEYOND BATMAN FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR (UNLESS WE LOOK REALLY HARD), SO WHEN OUR LOCAL FESTIVAL COMES ALONG IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BEHAVE MUCH AS A CAMEL WOULD AT AN OASIS, AND FILL UP WITH A YEAR OR TWO’S WORTH OF INTERESTING CINEMA IN A FEW SHORT DAYS.

Festivals are, of course, not immune to the kind of intimidation of which small independent cinemas are clearly victims. Festival organisers too can succumb to the fear that an unusual, ‘excessively internationalist’ program won’t attract an audience weaned on superheroes. It’s extremely pleasing then, when a young film festival like Adelaide’s holds firm to its original game plan and offers a spread of films designed to challenge rather than appease its audience.

Since 2007 the Adelaide film festival has been headlined by its competition group, a selection of a dozen films often indicative of the program at large. This year the competition’s emphasis on stylistically distinctive cinema continues. Established masters like Raoul Ruiz and Patricio Guzman line up next to newcomers and lesser-knowns like Kurdish Shahram Alidi and Australian Beck Cole (whose debut feature Here I Am premieres at the festival). And for the first time two documentaries are included in competition: Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz) and Australian Mathew Bate’s Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Mis-Adventure.

The decision to include documentaries in competition is as bold as it is curious, and it could be asked how a documentary can be fairly evaluated against narrative films in a prize for ‘best feature.’ Oddly enough, the inclusion is rather fitting for this year’s selection. More than a couple of those entries designated as ‘narrative features’ are themselves barely narratives at all, or at least barely fiction. One of the standout artistic merits of this year’s competition is that so many of the films carefully traverse the gap between life and art. The distinction between documentary and fiction becomes a lot less clear cut than we might assume it to be.

Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (Marti, Dupa Craciun) is a remarkable case in point, another gem from the current wave of great Romanian cinema. It combines a modest but passionate interest in adult relationships with a long take style that might be called bravura were it not so unassuming. Moving his camera only when necessary, and yet also refusing to cut into the action in order to drive a point home, Muntean respectfully and very skilfully allows his actors and his audience space to experience and interpret the story, that of a man who follows his heart wherever it goes and the ensuing catastrophe this brings his family. This is a truly great accomplishment of cinematic realism, wholly avoiding dogma in both tone and message. Some films we watch because they offer us a view of another world, others we can watch because they reveal our own lives taking place in another country.

If Tuesday, After Christmas offers a seamless kind of domestic realism, two other films in this year’s competition present a more poetic type of realism, of life beyond the day-to-day. Quite unlike anything I have ever seen, Michelangelo Frammartino’s The Four Times (La Quattro Volte) is a wordless ‘narrative’ that follows the transmigratory passage of a dying Calabrian goat-herd’s soul from human incarnation to animal (a baby goat), to vegetable (a pine tree) and finally to mineral (charcoal). Unusual though the plot may be (you might care to think of something more unusual) the filmmaker’s approach to the mystical content is anything but fantastical. Again, with extremely restrained long takes (many several minutes long) the action presents itself as a perfectly natural course of events. As with much great realist cinema, what the Four Times offers is an awareness of the world as a work of art, and of our movement through it.

Similarly in Year Without A Summer, Malaysian director Tan Chui Mui takes us on a journey that is as much about its setting as its characters. Long departed and forgotten friend Azam returns to his childhood fishing village, emerging from the sea like some monster to spend the night with his dear friend Ali and Ali’s wife Minah. Bobbing in their small boat on the moonlit ocean the friends rejoice with memories and folk tales, themselves resembling mythical figures in a watery dream world. Things suddenly change however, when the film returns to the much harsher world of Azam’s childhood. An elusive and very lyrical film, Year Without A Summer displays Tan Chui Mui’s highly developed visual sensitivity. The way digital video is used to capture moonlight on the Malaysian coast is alone reason enough to see this film.

More lyrical still is the Kurdish elegy Whisper with the Wind (Sirta la gal ba), winner of the Young Critics Award at Cannes. Paradoxically both eclectic and solemn, Whisper with the Wind conveys the period and place of the Kurdish genocides, known as ANFAL, which took place in the late 1980s in Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) under Saddam Hussein. The opening titles inform us that during these years 32,000 Kurds were murdered, many buried alive (though other estimates suggest as many as 180,000). Following the trail of message carrier Mam Baldar through decimated Kurdish communities, Whisper in the Wind presents a poetic and harrowing portrait of this profoundly troubling event. Whether or not the Kurdish genocide validates, or is in any way related to, the 2003 invasion of Iraq is not a question easily answered. What is certain is that a film like this in the 2011 competition powerfully illustrates the vital role that film festivals can play in a sheltered culture like Australia’s.

Other entries in competition for the International Award for Best Feature include the Peruvian black comedy October (Octubre) directed by brothers Daniel and Diego Vega, Kelly Reichardt’s acclaimed indie American western Meek’s Cutoff and Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies.

SHORT AND RELATIVELY SIMPLE, FLUID NETWORK WON JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY’S SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS SECOND ANNUAL SCREENGRAB NEW MEDIA ARTS PRIZE. CLEVERLY AND SUCCINCTLY ADDRESSING THE THEME OF ‘NETWORK,’ THE VIDEO WORK BY BRAZILIAN ENTRANTS JULIANA GOTILLA AND IZABEL RAINER HARBACH OF RAPADURA STUDIO RELIES ON FAMILIAR VISUAL AND SONIC MARKERS ALLIED IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY.

A world map with the continents formed from water on a slick white surface is the initial visual. Arresting for a number of reasons, it displaces/reverses where we think the land and ocean should be, so it’s already messing with our world as we know it; and it immediately raises questions as to how the effect is technically achieved—is it actual water, or a digitally embossed effect?

The map image remains static just long enough to allow us to contemplate these mysteries before the soundtrack kicks in with old school dial-up internet connection sounds, followed by scratchy static. As the sounds continue, drops of water begin to rain randomly onto the world map and the continents lose their distinct outlines. While the visual aspect gradually changes, the audio progresses through all those chirpy little alerts which tell us we have new emails, or someone wants to chat with us online. The fluid continents bleed and grow into supercontinents and then meld in a single world pool to a musical finale of a repeated Skype ringtone.

The sedate, watery video is wonderfully at odds with the anxiety-inducing soundscape, even though some of the net noises mimic plops and splashes. Gotilla and Rainer Harbach are obviously playing on their audience’s investment, socially and economically (and therefore emotionally) in internet communication. They are not telling us anything new about contemporary reliance on electronic interaction or how access is perceptually shrinking geographic distance, spanning oceans and redefining borders. Nor are they making any particular judgement about whether this is good or bad. But Fluid Network simply illustrates the intangible in an original, engaging way employing basic and familiar elements. The use of water both for its fluid properties and as a metaphor for universality is inspired.

Another video work from Italy, Multimedia Head by Osvaldo Cibils, shares the tactile, analogue sensibility of Fluid Network, but examines a deficit of the communication network—the compromise of personal identity under the weight of accumulated data. Cibils has taped himself taping things to himself, quite literally. We first see his face unadorned, then watch as he attaches a cassette tape, a mobile phone, a book, a flash drive, a media disc, and so forth, to his head with masking tape. His clumsiness is mildly amusing, the action is laboured, but bewilderment as to his motive keeps the viewer glued for almost five minutes to see the outcome. In the end, Cibils is totally obscured, resembling a mummy who has fallen into a bargain bin at a Dick Smith outlet, the lens of a digital camera staring out in place of an eye. Emphasising the symbolic dehumanisation in process, Cibils doesn’t speak a word throughout.

Questions of compromised electronic identity are also played out by Boris Eldagsen in Spam: the Musical; a genre-bending, theatrical and very funny episode subtitled The Lonely Girls. Three young women with a variety of accents, dressed in pyjamas, battle for a hairbrush pretend-microphone via which to relate texts taken from actual spam emails from love-lorn Eastern Europeans and Africans requesting help to claim inheritances, giving out false names, lying about their height—all delivered with disarming sincerity.

The additional Deleted Scene is also a take on image manipulation, but in total contrast to the visual fluffiness of the first part. A woman sits in a spotlight in a cabaret setting wearing a sequinned top and smudged mascara, while three sets of anonymous hands move her arms and mouth to mime a bluesy version of the AC/DC song “TNT (I’m Dynamite).” She is a marionette at their mercy and the song mocks her helplessness. It is compulsive to watch, but very disturbing, hinting perhaps at the systemic malignancy behind scamming and identity theft.

The UK’s Marco Donnarumma’s Golden Shield Music subtly draws our attention to political manipulation, using China’s IP censorship (the Golden Shield Project) for a generative net art composition. The work collects the IP numbers of the 12 most-blocked websites and assigns them musical notes, generating a free-form composition. The idea of random and creative art emanating from a project intended to repress individual freedom and limit access to information is the beauty of Golden Shield Music, even if the screen visual, a list of IP numbers, isn’t particularly compelling.

Silica-esc by Vladimir Todorovic of Singapore is a generative movie about a new supercomputing platform introducing itself to potential users with extravagant promises of becoming a means to ‘unite all mankind’. The graphics are mesmerising—cold, sophisticated and seamless matrices. Despite the apparent gravity at the start of the eight-minute work, the tone quickly becomes tongue-in-cheek as a rich woman and a farmer, each represented by a different roiling geometric form, discuss (in English-subtitled French) who caused a car accident, quickly descending into a class-based slanging match. Silica-esc (in Chinese) also boasts that all individual expression and feeling is recorded in “our spiritual data segment” for classification and dissemination via Spiritupedia. Others will become your friends and “celebrate and rejoice in your networked spirituality in unity.” By sending up the persistence of humankind’s eternal power struggles and search for meaning, Todorovic seems to be acknowledging that any means by which we choose to communicate and interact will still reflect innate human strengths and weaknesses.

Many of Screengrab’s 17 finalists test the limits of technologies as artistic media while hypothesising the potential and pitfalls of the system even as they use it. The role of the artist, regardless of the preferred media, is evidently intact.

Screengrab, School of Creative Arts New Media Prize, eMerge Media Space, James Cook University, Townsville, Oct 15-Nov 18, 2010

Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed, 2002, video installation, Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia

THE BRINGING TOGETHER OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES FROM THE PACIFIC REGION, WHETHER IN LARGE SCALE EVENTS LIKE THE ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL OR SMALLER BUT SIGNIFICANT SHOWS LIKE JENNY FRASER AND LUBI THOMAS’ BIG EYE: ABORIGINAL ANIMATION FROM AUSTRALIA AND CANADA (RT91, P26) YIELDS INSIGHTS FOR BOTH ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES ABOUT INDIGENEITY AND ART IN A BROADER THAN USUAL CONTEXT. STOP(THE) GAP IS SUCH AN EVENT, ONE WITH AN EXCITING, TIMELY FOCUS ON MEDIA ARTS.

As part of its celebration of the moving image in visual art, the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival is partnering the University of South Australia’s Samstag Museum of Art to present Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion. Curated by Brenda L Croft, the exhibition will bring together from Australia the considerable talents of filmmaker Warwick Thornton, leading new media artist r e a and curator and media artist Genevieve Grieves (Bunjilaka, Melbourne Museum).

Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund 2011

Warwick Thornton’s contribution to Stop(the)Gap, commissioned through the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, will be on show at the Samstag Museum while r e a and Genevieve Grieves will screen their creations outdoors at Port Adelaide’s historic Harts Mill.

The Australians are joined by a range of visiting major artists: Rebecca Belmore (performance, installation; Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, 1988), Dana Claxton (Canada; video, performance; Sundance Film Festival; 2010 Biennale of Sydney; Microwave, Hong Kong); Alan Michelson (USA; digital photography, video and glass), Nova Paul (NZ; photography, film: fascinating three-colour separation images of New Zealand sites), Lisa Reihana (NZ; Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Edge of Elsewhere, 2010 and major Australian galleries have shown her richly textured photomedia portraits) and Erica Lord (USA; interdisciplinary artist; striking photographic work).

In the Stop(the)Gap press release, Brenda Croft writes, “Some of the most provocative and illuminating moving image work today is being created by Indigenous new media artists—yet there has been no international focus on this work until now. Despite physical distances, Indigenous communities around the globe are linked through their shared colonial histories, each bearing the scars borne of dispossession, injustice, inequality, and misrepresentation.” Croft has “selected works challenging preconceptions of contemporary Indigenous expression and addressing themes of human rights, environmental concerns, cultural security, and negotiating diversity.”

At the very same time as they provoke us, the works of these artists display the seductive power of art, using bodies, film, video, new technologies and a potent sense of place to transform a problematic world into one that fascinates as much as it challenges, thereby further opening us up to the riches of Indigenous cultures.

WHEN MICHAEL O’ROURKE ATTENDED THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF FILM SOCIETIES’ ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING AND WORLD CONFERENCE IN RECIFE, BRAZIL, LAST DECEMBER, HE EXPECTED DAYS OF TALK AND DISCUSSION AND THE OCCASIONAL FILM SCREENING. HE DIDN’T ANTICIPATE HAVING ONE OF THE MOST UNEXPECTED AND MOVING VIEWING EXPERIENCES OF HIS LIFE. BUT HE DID.

The Pina favela is one of the poorest and most deprived areas of the city of Recife, and it was in the favela, in Bullet Square (a place rumoured to see two murders a day), where a screen was erected one evening to show a new documentary. All the IFFS delegates were invited to see A Mao E A Luva, which had been filmed within the favela. They sat watching with crowds of favela residents, who laughed and cried as they viewed a film in which they and their children appeared: a film about something and somebody very important to them. And Michael O’Rourke, with years of experience watching emotional and harrowing stories on film, reports that it was the most moving experience of his filmgoing life, to watch this uplifting, hopeful film, amongst people to whom it meant so much.

The Pina favela spreads along the banks of the river, and it is here that Ricardo Gomes Ferraz, now aged 35, better known as Kcal, a poet and musician, has turned his shabby waterfront house into a library for the children of his community. For over 15 years he has used all his spare resources to buy second-hand books in different places all over the city to gradually establish a library that has now become a meeting place for hundreds of children and adults—“where dreaming is not forbidden, where imagination can fly to places very different from the favela,” as Kcal says.

Drugs and prostitution are constants in daily life in the favela, but for Kcal that life changed when at 16 he found and read a book, A Mao E A Luva, by Machado de Assis (a 19th century writer, descended from slaves, now regarded as one of Brazil’s most important). He realised the importance of reading—and from that day on he has never stopped—then passing it on to children. In 2008, this man, who defines himself as “a dealer in books,” received an esteemed national award in recognition of his work but, more importantly, a government project has evolved which has seen the opening of many libraries in the favelas; from the original founded by Kcal, another 514 libraries are functioning all over Brazil today.

The film about Kcal and his work was directed by Roberto Orazi and produced by Riccardo Neri, two Italian filmmakers who were in Recife researching a film they were making on the dark subject of the trade in human organs. Looking for someone to help them talk to people in the favela, they were directed to Kcal. After meeting and working with him and learning about his work with books, the library and with the children of the favela, they decided that they had to make a film about this wonderful story. (The film screened at the Rome Film Festival late last year and hopefully will be making its way to other festivals soon.)

the cinema club phenomenon

Michael O’Rourke was in Recife representing the Australian Council of Film Societies, of which he is vice-president. Film societies in Australia have a long and interesting history, but they are currently in decline, and the Council is urgently looking at both this decline and the role of the council, with the aim of re-invigorating both firmly in its sights. O’Rourke found much in his five days in Brazil to encourage him and, through him, the council; the international film society scene is amazingly rich, varied and active, with much more happening in many countries round the world than in Australia.

A film society is a membership-based organisation where people watch screenings of films not shown in mainstream cinemas. (In Spain they are known as cineclubs and in Germany as filmclubs, names that are increasing in popularity around the world.) Such organisations, usually with an educational as well as a screen cultural aim, work to introduce new audiences to varied audiovisual work through a member-curated program of screenings, usually supported by well-researched information sheets and even essays on the films shown. A common feature of most screenings is an introduction to the film and a post-screening discussion; a healthy debate on both style and content is seen as important. Film societies in most countries are organised into federations, councils, collectives, or local networks, and these national bodies can be members of the IFFS, which uses its rich and multi-lingual website and its regular publications to maintain a free flow of information throughout the film society world. (Interestingly, the IFFS is currently setting up an archive in which to collect and preserve all the documentation produced by its members; it will be, as retiring Secretary General Golan Rabbany Biplob said, “the right place where any researcher can get sufficient input to study the world film society movement.”)

a united effort

Last December the Brazilian government provided some outstanding hospitality to allow both the world conference on film societies and the general assembly of the IFFS to take place in Recife over five days, with participants coming from all around the world to report on their current activities and to plan for the future of worldwide “cineclubism.” This was the first time in 25 years that such a get-together was held in Latin America, where the film society movement seems to be doing well. The Brazilian government, on behalf of the Brazilian Federation, covered travel expenses and accommodation for many of those in attendance; Michael O’Rourke was particularly impressed by the fact that the national body from Norway paid the membership fees for the newly formed film society in Kabul so they could send a representative.

The five days saw a packed program in which reports from state and local film societies, from national bodies, and from various working groups were interspersed with panel discussions on relevant issues, including a debate on the role of film societies in the 21st century, and on research on film societies, their origins and publications, while social events and screenings lightened the more formal but necessary business of conference and AGM.

film clubs for the young

It was a report from Denmark on its very successful film club model for children and teenagers that particularly enthused O’Rourke. It’s a model that has its roots back in the 1950s, when teachers decided to show films to their students on a regular basis, while in the 1980s a law was introduced that required 25 percent of national film production be set aside for children’s and adolescent films. Now most young Danes belong to film clubs, where they have regular screenings of high quality films, acquiring a habit of watching films within their community and in circumstances that encourage both a critical standpoint and lively discussion, and gaining an insight into both the issues covered in the film but also in the way cinema works. While Australia does have some local or regional activities that encourage children’s film-going and critical evaluation (such as Queensland’s Cine Sparks), there’s nothing on an organised national level.

film club australia?

Back from the meeting excited and invigorated by much of the film society activity he heard about in other countries, O’Rourke is looking forward to the challenges posed in Australia, where the film society movement is now going through a difficult period, with many longstanding groups faced with aging and declining membership and finding it hard to connect with new audiences. The attractions provided by excellent equipment and the rich and growing supply of material on DVD is enhancing home viewing, while many in the younger generations seem to have different interests and other ways of watching screen material. It’s not all doom and gloom; there are some film societies doing really well, with large and active memberships and programs. What’s needed is some way of making this much more widespread, and to this end Michael O’Rourke feels positive about increasing Australia’s connection with the burgeoning world of film societies.

HAVING BEEN BASED IN THE UK SINCE 2007, IT IS GLARINGLY OBVIOUS TO ME HOW INVISIBLE AUSTRALIAN VISUAL ARTISTS CAN BE ON THE HIGHLY COMPETITIVE INTERNATIONAL CIRCUIT. THEY ARE RARELY SEEN IN EUROPEAN BIENNIALS AND SURVEY EXHIBITIONS, LET ALONE IN SOLO EXHIBITIONS. SOME AUSTRALIAN GALLERISTS TAKE THEIR ARTISTS TO INTERNATIONAL FAIRS, THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL OFFERS SUPPORT IN VARYING DEGREES AND MAGAZINES LIKE ARTLINK ARE MAKING THEIR WAY ONTO THE SHELVES OF UK AND EUROPEAN BOOKSHOPS. HOWEVER, AUSTRALIANS WORKING IN COMPUTER-GENERATED AND RELATED FORMS HAVE CONSISTENTLY ACHIEVED PROMINENCE ON THE EUROPEAN MEDIA ARTS CIRCUIT AND BEYOND.

Since the early 1990s Australian artists have been highly visible in this arena and have made a vital contribution to the growth of international media arts practice. With the continued vitality and expansion of the sector evident in events such as Ars Electronica in Austria, Transmediale in Germany and the nomadic International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA, scheduled for Sydney in 2013), the media arts scene has proved itself a resilient and relevant forum for audiences to experience media arts practice.

Not only are Australian artists prominent in these exhibitions but their excellence in the field is acknowledged, especially through the series of prizes awarded by Ars Electronica. In 2010 Melbourne-based Stelarc was awarded the highest prize at Ars Electronica, the Golden Nica (for Hybrid Art) and Perth-based SymbioticA won the same prize when it was first awarded in 2007. Awards of Distinction at Ars Electronica have also been presented in 2005 to Brisbane based Keith Armstrong, Sydney based Joyce Hinterding & David Haines in 2009 and Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski in 2007. Melbourne Oribotics artist Matthew Gardiner was an Artist in Residence at Ars Electronica Futurelab in 2010 with the support of Novamedia and the Australia Council for the Arts, and returns there this year.

This Australian presence on the media art scene has developed over 20 years, the outcome of hard work from artists, support and profile building by the Australia Council along with Australian curators and agencies. Individuals such as Linda Wallace in the 1990s through her company Machine Hunger took the work of Australian artists to Asia and Europe and Antoaneta Ivanova with Novamedia established an international network for exhibiting media art in the 2000s. Experimenta has curated several exhibitions that have toured internationally and ANAT has supported artists to present work through its (now defunct) Conference and Workshop Fund. Kim Machan through MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) has also built significant collaborative exhibition opportunities in Asia and presented major exhibitions in Singapore and Beijing.

Entrepreneurial Australian curators continue to create opportunities for Australian media artists overseas and in 2010 Dream Worlds: Australian Moving Image, curated by Melinda Rackham and produced by Michael Yuen (see p10) showed eight artworks on a 27-metre public screen in Beijing’s Sanlitun Village. This large screen was apparently very hard to miss and caught the eye of the local press: “Few in China are aware that as well as strange animals and a Mandarin-speaking former Prime Minister, Australia sports a thriving new media art scene comprising some of the world’s most innovative artists” (www.thebeijinger.com).

This concerted effort has enabled artists to build networks and relationships (particularly in Asia and Europe) that continue to yield invitations to exhibit and participate in other opportunities such as conferences and residencies. While organisations like MAAP and Novamedia are not as active in the current climate, their efforts have paid off through a continued presence of Australian artists in the international spotlight.

For established artists such as Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, exhibiting overseas “is important to us because of the opportunity it gives to engage with a wider audience, and from our experience, unexpected opportunities often arise from participating in an international exhibition or art festival.” Starrs and Cmielewski’s work is well regarded. They have shown at the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial and in 2011 present at the Sydney/San Francisco Biennale and the Auckland Arts Festival. They have also secured opportunities for R&D through residencies and in 2009 were the first Australian artists in residence at the Ars Electronica Future Lab.

An artist achieving considerable success overseas is Lynette Wallworth. It is not unrealistic to say that her profile is perhaps more significant outside of Australia than it is at home, although her solo exhibition at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum in 2009 in tandem with the Adelaide Film Festival gained considerable national attention. She is represented by UK based Forma, one of Europe’s leading production agencies for interdisciplinary contemporary art. With the support of Forma, Wallworth is developing complex and engaging media installations that are shown in a range of venues. Over the last few years, her work has been commissioned and exhibited at the Lincoln Centre, NYC; New Frontier at Sundance Film Festival; Vienna Festival and Aix en Provence Festival. In 2010 she developed a 40-minute video piece, Kafka Fragments, in the Netherlands and in the same year an interactive video for English National Opera’s Elegy for Young Lovers directed by Fiona Shaw.

Wallworth says that these opportunities “offer a way of developing a different relationship with audience and I am interested in that. The importance for me is in staying fluid enough to go where the space is opening up…Right now for me that is definitely film festivals as they make space for moving image work and for artist film makers.”

Wade Marynowsky, Bricolage Disco, 2010, ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland, New Zeland

Emerging Australian artists are also starting to find their feet in the international arena. Sydney based Wade Marynowsky was recently included in the 2010 Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland and also in 2010 showed his installation Bricolage Disco at ST PAUL St Gallery in Auckland. He has commented that these opportunities have arisen from meeting international curators who have visited Australia, with introductions through the likes of Fiona Winning and Mike Leggett. Inclusion in international exhibitions opens new doors and exposes younger artists to the work of important international figures. Marynowksy says about Poznan, “it was important to show the work overseas to access new audiences and for professional development; it was also my first experience of exhibiting in an international biennale. This was exciting for me as I was shown amongst some media art big names such as Ken Feingold, Luc Courchesne and Eduardo Kac.”

All the artists mentioned here have significant international profiles or are starting to embark on international careers, but they are not the only media artists regularly exhibiting overseas. Jon McCormack, Christian Thompson, Alex Davies, Nigel Helyer, Daniel Crooks, Kate Richards, Mari Velonaki, Craig Walsh and Troy Innocent all enjoy success and continue to build their profiles through international connections.

These artists have spearheaded the forward guard of Australian artists on the international stage. They demonstrate that despite distance, limited resources and a certain European snobbery directed at the ‘antipodes’ that Australian art can thrive beyond our shores. There are certainly more opportunities to be explored, but in the meantime the forging of networks and opportunities by innovative practitioners might possibly provide inspiration for the Australian visual arts sector to embark on new directions into new places to reach new audiences.

{$slideshow} THE IMAGE OF TIME, A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK OF SENIOR BRITISH ARTIST MALCOLM LE GRICE, INITIATED BY NEW ZEALAND CURATOR MARK WILLIAMS AND REALISED IN BRISBANE BY OTHERFILM, SHONE A LIGHT ON A QUEENSLAND SCREEN CULTURAL LANDSCAPE WHOSE CONTOURS ARE BEING REMAPPED. OVER TWO NIGHTS AT THE INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART AND THE TRIBAL THEATRE, THE LE GRICE PROGRAM WAS SUPPORTED BY AN INSTITUTION AT THE EPICENTRE OF THE CURRENT SHIFTS IN SCREEN CULTURE: THE BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (BIFF).

brisbane international film festival

There have been a few changes at BIFF lately, just like there’s been a bit of rain in Queensland. Huw Walmsley-Evans discusses the organisational purge at the city’s flagship screen event in the 57th edition of Senses of Cinema (which, like RealTime’s OnScreen has not been funded by Screen Australia for 2011). In 2009, BIFF was seen as “a diseased limb” of the troubled state film financing body, the Pacific Film and Television Commission, and so, “when the PFTC was purged, the blameless BIFF administration was also swept away.” The loss of director Anne Demy-Geroe, whose 17-year stewardship of the festival saw it foster and grow a deep appreciation for grown-up film in Brisbane, was felt in 2010. Walmsley-Evans pays tribute to the artful layering of Demy-Geroe’s “Russian-doll”-like programs, with their thematic and aesthetic sub-sections, “digressions, riffs, fully fledged retrospectives, tributes and established areas of specialist interests,” and notes with some chagrin the etiolated Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern programming.

trash video

Digressions, riffs, retros, tributes and specialist interests were a casualty of another 2010 demise, that of Trash Video, which closed the doors of its West End bunker for the last time in August. More than just an independent video store, Trash, like BIFF, acted as a public gateway to the cinematic state of mind. Presided over by Andrew ‘Stumpy’ Leavold, Trash offered an absorbing education in the unfamiliar, unsettling and sometimes unsanitary worlds of B-movies and cult cinema. While all film programmers are people of passion, there are few with Stumpy’s almost messianic exaltation of the most mutant, malformed, only-a-mother-could-love them films. The organised chaos of the physical Trash universe may be gone, but Stumpy’s unflagging devotion to ‘other cinema’ lives on with other unmistakeably ‘Trash’ projects. At BIFF, he introduced the Philippines exploitation cinema overview, Machete Maidens Unleashed, fronted by Mark Hartley (who directed the exploitation cinema doco, 2009’s Not Quite Hollywood). As Trash Video Film Club patrons may recall, the words “Filipino midget private eye” remain inextricably associated with the store and the man whose Search for Weng Weng remains legend.

Machete Maidens’ BIFF premiere, as part of the Shock Corridor section of cult, grindhouse and exploitation cinema (which, Walmsley-Evans notes, is “the one recognisable holdover from Anne Demy-Geroe’s programming”) coincided with the festival’s presentation of the Malcolm Le Grice program at the Institute of Modern Art. IMA and BIFF have partnered memorably before, with the tour de force Shoot Shoot Shoot program of British avant-garde film curated by Mark Webber in 2002, and with film artist Guy Sherwin’s performance program in 2008.

malcolm le grice

The Malcolm Le Grice program lent first-hand substance to arguments that this kind of work finds a natural home in the white cube; certainly, in comparison to the black box of the theatre, the gallery space seems to more readily adapt to the aesthetic and material challenges of staging hybrid experimental work. At the IMA, Le Grice’s 40-year career was surveyed in installation, film and video screenings and performance. At the artist’s suggestion, the meta-cinematic work After Leonardo (1974) was installed in multi-screen across the smooth white interior of the gallery, allowing for a wall-to-ceiling immersion in the work’s play with film frames/video frames. The playful deconstruction of art history is a marker of the filmmaker’s modernist pedigree and, as the artist explained in his affable unscripted address to the crowd, also a way to pose questions about the relations between cinema, experimental film and painting.

As a film festival venue, the gallery space afforded critical intimacy to the audience with the projected works and the artist himself. Nowhere was this more evident than in Horror Film 1. For many in the capacity crowd, the chance to finally experience Le Grice’s legendary 1971 multi-projector film-performance, re-enacted in all its kaleidoscopic, confrontational glory, was a high point in the cinematic year. In contrast, something of the sense of critical liveness of the second expanded cinema performance, 1972’s Threshold, was lost at the conclusion of the second program the following night. This three-projector performance, at the more traditional cinematic venue, the Tribal Theatre, nonetheless provided insight into the interplay between projection processes and human vision, showing how, as Le Grice explained, “film is, at each stage, raw material for new transformation.” The program illuminated how sensitive we have all become to the specificities of space—physical, phenomenological, social and institutional—in the experience of moving image art.

gallery of modern art

Concomitant with the unfolding of the first new-regime BIFF program, the Gallery of Modern Art screened yet another extraordinary program. Pier Paolo Pasolini: We Are All In Danger was precisely the kind of exceptional, world-class retrospective program Brisbanites have come to expect from the programming powerhouse of Kathryn Weir and her team. As other institutions have been dismantled or reformed, the Cinémathèque has continued to amaze and exceed expectations, and is consistently rewarded with growing audiences at even the most demanding films. It is clear that the strategy of astutely curated ‘blockbuster’ seasons with the power to partly subsidise or offset the programming of contemplative films from all corners of the globe is an ideal model. Audiences are fortunate—and relieved—that the Cinémathèque, despite closure for some weeks following the flood, appears to have survived with its enthusiasm for adventurous programming undampened.

In addition to exciting imaginations with the BIFF show, IMA brought the extravagant Nollywood metacinema of photographer Pieter Hugo, and the installed audiovisual mayhem of Christian Marclay to further expand Brisbane’s moving image experience and develop the relations between visual art and screen culture. The year also saw more growth and renewal in Brisbane’s independent sector with the promising signs heralded by the newborn Brisbane Underground Film Festival and flourishing artist-run initiative scene, showing that amidst strife and cataclysm, new conditions of possibility are always emerging.

Malcolm Le Grice, The image of Time, a joint project with OtherFilm, Institute of Modern Art, New Zealand Film Archive and Screen Queensland, Brisbane Film Festival, Nov 4-14, 2010

Throughout Dance Massive, RealTime reviews and interviews will appear online at www.realtimearts.net.

Dance Massive: partners Arts House, Malthouse Theatre, Dancehouse; Melbourne, March 15-27; download the program at http://dancemassive. com.au

Leisa Shelton, Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, Fragment31

THE LAST TWO PERFORMANCES IN THE ARTS HOUSE FUTURE TENSE SEASON, BY MELBOURNE’S FRAGMENT31 AND THE GERMAN-ISRAELI TEAM JOCHEN ROLLER AND SAAR MAGAL, SHARE DOUBLE FOCI: IRONY AND TRAUMA.

Fragment31’s Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve performance is a theatrical rendition of Anne Carson’s poem of the same title, which turns the poet into a third-person Deneuve, and narrates her infatuation with a female student through the doubly ironic prism of cinema and classical references. What would Socrates say, she wonders, her words laced with mature, weary detachment. Deneuve, the cinematic Barbie doll, effortlessly blank, is inserted in the place of a complex self. (In The Guardian, December 30, 2006, Germaine Greer remarked that so devoid of personality have Deneuve’s roles been, that she cannot recall a single line any of her characters ever uttered.)

Fragment31 play with the representation of the fractured desiring self by simulating film. Shelton/Carson/Deneuve walks to the Metro; receives a phone call in her office; waits in a hotel room. Each scene is sculpted in filmic detail, each physically and narratively disconnected from the other, each floating as an island of naturalistic imagery in the mangle of props and wires of the Meat Market stage space. Sound, light, set, actors and musician, and designers, onstage too, come together in fitful fragments—the coalescing of the desiring, decentred self into one sharpened and fuelled by love. Even the narrator, Carson/Deneuve, is played by two actors: Leisa Shelton for body, Luke Mullins for voice. It is an attempt to discipline desire with a muffle of irony, dissimulation. But irony is not enough to stop infatuation; self-knowledge does not mandate control. Desire shows through. The poem crackles; the stage version, murkier and not as focused, less so.

If in the first work irony is employed as the girdle of trauma, to keep the fractured self in one piece, in the next work irony is a safe, fenced pathway to the exploration of trauma. Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do is Israeli choreographer Saar Magal’s answer to a question: whether to make a work about the Holocaust with friend German Jochen Roller or, rather, not about the Holocaust at all, but third generation Israelis and Germans.

It opens with a discussion over the order of epithets—which layer of identity comes first? They agree: German Jew, black Jewish German, even gay German black Jew; but, says Magal, “we’re not going to talk about Palestine.” Magal and Roller change clothes, from the yellow of the Star of David to the brown of the SS uniform, and back. They play Holocaust testimonies on tape. They enact a series of iconic WWII photos: Magal collapsing into Roller’s arms, Roller shooting Magal, vice versa. Magal says, “This man stole a book from a Tel Aviv bookshop!” And Roller recites, “I don’t remember. Everyone was doing it. I was simply there.”

We are asked to take our shoes off, walk, sit and, later, to get up. We don’t understand. “Aufstehen!” shouts Roller. Some of us are randomly marked out, and one person pulled out of the crowd, to dance briefly with Magal, and then sent back. The show creates small moments of terror: we are dislodged from our audience complacency, but nothing bad ever happens, because it’s not that kind of show.

Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do is a catalogue of images enacted, repeated, but only as traces. It assumes a traumatised audience, for which every hint will be a trigger of memory. But, remarkably, it is a work that refuses to create false memories. It tests recognition; it has exactly as much content as the audience brings to it. It is up to each person to see genocide in the stage imagery, hear the Nuremberg Trials in the dialogue. The piece gently probes. How much do we still remember? What does it mean to us? What does it do to us?

In Australia (as opposed to Germany or Israel), the answer is not much. There were some walk-outs, which I cannot imagine happening at a Holocaust tear-jerker (for reasons of decorum). But for those to whom it meant something, Magal and Roller created a tasteful, careful little memorial space, in which a past event was reconnected to the present, and the relationship between the two weighed up.

One could say that the risks in Basically…never felt sufficiently dangerous, the stakes never high enough to justify the pussyfooting (one German critic called it “politically correct”). The love woes of Deneuve/Carson are saturated with much greater danger, despite the ironic title. However, Basically…uses irony differently, as a way of coming closer to something unspeakable, rather than pulling away from it. If traumatic desire is a sore one still wants to pick, the Holocaust is a trauma of a completely other kind, one to tiptoe around carefully, holding hands.

Fragment31, Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, creators, performers Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton, music Jethro Woodward, set Anna Cordingly, lighting Jen Hector; Nov 16-20; Basically I Don’t But Actually I Do, creators, performers Jochen Roller, Saar Magal, lighting Marek Lamprecht, soundtrack Paul Ratzel; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, Nov 24-27, 2010

WOMAN TEETERS IN THE DISTANCE, A GIANT PUMPKIN FOR A HEAD. SHE CUTS A SURREAL FIGURE. SHE IS IN HEELS, SKITTERING ACROSS A SMALL PROSCENIUM ARCH STAGE. VEERING FROM SIDE TO SIDE, SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM, THE WOMAN-VEGETABLE FAILS TO SETTLE, FAILS TO ACHIEVE STASIS. SHE ABANDONS THE TASK, SQUIRRELING ALONG TOWARDS THE DISTANT AUDIENCE. THE PROSCENIUM ARCH OFFERS A TALE, OF WOMAN AS OBJECT, AS HYBRID, BUFFETED BY ELEMENTS BEYOND HER CONTROL.

She is so far away that we watch almost dispassionately. The frame in a distance flattens. When she leaves, she becomes more real, a body rather than an image. No longer part vegetable, she comes towards us, moving to a melange of rhythms. She draws upon a history of dance training, pulling out moves and stringing them along a line. Inexorably, she approaches. As she nears, her body becomes round, flesh, soft. She dances nearer and nearer until her face becomes a player. Emotions, affects and intensities flicker then pass. Not exactly real but not quite surreal either, like switching stations on the radio.

Facing the audience, she emits a string of sounds. We are close now. The music is part of all this somehow. It matches the shifts, the proximities, the intensities, the progress. It seems we are at a peak. Clothes come off. Her naked body speaks, of dancing; muscular, buff. Even nudity tells a story. When the performers in the musical Hair stripped off, their nudity made a statement. Mellow’s nakedness emerges after a slew of expletives, like a full stop.

From a linear point of view, thus far the gaze of the audience has been increasingly enhanced by the tactile approach of a body. The volume of its flesh has been continuously increasing. Beginning as a distant figure, a subject-object, she is now more assertive, an intensity making decisions rather than a thing that responds.

The next phase is more twisted. She finds clothes and pursues a duet with a rope, melding and folding in movement. She traces a retreat to the rear of the theatre space, threading her way towards an ultimate inversion. She hangs upside down, like the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack. Technically and traditionally, the Hanged Man represents submission. Not submission as annihilation but giving up something to achieve something else. A creation through reversal, perhaps.

While Expectation follows a linear pathway of increasing revelation, it also reverts into a twisted transformation. Perhaps nothing is revealed. Is something expressed? Mmm. What I perceive is a powerful commitment, an intensity of feeling, a modulation of theatrical effect and an episodic movement through phases. The cavernous Arts House space has been treated to good effect, creating frames and scenarios that make this piece feel like more than a solo work. The shifting occupation of its massive depth—far, near, high, low and diagonally—cuts back from any linear sense of progress. We are rather treated to a series of differences that vary in intensity. Mellow exudes a performative strength that seems to heighten as she comes nearer. Perhaps her own energy becomes more directed toward the observer when she vocalises and strips or perhaps the observer reciprocates something in response.

Expectation follows Carlee Mellow’s performance in Deborah Hay’s solo project, In the Dark (RT98, p22). It resonates with Hay’s attitude towards performative attention. Its theatrical tenor also suggests Margaret Cameron’s dramaturgical influence—whimsical, surreal, with a strong performative focus. Since Hay’s work is about performance quality rather than any physical look, the movement belongs to Mellow. There is a trace of Ros Warby too. Mellow’s weird soundings reminded me of Warby’s vocalisations when performing Hay’s work, as if both women were abducted by the same aliens.

My enduring impression of Expectation is a sense of delight at Carlee Mellow’s courage and commitment. There is a freshness in this work; a degree of structure but also an aliveness that left me alert. Perhaps this piece is not alone in its concern to achieve something in the moment, to connect with its audience, but it does so in its own way.

Arts House, Future Tense: Expectation, choreographer, performer Carlee Mellow, composer Kelly Ryall, design Bluebottle, dramaturgical consultant Margaret Cameron, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Nov 9-14, 2010

THE LAUNCH OF NEXT STAGE 2011 WAS HOT. THE TEMPERATURE WAS UP, THE WHARF 2 FOYER CRAMMED WITH ENTHUSIASTIC 20 SOMETHINGS AND ARTISTS THRILLED TO BE IN THE PROGRAM WHICH STC ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR TOM WRIGHT AND LITERARY MANAGER POLLY ROWE OUTLINED IN A NEAT DOUBLE ACT FOLLOWED BY A FEW WORDS EACH FROM DIRECTORS AND PERFORMERS.

Next Stage is focused on development, emerging artists, providing alternatives to the STC’s main program, attracting a different audience, “not trying to please everyone all the time” and “not setting expectations too high” for new works. Tickets are $25 and there’s a free beer per ticket offer.

First up in Next Stage 2011 is German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Before/After, directed by Cristabel Sved, who spoke mid-rehearsal of “the luxury of all working together and with all the languages of the stage being used.” A nice change from the challenges of resource-scarce independent theatre. With its 51 short scenes the play should provide a fascinating companion piece to the STC mainstage production of German writer Botho Strauss’ epic Big and Little Scenes.

Sam Routledge a collaborator with contemporary performance group My Darling Patricia expressed the group’s pleasure at being in Next Stage with Africa, originally a Malthouse commission, and outlined the origins of the work in the true story of German children caught running away to Africa. Told with puppets and broken toys, Africa presents a magical Australian perspective on childhood pain and fantasy.

Another innovative Sydney-based performance group, Post, in typical form stacked on a stand-up turn anticipating the themes and fun antagonism of their new work Who’s The Best? which was developed with Next Stage’s support in 2010.

Also developed in 2010, Money Shots will feature 15-minute plays about money by Tahli Corin, Duncan Graham, Angus Cerini, Rita Kalnejais, Zoe Pepper and The Suitcase Royale, directed by Richard Wherrett Fellow Sarah Giles and designed by Alice Babidge. As well the program continues the Rough Drafts series, week-long creative developments followed by free showings that allow audiences to track the growth of a play.

The heat’s on: Next Stage 2011 promises intense diversity of form as well as the means for hot-housing new work from a fascinating range of theatre and contemporary performance artists.

STALKER IS ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC PERFORMANCE COMPANIES, EVOLVING OVER TWO DECADES FROM STILT-WALKING SHOWS—WITH VERVE AND INTELLIGENCE—INTO INCREASINGLY SOPHISTICATED, RICHLY THEMED LARGE-SCALE WORKS, ALL PERFORMED OUTDOORS, AND THEN DIVERSIFYING INTO TWO COMPANIES, STALKER AND MARRUGEKU. BOTH HAVE RESHAPED NOTIONS OF PHYSICAL THEATRE, INCORPORATING OTHER ARTFORMS AND EMBRACING SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND METAPHYSICAL ISSUES AND THEMES WHILE ACHIEVING INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION.

Sydney-based Stalker is co-directed by David Clarkson and Rachael Swain, each contributing discrete shows to the company repertoire, while Marrugeku is co-directed by Swain and Broome-based choreographer Dalisa Pigram. I spoke with Clarkson and Swain after Stalker celebrated its 21st year at the end of 2010. Such longevity for a continually innovative company is quite an achievement, not least in a country of short-lived artistic ventures.

starting out on stilts

Clarkson tells me that an early version of the company had played in New Zealand for three years, but reformed in Sydney where it was joined by Swain in 1989 and given “$10,000 cold cash by the Sydney Festival after I showed them some of our New Zealand work and they said, ‘It looks great!’” Swain and Clarkson point out that their starting out was timely—the Expo in Brisbane and the Bicentennial had programmed a substantial number of outdoor works, as did the Perth Festival and the Spoleto Festival in Melbourne directed by John Truscott. Clarkson recalls that “within a year we were touring Australia-wide and within 18 months we were in Europe.”

I asked how the pair would describe their early work. “It was street theatre. Very high energy,” says Swain. “When we first got to Europe we made quite a big splash. David and I both grew up in New Zealand and I think there was a sense of the rhythms and energy of the Pacific in the work. It was quite pumping.” Adds Clarkson, “Our work was stilt-based and we took stilts somewhere that no-one else had. Dive rolls, backbend get-ups, carrying each other, throwing each other to the ground, picking each other up. Very bruising. ‘Hell for leather,’ that’s what it was. Stilt acrobatics.”

Swain mentions that Stalker was working with choreographers as early as their second show, Toy Cart (1990): “Nigel Kellaway directed and Rosalind Crisp choreographed and it premiered at Spoleto in 1990. It was high energy but it was also quite visually driven work and quite lyrical—a strong aesthetic that exists to this day.” Clarkson recalls that Swain “was never in love with Fast Ground (1989), our first piece, but looking back at it and at Grotowski’s movement work I can see connections—muscle and bone work, always distinctive from circus even though stilts are a circus thing. It was always for me about embodiment: ‘a state of being’ expressed through the body and what visual imagery we might use to support that embodiment.”

Swain and Clark acknowledge significant differences between their bodies of work, their aesthetics and Marrugeku’s artistic direction. Marrugeku started in 1995, commissioned into existence by Perth Festival. Stalker produces Marrugeku, but the company has its own life, based first in Central Arnhem Land for seven years and subsequently in Broome for eight, and with its own steering committee and direction. “But,” says Swain, “there are certain core elements that link all three bodies of work, combining dance theatre processes and aesthetics with circus forms and a fairly poetic, layered dramaturgy prevalent in all the works. David and I worked collectively to make material initially and then slowly brought other people in—Sue-ellen Kohler choreographed the third work we did, Angels ex Machina (1993)—often in very strong collaborative partnerships. Both of our processes are physical—we make material on the floor—like choreographers.”

working europe

Some of the aesthetic influences on Stalkers’ work came from their rapid arrival on the European summer festival street theatre touring circuit in their first year of existence. “We were exposed to a whole raft of European companies from the small street theatre acts through to really large scale: Generik Vapeur, La Furas dels Baus, Les Ballets C de la B, Vis-a-Vis, Dogtroep, all making very ambitious, large scale work.” Clarkson says that the company saw a model they thought they could adapt. “Some of the shows were in the streets, with a full 1,500 seat grandstand and all the production values, like the Dogtroep work. We saw a model used to create an incredible audience base and access to touring circuits, came back here and tried to function between the two markets, Europe and Australia. For about a decade that was both our advantage and, to a degree, our bête noir. We were trying to exist as if we were a European company but there wasn’t the market here for large scale outdoor shows outside the five major festivals.”

Swain regrets that “for me, the only presentation in Australia I’ve had outside a festival has been when the Sydney Opera House commissioned Incognita (2003). We’d spend our year in the European summer and come back for the Australasian summer for 10 to15 years.” Clarkson recalls that “in the early years we were on the road for 10 months of the year.” In the mid-90s, when Justin Macdonnell was the company’s manager, its circuit extended to Latin America, as it did to Japan with Marguerite Pepper and Rosemary Hinde. Clarkson says, “We were really surviving by touring and weren’t really funded early on. For youngish performers it was a tremendous experience and great exposure for us, an exciting way to live, but the ensemble burnt out. You can’t actually live by touring eight or nine months of the year.”

a model for survival

I asked when it was that Swain and Clarkson decided not to work together. Clarkson explains that he took “a big sabbatical in 1999. Blood Vessel was a Stalker show without me performing in it. I was in the States. Throughout the 90s we’d had a very close working relationship but then decided to go our own directions. [Arts consultant] Antony Jeffrey came in to work with us as facilitator to devise a new model. I think we both thought it meant either ending the company or one of us taking over. Personally I think what we got is a really great model for survival in the arts—shared infrastructure and management for two bodies of work that have similar sets of concerns.” Swain says, “it’s become a way of sharing resources and a point of dialogue and support for each other’s work, which I think we possibly wouldn’t have come up with ourselves. And so Antony is to be credited.”

market adjustments

Swain says she “went very strongly into the large scale outdoor theatre model and somehow managed to make that function until the dance theatre element of it became stronger and stronger and the large scale outdoor European summer festivals didn’t know how to program it. It was somehow too ‘arty’ for the summer festival world and the dance festivals that were starting to get interested didn’t know how to present outdoor work. So my work started to fall between the cracks and I think the fact that Shanghai Lady Killer [Swain’s latest creation for Stalker, 2010] became an indoor work has been a part of that process. I just wasn’t finding a way to park the work. Incognita should have had a longer life. It did three of the national Australian festivals, which is about as good as you can get in this country. Then in Europe we couldn’t fit either field any more. We have multi-arts festivals here so we’re used to all kinds of works being in a festival whereas in Europe they’re very artform specific.”

from the body

In 2010 David Clarkson created Mirror/Mirror (2009) for Stalker in collaboration with dancer Dean Walsh (RT94, p36). Before that he’d made Red (2004) and Four Riders (2001) “with an ensemble that I trained, with them taking on my approach to physicality.” Clarkson is currently developing a new work, Encoded, “working with a range of artists, virtual cameras and projection and point cloud generated animation” and wondering, “What is the next phase?” He suspects he’ll direct Encoded but not perform in it—“but it’s my own physicality that still enriches my creative process.” Like Swain’s Shanghai Lady Killer, Clarkson’s Mirror/Mirror also moved indoors.

a choreographic heritage

Rachael Swain appears to be working more and more choreographically, via collaboration with a range of choreographers, as in Incognita (2003) and Shanghai Lady Killer (2010) for Stalker and the Marrugeku creations (MIMI, 1996; Crying Baby, 2001; Burning Daylight, 2006, 2009). The works are large, multi-plane, theatrical, culturally dense. She attributes this in part to the influences of Europe in the 1990s and also of Stalker’s agent since 1991-2, Gie Baguet, as his first international company. Swain says, “Gie’s also the agent for Les Ballets C de la B and he introduced us to their work and other northern European dance theatre companies. The last decade for me has been a big project to bring something of their aesthetics into a dialogue with the kind of raw physicality of Australian dance and Australian new circus techniques. We saw so much work. We were in Amsterdam during the Yulidans international dance festival every year. We saw the evolution of the works of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Needcompany, Les Ballets C de la B. And we saw them every year. Australian physical theatre, dance theatre and circus have a really amazing physicality, a lot of which comes from a relationship with the landscape and the physical environment. I wanted to bring this and European aesthetics and processes together. A lot of that work is about a theatrical improvisational process that, as Alain Platel says, “sometimes leads to people dancing.”

That quotation puts me in mind of the work of Pina Bausch. Swain agrees: “Of course that is the lineage. Tim Etchells once said that he thought Forced Entertainment’s work was the end of a line of Chinese whispers that started in Wuppertal [the home of the Pina Bausch company]. And I sometimes think what we’re doing is too. Marrugeku’s Burning Daylight is the result of a very long Chinese whisper that started up in Wuppertal and went to Ghent through the collaboration between me and Koen Augustijnen [of Les Ballets C de la B] for Incognita and Serge Amié Coulibaly [from Burkina Faso; also worked with Les Ballets C de la B] for Burning Daylight and the classes I did over there.

“So I think that’s been the grand project on that front. Yes, I think I conceive and direct work as a choreographer but I really like to partner, most recently with Gavin Webber on Shanghai Lady Killer. Once again, that was about bringing European influenced contemporary dance from Gavin’s time with Wim Vandekeybus, formed through his time with ADT in a kind of loop back into the Australian dance theatre vernacular. I think that’s an ongoing project. And when I’m on the floor I’m working in an improvisational dance theatre process in shaping work.”

Swain is developing Shanghai Lady Killer after its 2010 Brisbane Festival premiere. “It’s a really big work for Stalker. It’s very complicated, an Australian-Chinese martial arts thriller that combines the wire and stunt work used in martial arts films, trampolines on stage, Chinese pole techniques and Wushu which is a particularly lyrical form of Chinese martial arts, in a kind of plot-driven futuristic thriller narrative. This was my first time working with a writer [filmmaker Tony Ayres] which was a great and challenging experience.”

Clarkson says he’s captivated by Shanghai Lady Killer despite early reservations about “the commercial narrative structure which I’ve always had problems with because it’s so bloody dominant.” Swain points out that she and Ayres conceived the show before the Global Financial Crisis when “there was a niche appearing for arthouse commercial theatre,” with some opportunities for radical, culturally diverse content. “But the GFC hit and the support that we had for it internationally went. We’d been aiming for a multi-million dollar version, but had to scale way, way, way back down. We were very lucky to be commissioned by the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals through the Major Festivals Initiative Fund—enormous support and a big project for the fund. I think there is a big national home for Shanghai Lady Killer.”

intergenerational cultural sustainability

I wonder if Swain craves work on a smaller project. “Absolutely!” she replies. “We premiered Buru [Broome, 2010] straight after Shanghai Lady Killer. It’s a much smaller work although it’s still got a fairly large cast. It was devised and created with 10 young performers from Broome aged between 10 and 21—so it’s a very different feel. We worked for three years together with elders from the Broome community, very much in the wake of Burning Daylight, grasping this model as a way to use theatre as a sustainable form of culture, of carrying stories forward—obviously not the [sacred stories] but the ones they really want to pass on, to be public. The elders started to come into rehearsal and to say this is what I think should be happening now. It was a great moment for the company where there was really direct intergenerational knowledge transmission occurring in the rehearsal process and the young performers were really given the work to take forward. So effectively, we’ve established a youth company for Marrugeku. I don’t know if that means a fourth string to our bow now!”

Clarkson is similarly focused on intergenerational connections: “There’s a piece I’m doing called Elevate out at Penrith with three 19-year-olds, a kind of hip hop street stilt piece which is very much about the next generation. I think it’s only appropriate. Theatre is a gift that’s given to you and you pass it on.”

Swain says that “when I came to writing the speech for Stalker’s 21st birthday celebrations, I momentarily found it quite depressing. What is there after 21 years? What is left behind is ephemeral, in the memories of our audiences in all those different contexts, all over the world. And because that’s been so diverse for us and because what Stalker is in Belgium or what Stalker is in Colombia or what Stalker is in Perth, they’re all different, presented in very different models and to different sectors of the community. Twenty-one years of blood, sweat and tears, quite literally…broken bones and all that.

“But there are company members who have been in our work, learned new skills and gone on and done their own work or gone into other companies and contributed to other processes. I certainly hope in Marrugeku’s case that what comes after us will be the measure of the company’s success—finding a language that reflects the Aboriginal elders’ complexity of knowledge but that is also very contemporary. It is very hard to find the comprehension of that work, especially overseas. People often just don’t know what they’re looking at. I hope that we’re opening doors and that further down the track there’ll be more appreciation.”

Stalker have created a significant legacy over 21 very creative years. If the company had fallen apart a decade ago, that legacy might not have been as rich. Swain thinks that “there were times when I’ve thought had we been sane human beings we would have stopped.” Clarkson agrees, “Either financially or personally…but there have been big rewards, tremendous experiences.” And Swain concurs. Happy 21st, Stalker.

IF NIETZSCHE GOT IT RIGHT, AND HUMANS ARE LESS STATIC BEINGS THAN INCONSTANT BECOMINGS, THEN SURELY THE SAME CAN BE SAID OF THE INSTITUTIONS WE CREATE. CERTAINLY, THE MUCH-DISCUSSED “CHANGING OF THE GUARD” IN AUSTRALIA’S MAJOR ARTS ORGANISATIONS HAS MANY THEATRE PUNDITS PONDERING WHETHER THESE COMPANIES WILL BE PUSHED TO REINVENT THEMSELVES AS A RESULT, OR WHETHER IT’LL BE BUSINESS AS USUAL WITH A NEW BRAND IMAGE. LOOKING AT THE SMALLER GROUPS MAKING WORK IN MELBOURNE TODAY, HOWEVER, WHAT’S MORE EVIDENT IS HOW THE NATURE OF SUCH ARTISTIC ENTITIES IS ALWAYS A NEGOTIATION BETWEEN AN ENDURING IDENTITY AND A FIELD OF POSSIBILITY.

the nest

The Hayloft Project has remained one of the most exciting companies in Australia for several years, but focusing on the through-lines that connect each Hayloft production can distract from the impressive imaginative diversity it has also offered. Its final production for 2010 was The Nest, and while the production furthered the company’s interest in classic (especially Russian) texts adapted for a contemporary world, it was also a significant departure from what’s gone before.

Firstly, it saw Artistic Director Simon Stone hand over the reins. While Hayloft productions are almost always helmed by Stone as director, he has also allowed others to create their own works under the company aegis without overt artistic intrusion from its founder. 2009’s Yuri Wells was a hugely successful experiment in this vein, and that show’s creators also form the creative core of The Nest.

Taking as their source Maxim Gorky’s The Philistines, Benedict Hardie and Anne-Louise Sarks have developed a wonderful script that seems utterly of our time. As with Yuri Wells, Sarks again directs and Hardie performs, with a sizeable and accomplished cast making up a strong ensemble. Performed in the round (or, rather, square), Sarks displays a terrific command of pace, shifting quickly from scenes of crowded chaos to tiny, intimate moments of solitude or suspense. Despite the relatively brief running time—around 90 minutes—the sense of an expansive and credible world is quickly established, and something of the sweeping historical consciousness which often infuses Russian playwriting is maintained here.

But where productions of Gorky (or Chekhov for that matter) walk an uneasy line between historical specificity and more universal relevance, how would you know that The Nest hadn’t been written from scratch yesterday if you hadn’t already been told? The only thing that really reminds us of its origins is that oh-so-Russian habit of having countless characters turn up unannounced. Even this slightly anachronistic theatrical convention is knowingly laughed at after the production concludes and the theme songs from various sit-coms are played (sit-coms, of course, being the only place where it’s still acceptable for a constant stream of acquaintances to invade the house at all hours).

I’ve no doubt that in different hands—Stone’s, for instance—The Nest would have been a very different beast. But its inclusion within the Hayloft’s broader output only expands the company’s creative reach, making it home to a multiplicity of voices rather than a single, unitary directive. It’s all the better for it.

Georgina Naidu, Greg Ulfan Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, Melbourne Workers Theatre

yet to ascertain the nature of the crime

Melbourne Workers Theatre, conversely, has had many esteemed directors across the decades, but is now undergoing a radical reinvention. Its last production, Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, hinted at the plans new director Gorkem Acaroglu has for recreating the company as one solely dedicated to documentary theatre, as well as a more general shift away from creating works based primarily around class concerns towards addressing a wider variety of contemporary social issues.

Yet to Ascertain…spoke to this new brief with outstanding clarity, incorporating questions of class and work but also closely scrutinising the realities of race relations in Australia today. It was developed from a range of verbatim sources including interviews, journalistic articles, official reports and first-person narratives. Three performers re-enacted these exchanges in a variety of theatrical styles, from frankly silly Bollywood dances to skit-comedy routines to sincere and moving monologues. Though patchy in tone, the collective weight of the production was considerable, and a lengthy final sequence in which a taxi driver is attacked by racist passengers before his own cab-driving community comes to his rescue is simply breathtaking theatre.

Though largely played in somewhat exaggerated, consciously theatrical ways, the various narratives produced here were of an intricate and provocative nature. Many circled around the experiences of Indian students and immigrants in Melbourne, including the real incidents of racially-motivated violence which have made international headlines as well as more engendered and institutionalised forms of discrimination. There are layers of irony to many of the word-for-word recountings of victims themselves, including denials that Australia is home to racism, as well as the police statements which are the basis for the show’s title. At the same time, contrary viewpoints which complicate the notion of racism as an ‘us vs them’ binary add to the overall challenge—and lack of easy answers—which the show presents to its audience. It’s a pity Yet to Ascertain…had such a short season, but it’s certainly an inspiring beginning for the company’s next stage of development.

the blue show

Circus Oz’s The Blue Show was billed from the outset as something unusual from the company. Housed in its new Spiegeltent, it promised an adults-only show as part of the midsumma festival, but what eventuated was something quite different. Less ‘adult’ in content than context, it was more an ageless celebration of sheer fleshy joy. Many similar Spiegeltent burlesques end up as shop-worn sequences of fairly tame titillation and nudge-nudge cabaret. Here, rather, was nudity and humour with a lack of inhibition that is often only found in children—it wasn’t that the acts set out to transgress social boundaries, but that they didn’t seem to even admit of their existence. Sure, there’s appeal in a show that allows us to enjoy a drink in intimate surrounds without toddlers scampering underfoot, but very much the same show could have played to all ages at an earlier timeslot without risking much outrage.

For me, the company’s regular higher profile family outings have long been hampered by “kid-friendly” clowning that doesn’t evince the same sophistication as some of the more intricate routines; the performers are all top-notch, but their talents can come across as dumbed-down when they don’t need to be. The Blue Show treats its audience as adults, as capable of viewing on a range of levels, but it also seems to me that many kids are just as able to handle this kind of subtle complexity. It’s encouraging to see the company branch off in this direction, and one can only hope that some of the acuity and focus displayed here will develop in the company’s more popular ventures in the future.

The Hayloft Project, The Nest, writers Benedict Hardie, Anne-Louise Sarks, after Maxim Gorky’s The Philistines, director Anne-Louise Sarks, performers Sarah Armanious, Stuart Bowden, Stefan Bramble, Alexander England, Brigid Gallacher, Julia Grace, Benedict Hardie, Carl Nilsson-Polias, Meredith Penman, James Wardlaw, set Claude Marcos, costumes Mel Page, lighting Lisa Mibus, music & sound design Russell Goldsmith, Northcote Town Hall, December 4–19, 2010; Melbourne Workers Theatre, Yet to Ascertain the Nature of the Crime, writer Roanna Gonsalves with Raimondo Cortese, Damien Miller, director Gorkem Acaroglu, performers Georgina Naidu, Greg Ulfan, Andreas Littras, performance consultant John Bolton, sound design by Mik La Vage, lighting Jason Lehane; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Nov 24-28, 2010; Circus Oz, The Blue Show, director Anni Davey, Circus Oz Melba Spiegeltent, Jan 13-Feb 6, 2011

Natalie Rose, Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, Post

IN A DELIRIUM OF RIGHTEOUS FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM, WESTERN CAPITALISM, ONSELLING UNSUPPORTABLE LOANS THE WORLD OVER, WENT MAD. SOME OBSERVERS RECOGNISED THE SIGNS OF INSANITY AND FORESAW IMMINENT COLLAPSE, THE REST OF US SUFFERED THE DELIRIUM OF THE AFTERSHOCKS AS STATE ECONOMIES, JOBS AND HOUSING MARKETS WERE SUCKED INTO A HELLISH BLACK HOLE.

Even if you didn’t feel the impact of the Global Financial Collapse in the pocket (a welcome $900 cheque from Prime Minister Rudd aside) you doubtless spent time anxiously wondering what had actually happened and would it recur in the shape of a much anticipated vicious double dip recession.

Nervous times yielded countless articles, broadcasts and books providing analyses simple and complex of the Global Finance Collapse. Some have been reassuring—providing a clear chain of cause and effect running from bad economic theory to market deregulation to failed governance and downright corruption. Others have revealed more worrying networks of disturbance, from unrelated one-off criminal acts (Bernie Madoff, a handy villain) to globalisation’s maximisation of the GFC’s impact, from American Republican and Australian Liberal politicians arguing for brutal economic clean-slating instead of stimulus packages to Detroit’s motor industry tsars driving cars to Washington’s Senate Enquiry and all of us having to grasp the reality that the USA was in substantial debt to China. The world had truly turned upside-down.

How can art assist in a time of paranoia and breathtaking absolutism? Belvoir’s B Sharp, in one of its last acts, brought relief and enlightenment in the form of A Distressing Scenario, a double bill from Sydney performance companies Post and version 1.0.

Of the two performances, Post’s Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, more effectively conveyed the aforementioned sense of delirium with a virtuosic stringing together of unlikely causes and effects, the semi-lecture format reinforced with bizarre chalkboarding (the board itself revealing ever new extensions) and interrupted with manic dancing, the waving of sparklers and the positioning of champagne bottles in readiness for the ultimate release.

The experience was like having the GFC explained to us by the ill-read, the ill-informed and the plain ill—the bandaged performers presented variously as victims of car accident, tonsilitis, cocaine addiction and pregnancy, all impediments to putting their show together. Undaunted, the Post trio launched into an elaborate and diffuse explanation of the GFC replete with muddled and inaccurate historical grabs and bizarre connections altogether reminiscent of paranoid popular media. An exhausting whirligig of associations dated GFC origins back to Rockefeller, the corn market, popcorn and the decline of the cinema, the 1988 Australian Bicentennial and Bette Midler tours as positive market indicators. These were accompanied by wild speculations about the value of training monkeys in universities and why there are no jaws of death for newsagents. The sheer, manic drive of the performance, its bracing informality, the self-belief, its mad poetry and smatterings of GFC-reality sucked an initially wary audience into a vortex of nigh impossibly suspended disbelief.

Everything I Know…was durational in every sense, for the courageous performers, sometimes perilously over-taxed, and for an audience riding the wild waves of free association, coursing the looping illogic and withstanding the recurrent, battering dance passages and the final champagne spray. With wicked ease, but little to celebrate as bankers and brokers clawed back their bonuses, Post left us nonetheless wiser about the way the human brain miscalculates and rationalises its way into disasters of the order of the GFC.

After the brief respite of intermission and anticipating further assault, we were bemused to find ourselves removed from Post’s compulsive cosmos and relocated to the parallel universe of version 1.0’s The Market is Not Functioning Properly. Same Big Bang—the GFC; same problems—how to comprehend and survive economic disaster; similar symptoms—faltering rationality and increasing delirium. The Market’s performers also, like Post, reveal themselves to be performers (“I’m an artist: no finances to speak of,” declares one).

But the Post and version 1.0 universes travel in opposite directions. Instead of the desperate, gutsy vigour of Everything I Know, The Market is neat, tautly framed, carefully paced. Two genteel women (Jane Phegan, Kim Vercoe) in pearls and satin gowns appear to parody themselves and then, more archly, middle-class womanhood as they grapple with the GFC and their domestic budgets (laid out on laminated cards that threaten to slip from their grasp). If Post are wildly mock educational, version 1.0 are calculatedly didactic. The women puzzle and bicker informatively beneath three screens inhabited by unreassuring world leaders, all men, alternating with three Australians, also men, with very little to say about the GFC.

As finances and life become less manageable (cut back on wine, on Belvoir tickets), the women strike poses of fright before the images of these men (the powerful and the ‘ordinary’ at times superimposed), dance awkwardly, swing together in violent circles, teeter on the edge of the raised stage and, finally, spew champagne into buckets hanging immediately before us. But they might as well have gone to pieces on another planet from our own. We could recognise the symptoms of their GFC-induced malaise but where was the rich, cranky substance of appalling cause and effect that we have come to associate with version 1.0? The Market was a surprisingly tame affair for a company whose major works have surreally and satirically brought to light the frightening deployment of power in politics, media and gender relations—revealing that the irrationalities and manipulation involved don’t have to be exaggerated, but reframed in order to be seen. Version 1.0 have set their benchmark very high and we expect a lot, not least the means with which to do battle with the insidious GFC.

B Sharp, A Distressing Scenario: Post, Everything I Know About the Global Financial Crisis in One Hour, deviser-performers Zoe Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose; version 1.0, The Market is Not Functioning Properly, deviser-performers Jane Phegan, Kym Vercoe, director David Williams, video artist Sean Bacon, sound Paul Prestipino, lighting Frank Mainoo; Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, Nov 25-Dec 19

IN REALTIME 100, I GREETED THE 2011 BELVOIR PROGRAM WITH ENTHUSIASM. NEW ARTISTIC DIRECTOR RALPH MYERS’ LARGELY YOUNG TEAM OF DIRECTORS (INCLUDING SEVERAL WOMEN), A MIX OF RARELY SEEN CLASSICS (INCLUDING RAY LAWLER’S SUMMER OF THE SEVENTEENTH DOLL TO BE DIRECTED BY OUTGOING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR NEIL ARMFIELD), NEW PLAYS, A DANCE PIECE AND TWO ABORIGINAL WORKS COMPRISE A SERIOUSLY INVITING PROGRAM. IN ADDITION, THE INCORPORATION OF THE DOWNSTAIRS THEATRE INTO THE OVERALL PROGRAM SEEMS A SIGNIFICANT OPPORTUNITY TO PHILOSOPHICALLY AND PRACTICALLY EXPAND BELVOIR’S PROGRAM AND REACH.

MYERS, IN OUR FIRST MEETING, CONFIRMS HIS REPUTATION AS AMIABLE, FUNNY AND SHARP. HE’S AN ACCLAIMED THEATRE DESIGNER, NOT A STAGE DIRECTOR [AS YET], SO I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO USE THAT AS THE PIVOT FOR OUR CONVERSATION.

You trained in visual arts, specifically in silversmithing, but then you went to NIDA.

I’m a bit impatient and hasty to see a quick result which is why I thought I might not make a good jeweller. And there’s something great about theatre design and indeed the process of making theatre in general. It’s something that happens quite quickly, you get a big result quite quickly and it’s all kind of slightly junky, which I think appeals to my kind of sensibility.

It’s ephemeral—you only need to make it last for a season while achieving the impression and the sensation that you’re trying to generate in the mind of an audience. Jewellery making—and I’m touching my wedding ring as I say this—is about the integrity of the material. How many carats is the gold, how well is it constructed, how many hundreds of years is it going to last? What I like about theatre is the exact opposite of that.

It is and that’s a strangely fugitive thing as well. Memories twist and transform. Neil’s wonderful production of Diary of a Madman makes quite an interesting comparison between what theatre was like 20 years ago in Sydney and now. He’s pretty faithfully reproduced that 1989 production with Geoffrey Rush and the original team, the original designers. It’s marvellous that even though it’s not that old, it’s stylistically from another era.

There are times when you have to live with your designs a lot longer than a Sydney season. A Streetcar Named Desire going to the US must have posed interesting challenges.

It’s a slightly horrible thing to say, but the ones that have the longest lives are not always the ones you want to. The curious thing about being a set designer is that ultimately you need to serve the vision of the director. So sometimes you have to make a decision to put your taste and your sensibilities—and your fears—aside and allow the director to ultimately make the decision.

Absolutely. And she is an extraordinary figure, an important artist of the 20th century. Who am I to tell her what to do? I’m working on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the moment both as set designer and as artistic director of the company. We’re finding a way for that to work. And it does work because Simon Stone the director is very clear about his ideas and vision. So it’s not muddy.

There are a number of strong directors around who could be labelled auteurs, who arrive not just with a play but also a design concept for the designer to realise rather than invent.

You get directors who know exactly what they want and the task is making that work within the space and the parameters. And there are always an infinite number of details to resolve. I don’t mind that. I’ve been in situations for instance with Benedict [Andrews] where he’s led the process very much—I’ve realised an idea that’s come to me from him very much fully formed. On the other hand there have been other situations where the idea has been largely mine and it’s evolved in conversation. Barrie Kosky is another example. He has very strong ideas about what he wants. To be honest I find that the better directors know precisely what they want or latch onto an idea and allow it to be followed through to its logical conclusion. When I was working with Neil Armfield on Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes for Opera Australia, I’m fairly sure Neil came up with the idea of setting it in a church hall. I built a model of it and very quickly we realised that it would work. Then he allowed me to realise that very much on my own. So there’s quite an element of trust and understanding.

Your father was an architect, your mother a visual arts teacher; I’m very interested in the architectural quality of your work. It seems to me that some designers have a better architectural and spatial sense than others (whose work might resonate, say, with contemporary visual arts or technology or interior design). In certain of the shows you’ve designed the architectural quality is pronounced—those huge floating rooms in The Lost Echo (STC) or the room that revolves in Measure for Measure (Company B), that modernist superstructure hanging over a very ordinary, aged apartment in Streetcar Named Desire (STC), the grim in-the-round basement world for Blackbird (STC), the hall in Peter Grimes. They all struck me as very three-dimensional, very substantial. For all that ephemerality, they felt eerily solid.

I’m interested in solid things. My mother was an architect before I was born. I’ve always been around architects. I suppose if you come from a family of tailors, you look at what people wear. I am interested in people and space. I’m flattered that you think my work seems solid. The thing you’re fighting in theatre is that nothing is solid really. It’s all made out of bits of cardboard.

How do you feel about The Wild Duck? Do you engage with the actors and the director about the way the space is being used and inhabited?

I try to attend rehearsals as much as I can. I really like being in rehearsals. And of course the more you’re there the better the design serves the purposes of the play. I’d like to be there all the time but you can’t always be. In all good rehearsal rooms, there’s a certain amount of cross-fertilisation. Actors will suggest something about the set and you can suggest something about how they do their performance (LAUGHS). In the end it all comes out in the wash.

One of the tricks of being a good designer is to maintain as much flexibility as you can within the structures of how companies like this will work. All theatre and opera companies and certainly production departments will try to lock down the physical elements of production as early as they can because it makes it very much easier for them to do their job. One of the difficult things to say after the second preview might be: “Actually, it should all be pink” or “I think this is completely wrong. Let’s get rid of the set and do it on an empty stage” or “I think she should be wearing a wedding dress.” These things throw a spanner in the works, blow the budget and make it very difficult. But ultimately that’s what you might need to do: use the time at your disposal to make the production as good as you possibly can. Sometimes you can’t have the best idea three months in advance of the production or, in the case of opera, 18 months.

One of the things I’m conscious of as artistic director of this company is allowing it to remain pretty responsive, which it always has been. As a set designer this was the one place where you really could change your mind quite late which is a really fabulous thing. I think this probably comes from Neil’s chronic inability to make artistic decisions (LAUGHS). He’s left a great legacy for the rest of us.

For Measure for Measure you were working with projections and onstage cameras. You’ve made it clear elsewhere that you see theatre as a very different realm from film and new media—that’s not to say you’d exclude them. But that work provided a fascinating experience in terms of design, accommodating the revolving room that keeps transforming and the screens that frame it.

I’m often extremely sceptical about the use of audio-visual material in theatre productions because I think it can be a substitute for something that could be shown in real time or ‘real life.’ The figure on the screen is often much more interesting to watch than the onstage figure, because of scale. So your eye tends to be drawn there which starts to beg the question well why is there a figure there at all onstage? As you know, Benedict’s extremely interested in working in that way. As the designer for Measure for Measure of course I went along with it, made it work as best I could within the space, worked with Sean Bacon and in the end I think it was extraordinary. You gain something, of course, by the use of the camera to show a kind of detail that otherwise couldn’t be seen. That’s much more interesting than showing what you can already see. So Benedict’s focus on Mariana’s wedding—you know touching her engagement ring at the top of Act 3—or zooming in as he did in The Season at Sarsaparilla on a detail or moment that would otherwise be lost to the audience, is extremely interesting. It’s an interesting extension of that idea.

I suppose there’s not much you can reveal about your design for The Wild Duck at this stage. What would you say is the creative impulse for you in the production?

It’s extremely exciting. I don’t want to jinx it by saying it’s going to be good but Simon has a very sharp brain and a very good sense of what’s at his disposal in terms of the actors and the resources that are available to him after coming from a background in independent theatre where everything is slightly difficult to get hold of. Here things are more possible. That said, it’s quite a restrained production, not over the top in any way. He’s essentially taken the core story of The Wild Duck, those six central characters, the inevitable playing out of an action over a short period of time that happens in Ibsen plays, and stripped it of all the stuff around it, rewritten it and placed it in a very spare environment.

It’s even more abstract than that somehow. It’s really no space at all. The adaptation has a kind of charm that’s often missing from the adaptation of classics—a kind of lightness, playfulness and charm that’s very easy to lose when you’re trying to faithfully adapt something. It’s a bit like—while being nothing like—Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde in that the way that people interact with each other doesn’t always reflect the great drama and import of the things that are being discussed. I don’t know how Simon manages to create that. He’s got a very playful rehearsal room. There’s a great deal of light. But it’s a horrific play. A 14-year-old girl in the end shoots herself.

Obviously like many before you, you’re enamoured of the Belvoir St Theatre space, and you’ve worked it before. Will you occasionally lease yourself out to bigger stages?

I’m working on a production for Opera Australia in 2012. That’s the only thing I’m doing outside at the moment. I’m designing for Benedict’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull for our 2011 program.

It’s an enormous pleasure listening to a whole lot of people speak very passionately and enthusiastically about the things they want to do. The difficulty, of course, is choosing which ones to take up. A company like this should be as open as it can be, as able to hear as many ideas from as broad a range of places as possible. One of the challenges for a company is that you can become insular or that you only turn to people you know or who you’ve worked with before, which I think is extremely dangerous. The other side of that is that you have to listen to a whole lot of bad ideas from a whole lot of people too. But that’s okay. So that’s a great pleasure. And then you make a salad out of it. And there are a lot of reasons why some things end up in the mix and others don’t but really nothing ends up in there that I don’t think is going to be good or interesting or hopefully both. I very much started the process with the ambition to not include anything simply for pragmatic reasons.

Yes and you never can anyway. From a few years of working at the Sydney Theatre Company and from many years around the traps working as a designer in lots of theatre companies, you see that there are things that a company does for legitimate and artistic reasons and there are other things they do to satisfy what they imagine the audience wants or what’s going to make money, all sorts of reasons. My one ambition is to not have one of those productions. We’re lucky we can do that here. We don’t have quite the pressures of the big state companies. It’s an enviable position. The trade-off for winding up the B Sharp program was that we were going to be able to do fully staged productions down there. The disadvantage was that we wouldn’t be able to do so many of them. My ambition is to build that up over time so that it has the same volume and energy that B Sharp had but where everybody is being paid. My big ambition is to employ more artists in general. It’s surprising how few people think that’s a good idea [LAUGHS]. But I think it’s critical for a city of this size, a city as fabulous as Sydney to have a lush and thriving artistic community. And I think you have to do that by directing money towards people to do it. We’re the third or fourth biggest theatre company in the country. I think we need to face that reality.

Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, directed by Simon Stone, featuring performers John Gaden, Anita Hegh, Ewen Leslie, Eloise Mignon, Anthony Phelan, Toby Schmitz and designer Ralph Myers is playing at Belvoir Street Theatre, Feb 12-March 27; Belvoir, artistic director Ralph Myers, Sydney; www.belvoir.com.au

HERE’S AN INSPIRED IDEA: NOT ONLY PLAY A SERIES OF EIGHT CLASSIC AUSTRALIAN STAGE AND RADIO PLAYS PRODUCED BY THE ABC OVER THE DECADES BUT ALSO INTRODUCE EACH WITH CAREFULLY AND INVENTIVELY CRAFTED 30-MINUTE INTRODUCTIONS FROM WRITERS (WHERE AVAILABLE), PRODUCERS, ACTORS AND SPECIALIST COMMENTATORS FLESHING OUT THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND AESTHETIC WORLDS AND CREATIVE IMPULSES FROM WHICH THE WORKS EMERGED. PLAYING THE 20TH CENTURY REALISES THE VISION WITH VERVE.

The series is a collaboration between ABC Radio National’s Hindsight and Airplay programs aiming to “chart a century of Australian theatre” from Louis Esson’s The Time Is Not Yet Ripe (1912) to Katherine Thompson’s Diving for Pearls (which won the Louis Esson Prize for Drama in 1991!). The other plays are Betty Roland’s The Touch of Silk, Douglas Stewart’s radio verse play Fire on the Snow, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed, David Williamson’s The Removalists and Frank Moorhouse’s experimental radio drama Loss of a Friend by Cablegram.

Of the three introductions I’ve listened to so far, it was the world conjured by the reflections of Moorhouse, McLennan and actor Arthur Dignam on Loss of a Friend by Cablegram that I found the most engrossing. The commentaries on The Time Is Not Yet Ripe from academics John McCallum and PJ Matthews were richly informative but the voice given Esson (from his letters) was not engaging and the documentary’s structure is the least inventive of the three. The introduction to Diving for Pearls however is full of the sounds of its Port Kembla steelworks and coastal setting and there is clever segueing from playwright Thompson’s voice into those of her characters along with astute observations from the play’s first stage director Ros Horin and Di Kelly from the University of Wollongong on the political context.

The appeal of the introduction to Loss of a Friend by Cablegram for me lies in its embodiment of a period of transition in radio drama production in the early 1980s from the imitation of the live theatre experience on air to more intimate approaches, from single take recordings on tape (often subsequently destroyed) to intensively edited productions, from crude FX to field recordings (the right acoustic) and from predictable structures to experiments in form. McLennan, who produced the play, details these transitions with amusement against the sounds of tapes running and creaky old FX. Again there’s a brisk alternation between the documentary voices and the original recording which was made with Dignam and Robyn Nevin in a room in the Sebel Town House in Kings Cross with verite intimacy and a lovely depth of field. Typical of the period of transition the sense of experiment that comes with Moorhouse’s writing is undercut by stilted, hyper-articulated stage delivery. Even so there’s much to amuse and even disturb in the production as a man and his estranged wife deal with his bisexuality, not least when she asks, “Did you think you were a woman when you lived with me, when we were married?”

There’s much to enjoy from Moorhouse about writing, about notebooks (which provide the play’s structure), about bisexuality, and from Dignam about working in radio (“When I started to learn how to drink”—as the actors headed off to a Push pub after recording for, as Moorhouse puts it, “critical drinking”) and the pleasant experience of being involved in a new way of working. Even so McLennan is surprised that most of Loss of a Friend by Cablegram was largely recorded in real time, in the traditional manner, even Dignam’s character’s inner thoughts—achieved by the actor simply turning to another microphone. Producer Catherine Gough-Brady’s introduction to the play offers insights about the writer, the work and an era of transition—sexual and aesthetic—telling us much about radio as well as the Australian play.

ABC Radio National, Airplay and Hindsight, Playing the 20th Century, producers Catherine Gough-Brady, Regina Botros, presenter Andrew McLennan, broadcast Dec 19, 2010-Feb 6, 2011; the series can be heard at www.abc.net.au/rn/playingthe20thcentury/

TARGET, THE ITCH AND ANOTHER LAMENT ARE THE WILD PROGENY OF CHAMBER MADE OPERA’S 2010 LIVING ROOM OPERA SERIES, AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO FUNDING NEW WORKS ENCOMPASSING PRIVATE PATRONAGE, GOVERNMENT SUBSIDY AND CROWDFUNDING. A HOST PROVIDES THEIR LIVING ROOM AS THE PERFORMANCE SPACE, WHILE BOOKING ONE OF THE LIMITED SEATS (IF YOU’RE LUCKY YOU’LL ACTUALLY GET THE SOFA) COMES WITH RECOGNITION AS A CO-COMMISSIONER, FOOD, WINE AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISCUSS THE WORK WITH THE COMPOSER AND FELLOW AUDIENCE-PATRONS.

While the Living Room Opera series has precedents in salon performance traditions, its particular combination of funding and social strategies gives hosts, audiences, composers and performers a unique sense of ownership, opening up the possibilities for original and inspired creations.

Luke Paulding’s Target re-imagines the Ancient Greek myth of Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals abducted by Zeus to serve as cup bearer to the gods; Alex Garsden’s The Itch musically embellishes an article from The New Yorker in 2008 about a woman who awoke one morning with an chronic itch on her head (RT100, p40); and Another Lament (a collaboration between double bassist and singer Ida Duelund Hansen, from the mixed-ability performance ensemble Rawcus, and sound designer Jethro Woodward) explores the death of the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. The young composers’ musical styles are as varied as their subjects, from the bleeding edge of extended string techniques to jazz-inflected baroque arias.

“I did not especially set out to work with young composers,” claims Artistic Director David Young, “the works speak for themselves.” As many composers struggle to find funding once they grow out of the youth bracket of government grants, the Living Room Opera series provides a valuable lesson in alternative sources of funding for its participants.

target

Performed in “Melbourne’s living room,” La Mama, the work in progress Target showcases Paulding’s distinctive timbral vocabulary in exploration of the dynamics of sexual desire and fear in ancient and contemporary worlds. Through saccades between episodes of delicate wind, percussion and vocal extended techniques, Target’s enchantingly transparent sonic palette evokes a world of short attention span pleasure as Zeus (baritone Matthew Thomas) towers over Ganymede (boy soprano Jordan Janssen) in the cramped La Mama theatre. Flute and tuba breath tones flicker at the periphery of hearing until the terrifying and terrified power of Zeus’ voice is brought down upon Ganymede at the moment of his abduction. Ganymede interrupts the peripheral hum not with screams but with silence, the boy’s twittering interrupted by the glottal stops of trauma.

The audience was intimately close to the ensemble in La Mama’s black box, ensuring that none of the subtlety of Paulding’s composition was lost. After the performance, the audience had the opportunity to ask questions of the composer and hear key sections of the opera again. As David Young explains, the Living Room Opera concept takes its cue from the 19th century tradition of salon performances, where virtuosi would bash out the latest works by Liszt and gentlemen would show off their fine baritone in an intimate, semi-private setting. Beyond a small-scale format for the development of new grand works, Young sees the salon format as serving a pedagogical purpose. Warning that “this is not just a nostalgic experiment,” Young wants audiences to “learn more by having a close experience and speaking with the artists after the show.”

The didactic ending to Target evoked not only salon performances but also Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances of 1918–21. Formed for the development of musical understanding, the well-rehearsed works were repeated as many as six times during a single program. Unlike at the strictly pedagogical performances of Schoenberg’s Society, there was no shortage of applause at the conclusion of Target, which is set to become a fully-fledged Living Room Opera later this year.

the itch

With Alex Garsden’s The Itch, the Living Room Opera series moved in to full swing. Fiona Sweet and Paul Newcombe’s open plan living space filled with interested patrons quaffing wine while the performers loitered outside a set of french doors. Although Garsden’s masterful representation of skin irritation on string instruments was hard on even the most seasoned ears and despite the occasional twitch, cough or scratch of discomfort, the audience sat in rapt attention to Garsden’s score and soprano Carolyn Connors’ pained vocalisations. This was not an audience looking for a pleasant night’s entertainment, but one intent on supporting new music.

Offering the perks of being recognised as co-commissioner of the work, speaking with composer and performers, and sharing the performance in an intimate setting with like-minded aficionados, events like The Itch resemble Kickstarter and Fundbreak crowdfunding campaigns, where fans sponsor small-scale cultural projects. They are rewarded, depending on the size of their donation, with things like back catalogue CDs and visits to the recording studio of the supported artist. (Since Kickstarter campaigns rarely gather donations from outside the campaigner’s circle of friends of friends, it might be more correct to say that crowdfunding campaigns resemble an intimate living room gathering of a network of interested persons more than the decentralised and anonymous peer group that the “crowdfunding” appellage suggests.)

another lament

Another Lament takes as its inspiration the death of English baroque composer Henry Purcell. So the colourful version of the story goes, Purcell succumbed to pneumonia after his wife locked him out in the snow when he returned from a long night of carousing at the local theatre. Hosts Deidre and Naham Warhaft’s hallway and twin living spaces, separated by screen doors, provide a double proscenium arch for Rawcus director Kate Sulan’s immaculately choreographed tableaux vivants. Sulan uses the house’s depth and wings to conceal the Rawcus ensemble and lighting by Richard Vabre, haunting the tripartite stage with apparitions so carefully placed as to seem to have always inhabited the space. Even in moments of frenzied activity, when plates are broken and Purcell begs at the front door, the audience seems to be haunting a haunting quite indifferent to their presence.

Sulan’s use of simple repetition and broken symmetries complements Duelund Hansen’s pared back interpretations of Purcell hits on voice and double bass. She utilises a vast stylistic spectrum from baroque to jazz harmonies and mid-20th century Central European atonality, to extended vocal and double bass techniques. Her reinterpretations of Purcell demonstrate an expressive continuum in harmonic and timbral composition from unnerving baroque contrapuntal dissonance to the sickly crackle of cotton thread over a double bass string.

Woodward completes the ethereal habitation, manipulating sound throughout the three rooms. By looping and amplifying Hansen, actors’ voices, breaking tea cups and spinning plates, Woodward lends the house layers of resonating history as the performer’s voice is multiplied in a carefully controlled musical polyphony.

As representative of the Living Room Opera project, Another Lament stands as a celebration of contemporary chamber music and a rebirth of baroque arts business practice. The Living Room Opera series reflects the combination of public funding, private patronage and enterprise that Purcell himself enjoyed in Restoration England (while holding a post at Westminster Abbey), fulfilling commissions from royalty and composing music for the theatre. Though Chamber Made Opera’s workings may seem baroque (both historically and as in “irregular”) in an arts industry fixated on government subsidy, they are looking backwards to move forward, supporting a battery of composers by bringing chamber opera home.

A HIGHLIGHT OF WOMADELAIDE 2011 IS BOUND TO BE THE CREOLE CHOIR OF CUBA—EFFUSIVE, DYNAMIC AND COMMITTED TO SUSTAINING THE CULTURAL HERITAGE OF CAMAGÜEY IN CENTRAL CUBA. THE CHOIR OF FIVE WOMEN AND FIVE MEN FORMED IN 1994 WITH AN AIM “TO RE-FORGE THE RESISTANCE SONGS AND LAMENTS OF THEIR FOREBEARS, TO CELEBRATE THE HISTORY OF THEIR HAITIAN DESCENDENTS ENSLAVED TO THE CARIBBEAN FROM WEST AFRICA” (WWW.CREOLECHOIR.COM).

The choir’s Cuban name, Desandann, means “descendants,” and the title of their recent album Tande-la means “listen.” What you’ll hear are songs of resistance and lament about the choir’s forebears working as slaves in sugar and coffee plantations and the subsequent grim legacies of colonialism. Listening to the album or watching a video of the choir in performance however conveys anything but overwhelming grief or naked anger; rather there’s a sense of the joy of survival, of cultural continuity and hope. As well there’s the potency of the music’s diverse elements—Spanish, voodoo, gospel, Creole—and its distinctive percussion-driven choral synthesis.

WOMADelaide 2011 has a strong performative streak, with bands and performance groups offering a heightened theatricality —the Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha, French hip-hopper Féfé, China’s Hanggai (“born from the Chinese punk scene…remains true to its Mongolian roots”), the brilliantly adorned Papua New Guinean Huri Duna Dancers and Brazil’s psychedelic Os Mutantes (bearer of the 1960s Tropicália heritage). France’s Le Phun will guide small groups to installations featuring “peculiar half-human and half-plant beings from the vegetable kingdom” and, also from France, Compagnie Ekart’s large-scale puppets will roam the festival crowds.

WOMADelaide’s continuing engagement with contemporary dance is realised this year by Adelaide’s Leigh Warren + Dancers who will perform a new work, Breathe, “exploring the sacred nature of suspended breath, forged around the ageless, spectral sound of the didgeridoo.” Composer William Barton will perform his work on the instrument for Frances Rings’ choreography. The dancers will be Lizzie Vilmanis, Albert David, Bec Jones, Lisa Griffiths, Adam Synnott, Lewis Rankin and guest Indigenous artists in what promises to be another visual and aural WOMADelaide 2011 highlight. RT

WOMADelaide, Sounds of the Planet 2011, Botanic Park, Adelaide, March 11-14, www.womadelaide.com.au

THE PINNACLE OF MUSIC MAKING IS SURELY THE SOLO PIANO PERFORMANCE. IT IS FOR THE PIANO THAT THE GREATEST MUSIC IS WRITTEN, AND WHEN VIRTUOSO PIANIST MEETS LEGENDARY COMPOSER—RICHTER AND BACH, BARENBOIM AND BEETHOVEN, ARGERICH AND CHOPIN, NIKOLAYEVA AND SHOSTAKOVICH—MAGIC HAPPENS. MUSICAL RECEPTION INVOLVES EMOTIONAL PERCEPTION. THE COMPOSER WRITES TO ELICIT EMOTIONAL STATES AND THE PIANIST CONNECTS THE LISTENER TO THE COMPOSER THROUGH HERSELF.

Pianists need more than a high level of technical facility. Indeed, they can’t fully realise the music until they can transcend the score, find the composer’s voice and use it to tell their own story. When buying a recording, I used to look for the ‘best’ rendition of the work, but soon found that many renditions will appeal in their own ways. You meet a unique and engaging individual, the pianist, who introduces herself through another unique and engaging individual, the composer.

The pianist’s teacher empowers and inspires the pianist to find the composer’s voice and her own voice. To become adept is a lifetime’s work, a vocation. In her insightful and uplifting memoir Piano Lessons (Black Inc, 2009), Anna Goldsworthy reveals that her own teacher, Eleonora Sivan, teaches the philosophy of life, and describes how her teaching creates the pianist.

Inspired by meeting Eleonora Sivan and some of her former students at a music teachers’ conference, composer Larry Sitsky wrote a seven-movement suite, The Golden Dawn, each movement of which would be performed by one of Sivan’s former students—Goldsworthy, Gabriella Smart, Jane Burgess, Inna Fursa, Rosanne Hammer, Phuong Vuong and Debra Andreacchio. Sivan was a noted performer and teacher before migrating to Australia, and those students are themselves now performing and teaching, continuing a pedagogical line that can be traced back to Liszt and Czerny. Sitsky is also a teacher, having been a professor at the ANU School of Music, and was taught by masters who inculcated the Busoni tradition in him. Comparisons with the legendary Nadia Boulanger spring to mind—a teacher who could so inspire composers and performers that a whole era of development resulted.

Sitsky has written some great piano works, his The Way of the Seeker, wonderfully recorded by Michael Kieran Harvey, being a notable example. The idea of writing a work that celebrates the master teacher is uncommon in Western culture, but appropriately acknowledges the importance of teaching. In this concert, each pianist ceremonially paid homage to her teacher by giving her allotted movement a sparkling premiere performance.

For Sitsky, music is fundamental to life itself and is inextricably linked with mysticism. He named the suite after an early 20th century magical society in England, the Golden Dawn. The society used an esoteric language, Enochian, from which the names of the various movements were taken. The work is powerfully expressive, and the character of each movement is reflected in its title. The opening movement, Mahorela (Dark Heavens) begins with a slow, hammering bass and develops into a series of short, stabbing gestures as a call to action. The second movement, Malpirgi (Fiery Darts) begins with a loud bass gesture followed by cascades down the keyboard, fleeting figures and rapidly repeated notes. Vinu (Invoke) is slow and rhythmic, and Ser (Lamentation) is dreamily mournful. Luciftias (Brightness) starts with quiet tinkling and gains in complexity and Yor (Roar) growls and bellows. The final movement, Vaoan (Truth) is measured and speech-like, returning to the bell-like tones of earlier movements. Recurring forms and motifs connect the movements. The black-clad pianists sit closely around the piano, which, given the magical theme of the music, resembles a three-legged cauldron from whose depths they conjure. This is an enchanting event, and the playing is superb.

This performance is followed by delightful renderings of Sitsky’s Fantasias No. 11, E and No. 4, Arch, played by Smart, and No 7, on a Theme of Lizst, by Goldsworthy, demonstrating the range and depth of his composition.

The Golden Dawn celebrates both a school and group performance. The seven pianists approach the composition in their own ways. Should they change places, the result might be different musically, but no less resolved. The next generation is establishing itself; for example Marianna Grynchuk, a student of both Sivan and Smart, is giving articulate and persuasive performances. Each pianist brings to her playing her own emotional range and expressive style, her own consciousness.

The Golden Dawn is a consummation of elemental life forces. Afterwards, both Eleonora Sivan and Professor Sitsky seem well pleased and the gathering of teachers, composers, musicians and listeners rejoices.

Larry Sitsky, The Golden Dawn, performers Anna Goldsworthy, Gabriella Smart, Jane Burgess, Inna Fursa, Rosanne Hammer, Phuong Vuong, Debra Andreacchio, Hartley Concert Room, University of Adelaide, Nov 27, 2010

Chris Reid’s review of Sitsky’s The Way of the Seeker appeared in RealTime 78.

Daniel Bond (Amplified Elephants), Tom Oaks and Annemeike Oaks (Noise Scavengers), Belinda Woods, Caerwen Martin, Andrea Keeble (BOLT Ensemble), The Mountain, The Click Clack Project

THE MOUNTAIN EMBODIES AN AGENDA FOR SOCIAL EQUALITY. IT BRINGS TOGETHER ARTISTS WITH VARYING ABILITIES, FROM HIGHLY EXPERIENCED PROFESSIONAL MUSICIANS, TO THOSE WITH DISABILITIES OR FROM DISADVANTAGED BACKGROUNDS.

Artistic director James Hullick has striven to create work that equally values the contributions of all members, regardless of ability. In CD liner notes, Hullick writes, “If we are to accept that all people are equal as they walk amongst our vibrant community, then we must accept that the abilities of all people are of equal worth to our community.”

The Mountain brings together three ensembles: The Amplified Elephants, Noise Scavengers and the BOLT Ensemble. The Amplified Elephants are a group of musicians with intellectual disabilities, evolving through a program at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. Noise Scavengers is a group of young sound artists emerging from a similar program at Cloverdale Community Centre.

The BOLT Ensemble is a group of professional musicians, put together to perform original works by Hullick. As well as performing this role in the Mountain project, they have also helped in its development, working closely with musicians from The Amplified Elephants and Noise Scavengers to explore and discover new sounds.

The Mountain is a multi-movement work, using combinations of these three ensembles. It is based on Jetsun Milarepa, the story of a Buddhist saint who finds redemption through having to build a tower, then tear it down and repeat this process several times over. In this performance, Jetsun’s story is told through a series of scenes. The piece is not so much a programmatic depiction of the story but, instead, a series of abstract, contemplative moments derived from the narrative.

A plethora of sound sources are employed in this performance. These cover an entire spectrum of volume, from the subtle rustles of a prepared harp, blown bottles and delicately struck gongs, to loud, pulsating synths, no-input mixers and the grating sound of a tortured violin.

Given the varying ability of the musicians involved, Hullick’s approach to composition is dictated by the musicians’ capabilities. The role of composer is one of facilitation and the organisation of material. Hullick manages to breath life into this role by creating circumstances in which performers are free to delve into a playful engagement with sound. Despite this apparent freedom in performance, the overall work maintains focus and direction through variety of sonic ideas. What is perhaps most successful is the way sounds produced by non-professional players are integrated with those produced by professionals. This combination of sounds produced complexes of timbre that were detailed and intriguing.

Hullick’s compositions for the BOLT Ensemble seem to have recently developed a language that has greater command in the evolution of musical ideas over time. Rather than being a series of sound combinations that amble through a performance, there are different degrees of momentum and energy; musical structures that play with one’s perception of time.

Despite the complexity of Hullick’s musical structures, his aim for music to embody social equality is not lost. There is an inherent dialogue in the work in which all the voices of the players make a valuable contribution.

Visual images by Klara B Klaric and Tien Pham provide a useful way of delineating the various scenes. While the overall contribution was generally atmospheric, the graininess and roughness of the images complemented the music’s aesthetic, if at times distracting our sense of its evolution.

The Mountain takes the idea of ‘found sound’ in an entirely new direction. As well as turning unexpected objects into musical instruments, this work also finds unexpected performers. Just as found sounds are inherently intriguing, the manner in which musicians discover and engage with sound yields its own intrigue and idiosyncrasies. The risks in this work, taken for the sake of artistic ideals, have paid off with success. The Mountain Concerts have realised the ideal of social equality in performance, and not merely as the spectre of possibility.

The Mountain Concerts, by The Click Clack Project, featuring The Amplified Elephants, Noise Scavengers, BOLT Ensemble, presented by Footscray Community Arts Centre, Cloverdale Community Centre and JOLT Arts Inc; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Dec15-18, 2010

ON A TOASTY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE GATHERED FOR THE ROLLING STOCK EXTRAVAGANZA, FEATURING INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE WORKS AT THE JUNEE RAILWAY ROUNDHOUSE AND ON AN HISTORIC TRAIN RIDE.

The project had a site-specific emphasis, building on the evocative architecture and machinery of the train and Roundhouse and upon the phenomenon by which sound can overlay and transform the visual environment. Dave Noyze and Garry Bradbury made a hugely entertaining work of the Roundhouse turntable, a sort of huge record platter on which train carriages can be spun and driven into the workshops. The rotation of the platter caused a fearsome clamour as tons of metal and concrete ground together. The artists made a subtle yet savvy intervention, adding their own sounds but largely relying on the spectacle of the machine itself. The duo’s work harked back to the futurist enthusiasm for mechanical noise, with perhaps less Italian aristocratic arrogance and more rustily laconic bogan self-satisfaction, laced with snotty Industrial lip-curl. One can only hope that they’ll be let loose on another edifice, perhaps the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the rotating restaurant atop Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower.

Among other works, a local parkour crew braved the sun to provide some hi-NRG action, vaulting carriages and locos, eliciting visceral sensations in the audience as they flew above the concrete, evoking the spirit of concrete-clad outer Paris. Joel Stern and Andrew McLellan drummed and thrummed out a two-person, rural-NSW style gamelan sound using junk that was lying about (presumably waiting for such a performance opportunity), creating moments of entrancing musical pleasure.

Following the Roundhouse smorgasbord of sounds came a train journey to Cootamundra and back. Like the Roundhouse, the historic train needs barely the slightest breath from the artist, being a novelty in its own right. Infusing the artistic proceedings was the social scenario created by the train, where urban and regional were thrown together in the booths of the antique rail carriages. In one such encounter, my listening to the performance of UK artist Chris Watson co-existed with a woman’s story of her daughter’s suicide following a grand-daughter’s premature death. I could not ask the woman to stop, not least because the teller hadn’t noticed there was a performance to hear. Such is art as it emerges from its trench and sticks its head into the terrain of life.

Chris Watson’s polished and sophisticated work took the form of El Tren Fantasma (The Ghost Train), a sound design recreating another train journey. It is composed from recordings made by the composer for the Great Train Journeys TV series in 1998, documenting the last coast-to-coast passenger service of the Mexican State railway system prior to its closure due to privatisation. Watson’s strength is the masterful fidelity of his recordings with which he skilfully composes his simulations. The outstanding feature of the work was his manipulation of one’s sense of time, transforming a multi-day journey into a single experience. In Junee the work reads as an imaginative fancy, layering exotic Mexico over exotic rural NSW. Given the site-specific emphasis of the festival, one hopes Watson made some local recordings and might re-present them in situ in the future. El Tren Fantasma is soon to be released on CD.

Also working with the sound of the train was Sydney media artist Shannon O’Neill, whose Locomentum foregrounded the iconic phenomenon of rail rhythms. A subtle piece inviting close listening, it blended the live and recorded sounds to create a minimalist ‘phase space’ where the already hypnotic rhythm of the train is blurred by a recorded doppelganger. This innocuous play of rhythm opens up reflection on the auditory pleasure of trains, wherein the regularity of the sound is compelling. Trains, like ships, can have a particular pleasure, stemming from their combination of high-speed motion and hotel-style living. They have a lulling rhythm, but also the potential for humungous collision, injury and death. I’m reminded of the lullaby “rock-a-bye baby in the tree top; when the wind blows, the cradle will rock; when the bough breaks the cradle will fall”; it’s a rhyme that on reflection seems an odd one to relax a child.

Other works on the train included Sleeper Carriage by Noyze and Bradbury. Installed in a sleeper carriage, and sounding much like an Alan Lamb work, it offered a rich seam of electronic sound to be listened to from the privacy and comfort of a bed, albeit with the spoken accompaniment of artists and punters who took respite and refreshments in the compartments and perhaps didn’t realise or care how far their conversations carried. In another carriage the PVI collective presented a work based on local political issues via the medium of a tug-of-war. Numerous other works were presented, with details available at http://rollingstock.weebly.com/.

Art maverick Sarah Last, who describes herself as an artist rather than curator, organised Rolling Stock. Her work in the Unsound Festivals, the Wagga Space Program, The Wired Lab and a variety of other activities is noteworthy. There are few curators working in sound in Australia, and even fewer curators working with sound site-specifically. In her plenary address to the 2010 Regional Arts Australia conference, Last outlined her interest in breaking down artist-audience divisions and encouraging the creative and active participation of local communities in art projects. The audience at Rolling Stock didn’t actually get their hands dirty with noise making, but the presence of more non-practitioners than practitioners in the audience is a step in the right direction. While some of the works showed depth of engagement with the site and were created in cooperation with community, the degree to which audiences were challenged and their perception developed was less clear, perhaps by virtue of the very private nature of the art experience.

To my ear, the most amazing sound of the weekend was the soundscape of insects, animals and air movement heard at midnight in a quiet spot 10 kilometres from town—an immersive ecosystem of interlocking patterns, layers, events and narratives. Recording technology and artists will always be hard pressed to compete with the wonders that the world serves up. For me this is the strongest offering of sound culture: events like Rolling Stock induce heightened awareness of a realm of aesthetic information that is familiar to many practitioners but, I suspect, lost on people at large.

Rolling Stock was driven by Sarah Last’s pursuit of her ideas and aims and her ongoing relationships with particular spaces and communities such as the railway works and the people of Junee. These are long-term projects, embedded in her own life in a family farm that houses The Wired Lab. It will be interesting to see how these relationships develop and how Last’s objectives play out.

Wired Lab, Rolling Stock, curator Sarah Last, Junee, NSW, Nov 20, 2010; http://rollingstock.weebly.com/; artist residencies, Nov 12-19

THE ADELAIDE CONTEMPORARY ART SCENE IS BIG ENOUGH TO SUPPORT A SUBSTANTIAL AND DIVERSE ART COMMUNITY AND SMALL ENOUGH TO STAGE AN EXHIBITION EXEMPLIFYING THAT COMMUNITY’S PRACTICE. CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW SHOWCASED THE WORK OF 44 ARTISTS ACTIVE IN SA OVER THE LAST DECADE. LOCATED IN 12 SITES, INCLUDING PROMINENT PUBLIC SPACES AND EVEN ON THE SIDE OF A TRAM, NEW NEW CONTINUES CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA DIRECTOR ALAN CRUICKSHANK’S INTEREST IN PERIODIC SURVEY EXHIBITIONS.

Cruickshank indicates in the detailed catalogue that the participants were specially selected for the exhibition, which was intended to raise awareness of SA contemporary art and to educate viewers. The opening night at The Gallerie was so well attended that some patrons had to be turned away, attesting to wide interest. This raises the possibility of developing an ongoing exposition and a permanent contemporary art collection. It also raises the question of how artists get media exposure and recognition. New New provided an important opportunity for many artists, partly addressing the perception of CACSA’s preference for international over local art during the decade, though some notable artists were omitted. But it is a significant achievement for CACSA to mount such an extensive exhibition, which was only possible with substantial public and private support.

The work was strategically sited and the seven public works extended the exhibition into prominent locations. The choice of The Gallerie—a gutted, ironically-named, former shopping arcade—as the main location was significant in opening to the public a forgotten corner of the CBD and creating a vibrant atmosphere. But while New New resembled a biennial in scale, it eschewed any unifying curatorial theme. Approximately one third of the artists emerged in SA since 2000, and the work of the established artists generally typified their oeuvres, collectively presenting a Google Earth view of Adelaide’s art. It’s too soon to historicise that decade’s artistic development, but themes and directions are apparent.

New New aggregates the principal strategies of visual art and the forms of visual culture that have emerged since the 1970s—an expanded field of multifarious visual languages, employing traditional and vernacular materials, installation, performance, text, screen media and found objects, and actively engaging the viewer. Identity, contemporary culture and the very nature of the (art) object remain perennial considerations, and full appreciation of New New relies on the viewer’s awareness of recent art history locally as well as internationally.

Most striking was the work greeting viewers at the entrance to The Gallerie, Sam Songailo’s New Sound, an installation that immerses us in a dazzling colour-field, merging neo-Op Art into the fractured architecture to ‘clear’ our heads. Painting’s evolution is apparent in Paul Sloan’s Arise Therefore, which combines painting with found objects (rock band instruments and skeleton) in an installation that also inventively appropriates The Gallerie’s architecture. Anton Hart’s Twins incorporates a found photograph, construction and painting to juxtapose three forms of representation. Painterliness appears in contrasting ways in Christian Lock’s lush, swirling, glossy abstractions Sweet Tooth and The Luxurious Hours of the Duke of Berry, and in Warren Vance’s Voyage d-elimination in which small faux naïf illustrations are mounted on light boxes. Painting meets text and street art in KAB 101’s extensive untitled wall work at The Gallerie and the imagery on the tram.

George Popperwell’s teasingly cryptic but delightfully rewarding Far Away + Once Upon a Time and Bent Bank co-locate Old English texts with commercial packaging. Another intriguing work was Strange Fruit by the conceptual art group Green Candle, a collaboration between John Barbour, Paul Hoban and others. The group approach isn’t new in art, but exciting syntheses are developing between these prominent SA artists.

Adelaide’s established photographers showed the kind of work that has gained them their reputations. Mark Kimber’s lightbox-mounted photos of dioramas in Blyth Street challenge traditional concepts of masculinity. Darren Siwes combines images with installation to reflect on the impact of class and social structure on the developing individual. Ian North’s A Short Walk in the Country eloquently addresses his favoured theme of landscape and the situation of the viewer within it through photographs inscribed like an honour board with the names of great thinkers on landscape and environmental issues. Deborah Paauwe’s Entwined Song continues her concern with loss of innocence; Nici Cumpston’s photographic installation in Rundle Mall movingly documents traces of past Aboriginal occupation of drought-stricken Lake Bonney; and Brenda Croft’s scenes of Australia suggest she is recording it in anticipation of its loss, a kind of nostalgia for the present.

Video is developing in new ways. Made using a phone, Siamak Fallah’s five videos record his spontaneous and intimate interviews with friends and acquaintances. Iranian-trained University of SA masters candidate Nasim Nasr’s moving work, Erasure, shows a chador-clad woman writing on a chador-like form, whereupon the text is erased, referencing the ‘invisibility’ of Iranian women and the issue of cultural incommensurability. Andy Petrusevics’s Buzz! Fizz! Pop! comprises imagery projected onto small panels inside a viewing booth, playfully recreating life as a sideshow. Mark Siebert’s video, Mark Siebert’s South-East Asian Chess Tour, shows the artist playing chess, having declared himself a failed painter, the work inevitably recalling Duchamp’s preoccupation with the game and his withdrawal from painting. Yoko Kajio combines video with performance in Karistirma. And Monte Masi’s videos provide the exhibition’s self-referential element—his rap-style monologues and interviews with artists are both about New New and an element of it.

Environmental awareness emerges strongly but diversely in the work of Angela Valamanesh, Croft, Cumpston, Kajio and North, in Sue Kneebone’s A Broken Party, comprising animal bones on coffee tables, and implicitly in Hossein Valamanesh’s Wishful Thinking that employs the green-powered lighting on the face of a CBD car-park, the Rundle Lantern, to create a striking text.

My favourites included Songallo’s work for its visual and architectural impact, Jonathon Dady’s An Uncertain Vessel for its grace and conceptual eloquence, and Sally-Ann Rowland’s Monuments, a series of black velvet forms mimicking indoor plants, for their elegant, brooding intensity. Dady’s An Uncertain Vessel is an outline of a boat roughly 10m x 3m x 2m, an iconic form made from cardboard and sitting tilted on wooden supports. It resembles a life-size 3D drawing, exemplifying Dady’s concern with the propositional and his use of discarded packaging to reconsider familiar forms and objects. For me, it suggests a stalled but much needed ark. Equally captivating is Joe Felber’s installation at the CACSA, which juxtaposes competing elements to challenge the viewer’s attention: Playback, El nuevo mundo acústica, in which multiple sound sources are broadcast asynchronously through fixed and swaying loudspeakers, and his video Jumping, Jerking Flesh. And Siamak Fallah’s videos succinctly embody the impact of new communications technologies on human interaction, as well as being the most genuinely new work in the show.

CACSA Contemporary 2010: the New New, Contemporary Art Centre of SA; The Gallerie; Feltspace; the SA School of Art Gallery, University of South Australia; the University of Adelaide; and at various public locations in Adelaide, Oct 29-Nov 21, 2010

WHEN TALKING ABOUT LANEWAY ART, IT’S HARD NOT TO IMAGINE THE VIBRANT PALIMPSESTS THAT ADORN MOST AVAILABLE SURFACES IN MELBOURNE’S CITY CENTRE. BUT WHILE MELBOURNE HAS TUCKED-AWAY GALLERIES, BOUTIQUE SHOPS AND UBERCOOL BARS EVERY FEW PACES, SYDNEY’S LANEWAYS ARE THE TRULY FORGOTTEN SPACES—SHADY NO-GO ZONES WHERE TRUCKS UNLOAD, GARBAGE IS DUMPED AND CHEFS STEAL A QUICK CIGGIE BREAK. HOWEVER IT’S THIS UTTER LACK OF CHARM THAT IS USED MOST INTRIGUINGLY IN THE LATEST SYDNEY CITY LANEWAY EXHIBITION, ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME?, CURATED BY BARBARA FLYNN.

Armed with the downloadable PDF walking guide I started at Underwood Lane, near Circular Quay. While the lane itself does not have much romance, the name proved to be a direct inspiration to both artists exhibited here. Simon Yates’ Woodwork consisted of large-scale photocopy paste-ups of old-style typewriters and telephones, drawing on the fact that early typewriters were manufactured by Underwood, as well as referencing the lane’s location—behind the old telephone exchange. I was unable to find the secret messages supposedly hidden in the keyboards and phone dials, but this didn’t matter. The wallscape immediately invoked a literary dreaming, calling up a pantheon of down-and-out writers clacking out stories in their inner-city dives overlooking lanes like this.

The literary theme continued with Mikala Dwyer’s Milk and the town that went mad. For her the name Underwood conjured the spectre of Dylan Thomas and his poetic masterpiece Under Milkwood. On the barren corner beneath air-conditioning pipes, Dwyer placed a makeshift bar with stools, topped with a variety of curious and ugly ashtrays creating a hidden haven for smokers. As they indulged their guilty pleasure they were treated to Richard Burton’s famous reading of Thomas’ text. For a moment I wished I smoked in order to get the full experience, but just listening to Burton’s lilting voice, so clearly of another time, tangibly slowed the pulse in the midst of city bustle, cracking open the poetic potential of the site.

High up on a wall in Tank Stream Way, Rocket Mattler’s battered “Room for Rent—apply opposite” sign directed me to a large format print of a typical old-style suburban home. It was both terrifyingly bland yet rich with detail, from the dog in the window to a barely visible graffiti tag on the front fence. To many, this picture of normality is what they are fleeing as they try to make it big in the city, while for others it offers a wistful sense of nostalgia, and for others still—the homeless, the overworked—perhaps it is a tantalising dream. Placed opposite Nike Savvas’ Rush, a ceiling of coloured plastic strips reminiscent of retro fly curtains—the most overt and celebratory artwork in the selection—the combination produced a queasy hyperreality.

In De Mestre Place, Jan van der Ploeg’s Warrior offered a large canvas of black and white geometric patterns in mesmeric repetition. Given the scale and architectural integration of other works by the artist, it would have been good to see him let loose beyond the rectangle. In Wynyard Lane, Jon Campbell’s HAR BOUR VIEW did just that, unabashedly revelling in post-modern irony, his large banner bearing the text of the title in sickly pastels.

Across at Temperance Lane Newell Harry’s Circle/s in the Round for (Miles and Miles +1) was an elegant wall sculpture of concentric neon circles that counselled us to “NEVEROD.” Inspired by Miles Davis’ 1967 Circle in the Round album, the work literally lit up the end of the dark alley in an eerie-cheery way. As with several of the works that have been exhibited since 2007, when the Laneways regeneration project commenced, negotiations are underway to make this a permanent public artwork.

Most of the works were in out of the way locations so it was particularly fascinating to explore the laneways themselves. I had a lot of difficulty locating Justene Williams’ Banker, Baker, Spanglemachinemaker in Curtin Place, but in the process found several other ‘possible’ installations. The act of reimagining the urban site, looking for the ‘art’ in it, was a fascinating by-product of the exhibition. (It turns out that Williams’ work was a video projection that started around 7pm, and even after returning for a second viewing at 8pm it was still not quite dark enough to get a real sense of the piece.)

Equally elusive was Simryn Gill’s Food on the Table, an ambitious proposal to create a feast in Abercrombie Lane, made from the discarded food found in bins. Gill was hoping to challenge ideas about wastage, consumerism and poverty, but was unable to fully activate the idea beyond research and consultation due to regulatory issues—which says something about the difficulties involved in mounting public art.

Rather than an instant re-invigoration of Sydney’s laneways, Are you looking at me? offers a gradual activation of forgotten spaces. The most successful works don’t attempt to decorate desolate sites, but instead propose reimaginings in and for them. In a city renowned for its love of spectacle, these small-scale aberrations are welcome, but in order to have a real effect on the cultural life of the city, we simply need more of them. The City of Sydney’s recently drafted Public Art Strategy suggests this might become a reality.

Are you looking at me?—Laneway Art 2010, curator Barbara Flynn, City of Sydney, Sept 23, 2010-Jan 31, 2011

Titled Douglas Sirk: King of Hollywood Melodrama, the opulent Madman set includes the filmmaker’s classic melodramas—Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession—as well as minor classics like Tarnished Angels (about stunt pilots and based on William Faulkner’s Pylon) and Taza, Son of Cochise with Rock Hudson as an Apache chief in Sirk’s only western.

Read film scholar Wendy Haslem’s overview of Sirk’s key films on page 28.
To compete for the Sirk DVD set go to
www.realtimearts.net/sirk_survey.html

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In Sam James video work you’re watching an edition of RealTime
roll off the presses. Back in 1994, quite a bit of the pre-online print edition would have stayed on your hands as ink but more importantly in your mind, new synapses firing rapidly as we surveyed and critiqued the urgently needy hybrid performance and new media arts scene ignored in those days by the mass and other media. The excitement hasn’t abated, as indicated by the many artists and groups of the 101 we approached who have contributed to our 101st edition celebration with 101 or so words each about what’s next for them in 2011. The diversity, inventiveness, commitment and playfulness on show in their contributions and throughout this edition are reward enough for our 101st and will keep us fuelled up for the year to come.

To make sense of editions 1-101 and beyond as a comprehensive record of an era and to pay tribute to a generation of adventurous artists, we are archiving more and more of RealTime+OnScreen online. All editions are available back to 2001, all dance articles back to 1994 as part of our RealTimeDance portal (launching in March) and we’re working hard to put the rest of RealTime 1994-2000 online over the next year. If you’re a student, a researcher, an artist, an arts writer or a fancier of innovative art you’ll find our archive increasingly valuable, recharging failed synapses, firing new ones. Fond memories and online pleasures aside, opening and fondling a new print edition of RealTime still brings joy to many a reader: the ink might not rub off, but ideas and sensations still do. Read on. Celebrate.

we like short shorts

It may be the season for wearing shorts, but it’s also the season for watching them. More specifically, it’s time for the International Short Film Festival Flickerfest, which has just finished screening in Bondi and is now set to tour the country. This year Flickerfest will travel to more than 30 locations, including regional centres such as Alice Springs, Katherine, Noosa, Narrabri, Cygnet and Wyalkatchem. The program varies from venue to venue, so while some will focus on the Best of International Shorts, others will feature Flicker Kids and the Best of Comedy. However, most venues will be screening the Best of Australian Shorts program, which includes the animation The Lost Thing (winner of the AFI Award for Best Short Animation 2010), directed by Andrew Ruheman and Shaun Tan, as well as Bee Sting (starring Brendan Cowell and Matilda Brown) and The Telegram Man (starring Jack Thompson as “the man who must deliver the worst kind of news during the long years of World War II”). For more information see the Flickerfest website. Flickerfest Tour, various venues, Jan 21-March 27; www.flickerfest.com.au

movement at the station

Sydney’s CarriageWorks has just announced Lisa Havilah as its new CEO, commencing February 2011. Havilah is currently the Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, where she has pioneered a program of inclusive and experimental contemporary art, much of which has been reviewed in RealTime. To get a sense of her breadth of vision see our reviews of Chiara Guidi, the River Project, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing and News from Islands. Havilah says, “I am proud of what we have achieved and the people I have worked with at Campbelltown Arts Centre, and excited to join CarriageWorks at such an important time in the organisation’s development. CarriageWorks holds a vital place in the cultural fabric of Sydney, and is home to an extraordinary group of resident companies. I look forward to building on the many achievements that CarriageWorks has already delivered” (press release).

In the meantime, one of CarriageWorks’ resident companies, Performance Space, has announced that Jeff Khan as its new Associate Director with responsibility for dance and performance. Khan is a “curator and writer with a particular interest in interdisciplinary projects and site-specific and socially-engaged practices” (press release; see also our interview RT96). From 2006 to 2010 he was the Artistic Director of Next Wave (RT98). He is currently a member of the Australia Council’s Dance Board and has held previous positions and guest curatorships at the MCA, Gertrude Contemporary and PICA. Exciting times in Redfern!

cold edge, hot summer

Writer and spoken word performer (and contributor to RealTime) Urszula Dawkins brings tales of sub-zero Svalbard to Midsumma Melbourne and cia studios in Perth, following her 2010 participation in The Arctic Circle creative residency—an ocean voyage around the high-Arctic, a few hundred miles from the North Pole (see RT100). She writes: “The romantic landscape gives way to the treachery of a nature that needs neither art nor art-makers, and the quest for ‘place’ is blasted away in horizontal snow-drifts, leaving only desire and the return to home…Polar bears, northern lights, glittering glaciers and an ice-class sailing ship sit side by side with the end of the sublime.” The program also features film and video pieces by Arctic Circle participants Katja Aglert (Sweden), Janet Biggs (US), Rebeca Mendéz (US/Mexico) and Laurie Palmer (US). Cold Edge: The Arctic Circle, Hares & Hyenas Bookshop & Café, Jan 25; www.midsumma.org.au; cia studios, Feb 3 www.ciastudios.com.au (please RSVP kate@pvicollective.com)

australian-asian art connections

The Chinese Year of the Rabbit begins on February 3 and to celebrate the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is mounting Cinema Alley. For one night only, an open-air cinema at the heart of Chinatown will screen five short video works by contemporary Chinese artists Chen Chieh-Jen, Jun Yang, Ou Ning and Cao Fei (reviewed in RT96), Wang Qingsong (RT100) and Yuan Goang-ming. Their work explores “perceptions of cities, their transformation, experiences of alienation and the effects that history and tradition place on the individual” (website).

Elsewhere, Performance 4A is producing the COOLie Asian Australian Performance Event, to be held Downstairs at Belvoir St Theatre for two weeks, February 1-13. The first season, Stories East & West, sold out Belvoir’s Upstairs theatre last May. It featured Asian Australian artists exploring relationships with their ancestors and cultures and examining how these impact on their lives today. The new show features Chinese-Australian photographer, storyteller William Yang (RT96; RT47) and indigenous elder, researcher and historian Noeline Briggs-Smith swapping stories about their lives. The following work, About Fact, is billed as a “contemporary variety show” combining music, dance, comedy, monologue and song and featuring Asian-Australian artists Paul Cordeiro, Lena Cruz, Les Gock, Oliver Phommavanh, Suara Indonesia Dance Group and Jennifer Wong.

Artspace, in association with the Sydney Festival, is hosting Singaporean artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen in an exhibition featuring three major video works—NEWTON (2009), ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE (2009/2010) and the centrepiece 42-minute EARTH (2009/2010), a ‘videographic’ remix in three long takes of 17th and 18th century Italian and French paintings in which the human body is penetrated, fragmented and re-arranged. On January 24 and 25 there is also a Live Sound Score Performance by composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi. Cinema Alley, 4A Contemporary Asian Art, Feb 11; www.4a.com.au; COOLie Asian Australian Performance Event, Belvoir St, Feb 1-13; www.belvoir.com.au; Ho Tzu Nyen, Earth, curator Blair French, Artspace, Jan 20-Feb 20, Live Sound Score Performance Jan 24-25; www.artspace.org.au

colbert and censorship

Here at RealTime we’ve been idly holidaying online, roaming the world wide web and catching up with the wickedly incisive Stephen Colbert who, on December 8 in his Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger segment, praised censorious Republican Senator Erik Cantor (the incoming House Majority Leader) with a damning serve of artspeak. Cantor had declared that the Smithsonian National Portrait Museum’s exhibiting of a video installation, Fire in My Belly, in which ants briefly crawl over a crucifix, was an insult to Christians, not least because it was being displayed over the Xmas period. The slight therefore warranted a threat to defund the Smithsonian. Colbert applauded the Jewish politician’s sensitive support for beleaguered Christians. “This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship,” he argued. “It’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art banning…Cantor’s art is about the art that isn’t there, making the inaccessible literally inaccessible.”

On Fox News, Cantor said, “When a museum receives taxpayer money, the taxpayers have a right to expect that the museum will uphold common standards of decency. The museum should pull the exhibit and be prepared for serious questions come budget time.” The Smithsonian subsequently removed the video, the 1987 work Fire in My Belly (David Wojnarowicz, Diamanda Galas) from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Oct 30, 2010-Feb 13, 2011).

You can read more about the video, the conservative advocacy group the Media Research Center, and protests against the withdrawal of the work at Half Wisdom, Half Wit. You can watch Colbert’s Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger Art Report and see the rest of this episode of The Colbert Report featuring Steve Martin and some leading artists , including Frank Stella and Andreas Serrano in a droll assessment of the financial evaluation of art. Also available is an extended version.

A MAN STANDS HIGH UP IN THE DISTANCE, SPOTLIT, ABOUT TO JUMP, HIS VOICEOVER SPELLING OUT THE TENSION GENERATED BETWEEN THE IMPULSES OF HIS REPTILIAN BRAIN AND THE RATIONALITY OF ITS EVOLVED FORM, ALTERNATING BETWEEN SHEER TERROR AND THE ATTRACTIONS OF RISK. ONE, TWO, THREE, HE LEANS…BLACKOUT. WE DON’T KNOW IF HE ACTUALLY JUMPS, BUT ONE THING’S CLEAR, HE WANTS TO AND HE HAS KNOWLEDGE AND CHOICE. BUT FORCE MAJEURE’S NOT IN A MILLION YEARS BUILDS ITS PERVASIVE SENSE OF PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL CRISIS NOT FROM THESE EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGES BUT FROM INCIDENTS OF POWERLESSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS, WHERE CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE SUCKED AWAY THE PHYSICAL CAPACITY OR WILL TO ACT.

Some of the figures in Not In A Million Years—an airline attendant, a paraglider and a pair of miners—engage in jobs or activities that are inherently risky. The miners endure the collapse of a mine while the airline attendant suffers something unique: she is the lone survivor—found on the ground—of an aircraft that exploded at 33,000 feet. The paraglider is sucked up “higher than Everest” into the upper atmosphere, unconscious throughout and almost frozen, but miraculously survives (perhaps ‘preserved’ by the cold). Other figures haven’t taken the risks of employment or sport but the will to act is likewise denied them: a man in a comatose state for 10 years suddenly wakes to a world with which he is unable to engage. A woman wins a huge lottery prize but is rendered incapable of using it, fearing public attention and the risk her son might be kidnapped. Another character is a sporting champion (inspired by the story of an astonishing long-jumper), abused and shamed by her coach into mindlessly and dangerously excelling.

The horrors of these conditions are made palpable, played out on shifting clouds, fields and dunes of soft, snow-like sparkling crystals through which people wade fitfully—or, like the athlete, forcefully, as if battling sand or heavy surf—or in which they are buried. A man unearths the airline attendant in the first of a series of duets, cradling, lifting, helping her stand before an inevitable, sad collapse. The challenge of helping is further writ large in the frustrations of the wife of the comatose man as she struggles to clothe him while begging for his affection, trying to make him jealous, or in the mutual assistance enacted between the trapped miners, from time-filling chat to shared songs to the slightest of physical shifts to ease pain. Later the wife will drag her comatose husband through the ‘snow,’ unable to make him stand unassisted, amplifying the sense of helplessness experienced by carers as much as the victims of fate.

Max Lyandvert’s emphatic score moodily underlines the action—melancholy piano for the airline attendant, electronic pinging and pulsing for the athlete, ominous rumblings for the miners. Spatial transformations are also effected with the ‘snowscape’ swept away, replaced by mobile walls that frame the entrapment of the wife of the comatose man and the reclusive lottery winner, while the paraglider flies in the distance, often seemingly helpless, an almost constant reminder of the beauty and risk of human flight.

The instability of these aural and visual shifts resonates with emotional complexities as the interwoven tales unfold, some more detailed than others. Survivors like the airline attendant and the formerly comatose man cannot comprehend why they are treated like heroes. The man is bitter over the loss of time and love: “Where’s the miracle?” He cannot relate to his son or understand why his wife just didn’t give up on him—”Why did she keep me…like a piece of nostalgia?” Only a mate’s ironic “Guess what, stupid, you stopped smoking” cheers him.

These ‘accidents’ variously yield humour and fortitude, or reveal the strengths and weaknesses of relationships or result in uncomprehending despair and infinite frustration—the athlete is literally driven up the wall, repeatedly rushing at and bounding up CarriageWorks’ craggy stonework. Amidst such indeterminacy it’s odd that the figure who opened the performance, pondering a leap, returns to muse over a famous tightrope walk between skyscrapers in New York, picking over its meanings—sublime or absurd, inspirational? “Could I ever risk that? Am I ever that alive?” The victims of strange and not so strange accidents in Not In A Million Years have not taken undue risks (you might not like to paraglide, but many thousands do) and in several cases they certainly feel less than alive after their ‘accidents,’ and certainly neither adventurous nor heroic—their will-power had been suspended.

As if to underline a swing to a more optimistic view of the effects of extreme happenstance, the athlete, seemingly freed of her coach, spins and sweeps through the expanse in the first palpably choreographed movements. She draws the other performers with her into a collective dance in silence, cutting neatly through the ‘snow,’ hands pushing back over heads, fingers pointing, legs weakening at the knees (reminiscent of those characters who earlier collapsed into the ‘snow’) but rising up, looking up, suppliant even, asking not “Could I ever risk that?” but “How could I endure those states of being, of suspended will and self, with their all too existential consequences?”

I’m not certain that Not In A Million Years is conceptually consistent or that it fully exploits the potential of its ‘snowscape’ design—visually or sonically—while the deployment of the ungainly mobile walls functionally detracts from the overall eeriness and the soundscore occasionally verges on the melodramatic. But it’s a thoughtful and often disturbing creation that conveys the unbearable lightness of unconsciousness. For a dance theatre work, curiously it’s the naturalism of the affecting performances from Elizabeth Ryan and Joshua Tyler (not least as the wife and erstwhile comatose husband) that provide Not In A Million Years with its emotional centre of gravity, as their world and others around them spin out of control. I’m looking forward, anxiously, to experiencing Not In A Million Years again at Dance Massive in Melbourne in March.

Force Majeure, Not in a Million Years, director Kate Champion, assistant director Roz Hervey, designer Geoff Cobham, performers Vincent Crowley, Sarah Jayne Howard, Elizabeth Ryan, Joshua Tyler, original music, sound designer Max Lyandvert; CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 18-27, 2010; www.forcemajeure.com.au

IN CHRISTIAN RIZZO’S B.C., JANVIER, 1545, FONTAINBLEU, BLACK CURTAINS PART TO REVEAL A WHITE BOX STAGE LIT BY DOZENS OF TEA CANDLES SCATTERED ACROSS THE FLOOR. SCULPTURAL CLUSTERS OF BLACK FABRIC ARE SUSPENDED LIKE FLOATING INKBLOTS AT VARIOUS HEIGHTS. UPSTAGE CENTRE, DANCER JULIE GUIBERT, IN BLACK SKULLCAP-CUM-WIG, BLACK SHIRT AND PANTS AND SILVER STILETTO HEELS LIES ON A NARROW WHITE TABLETOP WITH HER BACK TO US. IN THE FOREGROUND STANDS CHOREOGRAPHER RIZZO, WEARING AN ANTIQUE-LOOKING RABBIT MASK, T-SHIRT, BAGGY JEANS AND HIGH-TOPS—AN ENSEMBLE THAT MAKES HIM LOOK LIKE A ROMANTIC-ERA PORCELAIN FIGURINE DRESSED AS A RAPPER. THE STAGE COMPOSITION IS EXQUISITE (A LITTLE CHEER GOES UP INSIDE ME).

Guibert gets off the table and performs a short, gestural score that has her bisecting space in flat planes, changing levels and implying geometrical shapes. The execution is meticulous. She will repeat this sequence for the duration, adjusting the details slightly, changing her spatial orientation and imperceptibly increasing the tempo. Superbly controlled, Guibert is all precision and grace, even on four-inch silver spikes. Rabbit-faced Rizzo takes his time moving the candles from the floor to the table, just a few at a time. Each part of this slow-moving image is thoughtfully placed. I can feel the surety of an expert artist’s hand. I let the picture seep into my nervous system like an opiate.

Once the initial hit has done its work, I want the piece to change. It does, but at a glacial pace. Guibert goes through her iterations. The sculptures are removed. The candles are extinguished. The quality of light goes from candle-flicker warm to walk-in-cooler frigid. I think this progression is supposed to feel like a graduated revelation but, beautiful as the final state is, the development is too slow for surprise. A high volume industrial sound score by Gerome Nox makes its presence felt part way through. The grinding drone tends to flatten out the nuance of the Guibert’s articulations. The lighting design, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of sensitivity. Designer Caty Olive’s interest lies in the instability and ambiguity of her medium. From the outset she gives us a restless light, almost constantly in flicker, that refuses to settle on a base colour. Within the highly reflective surfaces of the white box, Olive manages to create a depth of field in which Guibert, Rizzo and the sculptural objects come in and out of focus. Unlike the crush of the sound score, the active lighting design contributes a deft dynamism, responsive to the spatial adjustments at work and partnering well with Guibert.

It’s a little hard on the eyes and ears at times. The unstable light, combined with Nox’s acoustic drone and the measured pace of the piece, makes me a bit sleepy. Maybe that’s the point: as I drift into semi-consciousness b.c., janvier, 1545, fontainbleu cuts a deep groove in my dream track. It stays with me in a way that most shows don’t. In the days and weeks since the show ended, the restlessness and dissatisfaction I felt at curtain has given way to a feeling of dream-saturated appreciation. When I think of the show now, I’m left with the fullness and clarity of the image.

The image, however, isn’t Rizzo’s first concern. He begins by building the choreography a step at time. His idea of choreography includes light, sound and sculpture as active partners. The ‘image’ is a natural result of such ‘partnering.’ In the 1990s, Rizzo and other choreographers were labeled in France as makers of non-danse, a designation that in retrospect only makes sense if you think of the dancer as somehow separate from the performance setting, moving in a featureless, empty space that doesn’t interfere with the purity of movement. Non-danse attempted to recontextualise the dancer—sometimes by placing them in a setting that was more ‘theatrical’ (for example, a living room), sometimes by putting the dance in a specific location and often by focusing on the bare materiality of the dancer rather than on the dancer’s technique.

These considerations, as well as others, forced a re-examination of dance and choreography. Previously, speaking, playing guitar, cooking, lecturing etc, were expressions of the body that didn’t fall into the category of dance. Things like set pieces, sculpture, props, lights and sound were usually treated as add-ons, always peripheral to the primacy of the human body. Non-danse puts the dancer-body in dialogue not just with other dancers, but also with all the other elements mentioned above. In a Rizzo show this requires a shift in the kind of attention a spectator brings to the performance. What is the interplay between dancer and light? Between sculpture, space, and sound? Like the lights, my attention flickered between all of these. Then the front part of my brain relaxed, I got sleepy, my consciousness widened and b.c., janvier, 1545, fontainbleu continued its iterations in my memory log.

b.c., janvier, 1545, fontainbleu l’association fragile, choreographer Christian Rizzo, On the Boards, Seattle, Oct 10, 2010

JAN CHAPMAN HAS A KNACK FOR FINDING RISING TALENT WHEN IT COMES TO AUSTRALIAN SCREENWRITERS AND DIRECTORS. IF HER NAME IS STAMPED ON A FILM (AS PRODUCER OR EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IT MEANS THE FILM WILL LIKELY HAVE A UNIQUE VOICE WITH GREAT CHARACTERISATION AND WONDERFULLY STRANGE TOUCHES — LOVE SERENADE (SHIRLEY BARRETT), JANE CAMPION FILMS INCLUDING THE PIANO AND BRIGHT STAR, LANTANA (RAY LAWRENCE), SOMERSAULT (CATE SHORTLAND), SUBURBAN MAYHEM (ALICE BELL; PAUL GOLDMAN)—AND NOW HERE COMES GRIFF THE INVISIBLE FROM WRITER-DIRECTOR AND NOVELIST LEON FORD.

Recently selected for the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals, Griff the Invisible features an Australian superhero not quite able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and who, by day, suffers bullying in the workplace while exacting revenge at night by fighting injustice in his neighbourhood.

Recent Australian film has tended to emphasise rural nostalgia (The Tree, Summer Coda, Lou, The Boys Are Back), gritty realism (Animal Kingdom) and mainstream comedy/romance (Bran Nue Dae, I Love You Too), so it’s great to see a director who’s not afraid of an experimental touch or play with genre. Leon Ford is well-known as an actor (Beneath Hill 60, Changi) while his short films Katoomba and The Mechanicals have shown a real talent for writing in particular, winning awards at the Sydney and St Kilda Film Festivals. He joins a spate of actors (Rachel Ward, Serhat Caradee, Anthony Hayes, Nash Edgerton, Matthew Newton) turning their hand to directing, with accomplished results for their first features. These directors also have a good feel for casting: Griff the Invisible goes against type with Ryan Kwanten (who does awkward as well as he does tough-guy in Red Hill and True Blood), Maeve Dermody (Beautiful Kate) as the fragile but potent Melody, and Toby Schmitz (The Pacific, Three Blind Mice and, onstage, Ruben Guthrie for Belvoir) charismatic as the arrogant bully Tony.

The film opens with a quotation from Oscar Wilde—“Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”—as we enter the frame of a large telescope, eyeing the cityscape, before panning around a room full of surveillance equipment on red alert for action in the streets. A woman walks, pursued by a man in a strange top hat. This is a nice parody of the big-budget blockbusters, like Superman Returns, filmed on our shores, before we’re introduced to our truly B-grade superhero in a cheap black rubber suit with a large gold G on the chest, for Griff, not Gotham.

Griff the Invisible has no superpowers that we can see but carries a blade that he swipes cartoon-style through the necks of his assailants. Kwanten has the physical ability to transform easily, moving beautifully between his alter egos. He practises his lines in front of the mirror at home—“It’s okay, you’re safe”—and searches for the right descriptor—Griff the Protector? Griff the Hidden?—as much for himself as the victims he defends.

By day, he is stalked by terrors even worse: the open plan office. Nervous and reluctant to engage, Griff spends his days on the phone answering client enquiries, trying not to talk to anyone at close range. Office bully Tony—a show-off in front of the ladies, a man with a strong sense of entitlement, used to getting exactly what he wants—is all too aware of Griff’s weaknesses and regularly harasses him. Ford (aided by Schmitz’s talents) cleverly chooses to portray Tony as an attractive and vivacious character (rather than the fat loser bullies often seen in US sitcoms), sexy and louche, with that right blend of menace and charm.

Griff brings his surveillance skills into the office, spying on colleagues with a series of ingeniously simple gadgets (he’s no Batman) designed to help him communicate without words. But the enigmatic narrative means that we’re never quite sure of the nature of Griff’s inner/outer world. Is it a fantasy playing in his head? Does he really hit the streets? Is he battling a mental illness in which he’s completely delusional? His girlfriend-to-be, Melody, a science student transfixed by the space between atoms, certainly believes all he says but, then again, she is the only character who can’t see him when he’s ‘invisible’ (a brilliant running gag). Getting that right balance between pathos, humour and occasional farce is extremely difficult and Ford manages it well; the film hums along with its strange dialogue, a visually inventive palette, the melancholic lead romance and real empathy for the loneliness of the central characters.

The entire plot fixes on the fight/flight response and which way Griff will turn at any moment. His life is about boundaries: who can cross them, when and where, and the possibilities of transformation. Melody, instead, wants to transcend her limitations right here right now, even attempting to walk through walls to reach Griff. With his central couple, Ford has almost effortlessly created (where films like I Love You Too and Summer Coda haven’t quite succeeded) an alluring and enduring romantic comedy, with characters complex and intertwined. It’s a strange and whimsical world for the viewer to inhabit but a terrific and courageous debut.

Griff the Invisible, writer, director Leon Ford, producer Nicole O’Donohue, executive producers Jan Chapman, Scott Meek, cinematography Simon Chapman, editor Karen Johnson, sound designer Sam Petty, production designer Sophie Nash, original music Kids At Risk; www.grifftheinvisible.com

AS PART OF THE 5TH DIGITAL ARTS FESTIVAL, CLUSTER, IN TAIPEI, THE FLEDGLING DAC DIGITAL ARTS CENTRE PRESENTED AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS FROM LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE. FOUR MEDIA ARTWORKS FILLED THE GALLERY, CONFORMING TO AND CHALLENGING NORMATIVE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT MEDIA ART. SOME PRESENTED A REIFICATION OF NOVELTY AND TECHNOLOGICAL EFFECTS AND OTHERS SIDESTEPPED THE SIDESHOW TO PUSH CONCEPTUAL AND EXPERIENTIAL ASPECTS.

Nature, so often yearned for in the dark spaces of media arts, is the theme upon which the exhibition hinged. Kerstin Ergenzinger (Germany), Yi Ping Yang and Guillaume Marmin (France), Yun-Ju Chen (Taiwan) and Chih-Chieh Huang (Taiwan) each tackle this theme distinctively, calling attention to our immediate surroundings and the global context, the metaphorical and the literal.

Kerstin Ergenzinger’s Whiskers in Space is the pièce de résistance. It engages the participant with an array of forms clumped in three groups on the gallery floor. More immediately suggesting a field of grass than whiskers, they are rough-cut airplane foam, peaking to knee-high blades. As one walks through the room, they move, bend and stretch from side to side and jitter as though stimulated by some sudden neural impulse or vibrated by a mysterious wind. In fact, wind is the critical element defining the work; not that of a blustery sea-side, but a micro-scale, unfelt wind that might trigger goose-bumps on the back of your neck for reasons bewitching and unknown. These micro-currents, impacted by our movement through the exhibition space, trigger the seemingly uncanny animation of the whiskers.

Whiskers in Space is constructed to draw the participant closer to the experience of nature not by granting the instant response expected of computing technology, but randomising and delaying the data received by changes in the air in the room. The system has been fastidiously tested by the artist to present a balance between audience expectation and the denial of immediate gratification, which is deferred but not absent. Ergenzinger’s creation is poetic and mesmerising, belying the speed imperative characteristic of the digital age—it is enough merely to sit and watch the slowly undulating forms move in mysterious ways. It is also compelling to feel responsible for their movement, in much the same way our actions yield consequences, small and large, of which we’re largely unaware, upon the natural world.

From grass roots to mountain tops: French and Taiwanese duo Guillaume Marmin and Yi Ping Yang present Around the Island, a glowing sculptural installation of a mountain range, or stylised island, surrounded by a pitch black, uneven ground. The bright white peaks are used as a projection surface and the work essentially reaches its zenith as a performative projection installation. The accompanying soundscape, composed by Philippe Gordiani, is performed live by Yang and mixed alongside the projection of Marmin’s abstract, naturalistic organic forms drawing on local Taiwanese landscapes. The score comprises the sounds of common household objects and Yang’s haunting vocals with their erotic breathlessness. Without this auditory component, Around the Island would lose much of its sensorial impact. Rather than recalling nature, the juxtaposition of complex, layered experimental sound with imagery draws the audience into an experience more attuned to culture and its codes of expression.

From the mountain to the sky: in Starry Starry Night, Taiwanese artist Yun-Ju Chen seeks to address environmental issues with an installation of large glowing balls hanging limp like loose ball-sacks, or puffed-out like eager beach balls, and lit from the inside with alternating pastel hues. These spheres symbolise the Earth’s continents. Data in the form of key words is taken from various websites and rated as positive or negative, then fed to the balls. If there are reports of flooding or excess pollution, the balls inflate, heavy with the burden. Conversely, reports of carbon reduction by use of alternative energy sources make the balls deflate as a sign of relief. Chen writes of a desire “to awake[n] people’s concern for environment,” but the work appears unresolved, problematically literalising the binary logic at the heart of digital data. Had it moved beyond the rhetoric of on/off, good/evil dichotomies to push in the direction of other possibilities it would have had greater impact.

Chih-Chieh Huang’s LBSkeleton Lite is a robotic installation in the form of an origami-like flower pillar that emits light from an ordinary bulb within its cylindrical body. Controlled by pneumatic switches, the device continually juts out its arms. As a cross between an inarticulate robot and bad lighting, the work’s mechanical qualities supersede its poetic potentiality. Acknowledging this criticism, the work is presented as part rather than whole, minus the crucial auditory accompaniment originally intended for exhibition. As such, it is a demonstration of a work-in-progress, one mired in its mechanical technicality, its elegant origami aesthetic at odds with the jolting industrial animation.

The artists in this Digital Arts Centre exhibition, for better or worse, endeavoured to create works that act as extensions of the sensorium in relation to our experience of the ever ambiguous concept of nature. They imaged, imagined and constructed nature in terms of both our symbolic and real relations to the fragile yet fierce organic world that surrounds us. It is undeniable that nature today, as demonstrated in this exhibition, is ever enculturated. But defining nature through the technological cannot help but risk falling into to this problematic terrain.

Digital Arts Centre, Cluster: 5th Digital Art Festival, Taipei, Nov 26-Dec 5, 2010; www.dac.tw/daf10

“A FESTIVAL IS AS PRECARIOUS AS ANY ARTWORK,” HELEN COLE, PRODUCER AND CURATOR OF THE UK’S BIENNIAL INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL OF LIVE ART AND INTRIGUE IS TELLING ME. “YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TILL YOU ADD THE AUDIENCE. YOU’VE WORKED HARD TO CREATE THE OVERALL SHAPE AND THE JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORKS, BUT YOU HAVE TO BE MET HALF-WAY BY YOUR AUDIENCE, YOUR CO-WORKERS, THE ARTISTS IN YOUR COMMUNITY.”

Cole’s concern for chemistry characterises Inbetween Time (IBT), a festival where the parties and pauses for conversation and exchange are as carefully configured as the performances. I attended the festival in its early days and was captivated by the sense of community generated by Cole around an esoteric and little known new festival in the small city of Bristol. Artists I had never heard of were mingling cheerfully with their better-known peers and international presenters in the Arnolfini gallery’s cosy bar. The work was carefully contextualised to accommodate emerging and established practice and make the five-day event feel like a singular, intense immersion into a range of practices anchored in the body.

Since 2001, the festival has grown in scale and profile and several of those emerging artists have similarly acquired international repute. Cole acknowledges that the 2010 festival is her most ambitious to date, with new venues added to the central Arnolfini gallery and performance spaces as well as an extensive sited program in public spaces. Now independently produced, IBT is a partnership with Arnolfini, where Cole was the Producer of Live Art and Dance for 12 years. With the majority of its funding for three years coming from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, IBT is in a relatively robust position amidst the devastation wrought by diminished arts funding in the UK.

“It was hard to celebrate this year,” says Cole, “knowing about the challenges facing the arts sector. Not to mention the snow!” Images from the festival, of which there are many on the websites documenting IBT, show panels of rugged-up presenters, artists and audiences engaged in joyful defiance of the weather. “There was a true spirit of the Blitz,” says Cole, “we were all in it together. The usual eccentric moments were magnified.”

highlights & new parameters

Cole cites several highlights in the 75 productions in her program, speaking with great enthusiasm of Frontman by Action Hero, the local group who have been garnering significant attention nationally and were facing that difficult hurdle of recreating the impact of their breakthrough work. In a new partnership with Circomedia, the Bristol based circus development organisation, IBT programmed Action Hero’s new work in a large church, creating an incongruous gig-like feel with dry ice and pumping sound. Cole rates the success of this satisfying production as highly as she does the extremely uncomfortable two works presented by British comedian, Kim Noble. “Kim pushed all the edges,” says Cole, “crossing from the intensely private into the public and making everyone cringe.” There was another cringing highlight for Cole in the Belgian production, Still Standing You by Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido from CAMPO. Presented as part of the Lecturama mid-morning program, this confrontingly visceral grappling dance between two big blokes had everyone wincing over their coffees.

The CAMPO production is testimony to the longevity of the relationships Cole holds with peer producers in Europe. Kristof Blom, CAMPO’s producer, joined Nayse Lopes of Panorama Festival in Rio de Janeiro and Fiona Winning from Australia on an International Curators’ Panel about the modus operandi he shares with Cole: his recommendation gave her the confidence to program Still Standing You from video alone.

This unlikely dance work demonstrates that IBT is about more than live art. The festival’s brochure explicitly states that its D:Stable strand comprises “new artist commissions, premières and international co-productions that thoroughly reject theatre convention.” New experimental works by such celebrated names as Blast Theory, Ivana Muller, Quarantine and Tim Etchells stand alongside home grown premieres from Timothy X Atack and Tanuja Amarasuriya, Alex Bradley or Cole’s own production, Collecting Fireworks.

There is a through line of exploration that unites the broad diversity of the program and creates that sense of communal adventure that resonates throughout the experience of attending IBT. Cole says, “I am curating conceptually and choosing work that makes sense in a program. I want audiences to consider not just these works, but a body of work and a conversation with an artist that is as much about where they are as where they are going next.”

the australian connection

Three Australian works in IBT10 reflected Cole’s lengthy engagement with Australian contemporary performance. She first visited Performance Space in Sydney in 2000, striking up a relationship with then director Fiona Winning that resulted in a number of Australian artists appearing at IBT 2006. In 2010 Winning herself and Victoria Hunt appeared in Dancing the Dead in the program strand connected to the Arnolfini exhibition, What Next for the Body.

“This work surprised me with how well it was received,“ says Cole, “given how little we know of that culture [Hunt’s Maori heritage is explored in conversation and dance]. Fiona and Victoria found a way of talking about the making of new work in front of people who do not know either of them, or the themes of the work, and held it all together. This sort of exploratory conversation really works in IBT.”

Another Performance Space connection led to the programming of Take This, For It Is My Body by Sarah Jane Norman, also in Arnolfini. “This one-on-one work was very simple,” says Cole. “I am not sure how much the audience could access the references to Australian Aboriginal culture, but they clearly understood the conceptual significance of Sarah Jane’s mixing of her blood into the bread and were challenged by her offer to consume it.” Cole saw Norman at Sydney’s PACT around 2004 and followed her trajectory through the creation of her independent work in Australia and then internationally. “We have been in conversation for several years,” she says.

A more recent conversation, and one that seems at first glance to be less likely, is Cole’s commission for Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre. “Despite our very different aesthetic tastes, we share the same commitment to building community around our work,” Cole says. “I learned an awful lot from having them make The Democratic Set with us over 10 days in Bristol. It is very politically current to work with diverse communities and make participatory work, but this is something different. They have such a light touch and such clear curatorial thinking. The relationships they built so quickly with our community were staggering. They worked with over 100 people without blinking. The project is so simple, so elegant and so heart-warming. There was a frenzy of about 400 people trying to get into the gala premiere screening. I am sure this is just the beginning for us. Back to Back have a community in Bristol now; people who have given something of themselves to the company and have started a relationship with them. Bruce [Gladwin, Back to Back’s director], an artist from the other side of the world, spoke at our opening event and it just felt right. Sometimes you find yourself on the other side of the world and you are at home.”

The number and diversity of artists who find themselves at home in Bristol is increasing year by year as Cole continues to pitch her close knit community of local artists further and deeper into the international context.

Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art & Intrigue, Bristol, UK, Dec 1-5, www.inbetweentime.co.uk

Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions

AMONG THE THRONG OF WINE-GLASS CLUTCHING AFICIONADOS AT INBETWEEN TIME’S LAUNCH PARTY, TWO SLIGHT YOUNG MEN SIT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER AT A TABLE, DRESSED AS PLAYTIME RED INDIANS: WHITE VESTS, SHORTS, AND CROWNS OF PRIMARY COLOURED FEATHERS. A GLASS JAR OF PEANUT M&MS (COLOURS CORRESPONDING WITH THEIR FEATHERS) SITS BETWEEN JONES AND LLYR, AND IN TURNS THEY SUCK, CHEW AND SPIT OUT THE SWEETS, FACING EACH OTHER DIRECTLY, THEIR GAZE SOMETIMES A CHALLENGE, SOMETIMES AN INVITATION, BUT ALWAYS A JOINT ENTERPRISE.

They drool residue onto the white table, making a gloopy multi-coloured patina. Occasionally they attempt to spit confectionery from one mouth to another; failed launches are met with wry smiles. This silent flirting with revulsions and bodily etiquette is youthful and funny—but at the same time suggests a strange entropy, dissipation and doubt. As the evening grows older, discarded chocolates scatter across the Arnolfini floor, as if the performance has a radiation, a half-life, particles falling away like petals from a flower.

The push-me-pull-you of partnerships is explored by several other performing duos at Inbetween Time, in forms that vary from fragile, stately propositions to noisy creative-destructive acts to sheer animal glee.

search party: somehow growing old with you

The fragile and stately first: Search Party are real-life couple Jodie Hawkes and Pete Phillips who we learn met in their 20s. Their show is a love letter to each other, but…wait, no, come back! Somehow Growing Old With You manages to circumnavigate the cloying neediness of a bad wedding ode. It doesn’t feel like a renewal of vows, though that’s essentially what it is: a ceremony, a statement of intent, occasionally demanding the patience you’d give such a thing. But its glacial pace and quiet repetition proves meditative, its moments of emotional beauty dotted about an arid landscape of salt and smoke.

Phillips and Hawkes slow-dance across a carpet of salt that crunches beneath their feet like glass. They walk forward, Hawkes having some sort of unspoken problem with reaching a certain distance, Phillips carrying her to the threshold in a variety of ways, each time failing to convince her to stay. They hold private conversations in inaudible whispers, discussing what to do next, checking their progress with each other in gazes, glances, frowns and smiles. Eventually, they each record a message to camcorder for the future, telling the story of how they met, of how their daughter was born. This is the start of a process wherein Search Party will record such messages every 10 years, for as long as they’re together, or until they’re no longer able to. The inevitability of human decay hangs heavy in the room, announced and committed to tape…but Search Party are carrying that knowledge, that destiny, together. I once heard the artist Franko B wonder at how audiences rarely have a problem with the sharing of pain, but no sooner does an artwork express overt sentimentality than its integrity is doubted. True love is sometimes a dirty secret in live art. This show, unashamedly, reeks of it.

action hero: frontman

Smoke is also filling the room at Circomedia, but this time it’s rock gig smoke, drifting over a raised stage and guitar amplifiers, shot through by spotlights. Action Hero are premiering Frontman, their lament for the egos of petulant musicians throughout the ages. Previously Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse have appropriated and assimilated texts from westerns and daredevil spectaculars with a style that sees them rope the audience into the proceedings—shooting down the hero in a hail of imaginary bullets, cheering the motorcycle jump or going silent when the stranger walks into the room. Tonight is slightly different; no less urgent, but another kind of energy, because it centres upon what happens when the contract between audience and performer falters or fails. Paintin holds court in spangled hot pants, making her way through various on-stage crises: hubristic, chaotic, physically destructive, confrontational. It’s a catalogue of ineloquence made either comic or distressing by its amplification. Then, when she finally gives up the ghost and crumples, hands over her ears, the soundtrack takes over, eliminating her, a wall of intense electronic scree with frequencies so violent we reach for the earplugs we’ve been handed before the show begins.

Stenhouse is also on stage throughout, a gangly roadie in rabbit ears, operating technical equipment, untangling cables in a hilariously slow and straight-faced manner. He’s heckled by Paintin and they physically fight on stage. She hides in the shadows and accuses him of ruining everything. It’s exhausting, and you feel for the performers, Paintin especially. Action Hero themselves are a company in the spotlight, their shows the subject of great acclaim. You wonder how much this show is actually about the artists, about their mercurial creative processes, their negotiations, cul-de-sacs and unpredictable life force.

pieter ampe and guilherme garrido/campo: still standing you

And speaking of untameable life forces: the audience for Still Standing You is assembling. It’s 11am. Guilherme Garrido is on stage, precariously seated on an impromptu stool made of his colleague Pieter Ampe’s legs. Ampe’s back is flat on the ground. He seems stoic about the situation. “We’re just waiting for a few more people to come in,” says Garrido, “Then we can begin this breakfast buffet of contemporary European dance.” And my god, I haven’t been this excited by a dance work in years.

I’d love to be able to describe Ampe and Garrido’s performance in intricate technical detail but I’m afraid I watched much of it through gasps, stifled giggles and tears of happy laughter. There’s no music, no set, nothing on the well-lit stage bar our odd couple: Garrido a swarthy Portuguese chatterer; Ampe a wiry, wordless, ginger-haired mega-bearded Belgian. The show is about them working out what they ‘mean’ to each other, and what this means for us is an extraordinary celebration of all the stupid, joyful, hilarious, loud and unlikely things that two human bodies can do to, at, for and with each other in one hour. Ampe and Garrido hurl one another around wrestler-style, make human climbing frames of themselves, play dangerous games of physical one-upmanship, snarling throughout in ridiculous thrash metal vocalisations, gurning, spitting and croaking. Then they finally rip each other’s clothes off, flapping nude about the stage like distressed fish, yanking at each other’s penises as if they were plasticine and locking around and upon one another to make half-men forms, strange animals with human skin, a being made entirely of legs, Siamese dancers, noisy molluscs.

Easily my favourite experience at Inbetween Time, it’s almost easier to describe what Still Standing You wasn’t than what it was. For a show with explicit nudity it wasn’t remotely sexual—despite, for instance, a moment where Ampe opened up Garrido’s foreskin and screamed into it from the top of his lungs. Yep. Read that again. That’s right. It didn’t feel like a masculine initiation rite, because it was so personal to the two individuals before us, rather than existing in a specific cultural place and time. And it wasn’t random and unfocused, because the dance proceeded from one crazy move to the next with a logic that carried the audience with it, making us laugh or wince in anticipation. What it was, at heart, is best expressed by paraphrasing the late great Pina Bausch: not interested in how these two people move, but in what makes them move.

Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue: Jones and Llyr, A Mouthful Of Feathers, Arnolfini, Dec 1; Search Party, Growing Old With You, Wickham Theatre, Dec 2; Action Hero, Frontman, Circomedia, Dec 4; Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido/CAMPO, Still Standing You, Arnolfini, Dec 2; Bristol UK, Dec 1-5

Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions

“THE REASON OF THE UNREASON WITH WHICH MY REASON IS AFFLICTED SO WEAKENS MY REASON THAT WITH REASON I MURMUR AT YOUR BEAUTY.” CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE

I’ve often thought of Live Art as having properly Quixotic aspects to it: foolhardy, sometimes nonsensical quests, undertaken in the face of scorn; easily mocked; often more moving and possessed of less selfish egotism, than might first appear. In Arnolfini’s foyer, an impeccably attired Pete Barrett decorates a wooden chair with tiny florets of cake icing, a beautiful, sedate action with strange, wordless inner logic. Many onlookers scowl with incredulity, some shrug…but it’s the kids who understand him best. They toddle up close to stand quiet and respectful at Barrett’s shoulder, as he lays concentric triangles of sugary paste across the dark wood.

For Wave Machine #2, US duo Cupola Bobber spend the cold afternoon in the shadow of Bristol Cathedral, attempting to replicate the swell of an ocean wave using pulleys and white/blue tarpaulins, repeatedly, back and forth, no-nonsense—because that’s what they do. For Black Box Ni, Paul Granjon has built an independently functioning robot that is able to control its maker via an interactive costume, compelling the artist to perform random repetitive tasks and—in one hilarious sequence—firing high-velocity paintballs at Granjon whilst he tries to construct a jam sandwich.

kim noble: kim noble will die

But there’s a darker side to Quixotic desire that even some of Inbetween Time’s audience might have problems with. Because generally, we prefer the safer madness, don’t we? The zany madness, the village idiot madness. Madness with boundaries and recognised borders. One 2009 review of Kim Noble Will Die protested, “Even for a show about going too far, he goes too far,” and that’s because Noble’s masterpiece is an uncomplacent, confrontational, no holds barred, side-splittingly funny and unbearably upsetting portrait of a mental condition, the bipolar monster that has been cruelly toying with him, on and off, for much of his life.

Noble has censored so little of himself (and been equally indiscriminate with the lives of his family, ex-girlfriends, and neighbours) that you leave the show feeling beaten up, elated, angry and honoured, all at once. You wonder what percentage of it was ‘true,’ and then you question how much (if at all) that knowledge would matter. Because even if Noble is fucking with our minds (he didn’t really ejaculate into that bottle of Vagisil and leave it on the supermarket shelf, did he?) the image would hold fast, the portrait of the artist would remain the same. Even if this were embellished rather than pure autobiography, the journey would feature the same remarkable peaks and troughs, in relating Noble’s struggle to find meaning in a world that, to him, looks increasingly barren.

The show is a high speed stream-of-consciousness audiovisual presentation cramming 10 hours of material into 60 minutes. Karaoke rock is sung to repeated close-ups of Noble’s ejaculating penis. Horrendously intimate phone calls bleed from the speakers. Members of the audience are banished from the room at random. Some poor ticket-holder sits with a bucket on his head for the full hour. There’s a genuine cameo by a world-famous Hollywood star. There’s product tampering, unhinged email exchanges, cash handouts and graphic, profoundly disturbing self-harm. It mugs you. Past audiences have actually reported this show to the police. It is, no doubt whatsoever, exploitative of artist, audience and innocents alike (but in its awful honesty, what else could it be?) and—it must be noted—it is very, very male.

This last factor seems to feature heavily in people’s responses to Noble’s work. Audiences keen on Live Art’s capacity to navigate uncharted territory sometimes baulk at being asked to care about problems of white middle class blokes with Macbooks. Maleness is often seen as conservative, the predominant power structure, the mainstream; as a result a full exploration of masculine motifs and issues is a relatively rare thing to see on this circuit, and to witness Noble taking it to extremes (sometimes horrible, misogynistic extremes) will go not only beyond empathy for some, beyond risk, but also beyond acceptability. I wasn’t sure what to think. I’m still, after several days, not sure. All I know is that, on and off, I’ll be thinking about this show until my tiny light sputters.

kim noble: you are not alone

In Kim Noble Will Die the artist is a pot-bellied silverback gorilla of a man, a dominant presence pacing back and forth who, you suspect, it’s best not to look in the eye for fear of reprisal. He’s grim and glowering, not smiling once. He’s similarly unsmiling throughout You Are Not Alone, his second show of the festival, until a fleeting moment late in proceedings. During a film of him presenting a ‘Kim Noble Award’ to his favourite takeaway restaurant, while shaking the bemused owner’s hand, a genuine sliver of a smile creeps onto his face. And it’s heartbreaking, a release—especially if you’ve sat through both shows. It feels like a tiny reward.

Kim Noble Will Die is riven with humiliation, failure and madness. You Are Not Alone is at the other Quixotic extreme, with its comic levels of altruism, its cranky hope, its unstoppable quest. The ‘ghost’ of Noble’s ex-girlfriend haunts the stage, a printed photograph on A4 paper projected via a glitchy webcam rigged to Noble’s head. The story begins as she departs in a taxi, their relationship ended at that very moment, and Noble decides to make sense of events by making his loneliness a weapon of empathy. Neighbours on the London street where he lives form a venn diagram of opportunities, and addressing their problems without complaint—often covertly and without reward—becomes a way of making the world better.

As you’d expect, this Knight Of The Woeful Countenance has particularly idiosyncratic solutions for stolen plant pots or a takeaway restaurant’s lack of business, his neighbour’s depleted sex life or the isolation of modern urban existence. He offers to deliver onion bhajis to anywhere in the UK, if only we’ll order them (phone numbers are provided). He ropes his audience into making appreciative phone calls about taxi journeys that never happened. He randomly twins his street with one in Eastern Europe (and journeys there to announce it, to friendly bemusement). One night he cleans every car parked on the road, dressed as a cartoon bear.

It’s still shot through with the usual Kim Noble queasiness—especially as determining his neighbour’s ‘problems’ requires him to engage in almost obsessive electronic surveillance. But he’s a different character tonight: barely speaking, letting a computerised voice narrate the quest, a man at the service of something beyond himself. Taken together the ultimate effect of these two amazing shows is, for me, the same as in Cervantes. You desperately hope that Kim Noble will one day conquer his afflictions. But at the same time the ludicrous, surreal beauty of his battle both repels and enchants you.

Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Pete Barrett, The Surety, The Surety (The Inner Surety), Arnolfini, Dec 5; Cupola Bobber, Wave Machine #2, various locations, Dec 2-5; Paul Granjon, Black Box Ni, Wickham Theatre, Dec 5; Kim Noble, Kim Noble Will Die, Arnolfini, Dec 4; Kim Noble, You Are Not Alone, Circomedia, Dec 5; Bristol, UK, Dec 1-5

Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions

THE CIRCOMEDIA BUILDING USED TO BE A GEORGIAN CHURCH, NOW RE-PURPOSED FOR AN ARTFORM IN WHICH TRANSCENDENCE OF THE PHYSICALLY MUNDANE IS A DOMINANT THEME. THE CIRCUS SCHOOL HANGS THE TRAPEZE HIGH UP IN THE CEILING ARCHES, WHICH HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM BELOW THEM FOR THE SAFETY NET. ALONG WITH THE ARCHES THEY HAVE KEPT SOME OF THE PEWS, A GALLERY AND A FEATURE STAINED GLASS WINDOW. THE SPARE BATH STONE INTERIOR IS SOFTENED BY A SPRUNG WOODEN FLOOR IN THE MAIN PERFORMANCE AREA.

hancock & kelly live: iconographia

It was here that Richard Hancock lay on a plinth, at the height of a kitchen worktop, spooning a dead pig. The pig was already in rigor with his legs stretched out, a slight twist cocking his body askew. The man and the pig were the same colour.

Traci Kelly stalked round him purposefully. She was dressed in a black ball gown, a black pillbox hat with a small veil over her eyes, black gloves. Her tools were a block of gold leaf, a folded card to tweezer up each leaf, and a large soft brush, like a make-up brush, to fix and burnish. She would pick up a square of gold leaf delicately, angling it in the breeze of its own movement to minimise creasing and doubling, lay it on one of the bodies and smooth it down with the brush.

By the time I got there, one hour in, the feet and hindquarters of both bodies were covered, and Kelly was moving to the front of the hybrid to pay attention to hips and ribs. Music played: Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. Shreds of gold leaf escaped from the block, from under the brush, from the bodies, fluttering to the floor round the plinth or sticking to the black gloves and having to be scraped off. Where gold leaf sealed the gap between bodies it kept breaking down and having to be replaced. I kept wanting the process of gilding to be perfect. It stubbornly continued to be messy, very far from perfect.

Hancock held the pig tenderly, one hand resting on its chest between its front trotters. Its legs lay between his and he rested one knee insecurely on its narrow hip. It was a young pig, and thus about one third the man’s size. At all times the combination of genuine gold and glitter, of bourgeois formality (the hat, the gloves, the heels), of the representation of high culture, Purcell, to guarantee the seriousness of the occasion, threatened to topple over into vulgarity. Which is indeed the case at all our most solemn social rituals, weddings and funerals, where the popular, the profane and the high-minded collide.

The man was breathing, the pig was stiff. Both were sinewy and heavily greased with Vaseline. The gold around their nether regions caught the light in a more sparkly, less dense way than did their glowing naked orange-tan-pink skins. The pig had a bruise on its forward ham. The man did not. The man trembled with the cold, or the strain of holding the pose, or because all warmth was being leached out of him into the block of dead meat he cradled.

I had been told the pig still had the grass of its previous happy existence between its toes; I walked round to scrutinise. The long cut that had gutted it formed a tightly sewn, corded seam up the length of its body. Its tongue protruded between its teeth, curving up towards its snout. Smears of blood had been mostly wiped away, leaving only traces under the layer of Vaseline. It was clean. Its eyes were half open—it seemed to be looking up. Hancock lay with his own face directed towards it. He would meet its eyes if he opened his own. Then he did so: they were blue, the same colour as the pig’s. There the two were, in affinity.

At this point I surprised myself—for I don’t have that culturally specific Western sympathy for livestock—by feeling sorry for the pig. Then I felt the ways in which Hancock stood for the pig, and the pig for him, and both of them for all of us, tied to a hunk of dead meat and an inevitable end. The realisation was awful. I had to retreat. I went and sat up in the gallery where all that could reach me was the spectacle. I felt like howling.

Although I can recall it to memory it was not a repeatable moment, since it was triggered by physical presence. Occasionally I went down to stand in the same place and feel the same thing, drawn by the intensity of it—we don’t face such raw perception very often. Kelly inexorably and gently covered the intertwined bodies, stroking and burnishing as she obliterated them with splendour. Hancock breathed, and trembled under her touch. The music broke down and destabilised with every repetition, imperceptibly; yet by the end it seemed a distorted, reverberating howling played on a disintegrating instrument. The tension as Kelly moved the gold leaf closer and closer to the two faces was painful, yet when it happened, the end was not so dramatic. She smoothed the last gold square over the diamond-shaped fragment of face that remained of Hancock. Then she took care to remove pieces of golden film from within his nostrils. Pig and man now were covered, grafted together, shiny and perfectly inert. Kelly left the area.

More people had come into the church and become slowly rapt, standing closer to the plinth, drawn towards it, fascinated. The golden object, the glittering remnant, was to remain displayed for another half-hour. But I left, not caring to watch Richard Hancock shiver for that length of time. While Kelly was there, she was responsible for the work. But once she had left, audience complicity came into play to give us all control of the spectacle.

teresa margolles: 37 cuerpos

It seems logical to me to compare Iconographia to Teresa Margolles’ work, not least because the spectacular aesthetic in which Iconographia wallows is so at odds with the minimalist aesthetic of Margolles.

In 37 Cuerpos a gallery space is bisected by a thread running from wall to wall. It is a little below waist height. The room has four entrances/exits, a pair on each side of the cord, at right angles to it, and an adjacent pair in one of the walls to which the cord is fixed, opening into a corridor. The lighting is subdued and the gallery’s plainness underlines the clinical air of the installation.
Closer inspection of the thread reveals details. It is composed of many lengths of a waxy, cat gut-like material knotted together. The sections vary in the degree of blemish they have picked up: rust-coloured, grimy-looking stains. The knots are angular, giving the thing a look of organic barbed wire. The program notes explain each length was used to sew up a body after autopsy. A couple of lengths are heavily stained indeed: that person’s end must have been grisly.

Nobody who ventures into this room steps over the thread to get to the adjoining gallery, although it would be easy to do so. Instead they walk down the line to where the two doors open into the corridor; exit from one, take two paces and re-enter from the other. Then they walk up the line again.

teresa margolles: aire

In Aire, Margolles’ work in the adjoining gallery, disinfected water collected from the washing of bodies humidifies a room. Those who walk there breathe it in and feel it cooling on their skin. I got to the entrance, hung with a heavy plastic strip door, where I caught a hint of pleasant coolness, as enticing for someone from the tropics as the smell of fresh bread baking. I noticed the industrial humidifier on the floor. I did not go in.

It is the spectators’ responsibility to pay attention, to leave themselves open to engage with the work. That may be all that is required, or they may be challenged by the artist to be complicit in what takes place; or they may be placed in a compromising position without their consent. However, in offering attention, the spectator also claims the freedom to refuse to take part. Once the artist asks for engagement they must also be ready for and accept refusal. Otherwise the quality of the encounter they have arranged is in question (what is real and what is not is always an issue in live work): their request is a sham, an underhand attempt to force a result using the contextual authority of the gallery.

Something more interesting is going on with Margolles, who uses not only the authority of the gallery but the entire machinery of prestige and commodification driving international high culture to draw attention to real lives and deaths in Mexico. As a conscientious spectator I could accept complicity, but I don’t: I am not part of that high culture machinery and I don’t think InBetween Time is either. Nothing could compromise me more in this situation than pretending to be so sophisticated that the idea of touching the paraphernalia of death doesn’t horrify me. A value system is being critiqued here, among other things: my naive reaction acknowledges horror at the base of it.

Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Hancock & Kelly Live, Iconographia, Circomedia, Dec 5; Teresa Margolles, 37 Cuerpos and Aire, Arnolfini, Dec 1-Feb 6; Dec 1-5, Bristol UK

Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions

THERE’S A BIT IN BARBARELLA WHERE A SPRAWL OF STONED WOMEN SURROUND A LIQUOR-FILLED GLASS GLOBE THAT HAS A YOUNG MAN SWIMMING AROUND INSIDE OF IT. HE LOOKS A LITTLE BIT HARASSED. THE WOMEN SUCK ON HOOKAHS ISSUING FROM THE GLOBE. “WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING?” BARBARELLA ASKS, INNOCENT AS EVER. “ESSENCE OF MAN,” COMES THE REPLY.

zoran todorovic: warmth

I walked into the room and made a beeline for the rectangular piles of felt that looked like folded blankets. Heaped on pallets they extended upwards to just the right height for me to finger them, and to get my nose down in there. They smelt clean. Matted fibres, mostly bear-colour. Some lighter strands, some white.

I’ve noticed elsewhere that European hair-colour averages out to brown, even in Scandanavia. So the blankets default to a brindled dark mass. Mounted on the gallery wall, monochrome videos on fast-forward sum up the process of making at length. The hair is cut at the barber’s, mostly into a far-from-pretty no-frills back-and-sides. So seldom does the camera peer over the subjects’ shoulder to spy at a face in the mirror that when it happens, it comes as a shock. The backs of so many heads presenting! It’s like forming an impression of personality from the look of a person’s arse. Not that that can’t be done.

Blunt, defended scrubby heads. Utilitarian, no-nonsense settings. A couple of women are fleetingly glimpsed amongst those who do the barbering. For the rest it’s all men. In the video the shorn hair is gathered up, emptied on to tables and sorted by hand. Tissues and other detritus are picked out of it. The clumps of hair are teased and dried out in heaps on the floor and then shredded (a little) and carded in big industrial rollers, washed and felted in the steel machines. Blokes in heavy boots and overalls deployed in utilitarian structures of concrete and steel wield brooms and black bin liners under a fluorescent flicker. All the dander and the smell, the shed organic dirt that the hair must have collected is sifted out, washed off, got rid of. The blankets have been passed through an industrial process, they have been standardised and homogenised and, to a degree, purified, all obtrusively particular matter has been removed. Yet the gallery is somehow humming with essence of Bloke: hardy, gruff, obtuse, stoic.

There is no smell beyond the suggestion of a smidgeon of grease—I daresay human grease smells awful to other mammals but not to us. Just as well—I’m asthmatic, me, and have to be careful with fibres. These fibres are contained. Then I catch myself wondering what kind of garment one could make from this material, that one could bear to wear. A heavy skirt perhaps. I can picture being wrapped in this dense prickly insulating shield. For an hour or two perhaps it would not be insufferable. Perhaps.

I know that there is an ideology that determines the course of this work. I know there is a brooding, a nationalism and an exclusivity. But the de-naturing of this material, this organic remnant, renders it general. What remains is the implicit presence of hundreds and hundreds of men, their tangible residue rendered down and processed, ranked and arrayed, stacked on its pallet, ordered by the machine. The installation simulates a stack of commodities ready for some Spartan, barrack-like environment: a trading post, a quartermaster’s store.

The artist further makes use of the context of the gallery to hammer home his point about commodification: the blankets are for sale in the Arnolfini shop. Paradoxically the narrative and ideology of the work is pervaded by a seductive tenderness, the ‘warmth’ of the blankets, and by a sense of brotherhood, of community. The iconographic referencing of the major European trauma of the 20th Century, the Holocaust, I needed to have pointed out to me before I saw it, and it still jars.

sarah jane norman: take this, for it is my body

“THIS WORK DEALS WITH THE GENERATIONS OF ‘HALF-BLOOD’ ABORIGINAL CHILDREN, INCLUDING THE ARTIST’S OWN MOTHER, WHO WERE AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENT’S REGIME OF ‘ASSIMILATION’.” INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL PROGRAM.

There’s a woman in an old satin slip welcoming me into the Dark Studio. It’s the sort of thing you wear when you’re slopping about the house getting on with something that’s needed to be done for a while. A garment that used to be glamorous and is now comfortable—that you feel self-indulgent in however shabby it gets. She has bare feet. There is a wonderful smell of bread baking.

Before I came in here I had to sign a disclaimer: “Please be advised that the ingredients include the blood of the artist. Please understand that you are not obliged to eat or accept this offering. If you choose to do so this will be entirely at your own risk.”

She greets me. We are on either side of a long table. There’s a small industrial oven behind us in the corner. There’s another table parallel to this one, a couple of floury baking trays on it, three or so loaves proving under a cloth. To the side against the wall is a table set for one with fine linen, plain crockery, a pat of butter and a butter knife and a napkin-covered basket. There’s an area on the floor with towels, a jug and a bucket of water, and there are black bags of supplies against another wall. It’s like a cottage production line, some kind of back-country industry the farmer’s wife fits in with her other duties. Stylistically there’s something about the combination of the efficient and the genteel that reminds me of the 50s.

There’s a large mixing bowl on the table, a sieve, small bowls of ingredients and a plate covered by another napkin, all different shades of white. The woman sieves the flour into the bowl and adds two dessert-spoons of sugar. In answer to my question she names the ingredients: “this is baking soda,” “this is buttermilk.” She lifts the napkin to reveal another dessert spoon. It contains blood, scarlet, with a darker line of clotting sunk to the bottom. So, the colours, glowing under the lights, are: white and cream ingredients, solid old-fashioned silverware, white crockery, white melamine tabletop, white linen, the woman creamy human in her creamy slip, one splash of red in the matt black surroundings of the Dark Studio.

Sarah Jane Norman pours the blood into the buttermilk and stirs. That turns it a dense pink, like Angel Delight. She pours this into the flour and mixes. The pink persists as the mixture starts clumping, darker material from the clot streaking through the dough. Amazing that such a small amount of blood has such a strong effect. She turns out the dough, kneading it, shaping it, slashing a cross into the top. She takes it to the next table to sit and prove with the other loaves (which show that definite tinge of pink as if they were special party bread). She goes to wash her hands in the bucket over by the towels.

The oven pings—the loaf that was put there before I entered the room is ready. Norman places it to cool by the proving loaves.

She invites me to sit at the place laid for one. Lifting the napkin from the basket she uncovers a rough, warm loaf, no longer pink. She cuts me a good slice, making eye contact all the time. It’s crusty, slightly bitter—that could be the baking soda—a bit heavy. I help myself to butter. If I’d tried to eat a whole slice we’d have been there for ages.

Succinct, earthy, confrontational, full of confidence, giving. Personal, not industrial, locating the political in the heart of family and domestic life, where it can do the most damage. About survival, not victimhood. Two very contrasting approaches to discourse about ethnicity and the threat of genocide.

Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue, Zoran Todorovic, Warmth, Arnolfini, Dec 1-Feb 6; Sarah Jane Norman, Take This, For It Is My Body, Arnolifini Dark Studio, Dec 4; Dec 1-5, Bristol UK

Our coverage of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival is a joint venture between RealTime and Inbetween Time Productions

“WHAT NEXT FOR THE BODY?” ASKS INBETWEEN TIME’S CENTRAL CURATORIAL QUESTION. TO WHICH JO BANNON ANSWERS: BONES SNAPPING, VIOLENT DROWNING AND GRISLY DEATH! (PLUS PARTY POPPERS. LOTS OF PARTY POPPERS.)

jo bannon: foley

Bannon’s Foley takes place at a table amplified by microphones and cluttered with vegetables, water bowls, metronomes and raw meat, a toolbox which the artist treats—and mistreats—to produce sound effects. Audience members are prompted to join in, providing footfalls, smatterings of applause and gunshots (hence the firecrackers). This is Bannon’s tribute to the pernickety and vaguely comic world of foley artists, where grown adults pretend to be foraging animals, a corkscrew doubles as a sonic screwdriver (true story, Doctor Who fans) and trudging through custard powder is the only thing that properly sounds like footsteps on snow.

No animals or snowdrifts here, though: Bannon’s audio landscape has an urban film noir vibe, which she narrates in deadpan received pronunciation. It’s a tale of mysterious dames and shady customers lurking in alleyways that recalls the mischievous tone of Godard’s Alphaville, generic elements peppering the storyline simply because they must; people get beaten up because, in a noir, that’s what happens. The femme is fatale because, well…what other kind is there? In Bannon’s world everything is, deliciously, at the service of the sounds. It’s also intriguing that for all of her flailing around—screaming into a bowlful of water, repeatedly slapping a slab of rump steak into the microphone—Bannon maintains a clinical detachment, a procedural poise. The artist appears to be asking us to conclude our own story, to fill in our own gaps, the sound alone is what she provides. These are the components she’s willing to give us…no more, no less.

alex bradley: day for night

There are several other works at the festival distinguished by starving one or more senses so as to expand others: sparse experiences where the viewer’s own body is the catalyst, the storyteller, the conduit. In Day For Night by Alex Bradley you sit on a bench in a basement of the Colston Hall, faced with nothing but an opaque half-moon window. A surround-soundtrack of treated guitar noise (barely recognisable as such) comes and goes in long washes of frequencies both within and beyond hearing range. The sub-bass pulses occasionally send geiger counter crackles through the bench and vibrate your backside and spine in a disconcerting way. But the principle requirement is that you must watch, focusing patiently on the window as it shifts, almost imperceptibly, from bright daylight to night-time gloom—complete with projected streetlamps and car headlights peeping through the venetian blinds—and back again. It’s accumulative, a little urban tone poem that condenses the day and speaks of roadworks beyond the bedroom window, wasted hours and cold evenings hidden inside the house, spoilt for me only by the over-effusive explanations of the venue staff: “You sit here. It’s 17 minutes long. It’s a loop. You watch it go from day to night. It’s dark now but it’ll get light later. It’s about bunnies.” (Well, maybe not the last one, but you get my drift…)

rod maclachlan: exchange

Exchange by Rod Maclachlan is similarly concerned with light and dark. A pair of participants is sent into a large space wearing flexible bands around their ribcages; the rise and fall of their breathing alters the light levels in the room. In this incarnation Exchange features an impressive rig of blazing hot lights (and the angry buzz of resistors is a powerful additional presence) but the full effect suffers by not quite responding with the symbiotic speed or precision you’d hope for. Even so it’s great fun, and the lights I’m linked to project directly out of the windows on Arnolfini’s upper level, adding a pleasingly extrovert edge to the experience, announcing your respiration across Bristol’s Harbourside.

teresa margolles: aire

But for me the most affecting of all these engineered, ‘heightened’ spaces is Teresa Margolles’ Aire, a room that, on first sight, looks like an empty gallery where Arnolfini staff have accidentally left two oversized humidifiers hanging around. These devices are, in fact, circulating a very particular type of water vapour around the room—a clue to its provenance lies in the ominous legend printed next to a clear plastic curtain isolating Aire from the rest of the exhibition: “THE AIR IN THIS GALLERY IS SAFE TO BREATHE” which, as a friendly reassurance, ranks right up there with “YES! OUR RESTAURANT IS NO LONGER INFECTED.”

Margolles has, in fact, infused the room with water used to wash corpses prior to autopsy at a morgue in Mexico City. It’s been disinfected, of course…but that simple information, that implication of death, hangs in the air. Now, you can approach this with disgust or reverence, or any number of fleeting feelings, and I spend a lot of time in Aire shifting from emotion to emotion. There’s so much to do in this empty room. What do you feel? You can consider the sheer number of bodies that pass through a Mexico City morgue (largely thanks to drug laws that future generations will point and laugh at, much as we point and laugh at the Elizabethans’ attempted cures for the plague) and the stories that this vapour transmits, the curtailed lives it has touched.

You can picture those bodies, en masse, standing in the room with you, blank-eyed, naked, vaguely perturbed by being asked to participate in an artwork, pissed off at not being allowed to truly rest in peace. You can imagine that you smell the queasy cleanliness of a hospital (which is ridiculous, but smell it I surely do) and recall every time you’ve hung around waiting for a friend or loved one in some green-tinted ward. You can think of the journey that liquid has taken, the unlikeliest hop from a Y-section on a Mexican corpse to the cosy middle class milieu of a Bristolian arts centre. You can fight off superstitious revulsion at the molecules fizzing in your lungs, and where they’ve been. You can breathe in and out, deep and protracted breaths, communing uselessly with the dead, because they are dead and gone, and what good can you do for them now? You can look out of the window at the dark street beyond, perfunctory mechanical traffic on a frosty West Country night, feeling what a morgue worker feels when they emerge outside on a fag break; marvelling at the tiny differences between the living and the dead. For something so simple, Aire is a truly complex thing. It’s a quantum piece of work, gloriously indeterminate—in that depending upon how you look at it, it completely changes its behaviour.

YOU’VE BEEN PUTTING YOURSELF ABOUT, HAVEN’T YOU? DON’T DENY IT. I’VE SEEN YOU. YOU’RE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE. YOU’RE FREE TO ANYONE WHO’LL HAVE A SLICE OF YOU.

Because it’s so easy to be everywhere. Everyone and their dog has a pocket-sized camera now. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a wireless hotspot. Most folks’ photo albums are visible to anyone who cares to do a half-arsed Google search. And maybe you don’t know it, but there you are: foreground or background, most often when you least expect it. A Flickr account of the back of your head at that gig you were at. School photographs on Friends Reunited. That really, really awful am-dram pantomime you were in? 3,647 views on YouTube, mate.

You’ll be online long after you’re dead. Cloned, copied, downloaded: it’s almost impossible to erase yourself from this ever-morphing tangle of digital connections. You can’t even make an unguarded comment at an Embassy dinner any longer without finding yourself on some sort of permanent bloody database. So there’s good and bad aspects to this whole thing. On the one hand: privacy is a myth. On the other: you will live forever. Swings and roundabouts.

Inbetween Time certainly isn’t helping you stay mortal. Because it seems this year, more than ever before, it’s focusing on YOU: your memories, instincts, personality, habitat. A plethora of works in the program contain no performance from the artist at all—instead they collect and compile. Photographer Manuel Vason is your co-conspirator in making a performance artist of yourself, creating your very own remarkable image. Blast Theory will phone you up at random, in the middle of dinner maybe, and ask you personal questions, recording your responses—which are then spliced with those of other volunteers and played back, in another city far away, to an audience of strangers. Helen Cole tends your performance memories with craftsman-like care, keeping them alive and thriving, as if each one was a rarely-blooming plant in a glasshouse.

helen cole: collecting fireworks

Cole’s Collecting Fireworks is a long-term project that makes audio recordings of people recalling performances long gone. As an installation it’s had many different incarnations (Inbetween Time finds it at the Cube Microplex, a rickety little venue with moth-eaten curtains and creaky stage), but wherever sited it has always been a game of two halves. First of all you sit alone in a very comfy chair, the lights fade and from the dark come voices recounting tales of performances, one by one. Alongside each voice the glow of a different lightbulb breaks the gloom, some close-up, some distant, some faltering and candle-like. Once this little constellation of stories has faded you’re led to a microphone and asked if you’d like to contribute your own memory.

Collecting Fireworks isn’t an academic compilation, it’s not a taxonomy of performance—the artworks themselves are rarely named, the contributors never, and amongst the theatre and live art some of the stories concern everyday urban incidents or moments that became theatrical in retrospect. In fact, being ‘tucked in,’ nestled alongside other peoples’ stories, means that the subsequent act of making your own contribution feels natural, unforced, community-minded. There’s a strong emotional undercurrent to the recollections you hear: themes of love and death predominate, and the contributors’ anonymity suggests the confessional or the support group. Faced with the microphone, I find myself speaking in the same quiet, clear, careful tones as those I’ve just finished listening to. In such unexpected ways Collecting Fireworks grows as an artwork as well as a document, its outcomes beautifully nebulous.

manuel vason: still image moving

Two other projects at IBT seem to celebrate capture, and both prove joyously life-affirming records of time and place, free-for-alls in which the inhabitants of Bristol make flesh of their thoughts: freakish, anodyne, political, fleeting or otherwise. In Still Image Moving, photographer Manuel Vason’s studio is a shipping container full of equipment that travels around the city, a sort of deluxe photo booth open to all—but the results are far from passport photographs. From the urban landscape spring tiny intimate moments and big, silly tableaux: the silhouette of a proud pregnant woman demarcated in vivid blue lights, the city in deep focus beyond; the pall of smoke from a recently lit cigarette making a lace shroud around a man’s face; figures half-buried in building sites, faces and bodies dressed in flowers and dirt, temporary monuments. Given the outlandishness of the poses most of them appear imbued with a tangible honesty, refreshingly happy. Each seems like a little song of liberation (even if, in the case of one suited gentleman blinded by his own tie and surrounded by a halo of mobile phones, they might also be a cry for help…).

back to back theatre: the democratic set

The same qualities infuse The Democratic Set by Australia’s Back To Back Theatre, a film in which anyone can appear, for 15 seconds at a time, as a camera passes from right to left in front of a room-sized wooden box. (See previous iterations of the show above and here.) The results are edited to resemble a single tracking shot along a series of different rooms inhabited by individual or group performances. Balls of wool trundle through doorways, people tumble from frame to frame, some sing at us, others gaze mournfully as we pass by. Occasionally it’s like a dream sequence in a David Lynch film, disturbing, unstoppable. Sometimes it reeks of loneliness, people going about their business in some seriously fucked-up economy hotel. But mostly it’s full of laughter and hope, a feeling very much helped by the wide demographic of its contributors. Watching it at Arnolfini with an audience principally made up of the film’s participants is particularly rewarding, hearing their whoops of recognition, because more than anything else this film isn’t a monument to the producer or director—it’s really about the lives of this strange hotel’s inhabitants and the unique document they’ve created together. It’s a living trace of them.

duncan speakman & sarah anderson: our broken voice (a subtlemob)

Another participatory artwork occurs on a chilly Saturday afternoon in Cabot Circus, Bristol’s newest shopping mall (so sparkling and clean that, for the UK, it feels vaguely dystopian). Over the last few years Duncan Speakman has been experimenting with a variation on flashmobbing, where random mass actions in public places are instigated online and by text message. Speakman’s far less self-aggrandising Subtlemob uses the same means of dissemination but adds elements of subterfuge, so that unless you’re taking part there’s a good chance you’ll be unaware of any performance—unless you notice 100 people suddenly walking in slow motion or staring up at the empty sky in unison. The downloadable MP3 of instructions is an artwork in itself: created with the musician Sarah Anderson it contains a narrative text entwined with subtle instructions to the participant, and a glacial accumulative music score that would, alone, change the entire way you look at the Brownian motion of shoppers around you.

‘You’ are an actor in these events, called Alex, or Claire (or some other name I didn’t hear and will never know). ‘You’ gear up to, and perform, a single significant action and then leave the shopping centre, left to guess at the implications. But it’s the moments of unexpected coincidence that really make an impact, the points at which everyday life and Our Broken Voice collide, apt images and happy accidents that you alone are witness to. Wisely, the artists have left plenty of time and space in which these never-to-be-repeated moments can flourish. It makes me think of the dictum used by Brian Eno to define interactive art: “The word should not be ‘interactive’. It should be ‘unfinished’.”

tim etchells: neon signs

Past sunset, the festival over: and the phrase “YOU WILL LIVE FOREVER” is emblazoned in neon lights, occupying a vacant window space at the bottom of the Christmas Steps, a quaint higgledy-piggledy stone stairway in central Bristol. Another similar sign on the lower curve of Park Street, in between newsagents and music shops, reads “PLEASE COME BACK I AM SORRY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE”… and inside the harbourmaster’s lookout on Redcliffe Bridge, if you’re distracted by the blood-red flickering light within, you can peer through the mucky glass to see the legend “FADING GLORY” on the concrete floor, crackling and failing.

I cross the street, standing at a safe distance to catch people’s reactions. Each sign is on a busy pedestrian route out of the city and most people are in far too much of a hurry homeward to see the messages. But every now and then someone peels off from the flow, and at each site I see at least one camera being produced, at least one picture being taken, to end up…where? Explained how? Ever retrieved? Recalled when? Because there’s no explanatory card tacked to these artworks, nothing to declare that they’re from the Neon Signs series by Tim Etchells. Nothing, in fact, to suggest that they’re artworks at all. It’s the simplest of acts, left to human chance: if you see the sign, you decide whether to care. If you care, you decide if, and how, to remember it. Classification and demarcation aren’t allowed to get in the way of the exchange. You just take it home and deal with it. If you choose to capture “YOU WILL LIVE FOREVER and picture-message it to your loved one, subtitled “LOL” or “WTF?” or “Awwwww,” then guess what? You’re the hero. You’re the honeybee. You’re pollinating. Ubiquitous, that’s what you are.

PAUL HURLEY IS UP TO SOMETHING IN THE LIGHT STUDIO, WEARING A ZINC BUCKET ON HIS HEAD, FEELING HIS WAY WITH A SIX-FOOT STAFF, TEETERING ALONG THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ROOM IN A SAVAGE PAIR OF DANGEROUSLY HIGH GOLD STILETTOS, BLOWING THROUGH A REEDY METAL WHISTLE ON EACH EXHALE. SLOWLY. HE’S WEARING A WHITE VEST AND Y-FRONTS. I DIDN’T THINK YOUNG PEOPLE WORE THEM ANYMORE. THE FIRST FEW TURNS ROUND THE ROOM HE HAS TO PUT OUT A BLIND HAND TO GUIDE HIMSELF AS HE GETS NEAR THE WALLS.

paul hurley: untitled actuation

Near a pillar by the door there are five packets of Sainsbury’s jam doughnuts, sealed, two boxes of eggs, a packet of glitter, a newspaper, another bucket. By the second pillar are three pomegranates, a ball of string, scissors, a bottle of water, a chair with a note on it, a sack of peat. By the next pillar, another galvanized bucket, the skeleton of a parasol, a cycling helmet, a pair of red trainers, a towel, a bottle of red liquid and a packet of something I can’t see properly (it was a survival blanket). And by the last pillar, a Polaroid camera and film, four bunches of flowers in cellophane, a pair of wellies and some little bells. We must take off our shoes before entering the room and I assume this is for health & safety reasons. We shall see.

When I go in the second time Hurley’s kneeling on a sheet of newspaper cracking eggs on his head. He sprinkles glitter on himself. Looking at the dripping gold mess he’s blinking through, I think: pretty.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see all you want to of a durational piece. From the Reading Room I’d heard a tinkling of bells but was delayed. When I did get back in there were no more bells. Hurley had red paint all over his head and neck and was wearing a space blanket over his pants. Some peat had been spread on the floor in the centre. There was an imprint in it and from the dust on his vest, once he’d put it back on, you could see he’d spread out the peat and laid back in it. Smiling, he met my eyes and offered me a doughnut. And it was delicious, and JUST WHAT I WANTED—I’d had the craving since I first went in there. What had he done with the flowers, the water, the towel, the fan? Hints remained, traces on the floor and on his body.

Hurley took off the space blanket and put his vest back on and slipped back into the clumpy golden stilettos, forcing his toes right into the front of them, leaving a gap between his heels and the back of his shoes—the most uncomfortable way to wear high heels that there is. He put the bucket back on his head, started his whistling and resumed a wobbly circuit round the room, this time counter-clockwise. They do say sartorial choices imply interior states: thus, in Buffy, you have the black leather trousers of evil and the red leather trousers of moral ambiguity. Well, I guess Hurley was making his rounds on the dangerous golden stilts of altered states and inspiration: blind and extraordinarily vulnerable in his underwear.

Hearsay: he had attached the bunches of bells to his red trainers, walking round the room like an urban Morris Dancer. Hearsay: he’d held the flowers in front of the fan. Or had he planted them in the peat? Either way, he’d sought shelter under the skeletal parasol. I wonder what it was he did with the feathers? They were all over the floor in front of the fan.

What it was it with the staging posts, I wondered, the four pillars in the room—each furnished with a cache of supplies for a different stage of the journey? And was he going or coming back?

Someone who had been there at the end said Hurley had looked at him intently while tying a pomegranate to the string, attaching it to a pillar and setting it swinging. He had met Hurley’s eyes and they had looked at each other. It was a moment of extraordinary connection. He, the spectator, had gone to sit down by the wall, still observing the pomegranate. Hurley sat down beside him. They were side by side, companiable.

Someone else who had been there had had a feeling that the end of the performance was tied to the moment the fruit should stop swinging. That person watched Hurley and another spectator sit side by side observing the pendulum wind down. It was a moment of extraordinary contact.

carter & zierle: pearls of sustenance

On the Saturday of Inbetween Time you might have gone up the stairs and noticed someone lurking anxiously, holding on to a pillar on the first floor. A slender person wearing a severe grey suit—not expensive, but with a very sharp look and a self-coloured stripe. After you had noticed the tension in her posture you would have seen that on this woman’s head was a castle-like structure composed of overlapping slices of white bread, like a big summer pudding, held in place with fishing twine and invisible adhesive.

Walking on a little way you might have noticed another person in grey lurking behind the lift. Again, the anxiety in him was palpable. His posture was suffused with hesitation, with longing, with a sense of reaching out and being held back by invisible obstructions, intangible barriers; his own weakness perhaps, or a sense of fear. He also wore a bread helmet. Physically he was very like the woman. They were a matching pair, both angular and hyper-sensitive, both with a restrained, conventional look about them. Even the bread-heads added to this sense: both characters, as it were, being muffled and baffled and under wraps.

The man began to edge round the corner past the lifts. Now it was possible for spectators to view both figures at once. She seemed stuck to her pillar as though it were an anchor, the only tangible thing in her grasp apart from the sense of her partner approaching. As though she couldn’t let go of it without falling into some sort of void. He, drawn by invisible strings, moved towards her hesitantly, inch by inch, once or twice sinking to the ground under all that stress.

Both of them shed crumbs: there was a Hansel-and-Gretel trail along his route towards her, while the trace of her own presence drifted sparsely to the floor of the foyer below. The tension between them was so extreme that people kept getting drawn into it; gradually the stairwell and corridor filled with people who couldn’t look away.

At one point she held onto the rail round the pillar with the hand that was behind her back, holding her other hand to her face as though she were studying her fingernails. Under the bread helmet she looked as if she were longing to let go of the pillar, desperately shy and lost. He moved towards her hanging onto the landing rail for dear life.

The last few feet of his journey were electrifying. She yearned towards him, he drew towards her, as though in their fearful state nothing was real but their sense of the other. They touched. She finally let go of the pillar. They stood together tenderly, slowly and blindly, exploring the other. They felt each other thoroughly, hands, arms, shoulders. They stood chest to chest with their hands trapped tightly between them. They explored the bread on each other’s heads. She began to crumble the edges of his helmet, and he to reciprocate.

Very slowly each began the destruction of the other’s mask. She rolled tiny little bread pills and dropped them to the landing below, stretching her arms wide. She uncovered his mouth. He uncovered her face. She began to feed him some of the pellets her enquiring hands had fashioned. By the time I left both of them had lost enough bread to be able to see the other’s face. They stood there in their bubble of mutuality at the top of the stairs: the attrition continued.

FROM THE EARLY 1990S MADELINE RITTER, A TRAINED LAWYER, HAD BEEN AN INDEPENDENT DANCE PRODUCER AND PRESENTER IN GERMANY WITH A STRONG INTEREST IN EXPERIMENTAL DANCE FILM AND VIDEO AND DANCE INCORPORATING NEW TECHNOLOGIES. SHE INITIATED LABORATORIES, NETWORKS AND FESTIVALS, CURATED DANCE PROGRAMS AND SAT ON JUDGING PANELS IN EUROPE AND THE UK. AS A FUNDER, SHE NOW WORKS ON THE STRUCTURES FROM WHICH ARTISTIC PRODUCTION CAN EVOLVE.

Ritter has been the director of the five-year Tanzplan Deutschland (Dance Plan Germany) which, although completed in 2010, has left significant legacies for German dance, yielded new ventures and been imitated in many other countries. I met Ritter when she recently accepted an invitation from Ausdance to visit Australia.

The aim of the Tanzplan project from 2005 to 2010 was to act as “a catalyst for the German dance scene…to provide dance in Germany with more recognition and establish it as an art form of equal value along with opera and theatre in the public perception and in the perception of those responsible for cultural policy” (www.tanzplan-deutschland.de). Tanzplan, Ritter explained, was initiated by Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation. She describes the foundation as “very unusual, a new organisation with an annual budget of €35million and an artistic director—something totally new for a funding body—with an artistic policy. The artistic director Hortensia Völckers had been the director of the Dance Festival München and an independent art curator.

“To put it simply, there are two strands to the foundation. One is very well defined; people can apply for funds and there are juries and so on. Then there is a significant part of the budget which is totally free— an amount that is not set and the Federal Cultural Foundation can decide itself what to do with the money it allocates. The foundation looked at the state of art in society and the first thing it did when it started in 2002 was to take up different themes like shrinking cities, migration or the future of work. It allocated several million euros, talked to people and secured art organisation partners to do very practical, hands-on things—praxis as research—in a very sophisticated way.”

Ritter explained that an initial focus on dance allowed for the emergence of Tanzplan Deutschland with a budget of €12.5m over five years. “The community was asked what the deficits in dance were and what could be done if a lot of money was given to an organisation. Two deficits were indicated: limited professional education and a lack of awareness, visibility and understanding of dance in society. First it was thought that we needed to do the biggest dance festival of all—a national festival for people to really see what dance is. Twelve curators were asked to present ideas—I was one of them. I looked at the deficits and I thought a festival wouldn’t solve them. A festival has to have an independent artistic spirit, and if you impose a cultural policy agenda it won’t fit.”

Ritter instead addressed other problems: “As an independent producer I had been frustrated with the way funding bodies looked at or were communicating with artists, producers and organisations. These were the ones doing the work, not as people needing funding, but as those who can really define the city, who are partners in developing what culture means in the city. How could we bring these two sides together, on equal footing? So the backbone of the Tanzplan strategic plan came from my experience as an independent producer and a lawyer who is used to looking at points of contention.”

Consultation ensued and became a constant in Tanzplan’s operations. “We travelled, invited politicians and artists to meet us in cities where there were professional dance scenes and institutions and we said, ‘We’re willing to invest €1.2m in your city if you have a great idea, a vision of what would really help dance in your area.’ We asked them to be very specific and to work together. In the end nine cities were selected for Tanzplan Local, “including the big ones from Berlin to Frankfurt but also middle-scale cities like Potsdam and Bremen.” All projects had to “be based on an existing, active dance scene, had to forge alliances with regional and community cultural administrators and local partners, have obtained 50% co-funding from their city or state authority, or from foundations or sponsors…[and] provide points of contact between classical and modern dance, theory and practice, the ordinary public and professionals, open up dance to a new audience and communicate its activities [and] continue to function sustainably after the end of the project” (www.tanzplan-deutschland.de). Ritter says that with the completion of Tanzplan Local “most of the projects have received local and regional funding to go on without our help.

“Over 450 dance institutions collaborated over the five-year period, nearly 900 dance works were produced and thousands of young people participated in the educational projects. These ranged from the creation of a unique space in Hamburg for a new choreographic centre, K3 at the Kampnagel arts venue, to a touring program for state-run and independent companies in northern Germany and the establishment of well-equipped residencies in several of the Tanzplan cities. In Düsseldorf, tanzhaus nrw collaborated with more than 20 local institutions to involve in and infect with dance as many kids and teenagers as possible. In Essen, PACT Zollverein creatively nurtured thinking about dance and in Dresden Semper Opera, Palucca School and Centre for European Arts Hellerau joined forces to support young professionals. Dance congresses in 2006 and 2009, an international co-production fund and Tanzplan’s comprehensive educational initiatives added to the assault from all sides. Through matched funding the original budget of €12.5 m was raised to €21m.”

Ritter regards ample time and independence as the essence of the success of Tanzplan: “There was a gestation period of over five years, each city had plenty of time for their project and was totally free—it could change direction when something wasn’t working. What I really learned was communication. We used mediators and external consultants to work on really concrete problems, how to bring people together to dialogue. A tough one in the education program was the challenge of bringing together the heads of all the dance universities, all 11 of them to talk to each other and work together. It took my colleague Ingo Diehl one year of preparation before we got them together for the first meeting. On the matter of archiving we invited an Australian, Michelle Potter to advise us; we were inspired by the way Australia brought together the National Library and the National Film and Sound Archive to create the Dance Collection. This was a good way to beat resistance to the sharing of archives.” There is now an Association of German Dance Archives.

The Education Program has been an important aspect of Tanzplan: “Now we have a dance biennale for students, the next generation of professionals: they meet every two years with funding which in the future will be secured from the Minister of Education. Our goal is to enhance not just awareness of but knowledge about dance—of what’s happening in dance in the world, the praxis.”

Another major project in education has been the establishment of the Inter-University Center for Dance Berlin (HZT) which started out as a pilot project of Tanzplan Berlin in 2006 and is now administered by the University of the Arts Berlin and the School for Dramatic Arts in cooperation with the Network TanzRaumBerlin. Ritter says that the centre “developed from the independent dance scene and its needs. Anyone can apply to do the bachelor degree—a gardener say, because it’s not about bringing everyone on stage and making them beautiful dancers but giving them a profound knowledge of dance which they might later use for anything they do.” Ritter laughs: “A little problem: the gardener wanted to dance on stage!” The university’s BA and MA programs “offer a reflective and experimental approach to study and combine practice-led artistic and theoretical teaching, as well as practical career guidance” (www.udk-berlin.de/sites/tanz/content/index_eng.html).

Another Tanzplan legacy is Dance Techniques 2010, a publication in book form, DVD and website, available in English (ISBN 978-3-89487-689-0). It is the outcome “of a three-year research project on contemporary dance techniques in which renowned dance institutions in Germany and Europe were invited to take part. Its goal is to provide comparative insight into the various transmission models of dance technique and to make practical and theoretical knowledge applicable” (www.tanzplan-deutschland.de).

Madeline Ritter is now working on another Federal Cultural Foundation initiative, a four-year funding project on the heritage of dance and on the partnering of schools and dance organisations. “I will be working on this with a colleague with all the knowledge we acquired from Tanzplan. Other things we are doing include setting up a national dance office because we feel a communicator-moderator is needed, and also creating a Digital Dance Atlas with the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, to be launched in 2011.” The Atlas “offers viewing of full-length dance works and access to treatises covering many aspects of dance, and the history of dance since 1900, with a particular focus on Germany. An additional area has been set aside for documentation and thematic dossiers” (www.tanzplan-deutschland.de). Ritter adds, “We’re also looking at what other countries are doing. We feel a real affinity with Ausdance, which is so connected to the needs in dance and the people in the field.”

Beyond her latest plans, Madeleine Ritter feels that art in Germany has to deal with too much established infrastructure: “I would like to infiltrate the state theatre system and its 62 dance companies, open them up and bring the outside world in.”

Madeline Ritter visited Australia at the invitation of Ausdance National, assisted by the Goethe-Institut, the Australia Council and Tasdance.

RealTime is 100! Well, not exactly. But we have reached our 100th edition and, after a very busy 2010, will celebrate on the occasion of our 101st in February 2011. Performance artist Angharad Wynne-Jones appeared on the cover of our first edition in 1994 before becoming house manager and then artistic director of Performance Space and, later, director of LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre). Most recently she’s been the organiser in Australia of the Tipping Point forums on the relationship between the arts and the future of the environment. The RealTime issue 1 cover reminds us how far we’ve come and the changes the arts have been through and how they’ve changed the world—and not. There’s work to do. We look forward to celebrating our 101st with you in 2011.

Our thanks go to the 40 NSW artists, companies and organisations who wrote statements of support for RealTime after we failed to win funding from Arts NSW for two years running. Now we’re back on the Arts NSW books and deeply appreciative of your generosity. Meanwhile, in the way of the swings and roundabouts of arts funding, after many years of receiving support from and engaging in joint publishing ventures with what is now Screen Australia, we no longer fit that organisation’s more corporate bill or its tiny funding allocation for screen culture. But that won’t deter us—we’ve had an excellent year and 2011 is looking good.

THE BOXES WHICH FIGURED AS MAJOR MOTIFS IN TWO OF THE DANCE WORKS IN THE 2010 BRISBANE FESTIVAL ALSO SIGNIFIED THE PACKAGING IN WHICH A PROPORTION OF THE FESTIVAL CAME WRAPPED—AN INVITATION TO EXAMINE THE DIFFERENT INFLECTIONS GIVEN TO WORKS DEEMED TO BE THE PRODUCT OF INTERCULTURAL COLLABORATION, AND HOW THEY ARE POSITIONED IN THE GLOBAL ART HYPERMART. ANDREW ROSS, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE BRISBANE POWERHOUSE, VOICED TO ME HIS MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE AESTHETIC AND IDEOLOGICAL TRENDS PROMULGATED BY INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS, PARTICULARLY AT THE EXPENSE OF INTRA-CULTURAL WORKS THAT SEEK TO REASSESS THE SOURCES OF A PARTICULAR NATIONAL OR REGIONAL STYLE OF PERFORMANCE IN ORDER TO SITUATE IT BETTER IN RELATION TO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES.

These issues were tangentially raised during one of the Festival Conversations between the London and Sydney-based Spanish choreographer and director of the Sydney Dance Company, Rafael Bonachela, and the Algerian-born director, choreographer and performer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who lives in Belgium. The two share a common cosmopolitanism, but diverged markedly in their approaches to intercultural collaboration, particularly regarding their sensitivities to the inner contradictions of two nominally Communist, but culturally different, societies. Bonachela rather naively came across as a liberator, describing Cuba as a prison but failing to mention the US-led embargo which has kept Cuba isolated from the rest of the world and ruined its economy. Unfortunately I missed out on Danza Contemporanea de Cuba and its “gifted, gorgeous Cubans…[who were] a very welcome ray of sunshine” (Daily Telegraph), hardly Bonachela’s grey prisoners. Whether intended or not, Bonachela seemed to be endorsing a neo-colonialist, post-cultural stance that deceptively positions itself, as Patrice Pavis has written, “outside the social, outside class conflicts and economic interests, outside political and historic relationships.”

sidi larbi cherkaoui, sutra

Cherkaoui was more circumspect, more willing to credit aspects of Chinese society which reflect badly on us in the West, and more subtle in delineating criticisms. The set design for his festival work, Sutra, comprising 21 rectangular-shaped boxes by Turner-prize winning artist Antony Gormley, was inspired by the living conditions of factory girls Gormley saw in China. A directorial coup had the Shaolin monks with whom Cherkaoui collaborated perform a martial arts routine dressed as modern office workers, then lying down in boxes which had been stacked like skyscrapers in a complex image which functioned both as an allusion to the factory workers and as a wry comment on what has been both lost and gained in China’s rush to urbanisation.

Cherkaoui has received criticism for indiscriminately engaging with the cultural Other (Flamenco, Kathakali), but Sutra was an exquisitely parsed model of cultural exchange, depicting the intimate inner journey of a uniquely placed European sensibility attempting to come to terms with the message of Buddhism. A Zen Buddhist parable about the appearance of phenomena describes a still lake from which a fish suddenly leaps and as quickly disappears back into the depths. This was recapitulated by the actions of the monks who were choreographed to mysteriously appear and disappear and, with their invisible manipulation of Gormley’s boxes on the bare stage to create vast vistas, cave temples, the monumental walls and walkways of ancient China, culminating in the towering motif of a lotus flower with a child, also a monk, at its heart.

The child performer who mimicked Cherkaoui and enthusiastically performed cartwheels across the stage during a quietly triumphant finale portrayed the artist’s own inner child let loose, in contrast to the rather clownish adult seeker of enlightenment which Cherkaoui so elegantly and unobtrusively manifested when as a dance performer he got amongst the action. Western self-reflexivity and dual mind were also represented by Cherkaoui periodically returning downstage to disconnectedly operate the changes by rearranging a small replica of the stage set. (See also Martin del Amo’s review p27)

tarian baru dari indonesia

Tarian Baru Dari Indonesia (New Dance from Indonesia) spoke first to its own culture, not to any universal construct. Nevertheless, while reworking tradition, these works also employed contemporary languages of the body. If other cultures can appear exotic, assuaging our deep ennui with our own culture, Hartati’s Di Dalam/Di Luar (In/Out) turns the tables on what Rustom Barucha calls “the euphoria of pluralism” whereby we are free to choose amongst cultures. Three women are trapped in glass boxes. They struggle to free themselves, only to become entrapped, individually, in a succession of other boxes, each containing a promising but ultimately limited experience of exploration and choice. When the women themselves become the means whereby the boxes are lifted from the stage it is the beginning of a celebratory dance passage where contemporary and traditional culture are harmonised before the final stage picture. A woman crouches down, meditating on a pair of red shoes placed before her on the floor; precariously balancing on one high heel, a second woman seems to interrogate the matching red shoe dangling from her hand; the last woman, immaculately turned out in her red shoes, gazes out at the audience for a long moment before breaking eye contact and confidently exiting the stage box.

If Hartati knowingly dissects the seductions of contemporary global culture for Indonesian women, Ery Mefri contemplated the figure of Eve’s centrality to the creation myth of all three monotheistic religions originating in the Middle East and imported to Sumatra as an Islamic cultural influence in the 14th century. Layered over the indigenous, matrilineal Minangkabau culture where property passes from mother to daughter, it seems both modernity and the resurgence of militant Islam constitute a two-pronged attack on the deep roots of Minangkabau society. Mefri’s Sanghawa (Eve) enacts the story of a son asking his mother’s permission to embark on a rantau, an Odyssey traditionally undertaken by young men from Sumatra for economic reasons. Reversing the myth, Mefri has Eve lamenting the forces tempting the young man away. This work was spare, tender, fraught and oddly sensual.

The mother’s centrality to the integrity of Sumatran family life was further explored in Rantau Berbisik (Whisperings of Exile) as a family running a food outlet in the capital descends into petty feuding in her absence. The folkloric Plate Dance and exciting, rhythmic percussion on glass and china vividly recreated the atmosphere of a working kitchen. The superb control of the dancers was hypnotic to watch, and Mefri’s intense vision induced powerful emotions of lost connectedness.

conor lovett, beckett’s first love

Beckett once wrote loftily that “[vaudeville] at least inaugurates the comedy of an exhaustive enumeration.” The phrase “comedy of an exhaustive enumeration” flies like a dove out of Beckett’s own mouth to describe First Love, a 75-minute rendition of an early novella, delivered brilliantly by Conor Lovett who was alert, and alerted us, to Beckett’s every word and nuanced silences. I can’t resist quoting: “But what kind of love was this, exactly? Love-passion? Somehow I think not. That’s the priapic one, is it not?…Perhaps I loved her with a platonic love? But somehow I think not. Would I have been tracing her name in old cow shit if my love had been pure and disinterested?” You can hear the voice of a stand-up comic, can’t you? The misogyny and the misanthropy? And the Irish accent? Always the Irish accent explicating Beckett—correcting early impressions when you had read him without the lilt; thrusting you into the mud of existence. This was the treat of the festival, and all the better for sharing the pleasure with an appreciative audience.

circa, wunderkammer

I thought I was over circus spectacles, but Wunderkammer, Circa’s world premiere at the new Powerhouse outdoor venue, has converted me. Simply, this was the best circus I’ve ever seen. Consistently inventive, moving along at a turbo-charged rate, provocatively sexy and displaying a full complement of skills across the ensemble, it left you gobsmacked. While it had touches of artistic director Yaron Lifschitz’s trademark S&M aesthetic with dark asides and nods to neo-burlesque, this was his homage to the body in its extreme flights, taking you to another realm. The industrial wall of the Powerhouse as backdrop suited this aim, as did the intimacy of the Spiegeltent for Strut and Fret’s circus cabaret which offered more theatrically devised satisfactions, recreating a louche, 1920s Parisian bar. The skills were just as evident (I haven’t seen a contortionist to equal Henna Kaikula, and what Mozes did with a neckerchief was hilariously risque), and it was a more corporeal experience. The radiant Charleston routine performed by the ensemble tied all the elements together.

Brisbane Festival 2010: Sutra, director, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, design Antony Gormley, music Szyom Brzoska, performers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Shaolin Monks, Playhouse-QPAC, Sep 8-11; Tarian Baru Dari Indonesia (New Dance from Indonesia): Di Dalam/Di Luar (In/Out), choreographer Hartati, Powerhouse Theatre, Sep 7-9; Nan Jombang Dance Company, Sanghawa (Eve) and Rantau Berbisik (Whispering of Exile), choreographer Ery Mefri, Powerhouse Theatre, Sep 10-12; Gare St Lazare Players, First Love, director Judy Hegarty Lovett, performer Conor Lovett, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Sep 21-25; Circa: Wunderkammer, artistic director Yaron Lifschitz, Plaza, Brisbane Powerhouse, Sep 14-18; Strut and Fret Production House, Cantina, performers Mozes, Chelsea McGuffin, David Carberry, Daniel Catlow, Henna Kaikula, Spiegeltent, King George Square, Brisbane, Sep 5-25

UNDER THE RADAR HAS EARNED A PERMANENT PLACE IN THE BRISBANE FESTIVAL AS A CURATED PROGRAM OF ALTERNATIVE, ARTIST-INITIATED WORKS DRAWN NATIONWIDE. FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS YEAR IT APPEARED IN THE MAIN PROGRAM WHICH PERHAPS ACCOUNTED FOR AN EXPANDED AUDIENCE INTERESTED IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES AND LONGER IN THE TOOTH THAN LAST YEAR’S MORE PAROCHIAL AUDIENCE OF DRAMA STUDENTS, SUPPORTERS AND FRIENDS (I’M TOLD THAT THERE WERE FAR FEWER SUBMISSIONS FOR THIS PROGRAM FROM QUEENSLAND THIS YEAR). SELF-CONTAINED IN THE MULTI-PURPOSE PRECINCT OF METRO ARTS, UNDER THE RADAR CONSTITUTED ITS OWN DISCREET, ATMOSPHERIC FESTIVAL OF PROVOCATIVE IDEAS AND INTIMATE, ENGROSSING WORKS.

birdmachine

On the outer edge of R&D into performance practices, the Birdmachine created by technologist/animateur Ivan Thorley and sonic artist Frederic Reuben was an animatronic performance installation that explored “the vitality and ability of movement to create difference and meaning between ‘forms of life’.” The installation consisted of a sparse (perhaps in the sense of last of the species) bird colony that performed ritualised, choreographed movements. Two tussocks were sites for a mating dance, the sex difference indicated by a stub of dowling, the atmosphere that of a silent rainforest until the microphones angled for interactive responses were utilised and triggered birdcalls. This was the most fragile, funny and endearing encounter of Under the Radar, one that enticed you, in the absence of narrative, to render your own meaning, to become aware of your movements as you bobbed up and down at the microphones, circled for a better look, moved in for closer inspection and away again as you shuffled round the space. We were an audience machine. These autonomous simulacra were deliberately tacky, daggy cloth puppets shaped from coat hangers with four elementary appendages to suggest flight and scuttling across a forest floor. Yet this bizarre assemblage conveyed the full bathos of Charles Darwin’s admission, “The suffering of the lower animals throughout time is more than I can bear.”

nostalgia

Also in the extreme R&D category was Nostalgia, a collaboration between three well-known Brisbane emerging artists: director/sound designer Matt O’Neill and performers Kieran Law and Ron Seeto. This work was intended to demonstrate that “different experiences and approaches were still capable in performance and, furthermore, that they could be realised and articulated with only the meanest of resources and the most rudimentary of skills.” Nostalgia’s concerns with movement relationships between bodies, the environment and a technologically produced soundscape echoed Birdmachine to an eerie extent. The piece began with the two performers immaculately miming industrial process work, a metaphor perhaps for the level of reproduction involved in the discipline of rehearsing and polishing a performance to the level of marketable product. This metamorphosed into free-form dance improvisation that was carried on over such a long time, to the point of physical exhaustion, that one ceased to be embarrassed by the lack of dance training and instead, dropping expectations, becoming fascinated by the performers’ monstrous prodigality and endurance. At the end, the audience was invited onstage for a free-for-all dance. Easily dismissed as self-indulgence, I was impressed nonetheless by the generosity of spirit in Nostalgia and the way the company re-envisaged community interaction with the arts and refused to be ghettoised. I only wish they’d been brave enough to perform in the City Mall.

brightness

It took a foolhardy Irishman to do that deed. In Brightness (funded by the Irish Arts Council), a modern version of an Aisling, or vision poem, the interventionist artist, Denis Buckley, presented poems and writings in Gaelic and English that were sometimes pre-recorded, sometimes read aloud, but went mostly unheeded in the gaderene rush of late-night shoppers or were drowned out by blasts of music emanating from Hooters, a strip club on the Mall. Buckley took this in his stride—he deliberately chose the location—as he performed against the incongruent projection of an Irish sky crisscrossed by plumes of jets carrying the latest wave of emigration caused by the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. In a formal suit, minus the jacket and bardically arresting, he grandiloquently called for the restoration of Irish culture as a cure for the country’s economic woes. Buckley was inspired by the Muse in a medieval poem who upbraids the poet to forsake his arty ways for the sake of Ireland in terms that reminded me of the irreverent slanging match between Kirsty MacColl and Shane McGowan in the Pogues’ song “Fairytale of New York.” It was Buckley’s sincerity that convinced this fellow Celt, with its perspective on place that seems only shared by the Indigenous first culture in this country.

the last man to die

The two installation performances that most impacted on a richly textured, deeply poetic level were the technologically sophisticated The Last Man to Die and the noir moodiness created in Of the Causes of Wonderful Things. (Unfortunately I didn’t see Neon Toast, but I heard great reports.) When I said to the crew of The Last Man to Die that the work reminded me of the library scenario in a David Tennant episode of Dr Who, they told me I was on the money. Normally I’m averse to multimedia overkill, but here the futuristic setting warranted, and vindicated, its skilful use, creating a subtly retro aesthetic to match the artists’ retrograde view of the immortality industry. Black and white time-lapse video of the production was projected on the back wall so that you recognised yourself ‘back then.’ As the hard working central performer, Hanna Cormick was costumed as a sexy cover girl from a 1950s sci-fi magazine. Everything was accommodated in the glow of a black and white film aura before the invention of technicolour; and each episode returned at the whim of an audience member placing a card in the alloted slot. We were in Borges territory, caught up in a maze of fine writing by Peter Butz and fine acting by Cormick with whom, as sadistic collaborators with technology, we were forced to repeat in an endless loop. Immortality.

of the causes of wonderful things

In Of The Causes of Wonderful Things performed and created by Talya Rubin we were in the noirish milieu of the 1940s and 50s, given a surreal aspect as the world of the dead merged with the living. This was a pure performer’s piece, and Rubin was in absolute control of her material. I particularly loved the slow, patient pace with which she drew us in. Rubin played all the characters, women and men, in riveting style as well as manipulating light, sound and sinister puppet vignettes onstage. Five children had disappeared while in the custody of their aunt, and a police hunt was on. The implicit conjecture was that they had been murdered and buried. An air of suspicion cloaked everyone, and, although there were hints, events remained a mystery to the end. The children’s natural mother who had seemingly abandoned them for a Latin lover is pure noir—torn, fragile and chain-smoking next to a single onstage lamp. The men—the Police Chief who falls for the aunt, the Latin lover and the aunt’s neighbour, a Japanese Bonsai lover—were portrayed by Rubin with, I suspect, undeclared humour.

With her own suspicions about the children’s fate, the aunt precariously attempted to keep sane in the world above ground, but was assailed by an elaborate symbology of underground motifs that gradually absorbed her. These were an assortment of found objects that atmospherically conveyed fragments of the children’s own story. Sometimes their voices conversed hollowly as if from a lonely grave. A cabaret MC of the underworld introduced a woman struggling dumbly to speak the silence of a lifetime in an anguished manner that was painfully, and artfully, prolonged. Another act from the realm of the dead involved the use of an enormous head of a donkey with an articulated jaw straight out of Goya.

the raven project

There was another work in the same vein that was lighter in tone, less integrated, but in the end as insinuatingly sinister as Alice in Wonderland. The Raven Project invited us into a parlour where we were offered tea and biscuits by white-suited Jeff Stein and black-suited Frank Mainoo making up a reticent ‘Gilbert and George’ pair. We were treated to a deliberately fumbling presentation with video illustrations of the ‘blot’ that allegedly appears on the horizon in Hitchcock’s movies and has ominous, even apocalyptic connotations. Halfway through we assisted in removing kitsch paintings from the wall to reveal peepholes through which we would espy the famous shower scene from Psycho. Instead, an alternative reality was revealed where we dimly recognised our vanished hosts in their true guise as demonic, hierophantic figures. They returned in their quietly polite mode to continue the lecture, but the orbit of our world had changed. I was reminded that I’ve never really trusted the bourgeoisie.

2010 Brisbane Festival: Under The Radar: Birdmachine, creator Ivan Thorley, sonic artist Frederic Reuben; Nostalgia, creator and director Matt O’Neill, creators and performers Kieran Law, Ron Seeto; Denis Buckley, Brightness; The Last Man to Die, creators, performers Hanna Cormick, Benjamin Forster, Charles Martin in collaboration with writer Peter Butz; Of the Causes of Wonderful Things, creator, performer Talya Rubin; The Raven Project, creators, performers Jeff Stein, Frank Mainoo; Metro Arts, Brisbane, Sept 5-25

I MEET ROSIE DENNIS IN THE LOCAL PIZZA SHOP NEXT DOOR TO MINTO MALL THAT SERVES A PRETTY GOOD SOY CAPPUCCINO. FOR CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE DENNIS HAS BEEN WORKING ON MINTO:LIVE, PART OF THE 2011 SYDNEY FESTIVAL, THREE EVENINGS OF PERFORMANCE CELEBRATING THE SUBURB’S CULTURAL VITALITY THROUGH COLLABORATIONS WITH AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS.

community collaboration

Dennis has previously worked in Minto, in Sydney’s south-west, developing her performance work Driven to New Pastures, which features a local senior resident June Hickey (this work is also in the 2011 Sydney Festival program). She says of the area, “When I started coming to Minto, I was really struck by the people living here, and how passionate they were about this suburb.” Dennis hopes to tap into this depth of feeling to create MINTO:LIVE in collaboration with the community. She describes the overall vision for the performance:

“It’s all off-site. None of it is in traditional gallery or theatre spaces. The whole event is set on an 800-metre walking route in Minto. We start over near Tyrepower. There’ll be eight performances, a mix of internationals (existing works) and new commissions. And all of the works are from artists who have some kind of connection with community, or work with non-performers. So it requires a lot of participation from local residents in Minto to make it a success.”

The work of UK duo Lone Twin (Gregg Whelan, Gary Winters) offers a good indication of the tone of the event. Their piece, Street Dance, will involve the duo and Sydney choreographer Julie-Anne Long visiting over time six to eight local households to explore and expand on ‘domestic choreographies.’ For the live event, the participating families will take to the streets with their creations, sharing them with each other and the public. Dennis saw the work when it was first performed in Nottingham and says of the experience, “It’s very beautiful…people are so generous not only in the performance but in the reception of others’ work. It becomes very clear what a big act it is for the people performing, as they’ve never done it before. There’s a lot of negotiating between audience and performers to develop that level of trust.”

UK/Indian artist Hetain Patel will be working with two local men from the Pacific Islander community to realise his piece TEN. Patel uses the 10-beat rhythms of traditional Indian music to underscore his humorous and thoughtful deliberations on cultural identity. Part performance lecture, part stand-up, part autobiography, Patel will be performing on the recently completed basketball court in the new parklands area.

Those who have experienced Rosie Dennis’ performances, will recognise a few personal preoccupations in her curation, most noticeably the musical elements. She is very excited to be able to include the Camden-based trumpet player and composer Freddie Hill, who will bring together an all-trumpet ensemble to serenade the crowd at sunset. The evening will kick off with Sweet Tonic, the 35- strong senior citizens’ choir singing from the back of a flatbed truck.

public and private

Because it’s in a state of considerable change, Dennis finds Minto particularly fascinating. Until recently, a large proportion of housing was public. However, many public residents have been moved to other areas and the land redeveloped under the “One Minto” scheme. Much of the evening’s performance will take place on parkland and streets that are still in the process of transformation.

The tensions between public and private, inside and outside are clearly represented in the work of Australian textile artist Nicole Barakat. She has asked the community to donate old fabrics from their homes: curtains, sheets, towels and so on. Working with the Embroiderers and Quilters Guilds and the Minto Tongan Tapa Group, she will cut up the donations to create string that will then be used to craft a three dimensional sculpture. Dennis elaborates: “…something from people’s private space becomes very public. Nicole likes this idea because where the evening finishes, it used to be all public housing and now it’s all very private.”

The final act of the night, which takes place in the newly built amphitheatre also offers a potent metaphor for this public/private notion. Belgian artist Gwendoline Robin’s Instant no 6899 is a pyrotechnic display unlike any other, in which the artist’s body becomes the site for ignition and explosion.

onsite ongoing

While MINTO:LIVE is a rather large undertaking in itself, it is actually but one element of an overarching ‘Live’ program Dennis has developed for Campbelltown Arts Centre. In November 2010 the first of a series of Site:Lab residencies will kick off, with artists on-site in various Minto locations. For example Lara Thoms will be in the library where she will invite visitors to read from a chosen book, from which an audio work will be created. Frank Mainoo will inhabit a vacant house, continuing his performative research into public and private spaces and acts. Barbara Campbell will work with local Chinese groups, opening up discussion of a politically charged poem.

While some of these residencies will not have outcomes until later in the 2011 Live program, three will feed directly into MINTO:LIVE in January. One of these is Nicole Barakat’s project mentioned above, which will based at a local church. Mickie Quick and Kernow Craig from Blood & Thunder Press will set up their printing press in the former supermarket in Minto Mall, inviting the local Bangladeshi community, and others, to collaborate on a publication that will be available at the end of the event as a souvenir.

UK/Australian artists Howard Matthew and Caitlin Newton-Broad will be in residence for nine weeks in the Sarah Redfern Primary School where they will work with third graders and their parents or grandparents on a storytelling project. Creating an actual waterhole in the school grounds, the pair will conduct hands-on, cross-artform workshops which will culminate in short videos. These will be displayed during MINTO:LIVE on screens on the back of bikes ridden through the suburb.

Site:Lab will continue in 2011. Dennis says, gesturing towards the buildings nearby: “It’s going to be more ambitious, hopefully across 10 shops in Minto Mall for three weeks. Someone will be working out of the bakery; someone working out of the optometrist’s; there will be a small theatre company in the beginnings of something in a shop over there; a sound artist over there; a video artist over there. Everyone in the same place.” Many of these projects will go on to have public outcomes in MINTO:LIVE 2012.

a living centre

While Dennis is setting up a mini-art centre in Minto Mall, she is also utilising the custom-built Art Centre back at Campbelltown. She explains, “So many local groups already use the Arts Centre who are unbelievably skilled and passionate. I’m looking to make interesting matches with artists who might be able to come and be in-residence with groups over a six-month period and then possibly make a work out of that.”

There is also an ‘artist initiates’ commission that gives a chosen artist a lump sum to realise a particular project. “The reality is the resources are finite, but it’s getting artists to think about how to do something on a small amount of money… [allowing for] a bit of movement, a bit of room for spontaneity. Video artist Sam James is the first one next year—he wants to do a creative documentation of Site:Lab in 2011.”

And that’s not all. There will also be a new writers’ initiative that, from an open call, will see three writers a year exploring their fascination with text in a series of residencies. At the end of the three-year project there will be some form of compilation or outcome, a festival of words or a publication to bring the works together and to the public. When you throw in the possibility of an international residency exchange, Dennis’ program looks diverse, ambitious and offers some amazing opportunities for artists engaged in live practices.

But before all that, Rosie Dennis has to nurture MINTO:LIVE into reality. To finance the event Dennis has undertaken extensive fundraising and attracted several corporate sponsors as well as state and federal project grants. In addition, she admits that the collaborative nature of the event requires constant energy and attention. But it is this that will make the event work. She says, “All of the service providers in the area are happy that something like this is happening. They see it as really positive to combat lead stories about a drug bust in Minto, a shooting in Minto, a stabbing in Minto. They’re actually few and far between and they happen everywhere. The majority of people who live here, it’s their home, they shop here, it’s their community, they go to the club here, to the PCYC. That’s what this is about.”

Sydney Festival 2011: Campbelltown Arts Centre, MINTO:LIVE, curator Rosie Dennis, the streets of Minto, Jan 20-22, 2011; artist talk with Lone Twin, Nicole Barakat, Caitlin Newton-Broad and Howard Matthew, January 22, 2pm-5:30pm, St James Anglican Church, Minto; Driven to New Pastures, creator Rosie Dennis, performers Rosie Dennis, June Hickey, Seymour Centre Jan 11–16

“A 4-SCREEN VIDEO EVENT FILMED ONE HOUR BEFORE THE AUDIENCE ARRIVES, SUPER NIGHT SHOT CONTAINS NO CUTS OR EDITS AND IS PRODUCED WITH FOUR VIDEO CAMERAS BY FOUR PERFORMERS. STARTING OFF AT BASE CAMP (THE VENUE), ALL CAMERAS ARE SYNCHRONISED TO RECORD AT THE SAME TIME. THEN IN A MILITARY STYLE BRIEF, THE PERFORMERS DECLARE A ‘WAR ON ANONYMITY’ BEFORE TAKING TO THE CITY STREETS ON A SET OF MAGICAL ADVENTURES THAT CELEBRATE UNPLANNED MEETINGS WITH STRANGERS…THE FOUR ACTIVISTS THEN RETURN BACK TO BASE CAMP…THE VIDEOTAPES ARE THEN IMMEDIATELY PLAYED BACK SIDE BY SIDE IN SYNCH, BECOMING UNITED IN ONE WIDESCREEN EPIC.” WWW.GOBSQUAD.COM

The Berlin and Nottingham-based Gob Squad, who will present Super Night Shot at the 2011 Sydney Festival, are the perfect product of a post-mediatised world: a clever mix of party, audience activation, technology and a reflection of our times. Witty, ironic and comfortable with failure, Gob Squad have been inviting the audience into their search for “beauty, meaning and humanity amongst the glittering facades and dark corners of contemporary culture” (their words not ours) for some time now and have become very good at it. They have pioneered a style of live filmmaking that includes the audience in its creation.

The stakes seem high in the company’s work; creating a film in real time in front of their audience with a seemingly casual approach to the countless chance elements makes each moment of a performance feel like risky fun. There is a lot going on and it seems that at any moment it could all go horribly wrong. This element of risk is of course all part of the joy ride. In their performances Gob Squad turn a humorous light on to this idiosyncratic world of ours and while challenging popular assumptions and beliefs, they are kind and generous in their approach. As they extend their relationship to the audience, there is no singling out, no ridicule or any attempt to undermine our vulnerable presence in the work. They welcome us with open arms, introduce themselves, smile and hold our hands. Gob Squad entrust their show to us and for an evening we are part of the collective: and together there is nowhere to go but forward, towards the curtain call.

In Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), Gob Squad reconstructed a series of Warhol videos, some of which they had seen and others that they had only heard about. The work is filmed live and projected on three screens in the middle of the theatre. In RealTime 83 we wrote about our experience of participating in a performance of Kitchen, “The essence of Warhol’s time is not the essence of Gob Squad’s time. In their frustration, the performers stop the film, they walk out from behind the screen and one by one replace themselves with an audience member. The performance ends with Gob Squad in the audience. With us standing in their place, they can be a blank canvas; they can be whoever they want to be. Gob Squad are making a new film before our very eyes and it’s free of histories. They are capturing the essence of here, right now; live in front of a camera and with an audience.”

In a recent conversation, Gob Squad’s Sean Patten explained that the motivating principle behind their works is their interest in reality and randomness; the work they make is driven by a desire to remain responsive and alive to the possibilities of encounter with the audience. To see their work is to quite literally find oneself in it as the performance is constructed in real time, live, with you in the centre. They have “designed the holes into which the audience fit” and the experience is spellbinding.

The story goes that Sarah Thom and Sean Patten met at Nottingham University in 1992. They started off making short, funny dance performances at Glastonbury Festival, the main incentive for which was to secure a free ticket to the party. Joined by visiting artists Berit Stumpf and Johanna Freiborg from Giessen University in Germany at the end of their final year, they made their first professional work, House, in a council house in Nottingham and history was made. In the beginning there were four of them and they made small, funny works that appealed to festivals and challenged a world consumed by work and bad clothing. In the years that followed, performers/artists Simon Wills and Bastian Trost joined. They have collectively made shows for theatre, interventions on the streets and in galleries and have toured across four continents. It is surprising then (at least for us) that it has taken them this long to come to Australia.
Super Night Shot

The company now works with a core of six and a growing series of guest artists who orbit the company’s collective practices and serve to enrich the world of Gob Squad. It’s a fairly unique entity in the world of performance, working without a director or hierarchy, making decisions together about each part of the work. We asked Sean Patten how they had managed to make a collective work over their 18 years. He told us about one of their most recent works, Are you with us, which addresses the difficulties of working together. The members interview each other, asking the difficult and potentially dangerous questions that they wouldn’t dare ask in private, each taking it in turn to play the role of counsellor or life coach. The results, said Patten, are funny and surprisingly therapeutic.

In the world of big business there is an increasing interest in collaborative, networked approaches to corporate environments. In offices across the world, projects called In touch, Blue Sky and Horizons are taking shape, trying to understand how collective learning, sharing and non-competitive approaches might function in the workplace. In the fraught world of the corporation it will take a long time for change to really be felt across the culture of work. In this context Gob Squad’s example might be held up as a shining beacon for collective working practices in action. If life really is a series of tests of grace under pressure, then Gob Squad are model modern citizens.

Patten says that Gob Squad’s members all remain ideologically committed to the idea of group work, which is always going to be better than work they make on their own—they don’t want to be solo artists. “You have to be a bit of a communist in order to be in Gob Squad.” He uses the metaphor of marriage or family: resentments build up, arguments and heated discussions happen and it takes the sort of work you would put into any relationship, checking in, talking about things, not leaving things to remain difficult.

“We remain interested in the world, hungry to experience culture, politics, the news and television. We start each day of rehearsal with a discussion of the books we are reading, the films we are watching, exhibitions we see.” This cycle makes sense to them, they are both producers of culture and consumers of culture.

Although Gob Squad has performed Super Night Shot over 140 times in various parts of the world, it remains an unfinished work. Patten says “It is a great mix of things that are planned and things that randomly happen on the streets. So while we may have performed the show over 140 times, we never tire of it, it always feels like the first time.” And this is true of all of their work. Gob Squad are the pop stars of contemporary performance, their much anticipated better-late-than-never arrival on Australian soil can, for performance enthusiasts, be likened to the Beatles’ tour of Australia in 1964 or perhaps Abba in 1974. Super Night Shot is one performance not to be missed in the 2011 Sydney Festival, so buckle up, you’re in for a hell of a ride!

See “Gob Squad saves the world,” RT83, p34 for Panther’s account of their encounter with the company in Europe in 2008.

Gob Squad, Super Night Shot, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 25-30, 9pm; presented by Sydney Festival, Performance Space and Sydney Opera House; www.sydneyfestival.org.au; ACMI, Melbourne Feb 3-5 www.acmi.net.au/; World Theatre Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 10-12, www.brisbanepowerhouse.org

PREMIERING AS PART OF THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, RANTERS THEATRE’S INTIMACY BEGINS WITH A SMILE. IT’S THE LOVELY, BEGUILING, DISARMING SMILE OF THE ACTOR PAUL LUM, DIRECTED AT US, THE AUDIENCE, AND ECHOING THE BEGINNING OF RANTERS’ PREVIOUS PLAY, AFFECTION, WHICH ALSO BEGAN WITH THE ACTORS SMILING AT THE AUDIENCE, IN THAT CASE, FROM THE COMFORT OF A COUCH. THE RANTERS SMILE IS NOT A MASK OF HAPPINESS BUT AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE US COMPLICIT WITH THOSE ONSTAGE.

ranters’ intimacy

The success of this attempt is beside the point. Ranters does not seem concerned with whether we trust the smile or not, because it is the attempt that makes manifest the slipperiness of the social contract inherent in the relationship between actor and audience. No matter how open and charming the actor’s smile, it still seems odd and unnaturally jaunty, like the quizzical gesture of someone feigning recognition at a party of half-remembered acquaintances. Indeed, is Paul Lum actually smiling at us, or is it his onstage persona? And does he actually see us, or is he simply smiling at the black void below the bright lights? And, with a nod to Zen, how much does our presence matter?

Later in the production, a character tells Lum that he is a good listener because “you’re there, but not there,” like a priest behind the confessional, the paper of the diary or the analyst behind the chaise longue. In Ranters’ theatre, the audience is similarly there but not there—we are good listeners precisely because we are imagined rather than active interlocutors, intimates invited in by an ingenuous smile. But again, the success of the invitation is beside the point.

Ranters’ aesthetic fundamentally relies for its dramatic tension on the slippage between the performer’s invitation and the audience’s response. There is typically no plot and minimal character dynamics. Raimondo Cortese’s writing evades obvious subtexts and thematics. Instead, the actors speak of ordinary happenings, of personal thoughts in a meandering manner that defies obvious interpretation. Nevertheless, the mere ordinariness of the text invites listening and, crucially, interpretation—because we are in a theatre, where we expect things to mean something. Thus, by simply framing and detailing the ordinary, Ranters engages the audience in the process of theatrical meaning-making until the ordinary becomes something else that both reflects what it emerged from and transcends it.

In Intimacy, the distinction between the ordinary and the theatrical is twisted even more by its simple conceit—the vox populi. We are led to believe that Lum ventured out one balmy St Kilda night and asked strangers to chat. And they did. Or did they? It is one of those glorious suspensions of disbelief that some in the audience would not think to question. That we can believe that a pilot with panic attacks, an emotionally distant father who loves roller coasters, a man who performs birds and a chef who cannot sleep would all talk to Lum around Fitzroy Street on the same night is, in hindsight, extraordinary. But at the time, it all seemed so ordinary. That’s Ranters.

jack charles v the crown

Jack Charles V The Crown is based on the life of one of Melbourne’s most admired, beloved and recognisable actors. Jack Charles, born in 1943, was one of the Stolen Generation and his life, no matter how idiosyncratic or personal, is inevitably representative of this most rending of experiences. Nevertheless, Charles is defiantly not one to stick to a script, as he winkingly acknowledges after roaming off his cues a few times.

Early on, Charles shows us a slideshow of his childhood, filling in the images with anecdotes and self-effacing humour. Though the breezy language and inescapably cute faces in the photos push us into the realm of This Is Your Life, the effect is perfectly undercut by a slightly off-key violin note from Nigel MacLean that keeps the tone uneasy and complicated—not everything is snowdrops and nostalgia.

Charles’ knack for pottery, which he picked up during a gaol stint, is a central motif of the piece. At the start, we see him at his wheel, throwing a vase. He tells us the Kulin Nation creation story of Bunjil and Pallian, the first men, shaped by Birrarung clay. He shares a tender and beautiful moment of falling in love with another prisoner as he teaches him to shape the clay, the reverie of their touching made all the more sweet by Charles’ memory of “his PK spearmint breath.” The pottery wheel keeps spinning and coming back to the same place, but each revolution and glide of the fingers redefines the subject little by little.

In many respects, Charles’ stage presence is this piece. His warmth, effusiveness and gentleness draw us in, his deft touch with language and song wins us over. The structure is wandering, like the man himself, and never in a hurry, but never happier than when walking and talking.

robert lepage, the blue dragon

When Robert Lepage comes to town, chances are there will be an army of black-clad theatre technicians stuffed into his valise. His production of The Blue Dragon does not disappoint on that level, with extremely detailed and ingenious scenography and spatial transformations.

The play represents Lepage’s second bite at the cherry of China. In 1985, his company, Ex Machina, produced The Dragons’ Trilogy, which refracted three generations of Chinatowns in Canada’s major cities into a spectrum of experiences that looked at China from afar. In fact, the Trilogy was less about China than Canada. The Blue Dragon is set in China but still it is more about Canadians suffering a bout of Orientalism than about the country it is set in, which steadfastly remains the Other in an unreconstructed sense. The narrative is a progression of hackneyed situations and the piece as a whole feels like a Fabergé egg, a hollow confection.

akram khan, vertical road

Fresh from its British premiere, Akram Khan’s latest dance piece, Vertical Road, begins in an unexpectedly literal manner. Seven figures covered in chalk stand in deathly stillness in front of a scrim. Their costumes evoke both the tight winding sheaths of fabric of East Asia and the looser robes of Sufism, but in their stillness and texture they bear a clear resemblance to Emperor Qin’s faded Terracotta Army. An eighth dancer remains outside this wedge formation of warriors and discovers at the front of the stage seven tablets arranged carefully but precariously on their sides. He inspects them with curiosity and then knocks them over like dominoes, a booby trap that revivifies the army of clay behind him. Alas, Harrison Ford does not appear with a whip and a hat to safely lead our hero past the flaming gates and rivers of mercury.

Instead, Khan’s imagery grows in confidence and complexity, threading together disparate motifs and ideas into a visual narrative that is borne along by Nitin Sawhney’s throbbing sweeps of drums and strings. From Plato’s Cave to whirling dervishes, from the invisible puppet strings of fate to the devotion of impassioned lovers, the choreographic language builds and extrapolates, always reaching towards ascension.

Ascension comes at the end of Vertical Road and is, appropriately, its most startling and transformative achievement. The scrim at the back of the space is the liminal point of communication between mortal and immortal worlds. Like the plane of water in Bill Viola’s Three Women, it diffuses and obscures the eternal figures behind it. As barely visible streams of water cascade down the scrim’s surface and haze fills the space behind it, a lone dancer, reaching towards the hands beyond, breaks through in a flash of golden light that unifies for one breathtaking instant the physical and metaphysical.

2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival: Ranters, Intimacy, devisor, director Adriano Cortese, text Raimondo Cortese, co-devisors, performers Beth Buchanan, Paul Lum, Patrick Moffatt, set & costume design Anna Tregloan, lighting Niklas Pajanti, sound design David Franzke, video Keri Light, choreography Alison Halit, Malthouse, Beckett Theatre, Oct 1-23; Jack Charles V The Crown, performer Jack Charles, co-writers Jack Charles, John Romeril, director Rachael Maza Long, design Emily Barrie, lighting Danny Pettingill, music Nigel MacLean, Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre, Oct 12-17; Ex Machina,The Blue Dragon, director, writer Robert Lepage, writer Marie Michaud, design Michel Gauthier, choreography Tai Wei Foo, Playhouse, The Arts Centre, Oct 8-12; Akram Khan Company, Vertical Road, choreographer Akram Khan, composer Nitin Sawhney, devised & performed by Eulalia Ayguade Farro, Konstantina Efthymiadou, Salah El Brogy, Ahmed Khemis, Young Jin Kim, Yen-Ching Lin, Andrej Petrovic, Paul Zivkovich, costumes Kimie Nakano, lighting Jesper Kongshaug, design Akram Khan and collaborators, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, Oct 19-23

FROM A DISTANCE, IT WOULD APPEAR THAT BRETT SHEEHY’S SECOND MELBOURNE FESTIVAL WAS THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL IN YEARS—NOT FOR WHAT IT OFFERED, BUT FOR WHAT IT LACKED. CRITICISING AN ABSENCE IS ALWAYS A SHAKY STARTING POINT, BUT FOR ME THE FREQUENT KEENING (FOR A NO-HOLDS-BARRED-EPIC; FOR A CENTRAL CONVERSATION HUB; FOR A CITY-CHANGING EVENT) DREW ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE FACT THAT WHAT WAS PRESENTED WAS OFTEN EXCITING, REWARDING OR SURPRISINGLY ENGAGED WITH ITS ENVIRONMENT. THE HITS OUTWEIGHED THE MISSES, AND EVEN THEN THE TRAIN-WRECKS WERE MOSTLY HEAD-TURNERS.

toneelgroep amsterdam, opening night

Take Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Opening Night, an outrageously ambitious and strikingly realised merging of realist drama, filmic de- and re-construction and theatrical conjuring. Taking its cues from the screenplay of the 1977 Cassavetes film (RT99, p15), it presented the behind-the-scenes preparation for the premiere of a new play in which interpersonal tensions and past grievances threaten to derail proceedings. The imminent meltdown of the leading performer acted as an emotional 18-wheeler bearing down on the edifice of appearances erected to conceal these fragile relationships.

Simultaneously, a set of real time cameras and projections reproduced the live performances as a filmic spectacle beamed across the space and on downstage monitors. The result was both a hyperreal, immediate play and a fragmented panoply of artificial surfaces, each of which could not be fully separated from the other. The power of the screen image to seduce our gaze constantly asserted itself, even if that image was just the second-order rendering of the fleshy, three-dimensional bodies being flung around the stage before us. Cinema’s epistemological status as a negation—as always referring to an elsewhere, an else-when—also produced a rich confusion, compounded when the projected image seemed to lag behind the real events, or freeze. Technical hitch or cunning ploy? What does it matter?

hiroaki umeda, adapting for distortion, haptic

An astonishing technological wizardry also animates Japanese choreographer/dancer Hiroaki Umeda’s paired billing of Adapting for Distortion and Haptic. In both, light is central to any meaning generated by the work—the body subsumed by the post-human abstraction of light. Indeed, Umeda seems to epitomise Donna Haraway’s conception of the ideal cyborg as a machine made of sunshine. Identity and the individual are stripped by the excoriating divinity of luminescence, but this works to radically different effect in the two pieces.

Adapting for Distortion is a monstrously visceral encounter with the binary order of 21st century technology. Fast-shifting grids of light, expanding and contracting potentially infinite horizons destabilise any sense of depth, in a case of Cartesian perspective taken beyond the capacity of the mind to comprehend. Approaching the sublime in its most classically terrifying of definitions, it was seizure-inducing stuff that made for anything but a pleasant experience. Hard to argue with its effectiveness, however, and the work, though brief, acted as a potent reminder of the unseverable connections between our physical forms and the perceptual capacities that orient them in space and time.

Haptic presented a marked contrast in tone. Here the dancer was a liquid shadow against warm, shifting waves of coloured light; a half-visible organism skittering across the surface of a radiant lake of unfathomable depth. Where Adapting to Distortion’s alien landscape was one of cold dislocation, Haptic produced a pre-Oedipal plenitude, the return of the individual into a fullness of being where world and self no longer suffered rupture.

It seems paradoxical that within these two works Umeda still managed to carve out a distinctive style of dance. Though he may now claim to be more visual artist than choreographer, his performance still drew on techniques of classical dance and hip-hop—body rolls that defied the limits of the skeletal, foot-slides of eye-blinking dexterity.

hotel pro forma, tomorrow, in a year

Despite this particular style, it’s not easy to determine Umeda’s contributions to Hotel Pro Forma’s electro/dance opera Tomorrow, In A Year. He is billed as “choreographic consultant” but none of his signatures are legible—instead, the elements of dance here appear so naively rendered as to make me wonder if this is deliberately the case.

Tomorrow, In A Year is one of those rare encounters where I wonder too if some elaborate prank is being pulled. It’s self-consciously obscurantist, visually drab and gestures towards complexity and exquisite chaos without actually engendering either. It takes its inspiration from the life and writings of Charles Darwin, but its collision of elements—divergent modes of dance, vocal styles, visual effects and the very forms of opera, electronica and postmodern theatre—result less in a new species of performance evolving beyond its ancestors than a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster in natty duds. There’s no natural law which states that the combination of random genes will produce a hybrid able to survive, any more than a random combination of words will result in a comprehensible sentence. And while the libretto may have drawn heavily on Darwin’s own words, phrases such as “Scissor-beak lower mandible flat elastic/it’s an ivory paper-cutter” make me focus less on the evolutionary arc of the avian than the increasing furrow of my brow.

michael clark company, come, been
& gone

If Tomorrow, In A Year falters under the weight of its own ambitions, Michael Clark Company’s come, been and gone is crushed beneath the onus of its own history. Paying tribute to several decades of work by the renowned British choreographer, its supposedly groundbreaking rebellion appears tired and shorn of context today. Set to a series of songs by artists such as David Bowie and Lou Reed, at its worst it presents an embarrassing literalism: The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” for instance, produces a dancer in a flesh-coloured bodysuit studded with foam needles writhing around in someone’s half-baked notion of a drug nightmare. For Bowie’s “Heroes,” the audience is even provided a large-scale projected video of the track’s video clip—it’s a hard task for rather uninspired dancers to compete with such an iconic figure, especially when the image isn’t deployed with the kind of understanding of its fascination suggested in Opening Night.

wren & de buysser, an anthology of optimism

There is inspiration to be found in Jacob Wren and Pieter De Buysser’s An Anthology of Optimism, but it’s of a coy and delicate sort. The pair—both writers, one a performance artist and the other a sort of contrarian humorist and philosopher—present a lo-fi dialogue exploring a notion of “critical optimism.” It’s a somewhat Socratic exchange with a clear argument and obvious structure. Wren is established as a sceptic, suspicious of the potential for optimism to bear any efficacy in a contemporary climate as troubled as ours; De Buysser takes the case for an optimism which admits of the world’s troubles without succumbing to defeat. Eventually they find some agreement: a cautious kind of positivity that promotes small steps in the face of big problems. It’s not radical thinking, but it makes its point both succinctly and without excessive guile.

The conceit of the production is delivered in a style that often threatens to tip over into a terrible tweeness. A retro slide projector, hand-written signs and a manually operated sound system nod to the mode of conspicuously no-frills, DIY theatre, but there’s a strained casualness to the performances that seems the result of much effort not to become mannered or artificial. Perhaps that would have created a tone of seriousness, undermining the inherently didactic nature of the work; these days, self-conscious irony is a more acceptable way of putting forward very political points.

But this is exactly the sort of work that, for me, fleshes out an international festival. It’s not a grand showcase of spectacular talent—as works like come, been and gone and Tomorrow, In A Year indicate, such productions too often make for monumental disappointment. Opening Night proved the exception, but on a smaller scale this year’s festival was marked by a great number of successes that add up to something more than two weeks of art with a single defining moment. I don’t know that festivals of this sort need such a defining moment. Rather than stamping in our minds an image of one event over all others, this year made for a plurality of miniature epiphanies and quiet fades, even blurring into the surrounding non-festival productions. That’s worth our attention, at least.

2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival: Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Opening Night, after John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, director Ivo van Hove, design, lighting Jan Versweyveld, video design Marc Meulemans, Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, Oct 20-23; Adapting for Distortion, Haptic, choreographer, dancer Hiroaki Umeda, sound S20, images S20, Bertrand Baudry, lighting S20, Hervé Villechenoux, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Oct 14-17; Hotel Pro Forma, Tomorrow, In A Year, directors Ralf Richardt Strobech, Kirsten Dehlholm, music The Knife, design Ralf Richardt Strobech, State Theatre, Arts Centre, Oct 20-23; Michael Clark Company, come, been and gone, choreographer Michael Clark, lighting design by Charles Atlas, costumes Stevie Stewart, State Theatre, the Arts Centre, Oct 8-10; Pieter De Buysser and Jacob Wren/CAMPO, An Anthology of Optimism, Fairfax Theatre, the Arts Centre, Oct 20-23

WHAT IS A ROSE BEFORE IT HAS A NAME? WHAT IF OUR ABILITY TO INTERPRET AND INTERVENE, OUR AGENCY TO DECIDE WHAT THINGS ARE, RECEDED AND WE COULD SEE THE WORLD WITHOUT ADJECTIVES, UNMEDIATED BY INTENTION? TO WHAT EXTENT ARE WE MADE IN TURN BY THE WORLD WE THUS CREATE? AND WHAT IS THE AGENCY OF THINGS? BETWEEN CARNIVAL OF MYSTERIES, HOTEL PRO FORMA, HEINER GOEBBELS’ STIFTERS DINGE, DAVID CHESWORTH’S RICHTER/MEINHOF-OPERA, SOME VAST GROUND ON THE TOPICS OF SYMBOLISATION AND REPRESENTATION WAS COVERED. IT SOUNDS PREPOSTEROUS; BUT THIS IS HOW.

richter/meinhof-opera

David Chesworth’s Richter/Meinhof-Opera was a highly anticipated take on the Red Army Faction’s Ulrike Meinhof. Announced as a 45-minute, pocket performance artwork (opera it wasn’t), it was an even shorter, quieter beast than expected. Tackling a potentially inexhaustible subject with an absolute minimalism of input and effect, it treads that usual fine line between the open-ended and the non-committal. It barely skims the complex story of Meinhof, respected journalist who joined a terrorist organisation, and whose simultaneous canonisation as left-wing martyr and demonization as Communist murderer still divides Germany. The only trace of the other members of the RAF is a record player, playing an Eric Clapton track, exactly as it did when Baader committed suicide in his prison cell. This is a rare instance in which the music goes beyond atmospheric soundscape; the other is a string duet, which mellifluously contrasts with the rest of the work, enhancing its thinness somehow. A few of Meinhof’s best-known quotations are projected onto ACCA’s shard-like walls, while centre-stage stands Gerhard Richter (Hugo Race), who famously painted RAF members’ death portraits in 1988, and was accused of mythologising terrorism.

The intended core of this work is the enormous disjuncture between direct action, advocated by Meinhof (often paraphrasing Brecht), and the indirectness and detachment of representational art, which often gives life to such ideas. The inability of our own cynical, ideologically unconvinced contemporary era to present the full spectrum of Meinhof’s time is another big theme. However, to say that Richter/Meinhof-Opera ‘explores’ them would be to give it excessive credit. Between Richter’s moody, detached canvases, the monochrome photos of the stylish Faction (which overwhelmingly comprised young women) and the occasional discursive duet (the libretto is a slim pastiche of quotations), the myth of RAF is presented as a matter of aestheticising or not; and the issue of direct action as a matter of professional ethics (to identify or not with one’s subject matter). Cold War politics lie forgotten, and ideas are not so much revealed as hinted at.

Even Richter, whose engagement with RAF is the focal interest of the opera, remains shorthand for the generic Artist. Evading all the big questions on this big topic, Richter/Meinhof-Opera feels and looks as if in development, like a sketch for a bigger work.

stifters dinge

Those who work with things (sculptors, architects, furniture makers) are often perplexed by the readiness with which more idealist disciplines (theatre, poetry) turn this material into signs and ideas. The result is frequently naive mystification, or embellishing fetishism: we have all seen signed urinals, soup cans, as well as their less rounded children—from derelict buildings employed as metaphors to artsy tapestries. What makes Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge so remarkable is that it does none of this, and has its audience enraptured. Its form is sui generis: a peopleless performance, or perhaps just a giant moving contraption. And yet, its workings are magical, for idealists and materialists alike.

Stifters Dinge’s dramaturgy is a sequence of apparently unrelated mechanical events: light changes, mechanical actions, sound clips and video projections. These are organised around a host of motifs: principally, the writings of Adalbert Stifter, a 19th century Austrian novelist whose prose is notoriously thickly furnished, upholstered, landscaped. (Literary lore has it that modernisation was already making advances into the order of things, and that 19th century naturalism was a kind of urgent stock taking.) Other motifs are the Renaissance dicovery of geometric perspective (chiefly Paolo Uccello’s paintings), utilitarian traditional music (Greek, Papuan, Colombian), voice recordings of Malcolm X. With technical perfection, the sequence of mechanical events coalesces into a world, all whilst remaining first and foremost mobile matter, without metaphors or superimposed meaning. The work builds into a deeply satisfying and meaningful totality by making us aware precisely of the bottomless materiality of its devices. When dry ice bubbles up in the three shallow water pools, seeing the trick does not stop the entire audience from holding their breath in awe. Stifters Dinge purges the stage of illusion and interpretation, but the ‘things’ that remain are neither threatening nor banal. Rather, they assume almost sacral fullness.

carnival of mysteries

Carnival of Mysteries, conversely, is an image of a carnival world. It has it all: tents, noise, nudity, candy floss, its own (inflated) currency and many short acts of varying skill and engagement. It is as entertaining and uneven as any carnival. It is also no more dramaturgically cohesive, nor exploratory: neither does it try to bring a superior level of artistry to the content, nor interrogate the form (in the vein of One-on-One Festival; RT99, p10). With many times more mini-shows than can be experienced in the allotted two hours, it is a somewhat frenzied experience, lacking the relaxed atmosphere of a fair. But the intensity does not translate into superb artistry, at least not in the fraction of the shows I witnessed. Should we be deconstructing it critically, suspending critical judgement, or witnessing it referentially? If Carnival is the answer, what is the artistic question? Is it a lowbrow event for a highbrow audience, with highbrow performers? Is it a replacement for Spiegeltent, which used to be the place at MIAF for circus, burlesque and other kinds of friendly lowbrow? A ‘carnival but of another kind,’ it is both too close, and once removed.

tomorrow, in a year

Hotel Pro Forma’s Tomorrow, In a Year, an ‘electro opera’ about the life and work of Charles Darwin, was the most controversial show of this year’s MIAF (its response coming close to the outrage caused by Liza Lim’s The Navigator in 2008 (RT87, p8); opera is clearly fraught cultural ground in Melbourne). It is a conceptual work, with no plot to retell. It explores the thematic links between four moments in Darwin’s life—including the death of his daughter (potentially linked to his marriage to a first cousin)—and the implications of his theory . The endless mutability of the natural world, whose laws form us despite our pretended detachment, and whose laws we can never break, is the terrible heart of this work. It opens with potentially bewildering, undifferentiated stage sludge, an image of the original primordial soup of life; it ends as accelerating hydroponic chaos, or perhaps complex order?

The stage imagery is poor: only two planes of horizontal movement, no interaction between the performers, green laser beams and much dry ice. Using botanical drawings and video footage of water, Hiroaki Umeda’s algae-like choreography and the occasional verse about geological time and entombed carcasses, it explores a complete intangible: the fact that the material world is bigger than a human being, that we do not become through it, but are crushed by it.

But unlike Chesworth’s non-committal opera, it is fully exploratory. A note of the Romantic sublime runs through the work, unnoticed by those who bemoan its coldness. It unearths a potential Western counterpoint to the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’: the awareness of the dyingness of things, of the essential inability of matter to last. Just as cherry blossoms are less pretty than tragically transient, so is Tomorrow, In a Year not so much beautiful to watch as it is a despairing attempt to grasp cosmic complexity.

In the absence of meaningful stage action, enjoyment of this opera is strongly predicated on appreciating the music, by the Swedish electronic duo The Knife, which forms its narrative, emotional and intellectual core. It is a complex composition of natural and electronic noises, bel canto, house beats, borrowings from Purcell, early polyphony. And yet this collage of pop and found remains staunchly anti-metaphorical, a postmodernist pile of stuff asking to be understood literally: when Kristina Wahlin sings that “epochs collected here,” she is relating a geological fact, not a poetic truth.

While the work has been hailed as showing the future of the operatic form, it seems to succeed largely in musical terms. Visually, it attempts an abstract variation on a nature documentary, with results too reminiscent of late 1990s raves to be genuinely eligible for the label ‘innovation.’ Knowing that cyborgs, virtual reality and Dolly the Sheep were all the rage circa 1998 provides some dramaturgical solace, but does not compensate for Tomorrow, In A Year falling short of its promise.

2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival: Richter/Meinhof-Opera, direction, music, sound design David Chesworth, text David Chesworth (after Tony MacGregor), performers Kate Kendall, Hugo Race, lighting Travis Hodgson; ACCA, Oct 14-16; Stifters Dinge, concept, music, direction Heiner Goebbels; Malthouse, Oct 8-11; Carnival of Mysteries, creators, directors Moira Finucane, Jackie Smith, production design The Sisters Hayes; fortyfivedownstairs, Oct 6-30; Hotel Pro Forma, Tomorrow, In A Day, directors Kirsten Dehlholm, Ralf Richardt Strobech, music The Knife; Arts Centre, Melbourne, Oct 20-23

WHEN BRIAN RITCHIE IS NOT CURATING THE MONA FOMA FESTIVAL OR TOURING WITH ONE OF HIS BANDS, HE IS RUNNING A TEA SHOP WITH HIS WIFE IN HOBART. DISCUSSING THE MENU HE SAYS “THERE’S THIS DISH CALLED NATTO. IF YOU TELL A JAPANESE PERSON ‘I LIKE NATTO,’ THEY SAY ‘NO, WESTERNERS CAN’T EAT THAT, IT’S ONLY FOR JAPANESE.’

“We put that on the menu and just call it soybeans and a lot of vegetarians and other people order it, unsuspecting. They say ‘This is wonderful, I love this,’ because nobody has told them that they’re supposed to be afraid of it.” It seems Ritchie’s culinary strategies perfectly reflect his curatorial approach to MOFO—one of the most interesting Australian festivals to emerge for quite some time.

The Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art (MONA FOMA, or MOFO for short) landed in 2009, as Ritchie puts it, “like a meteor smacking into Tasmania.” In 2008 Salamanca Arts Centre approached the then studio resident Ritchie (the former bass player of Violent Femmes had recently relocated to Hobart) to curate a music festival. Initially Ritchie said no, but “then of course my ego got in the way and I thought, ‘well, if I had a festival what would it be like?’ and I started to fantasise. I drew up a proposal for something that looks remarkably similar to MONA FOMA, and we went to David Walsh looking for sponsorship money.” Walsh, owner of Moorilla, one of Tasmania’s oldest wineries, has a history of arts philanthropy, including an ongoing relationship with BalletLab (see interview with Phillip Adams) and has been building the Museum of Old and New Art to house his extensive art collection. Along with marketing manager Lee Carmichael, Walsh decided that rather than sponsor the event, he’d like to partner it. With this backing, the Tasmanian State Government also came on board and by January 2009—a remarkably short turn-around time—the first MONA FOMA was thrilling Hobart’s locals and visitors.

an experimental flavour

While billed as a festival of music and art, music is the primary focus, with the performance and visual art elements of the program exhibiting a strong reliance on and collaborative approach to sound. However, unlike the majority of music festivals in Australia, MOFO is decidedly genreless—alternative rock/pop sits happily beside jazz, classical, world music, experimental electronic, improv and sound art. The broadest sweep indicates that there is an emphasis on instrumental rather than vocally driven music but the programming really takes its flavour from Ritchie’s appreciation of and search for the experimental across this broad range of styles. This allows for the mingling of international headline artists like Nick Cave, John Cale and Philip Glass with Australia’s most interesting, emerging and established experimentalists.

Ritchie points to a challenge: “Music is the comfort food of the arts…[It’s] the artform where people are trying to re-live something. That’s the reason 50,000 people will go to something like U2. It’s comforting for them.” Therefore, “one of the things we pride ourselves on,” says Ritchie, “is packaging the content of the festival in a really engaging fashion—to get people to listen to music that they’re not familiar with.

“Mostly we present unknown artists, or in some cases known artists, doing new things—[allowing] them to explore various facets of their creativity. For example last year we had John Cale. Everybody knows that John Cale is from The Velvet Underground, but [for MOFO] he played rock music, he played some classical music, he did some solo improvised piano, he did an art installation. You’re seeing a lot of different sides of John Cale that you don’t normally see.”

The MOFO team seem quite skilled at creating a sense of openness that invites audiences to try new things, from the clever juxtapositions within programming to the laidback, unpretentious marketing copy. Ritchie says, “A lot of times I think people are kind of defensive about what they’re putting out there in front of the public. ‘You might not like this,’ or ‘this is going to challenge you.’ How do you know? It’s presumptuous to assume that people are going to be challenged by something. Maybe people are going to say, ‘Wow, this is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life. Why haven’t I heard this before?’ In fact people have told me that.”

the menu

The 2011 program is still taking final shape, but Ritchie is able to share several highlights. One of the high profile artists this year, as mentioned, is Philip Glass. Nick Cave will be returning to MOFO with his compatriots Warren Ellis, Martyn P Casey and Jim Sclavunos, as the Grinderman, to present their swampy, epic tales. Also from the more popular, yet gritty end of the spectrum will be the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Melbourne’s Speak Percussion celebrate their 10th birthday with a massive percussion orchestra installed around the Princes Wharf venue presenting an all-percussion program including Edgar Varese’s Ionisation, along with a world premiere of a work composed by Anthony Pateras (who will also appear in MOFO with the Pateras/Baxter/Brown trio).

Ritchie is particularly excited about Chiri, a collaboration between renowned Australian jazz musicians Simon Baker (drums) and Scott Tinkler (trumpet) and traditional Korean singer Bae Il-dong, whose technique was acquired by singing into a waterfall 18 hours a day for seven years. Ritchie, a shakuhachi player himself, is no stranger to the difficulty of such cross-cultural musical mixes and considers this a particularly exciting fusion of world music and jazz.

In quite a different exploratory vein, Australia’s Jon Rose will return after last year’s cycling concert (RT90, p48) with another interactive experience—a giant ball that responds to audience play—as well as performing in virtuoso violinist mode. Other Australian artists include the Necks, the much beloved improv trio of Tony Buck, Lloyd Swanton and Chris Abrahams; Philip Samartzis, who will present his latest installation based on field recordings from Antarctica; and the audiovisual duo Botborg, who will induce hallucinations with their frenzy of sculptured static. Local Tasmanian electro-synth group Scientists of Modern Music will also play their home town as will SS2Q, an up and coming classical chamber ensemble.

While music is the focus, the gallery-based installations have been a highlight of previous festivals. Co-curated by Nicole Durling from MONA, this year’s program offers a range of impressive works including Australian Indigenous artist Brook Andrew’s Op-Art jumping castle (seen at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney) and Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s suspended, burnt-out piano inviting silent contemplation. Nor is the body forgotten with the inclusion of Philip Adams’ BalletLab presenting a trilogy of works: Above, Miracle and Amplification (see the interview with Adams, p23).

a bonus course

After a week of MOFO activities in the heart of Hobart, the action will then move to the Moorilla Estate for the long awaited opening of the Museum of Old and New Art—a 6,000 square metre “secular temple” built to display David Walsh’s extensive collection of antiquities and contemporary marvels, exploring sex and death and everything in between. There’ll be more performances with concerts by the UK band Wire and Health from the US, a pyrotechnical spectacle by Groupe F from France, a “live car-crash sculpture” by Swiss artist Roman Signer, plus the provocations of Singapore-based Serbian performance artist Ana Prvacki.

a different kind of cooking

One of the most important aspects of MOFO is that the majority of performances (bar some of the headliners) are completely free. But Ritchie maintains, “You still have to engage [the audience], and draw them in, because people’s time is valuable.” Furthermore, the fact that MOFO is largely funded by private money perhaps frees it from some bureaucratic imperatives. Ritchie says, “I think there’s kind of an orthodoxy in the arts here—even the experimental arts—a way of doing things, and ticking boxes that we don’t really have to do…People are looking at us thinking, they’re not playing by the rules.”

What Ritchie wants to do in future festivals is offer more project-based creations like last year’s 48 Fugues for Frank, a collaboration with Michael Kieran Harvey and four visual artists [RT96, p40] celebrating the music of Frank Zappa. He says, “This year we have something like that with Tormented Gong by the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and visual artist Samson Young. Next year we’ll have an opera we’ve commissioned. That’s the direction I’d like to go in rather than having a bunch of people doing their usual gigs.”

Ritchie is inspired to create these projects because he is deeply impressed by some of the great artists he’s found in Australia, like Michael Kieran Harvey, Eugene Ughetti, Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras. “It’s really fun to be able to get them to do what they want to do. A lot of the times artists say ‘What do you want from me, what do you want me to do?’ I say to them, ‘Do what you want to do.’ Sometimes they say ‘I’d like to have a triple orchestra’ [laughs]—but if it’s something that’s doable I like to just let them run with their ideas. When you give these artists a free hand then they usually come up with something dazzling.”

TENG CHAO-MING IS MARKING OUT AN AREA OF SNOW WITH LONG RED POLES AND PHOTOGRAPHING HIS NEW, POTENTIAL ‘HOME.’ THE MEASUREMENTS EXACTLY MATCH HIS FAMILY’S TAIPEI HOUSE. BEHIND HIM, THE MOUNTAINS HIORTHFJELLET AND LOUISFJELLET TOWER, THEIR SLOPES MERGING INTO THE FOREGROUND AND SHARP SUMMITS BLOWN OUT INTO WHITE SKY. A FEW GREY LINES ETCHED ON THEIR FLANKS GIVE THEM FORM.

Nearby but just out of shot, Mexican/US artist Rebeca Méndez is filming herself trudging through knee-deep drifts with a substantial flagpole and Mexican flag. Her figure crosses the preview screen: a tiny, comical beetle at odds with the dramatic background. Halfway through the take, the whole flag assembly flutters wildly in a gust before completely collapsing.

‘Nearby but just out of shot’ is how it often works here, as 19 artists from around the world negotiate quasi-individual relationships with the ‘sublime’ landscapes of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, on a two-week sailing voyage at around 80° North. Here at Advent City, a deserted mining town boasting little but boot-slashing strips of rusted metal, our last day’s work, October 20, is in progress under the watchful eye of an armed guide—polar bears are present throughout these islands.

october 12: gravneset, magdalenefjorden

High on the north-west coast, it’s perfectly okay for New York’s Janet Biggs to set up a video camera and brace herself: she fires a flare gun into the sky, releasing a cloud of red smoke along with crackling shock waves. Nobody registers it as a call for help, because there’s nobody else for hundreds of miles around. A snow-white fox leaps out of a hollow, though, and dashes for cover. Biggs’ installation, Anana Dream, was shown at PICA in Perth last year—a video loop of endlessly swimming, zoo-bound polar bears. 2010 is her second Arctic Circle residency; she aims to complete a video work—a “kayak ballet” that both addresses our presence here and engages directly with power, fantasy, gender and desire.

Early in the voyage, we feel our way in an environment that is, in a sense, both fairytale and nightmare. At Gravneset, artist and trained coastal engineer, Jane Chang Mi (USA) is zipped into a dry-suit and swims in the freezing shallows between chunks of glacier ice. Later in the trip she spends an entire day aboard ship while everyone else hikes, making delicate blue and white ‘postcards’ that reference Svalbard’s somewhat ironic history as a tourist destination.

Cameras are a safety valve for the unsure or overwhelmed: if in doubt, document. But photographers Christina Seely (USA) and Regina Kokoszka (USA) settle in with ease and purpose; so do painters Saul Becker (USA) and Carrie-Ann Bracco (USA). Belgian Eric van Hove also has a clear focus: working with a concocted ‘scientific instrument’ which he calls an “anthropochronic theodolite,” he photographs a landscape rendered inextricable from his tripod, pendulum and human femur assembly. He’s “surveying in the anthropocene era, and suggesting the instalment of a series of new survey markers which include the human presence as a geophysical force.”

Day after day we’re delivered to new shores to “make work.” The struggle to think, respond and maximise each opportunity competes with the practical necessity of ‘suiting up,’ watching our step on treacherously loose rock, or trying to stay in one place without freezing to death. The challenge is one of the strengths of the program. Over two weeks at sea, Bracco, for example, is a constant, almost iconic presence: although her paintings read as ‘traditional’ within the gamut of contemporary practices, her commitment to daily two-hour plein-air sessions (working in a mix of oils and, inevitably, snow) reflects the resilience of everyone on board.

october 17: monaco glacier, liefdefjorden

Around mid-voyage, our ship spends a whole day close to the formidable Monacobreen, its five-kilometre front of crumbling blue ice rising to 80 metres high. ‘Bitty-bergs’ drift around us; now and then the thunder of a bigger, calving berg carries from the near distance.

Dutch video artist and sculptor Arjen de Leeuw makes a connection between memory loss and the melting of Arctic ice. “I look at the glacial landscape as a centuries-old storage space of the earth’s memory,” he says. “As the ice and its data moves into the sea, this data is no longer available, it is gone forever.” De Leeuw is making a film featuring our group as ‘cast’; Wendy Jacob (USA) has been co-opted as a scientist who has lost her memory. At Monacobreen, de Leeuw sets a flaming hoop on a chunk of floating ice and films the drifting, incongruous scene.

Wendy Jacob has a coincidental interest in glacial ice and its millenia-old air bubbles, whose sounds she hopes to record and embed in a tactile sound installation. Perth choreographer/performer Aimee Smith is also recording, fascinated with both the visual and sonic ‘fracturing’ of ice. (Smith is undertaking a development with dancers Aisling Donovan and Sharlene Campbell in December 2010, focused around the complications of water as a resource, and responding to The Arctic Circle experience.) Danish artist Eva la Cour joins Smith and Jacob for a Zodiac trip closer to the glacier to, as La Cour puts it, “interview the ice.” The scene is slightly absurd: three heavily-clad bodies, faces mostly hidden but brows furrowed, pointing recording devices at blobs of ticking, popping, whistling, melting ice as it bobs elusively by.

The absurdity of all artistic endeavour in the Arctic (or perhaps anywhere) is central to Chad Stayrook’s (USA) work. At every opportunity, he sets up a gigantic cardboard ‘telescope’ and is documented surveying the landscape searchingly; or co-opts others into wielding mysterious ‘tools’ “to interpret the unknown.” At Monacobreen, he zips back and forth amid the ice in the Zodiac, perched with his ’scope in the bow; his work aims to expose “the futile nature of such a search, as well as the liberation one might find within the futility.” Inspired in some degree by Melville’s Moby Dick, his solo show, The Search for an Unattainable Beast, opens in San Francisco in December.

october 14: moffen island

Our furthest point north is Moffen Island, startlingly different from Svalbard’s mountains and fjords—just a barely-exposed shoal covered in snow and driftwood. The absurdity continues: Temujin Doran (UK) and several others set up a ludicrous bocce game with coloured aluminium fishing floats—every activity here somehow takes on the sense of an ‘intervention.’ Rebeca Méndez manages to complete a film piece, Recurrence Relation #2—complementing earlier work in Iceland—despite driving, horizontal snow.

Laurie Palmer (USA) is one of several participants with specific interest in science, particularly “signs and markers of very slow time” including extremophile bacteria and lichens, some of which spend thousands of years chewing their way through rock. On Moffen she attempts to collect core ice samples with equipment borrowed from the University of Svalbard, hoping to have it analysed for “extreme life and extreme chemical inclusions.” Palmer is “looking for what is invisible in all that obviously spectacular landscape” and for changes “on scales other than human.”

Returning to the Arctic for her second voyage, Raphaele Shirley (USA) spends her time on Moffen filming the groups of walruses that swim up to the shore to examine us, in hope of completing a sequel to her film, StarGaze in Sandnes. Describing the immense and disarmingly curious walruses as “like some kind of oddly formed gods of antiquity,” Shirley articulates a desire to “echo the harmony of the environment and play with it and its meaning.” Her technically complex light sculptures (photographed at dusk, over water, using moving lights and long exposures) glow and hover like beckoning UFOs. Moffen Island, in particular, “feels like a portal,” she says. “Mental barriers melt and self, space, place, start resonating in a really strange new way.”

october 20: abandoned

While half the group works at Advent City, others join Bruno Martelli (UK) and a second guide, hiking inland in search of Abandoned—a named ‘non-place’ he’s found on Google Maps. With collaborator Ruth Gibson, Martelli creates virtual or gaming environments as locations for inquiry, “not trying to simulate a place but to evoke it…mixed with fantasy and other real elements.” He’s considering creating a virtual Abandoned from his experience combined with Gibson’s imagined view of it. Interested “in ‘mashing up’ places and bending geography rather than recreating or simulating,” Martelli has previously utilised height map data sets from NASA, converting them into 3D terrain; but he admits that Svalbard’s DEM (digital elevation models) “may be hard to come by.”

Throughout the two-plus weeks of The Arctic Circle residency, we all undergo a kind of artistic boot camp—a Survivor experience which, rather than resulting in competitiveness and territory-grabbing, encourages cooperation, collaboration and generosity across the board. Billed as an art/science collaborative residency, no scientists joined the voyage in 2010, although the ship was fortunate to spend a half-day in Ny Ålesund—rated as the world’s northernmost permanent scientific community. Many of the artists cite an active interest in science and/or in critiquing scientific paradigms. It will be interesting to see how the scientific focus develops within future voyages, and in particular how greater interaction between scientists and artists, particularly in such a close and challenging environment, pans out.

The Arctic Circle international arts/science collaborative residency Svalbard, Norway, Oct 7-24

THE SALIENT MESSAGE FROM TIPPING POINT AT PERFORMANCE SPACE WAS THAT THE JOB OF SCIENTISTS ON CLIMATE CHANGE IS LARGELY DONE. THEY HAVE PROVED BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT THE SCIENCE BEHIND GLOBAL WARMING—WHAT REMAINS IS TO GALVANISE PEOPLE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Tipping Point was formed in the UK by Peter Gingold to create a network of environmentalists, scientists and artists committed to achieving this aim. Gingold explained that he was moved into action after renowned environmental journalist, and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben bemoaned the lack of cultural material on climate change: “where are the books? The plays? The goddamn operas?” Tipping Point aims to fill this gap with a variety of creative works that inspire us to change the impact human society is having on the earth.

Tipping Point has taken its own message for change seriously—its conferences were regionalised (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane) to avoid large numbers of people expanding their carbon footprint by traveling to one central event. Some sessions were held with natural lighting to avoid burning up electricity and some invited speakers spoke via Skype rather than make the resource-costly trip in person. Concurrent with the idea that the facts are largely self-evident and the key change that needs to happen is our willingness to act, the conference was structured like an extended coffee break; the majority of time given over to open space, informal meetings and small group discussions.

The two days began with an icebreaker game—all participants formed two circles and moved along introducing themselves to each other. While it would have been impossible to allow the 100 or so people to actually introduce themselves this exercise gave the impression that this should and would continue to happen over the ensuing two days (and in large part it did). In my part of the circle was Steve Pekar, one of the few keynote speakers flown from overseas to address the conference in the next session.

Pekar is a Geology Professor at Queens College and has been investigating past climate and oceanographic changes during times (45-16 million years ago) when CO2 was as high as predicted for this century (500-1000 ppm). His frustration over the lack of action on climate change burned with the focused intensity only possible in someone who spends their entire life researching its potential consequences. His speech was full of familiar yet terrifying statistics as he rolled out maps of the “hot plate” our earth is to become if we continue to emit carbon at current levels.

After the first presentations we moved into a room with four signs pinned to the wall; “Legislation and Compulsion”; “Fear and Aversion”; “Incentive and Rewards”; and “Vision and Inspiration.” We were asked to choose which we felt would be the most motivating to stop human induced climate change. The crowd spread unevenly with the largest group forming in the “Vision and Inspiration” corner and the smallest in “Fear and Aversion.” This activity had the desired effect of highlighting the importance of artists in bringing change. While not armed with all the facts Pekar had at his fingertips, we were hopefully qualified in “vision and inspiration.”

The rest of the conference was mainly spent in “open space” sessions. Despite the loose title given to these, they were in fact highly structured around a set of axioms: “whoever turns up is the right group,” “whenever it starts is the right time,” “whatever happens is the only thing that could have.” People were encouraged to be “bumblebees and butterflies,” bumping noisily into conversations or drifting around the room looking for something interesting to talk about.

Having spent most of the last decade in various environmental and social justice conferences that got bogged down in intense and sometimes pointless fights between competing left factions I can see the appeal of such a structure. It was nice to be free to drift, to listen when you wanted to, to interrupt whenever you felt like it, to avoid any attempts at domination by any group or individual.

However the discussions sometimes lacked a certain depth. Encouraged to be “mobile” people wafted away from discussions that sometimes needed commitment to bear fruit. Perhaps I was too schooled in my left training; I stayed in my group until the end and it was only starting to get interesting when the session was politely, but firmly, closed for the next to start.

While I enjoyed the open sessions I felt they were, on the one hand, a little too de-centred and, on the other, not quite de-centred enough.

The conference organisers encouraged a specific culture of discussion that facilitated positivity and openness yet discouraged disagreement and the difficult, time consuming yet potentially rewarding, struggle to find common ground.

Whatever the structure of conferences, people inspired by each other will usually find time to meet and talk. Deliberately creating time for this to happen within the conference planning is definitely a worthwhile shift in how we talk about politics.

Whether we write operas, books or plays about climate change as a result might not be the right premise for Tipping Point. Jean Luc Godard once commented that he didn’t want to make political films—but to make films politically. While everyone who attended Tipping Point might not make a work directly on the topic of climate change (although I hope many do) I think all of us will think a bit harder about the ways we make our works and how this could become more sustainable.

I would like to see the discussions begun at Tipping Point continue and deepen to foster an active network for artists, arts organisations and scientists planning how we can reduce our own carbon footprints whilst also contributing to a campaign for genuine political action against the companies and decision makers who make our carbon feet look like twinkle toes. We might not have that much time left before “vision and inspiration” give way to “fear and aversion.”

Tipping Point Australia, producer Angharad Wynne-Jones, Tipping Point UK directors Angela McSherry, Peter Gingold, Performance Space, Nov 5-6; http://tippingpointaustralia.com

“GET READY. THIS IS REAL. THIS IS TRUE.” SO READS THE BLURB ON MY BATTERED PAPERBACK COPY OF TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, JOHN MARSDEN’S RIPPING YARN FROM 1993 ABOUT A BAND OF TEENAGE GUERRILLAS DEFENDING THEIR HOME TURF. ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR AUSTRALIAN ‘YOUNG ADULT’ NOVELS OF ALL TIME, TOMORROW SPAWNED NINE SEQUELS AND HAS NOW MORPHED INTO A BIG-SCREEN ACTION-ADVENTURE THAT MARKS THE DIRECTING DEBUT OF STUART BEATTIE—ANOTHER LOCAL HERO, WHOSE HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITING CREDITS INCLUDE THE FIRST PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN (2003) AS WELL AS COLLATERAL (2004).

Marsden’s book and Beattie’s film share a simple, irresistible premise: seven high school friends—three boys, four girls—go camping in the bush outside their country town, in an Edenic secret valley ironically known as “Hell.” On their return, they find that everything has changed: power lines have been cut, dogs slaughtered, family members are nowhere to be found. Australia is at war with an unnamed country and these kids just happen to be at ground zero of the attack.

In both book and film, the trick is that the invasion is equally a nightmare and a wish-fulfilment dream. Marsden’s novel combines derring-do and soap-opera romance with open-ended moral inquiry, catering to his readership’s yearning for maturity while proposing anguish over bloodshed as part of the price. Beattie adheres to a simpler version of the same coming-of-age formula: “I want to do more, see more, I want to be more,” Corrie (Rachel Hurd-Wood) tells the protagonist Ellie (Caitlin Stasey) early on, never guessing how swiftly her prayers will be answered.

From Marsden’s perspective, Ellie and her mates aren’t so distant from, say, the gang in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, using jokey camaraderie to fend off darkness without and within. Far more streamlined and externalised, Beattie’s outwardly faithful adaptation is closer to Home and Away with guns. Where Marsden refuses easy philosophical solutions, Beattie’s slant is straightforwardly Darwinian: Ellie may express guilt over the death of an enemy her own age, but this is merely a character beat, a step on the transformative journey to adulthood.

Struggling to manufacture chemistry between his actors in the awkward dialogue scenes, Beattie is more at ease with a convention familiar from horror cinema, whereby pent-up emotions are relieved in bursts of cathartic violence. Unlike her counterpart in the novel, Corrie announces at the outset that she’s had sex with her boyfriend Kevin (Lincoln Lewis), a ‘loss of innocence’ that irrationally seems to trigger the destruction of her cosy childhood world. By contrast, Ellie remains a tough virgin resembling the Final Girl in a slasher flick—though keeping the franchise possibilities in mind, Beattie avoids bumping off any of his leads.

Jingoistic speeches are kept to a minimum, and we’re briefly reminded that the mainly Anglo heroes are themselves the beneficiaries of an earlier invasion. Not quite dog-whistle cinema, Tomorrow still serves its purpose as ideological propaganda, in the vein of recruiting advertisements (“The Army – The Edge”) that continue to screen regularly in Australian multiplexes. Beattie’s exploitation of the teen-soldier gimmick recalls both John Milius’ World War Three adventure Red Dawn (1984) and Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi satire Starship Troopers (1997); while in plot terms the invaders of Tomorrow could be replaced by extra-terrestrial bugs, the point of the exercise lies in bringing the fantasy back home, letting us view an outlandish scenario as potentially ‘real.’

There’s little doubt that this frightening yet enticing prospect matches the national mood in an era when “border security” is not only an election issue but the title of a top-rating reality show. Back in the pre-Howard days, John Marsden felt obliged to cover his tracks by refusing to specify the origins of his bad guys, as well as assigning a central heroic role to a Thai-Vietnamese character (played here by Chris Pang). For his part, Beattie unambiguously portrays the invading army as Asian, a decision he has justified in interviews by noting that geography limits his options: “Why would New Zealand invade Australia? It doesn’t make sense.” No, indeed—but with China or Indonesia, it’s presumably a different story.

The boot is on the other foot in Mohit Suri’s Crook: It’s Good To Be Bad, another paranoid fantasy of an alternate-universe Australia torn apart by racial warfare. Already a Bollywood veteran at twenty-eight, Suri shot part of the film in Melbourne last year, inspired (if that’s the word) by attacks on Indian students that gave the city the kind of media profile money can’t buy. Predictably, the film’s eventual release in Australia was beaten up into a minor controversy: “Bollywood Movie Paints Melbourne As Racist,” announced a disapproving headline on the ABC news website. Had those cheeky sub-continentals gone too far?

Or not far enough? A typical Bollywood melange of song, comedy and melodrama, Crook (like Tomorrow) exploits an attention-getting theme while disavowing any goals beyond the unimpeachable one of ‘entertainment.’ The initial comic sequences in Mumbai introduce us to Jai Dixit (Emraan Hashmi), a larrikin packed off to Australia by his uncle (Gulshan Grover) in order to get him out of the DVD piracy game. But his eye for the main chance remains undimmed: after an effort to impersonate a scholarship student, he settles for pursuing the beautiful radio presenter Suhani (Neha Sharma), though it’s unclear if he cares more for her personal attractions or her Australian citizenship.

As Jai explores his new surroundings, Crook idles in first gear for half an hour or more, reinforcing a dubious image of Melbourne as a sporty city by the bay that harks back to the touristic glamour of Siddarth Anand’s Salaam Namaste (2005). Suhani inexplicably lives in a million-dollar mansion with ocean views, while Jai joins a group of expatriates in a purple bungalow complete with backyard swimming pool, at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac with an inner-city nightclub just round the corner.

Jai’s quest to win over Suhani is complicated by her firebrand brother Samarth (Arjan Bajwa), a racial separatist who denounces Australia as a decadent land of former convicts and rampant pre-marital sex. Jai himself is more susceptible to the lure of the mysterious West, finding a secondary romantic prospect in a bottle-blonde stripper (Sheila Allen) with a troublesome brother of her own (Francis Michael Chouler). Just to complicate the film’s racial politics, a handful of scenes were shot with Cape Town doubling for Melbourne, and both these representative Aussies speak in what seem to be South African accents.

Meanwhile, student bashings are on the rise, with the connivance of at least some members of the Australian Police. For a few moments the film takes on the appearance of an agitprop documentary as Indian activists gather in protest, though collective struggle holds little interest for the stubbornly individualistic Jai. For my money, the highlight of Crook comes immediately before interval, when the hero slips away from a brawl and races desperately towards Flinders Street Station—just as Ava Gardner did all those years ago in On the Beach (1959).

Thereafter, the narrative goes haywire: the nightclub burns down, a major character is revealed as a serial killer, and the city looks set for a full-scale riot unless our feckless hero manages to mend his ways and convince us all to get along. Lurid but not ill-natured, Crook ultimately goes out of its way to propose a moral equivalency between Anglo and Indian bigots (other ethnicities hardly get a look-in) while depending like Beattie’s film on a strictly enforced opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ What Asia will make of Tomorrow, When the War Began is anyone’s guess, but Melbournians may be legitimately perturbed that their city has become an internationally recognised byword for prejudice: even a distorting mirror can reveal genuine faults.

Tomorrow, When the War Began, director, writer Stuart Beattie, novel John Marsden, cinematography Ben Nott, editor Marcus D’Arcy, production design Robert Webb; Crook: It’s Good To Be Bad, director, story, Mohit Suri, script Ankur Tewari, music Pritam, producer Mukesh Bhatt

“YOU HERE FOR THE FILM FESTIVAL TOO?” THE IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL ASKED WEARILY. WITH OVER 300 FEATURES SCREENING IN 10 DAYS, TORONTO HAS NOW OVERTAKEN VENICE AS THE MAIN FESTIVAL IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE EVERYTHING BUT, BY CONCENTRATING ON CERTAIN STRANDS, YOU INEVITABLY CARVE OUT YOUR OWN FESTIVAL. THIS YEAR, MINE INVOLVED THE DOCUMENTARIES THAT SHOWED FILMMAKERS PUSHING NON-FICTION FORMS IN NEW DIRECTIONS.

Just as new lightweight technologies spurred the reinvention of documentary forms in the late 1950s, digital technologies have made documentaries easier to shoot, but more importantly, easier to market through a more diverse range of distribution platforms including more television outlets which concentrate on non-fiction, and the burgeoning film festival circuit. Cannes, Toronto and the festivals that feed off them, now serve as launching pads as important as the specialised doco festivals.

patricio guzmán, nostalgia for the light

Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light was cast in the light of a personal essay which begins from the director’s desire to recover a lost past—a sense of belonging to his country Chile in the period before Pinochet. He approaches this indirectly through his focus on two groups, both of which seek clues to understanding the past, working in the Atacama Desert. The dry atmosphere makes this an ideal place for astronomers who look back across immense stretches of time with their telescopes. The second group are archaeologists whose interest in the past is all too immediate by comparison. They join relatives searching for the burial sites of those disappeared by the military during the junta years.

Guzmán’s film is indignant yet fiercely intelligent, movingly beautiful but unyielding in the understated way it countenances the horrors of Chile’s recent history. The two sciences study the universe in extremes of wide shot and close up. The role of the artist is to synthesise the two. As its unlikely comparisons emerge, they are startlingly obvious. Patterns of calcium can be found in the traces of stars and moons, just as surely as in the bones of the dead. When you wonder whether there is anything to be added to the sorry history of the Chilean junta, someone puts it into a larger pattern that finds a powerfully new way to suggest how everything is connected.

werner herzog, cave of forgotten dreams

Archaeology is similarly the focus of Werner Herzog’s 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which continues his project of re-describing science within the terms of Romanticism. The Chauvet Caves in southern France contain paintings that date back over 30,000 years. Herzog has a long-standing interest in the physicality of cinema and his adoption of 3D technology here is meant to underscore the way that these wonderfully detailed cave paintings are constructed around the contours of the rock.

Herzog’s interest is the origins of homo spiritualis—beings with a consciousness of having a soul. His career has focused on seeking out the limits of human experience where the outlines of this soul can be grasped most clearly. Here the limit is not a geographical one, as in Encounters at the End of the World, but rather one that is at the start of human time.

In contrast to Guzmán’s interest in the past, Herzog’s interest in archaeology lies in its capacity to provide us with the materials to think ourselves into the position of others. The postscript of the film, which employs the metaphor of albino crocodiles (nothing can be everyday in Herzog’s world) reaching out towards their own refracted reflections, acknowledges that the quest is an impossible one, that all we have to grasp at are representations.

errol morris, tabloid

Errol Morris is another filmmaker whose documentaries foreground the limitations on what documentary can tell us. He makes no pretence at being able to capture the truth. All we can know is what can be assembled from competing stories and the way we can connect these to a stock repertoire of images. His latest film Tabloid is the bizarre story of Joyce McKinney and her moment of fame in the late 1970s when she was charged with kidnapping a Mormon in England and holding him as a sex slave. Joyce’s life has been one lived in the thrall of larger fantasies: gods, dogs and finally the self-conscious drama of her own life.

Morris reconstructs the mosaic of stories put forth by McKinney and other surviving participants, particularly the British tabloid reporters who have certainly never been held back by onerous notions of truth. He frequently interpolates graphics and clips from old movies and TV shows, and uses a wash of abstract music as a distancing effect. These are fairly familiar tactics for Morris, though the sensationalised story of McKinney doesn’t provide the type of rich contrast of more serious stories (The Thin Blue Line) or political memoirs (The Fog of War). At his best, Morris works to abstract and defamiliarise the documentary form and make us question the way we arrive at judgements concerning the truth. On more lightweight material, his style seems merely clever.

janus metz, armadillo

It is a commonplace these days to question the distinction between fiction and documentary. Janus Metz’s Armadillo is a documentary which edges its way towards a realist fiction such as The Hurt Locker in its exploration of the adrenalin rush of contemporary war. We follow a team of Danish soldiers through a tour of duty in Afghanistan with intertitles counting down the remaining months in a device similar to Kathryn Bigelow’s film. There are plenty of other devices familiar from fiction films: slow motion, extensive use of non-diegetic music, montage sequences, gradation filters. The assumption is that you need to augment phenomenal reality if you want to arrive at the truth of a moment.

And the truth at which Metz arrives is pretty unvarnished. These soldiers are neither mythicised heroes nor vulnerable innocents. They are a bunch of blokey types sent to do the wrong job. Their training is in shooting people, and while they are keen to do some of that, the bulk of their task turns out to be talking with the locals, fielding the complaints of farmers whose fields are trampled, whose animals are killed and whose families are caught in the crossfire.

Armadillo (the code name of the Danish base) provides a genuinely fresh and immediate perspective on the war in Afghanistan by showing that the war isn’t something that happens only to our soldiers. It happens to Afghanis and the glimpses we see of their commonsensical scepticism about the western military speak volumes about the futility of our engagement there.

jørgen leth, erotic man

Last, and certainly least, we come to Jørgen Leth’s essayistic documentary, Erotic Man. Leth (who you might remember from Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions) travels around Latin America making this film and screwing women. The two are closely related. He thinks he is making the film as an anthropological examination of erotic attraction, but it seems more likely that it’s a way for him to get laid. He pursues eroticism with such ponderous self-absorption that is hard to care either way. Leth has become one of those bores who endlessly contemplates the type of film he is making. He claims to have a deep love for women but, of course, it is a love only for the very limited ideas about women he imposes on a bunch of aspiring actresses unwise enough to become the objects of his camera/dick. And here we have it: Jørgen Leth has become the caricature of the cinema that a lot of bad theory in the 1970s saw as its totality.

“IF EDITORS CANNOT ARTICULATE WHAT MAKES EDITS, EVEN ‘INVISIBLE’ ONES, GOOD, THEN THE JOB OF EDITING MIGHT AS WELL BE DONE BY SOMEONE CHEAPER, FOR EXAMPLE THE DIRECTOR’S BROTHER WHO IS GOOD WITH COMPUTERS.” KAREN PEARLMAN

There are some great books on editing. There is The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing, in which Michael Ondaatje interviews the smart and passionate Murch on his work as a film and sound editor. There is director Edward Dmytrk’s On Film Editing where he discusses the essential craft and practice of editing from a filmmaker’s point of view. There is also Sam Rohdie’s Montage and Jacques Aumont’s Montage Eisenstein, which are poetic studies of the aesthetics of editing in the work of filmmakers as diverse as Renoir, Antonioni, Kitano, Fuller, Rivette, Resnais and Eisenstein. So what could a new book on editing offer? Well, actually, quite a lot.

Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit is an insightful new book written by Dr Karen Pearlman who is Head of Screen Studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, co-director of the Physical TV company, a professional film editor, dancer, choreographer and lecturer. Pearlman combines her knowledge, skills and experience from her different creative and educational practices in this book. In fact, it is her work as a dancer and how it informs her thinking about editing that makes this book such an original and refreshing contribution to the literature.

Pearlman tells us that one of the first things that motivated the book was the mysticism and vagueness that surrounds the way so many editors talk about their craft. She cites editors who have described their approach to editing as “magic” (Sheldon Kahn), as something that “feels right” (Carl Kress) and something that is “exclusively in the realm of intuition” (Merle Worth). The repetition of these responses led Pearlman to the central questions of her book such as, “How is this intuition developed or acquired and how is it actually working in the process of editing rhythms?” The book, based on her PhD dissertation, goes a long way towards answering these questions.

In the first section Pearlman unpacks and demystifies several key concepts as well as discussing her own particular approach. She begins with a fascinating discussion of the mysterious notion of intuition, making good use of Guy Claxton’s work in The Intuitive Practitioner. Claxton proposes that intuition consists of six types of thinking: expertise, implicit learning, judgment, sensitivity, creativity and rumination. Pearlman uses these ideas to try to understand intuition, arguing that it is, in fact, something that can be learned and developed through “practical and theoretical experience and education.” She brings together the poetic observations of the filmmaker Tarkovsky with the work of neurologists and physiologists to establish a foundation for “rhythmic intuition” that is based on the knowledge of the human body. In the case of the editor, she says that intuition can and should come from knowledge of the world, knowledge of the editor’s own body and knowledge of the cinema and its actors. She suggests that editors need to sensitise themselves to these different kinds of knowledge and bring this to their practice.

The central concept of rhythm is something that Pearlman goes on to explore at length, examining the many ways in which rhythm can be shaped, and what its function and role in our experience of the cinema might be. For Pearlman, editing is the art of shaping movement, and movement is the material that the editor works with to create rhythm. This art of shaping movement is something that she has developed in her work as a choreographer and dancer. She describes choreography as “the art of manipulating movement: phrasing its time, space, and energy into affective forms and structures.” She links this in compelling ways to editing which she argues is also a form of choreography, and suggests that “dance and dance-making processes might provide craft and inspiration for editing.” The connections between choreography and editing as arts that both manipulate movement lead Pearlman to some surprising techniques.

In the second section of the book Pearlman provides an extended examination of different kinds of movement and rhythm and discusses how they work in the process of editing. Each chapter involves an account of key concepts like physical, emotional and event rhythms that are then followed by case studies as well as activities to illustrate and demonstrate these concepts. There are instructive case studies of films as diverse as The Godfather (1972), Goodfellas (1990), The Great Train Robbery (1904), Snatch (2000), Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Gone with the Wind (1939), to list just a few. Pearlman writes about films as a practitioner with a passion for understanding the way that images work together to move and engage an audience. Her analysis takes us beyond narrative and characters to energy and movement and the experience of movement and rhythm.

Possibly the most interesting case study in the book is the one in which Pearlman examines the final dance scene of Thursday’s Fictions (2007), a film made by her own production company and which she also edited. The Physical TV Company productions are stories told by the body, and there are parts of the film where the entire story is “carried by the physical.” She explains that her job as an editor was “to re-create not the precise choreography, but the feeling of the choreography.” Pearlman defines the processes she uses to “shape the physical rhythm” of a scene in terms such as “re-choreographing,” “physical storytelling,” “dancing edits” and “singing the rhythm.” She then demonstrates and elaborates on them through close analysis of a scene from the film.

This is a very readable book, written in an accessible style that should appeal to a broad cross-section, including editors, teachers of editing and film enthusiasts.

For those who might be interested in looking further at how Karen Pearlman has put her own theories into practice, she has recently edited Jeni Thornley’s marvellous documentary Island Home Country (2009, available on DVD), which is definitely worth chasing up.

Karen Pearlman, Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit, Focal Press, Burlington US, Oxford UK, 2009

ARS ELECTRONICA 2010 TOOK PLACE IN THE BREATHTAKINGLY CAVERNOUS TABAKFABRIK IN LINZ. THE 160 YEAR OLD PROCESSING PLANT ONLY CEASED PRODUCTION IN 2009, SO THE DUSKY, DAMP SMELL OF TOBACCO WAS STILL IN THE AIR. IN WHAT WAS BOTH A CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION OF ‘FESTIVAL AS FACTORY’ BUT ALSO AN ATTEMPT TO FILL SUCH A LARGE VENUE, THE MASSIVE PROGRAM OFFERED A MULTIPLICITY OF RESPONSES TO THE THEME OF ‘REPAIR,’ SOME PERHAPS IN DIRECT OPPOSITION TO EACH OTHER, AND MANY DECIDELY ANTI-ELECTRONIC. WITH SO MUCH ON OFFER, I CHOSE TO LISTEN TO THE FESTIVAL FACTORY’S WORKINGS.

winning works

The centre of the festival is the Prix Ars and this year’s Digital Music & Sound Arts category yielded several excellent works. My personal favourite was the kinetic sound sculpture Cycloïd-E by Cod.act (Swiss brothers Michel and André Décosterd) which received an award of distinction. The work comprises five pieces of piping attached at the ends in a way that allows them all to swivel 360-degrees. The base pipe is attached to a motor that causes it to rotate, in turn causing the four other sections to spin on their own axes, resulting in endlessly changing articulations. Within each pipe is a small speaker and oscillator, so the haunting hollow chords doppler as the sculpture dances. For all its complex engineering, Cycloïd-E appears elegantly simple and is totally mesmerising.

Surprisingly, this is the first time that Sound Art has been included specifically in the Prix Digital Musics Category. As we head into the second decade of the 21st century, perhaps this reflects a new ambivalence towards technical wizardry for its own sake and a stronger appreciation of aesthetics. The fact that Canadian artist Martin Bédard’s piece, Champs de Fouilles (Excavations), received an award of distinction certainly exemplifies this. A purely audio experience conceived for speaker orchestra and made from field recordings of excavations around Quebec, Bédard’s piece has direct lineage to the musique concrète and acousmatic schools and is a rich and dramatic exploration of texture and structure. Unfortunately the work suffered from being exhibited in a stairwell, a place of transit rather than contemplation, and was accompanied by the constant thwumping of heavy doors leading to exhibition floors. While Bédard was good-humoured about the situation, it’s unfortunate that a festival so actively engaged in sound culture is still struggling with these elemental issues around the presentation of sound works.

Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa was awarded the Golden Nica for his audiovisual creation rheo: 5 horizons, which fared much better in its presentation context. The installation consisted of five channel audio and vision exploring the flow of exquisitely barren landscapes intertwined with precise digital draftsmanship and was housed in its own half of a warehouse space. However it was in concert form that this work truly came to life with the sense of connection between organic, digital, audio and visual elements combining in an indivisible union that was simultaneously grand and meditative.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable sound performances in the festival took place as part of the Frozen Music opening night events. Japanese artist Ei Wada’s Braun Tube Jazz Band is a wonderful exploration of human-machine interaction. Gathering a bank of old cathode ray television sets, he sonifies the electromagnetic radiation and plays the whole installation like a giant drum machine. The sets are highly responsive to micro and macro gesture as Ei Wada taps, swipes and pinches the hum and drone into complex beats and melodies equally at home in a gallery or on a dance floor.

sounding spaces

An impressive aspect of the festival was the focus on the sonic potential of the Tabakfabrik complex itself. A massive empty warehouse with a natural 12-second reverb was named The Sound Space and programmed with three modes of presentation. Part of the day it was used to channel back sounds from around the site for treatment by the space itself; it was also the place for a range of workshops; and finally it was a performance venue. In reality I’m not sure the space was ever still enough to experience the first mode, blending frequently into the workshop situations. The performances offered a tighter focus, a range of approaches from the vocal play of AGF and the gentle piano mediations of Rupert Huber to the mass improvisation under the guidance of Marco Palewicz. While I’m not sure that all of the performers were consciously exploring its acoustic properties, the space certainly imprinted itself on performers and audience alike: huddled in the centre, dwarfed by its vastness, one felt a kind of humility, according almost a sense of sacredness to these performances.

The Long Concert was a roving event that explored almost the entire Tabakfabrik and, given it was in collaboration with the Brückner Orchestra, featured for the most part a contemporary classical repertoire. Starting off in the long galleries of Bau 1, Karleinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglige could have been amazing if it had been presented on the multi-speaker system for which it was composed, or at the very least on something more than the two very small speakers placed in the ceiling. The large crowd had been supplied with cardboard stools requiring origami-like construction, so the entire presentation was accompanied by the shuffling of the arriving audience and their cardboard manipulations. Positioned further down the space, Arvo Pärt’s piano works fared marginally better, as the audience began to settle and let Pärt’s profound simplicity float in the dusky light. Pärt’s music was the focus of the program, with a seated orchestral concert in the main hall and an epilogue of his Fratres pieces in the belly of the Magazin building. Not so adaptable to ambulatory placement, the contemporary classical repertoire was best served by the concert hall setting, but nonetheless produced an intriguing experience that drew in a large local crowd keen to explore the Tabakfabrik.

hearing the hum

A real highlight was the inclusion of Christina Kubisch (Germany) as a featured artist (and juror of the Digital Music & Sound Art Category). Kubisch has developed her practice around electromagnetic reception and transmission. Some of her past works have involved creating content to be received by her specially modified headphones within site specific installations (RT60), but lately she has concentrated on the pure reception of the electromagnetic hum of the world around us. Also exhibited was a recent series of works undertaken in the densely populated Ruhr area of Germany where Kubisch has recorded the electromagnetic hum of transport systems and public spaces. The centre piece is Bewegungen nach entfernten Orten (Movements to Distant Places), a six channel sound installation in which the recordings are composed into a stunning soundcape of shifting waves and overlapping fields of elemental vibration. In another installation, Ruhrlandschaften 2010, Kubisch places 40 numbered photographs on the wall and the visitor, armed with a standard gallery audio guide, can punch in the number to hear the sound of the various locations. This work highlights the surprising range and subtlety in the hum of objects around us: the deep earthy thrum of high tension wires; the staccato beats of a fluorescent sign; the high-pitched whine of a public telephone.

In addition, Kubsich offered walking tours so we might directly experience these energy fields. Having picked up a pair of her special headphones in the city centre, you could follow a designated route of traffic lights, street signs, overhead wires and security gates, or you could wander on your own sonic adventure. You could also go on a tour with Kubisch herself around the Tabakfabrik; this was particularly engaging because she had access to closed off areas such as the power plant. Initially Kubisch was disappointed, as most of the electrical infrastructure had been removed when the factory closed down; however what emerged in its place was perhaps even more interesting. Many of the festival artworks had their own electromagnetic signatures, so Kubisch opened up the possibility of an alternate way of experiencing Ars Electronica—a completely sonic Ars Electronica. Works such as Matthew Gardiner’s Oribotics (origami robots) or Jacob Sikker Remin’s KUBEN made from fluorescent lights, the flat screen monitors of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s rheo: 5, or the numerous video projectors took on whole new aural aspects. This accidental discovery was gently subversive, and a wonderful way to explore the exhibitions.

What Christina Kubisch’s Tabakfabrik intervention highlighted was the many ways to explore and access Ars Electronica 2010. You could experience the elite of media art; marvel at what corporate money can achieve with Honda’s robot ASIMO on display at the Ars Electronica Centre; talk code with the open source community; get your hands dirty repairing furniture in the workshop; or ‘repair’ yourself through self-help workshops. Like the many departments of a manufacturing plant, each area had a different agenda and often a different audience, but working together they brought into meaningful and joyously sonorous production the curators’ vision of the ‘festival as factory.’

{$slideshow} THE OPENING PARTY OF THE LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL RESOUNDED THROUGHOUT THE MASSIVE VOIDS OF THE OLD STANLEY DOCKS—ONCE AN ENGINE OF EMPIRE (AND STILL THE LARGEST BRICK STRUCTURE IN THE WORLD) PUMPING THE ECONOMY OF A CITY THAT, IN ITS HEYDAY, HANDLED 40% OF WORLD MARITIME TRADE. SITUATED JUST TOO FAR EAST ALONG THE DOCKS ROAD TO BE RE-DEVELOPED, THIS GOTHIC LEVIATHAN RECALLS THE LIVERPOOL OF MY UNDERGRADUATE DAYS, A CITY OF FOREBODING POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES, BOMB-RUINED WHARVES, DANK COBBLED STREETS, BOND STORE CELLARS WITH SLAVING RINGS STILL INTACT—THE WELLSPRING OF MY DREAMS FOR YEARS TO COME.

The sun has long ago set on the Empire; Blair’s Cool Britannia has likewise sunk beneath the waves, thankfully carrying with it the YBAs [Young British Artists] who now look like the corporate advertising stunt they always were. The Royal Navy may not even be able to afford its four new Trident submarines in what promises to be an economic bloodbath. Only the charity organisations of the Big Society are left to staunch the wounds.

Ironically, the Brits have long recognised the soft power inherent in the arts (cheaper and ultimately more effective than the aforementioned Tridents and their franchised supply of American rockets), so it will be fascinating to watch the two contradictory processes meet head-on over the next year or two. The ever-present and earnest desire in the UK to redefine and renegotiate its social and cultural system along with the stringent restructuring of the economy and governance will create a collision that will prove either toxic or tonic to the arts.

Arts funding in the UK does not shy away from strongly defined policies of social inclusion, cultural cohesion and urban regeneration and has spawned a range of arts organisations (and artists) acutely aware of their social and cultural mission.

Hidden in the old Ropewalks (an area of former rope manufacturing) between the oldest Chinatown in Europe and a massive pedestrian city centre renewal, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is one of those curiously British arts centres that operate in the nexus between social engagement and the avant garde.

This is an arts model recognised in theory but yet to be realised in Australia—a multi-arts production house, replete with cinematheque, cool cafe and bar, underpinned by a savvy, socially engaged curatorial program that asks real questions and delivers tough and inventive exhibitions. In Sydney, imagine the MCA without the pretensions and the snobbish restaurant (or the view), an Artspace with an ambitious commissioning program for national and international art projects, a Performance Space that controlled CarriageWorks, or an ICE (Information & Cultural Exchange) that has cultural prominence. Combine all of these and you would be halfway there!

Carl Jung characterised Liverpool as the City of Dreams; for Ginsberg it was The Pool of Consciousness; and for FACT at this year’s Biennial it was Touched—as by a mother, as by a return to an almost forgotten place (I don’t think anyone used that word ‘affect:’ touched denotes so much more).

As ever, biennales are ashes and diamonds affairs; the FACT exhibition was a small cache of the latter, starting with Life Work a One Year Performance by Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh (RT90). Dating from 1980 to 1981, this work records an action in the artist’s studio in which he clocked-on to an industrial workers’ time punch device each and every hour of the year, simultaneously photographing a self-portrait, naturally recording his ever flourishing hairdo. The documentation spooled back in the gallery as a time lapse amidst acres of punch cards and small still images. Of course some silly but pragmatic questions arise: how did he go shopping, socialise or stay sane with this regime? However, this self-imposed house arrest may have been the perfect art production strategy for an ex-pat Taiwanese artist in New York working 30 years before the China Art tidal wave swept the world. Hsieh ‘retired’ around 2000 and his elegant endurance performances have gained the status of legend.

Set against the coolly obsessive program of Hsieh’s serialist work the temperature rises in the video by South Korean Minouk Kim that seems to document a group of protagonists (are they a simple tour group somehow lost in the urban jungle, a detachment of citizen protestors or a cell of determined terrorists?) wandering through the contested Four Rivers Project tourist development site in Korea. We are not going to be told and anyhow this is no documentary as the material is shot in the infra-red spectrum using heat-seeking cameras that add overtones, not only of a surveillance and military targeting, but of a post-Holocaust mise en scène. Ironically the aesthetic of the work transcends its politically caustic potential, rendering it eerily mesmerising with a colour palette that recalls exotic tropical aquaria. Like all mature artwork it leaves the material hovering between significations, the synapse of metaphor active.

As we grow older the sound of our mother’s voice over the telephone, once so central, intimate and enveloping, acquires a tinge of sadness that grows with temporal and physical distance. Japanese Meiro Koizumi’s My Voice Would Reach You (single channel video, 2009) delivers us a man engaged in an unchecked emotional outpouring to his mother, but unfortunately distanced by mobile telephony and the frenetic backdrop of downtown Tokyo. Mother, however, isn’t available and the surrogate is a flustered call centre operator attempting to navigate the torrent of speech. The telephonic fracture is a classic exemplar tracing the fissures and voids created by urbanism and technology, a communication network that only makes sense when we are apart, in a ghostly vis-á-vis.

Queues at exhibitions are not my cup of tea, so I skipped Yves Netzhammer’s Dialogical Abrasion (2010) the first time around but the soundscape intrigued me so much that I joined the line, and it was worth the wait. This new project commissioned by FACT is a compound of three elements beginning with an animated 3D netherworld of crash-test dummy characters populating a De Chirico-like dreamworld, performing wordless rituals and transformations. Developing from this dreamscape is a series of IKEA-gone-wrong sculptural situations serving as the domicile of a crash-test being, plus an intermittent spatial soundscape by the composer Bernd Schurer, alarmingly loud and cross-linked with the gallery lighting to illuminate elements of the installation as if in a thunderstorm, an indoor Donner und Blitz.

The final work in the FACT exhibition falls outside of the scope and modus operandi of the above and was curated by Asher Remy-Toledo of No Longer Empty (p38). Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen worked in the atrium of FACT to create a site-specific installation that conceptually looped back into the central theme of Touched, in that it reprised the maternal labour and care expressed in the mundane chores of family life. Kaikkonen collected second hand clothes from the Liverpool community, laundered them and used the fabric to create a large architectural net, ballooning down over the foyer entrance, a work at once communal and familiar but also carrying individual narratives and memories, a combination close to the heart of FACT.

Touched, 6th Liverpool Biennial: International Festival of Contemporary Art, FACT, Liverpool, UK, Sept 18-Nov 28, www.fact.co.uk

WHEN, IN THE OLDEN DAYS, PEOPLE USED TO WRITE LETTERS TO EACH OTHER, HOW DID THEY IMAGINE THEIR CORRESPONDENTS? TODAY, WHEN WRITTEN COMMUNICATION PROCEEDS VIA EMAIL, SMS, FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND OTHER FORMS, HOW DOES THE WRITER CONVEY A SENSE OF SELF, AND HOW IS IT RECEIVED ON THE OTHER END? THESE ARE THE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS EXAMINED BY ESTHER MILNE IN LETTERS, POSTCARDS, EMAIL, A THOROUGH, SCHOLARLY STUDY OF MEDIA FORMS AS “TECHNOLOGIES OF PRESENCE.”

Central to Milne’s book is the concept of presence; she helpfully offers a working definition of it early in the first chapter: “Presence is an effect achieved in communication…when interlocutors imagine the psychological or, sometimes, physical presence of the other.” The concept is inherently paradoxical, as Milne demonstrates with a degree of skill and subtlety. As she explains, presence “is aligned with the concepts of intimacy and disembodiment,” yet it is achieved via material technologies such as the postal service or email system. The fundamental paradox is that the sense of presence depends on the absence of the other; the “absent body” in correspondence means that “communication partners are not physically present to one another.” Milne is particularly adept at teasing out the implications of this paradox in her historical study of communications from the origins of the postal network to Twitter.

This historical approach is achieved through detailed analyses of a series of correspondences across the centuries. First is a network of British letter writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including a correspondence of over 700 letters between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford. Milne first surveys the beginning of the British postal service before providing a close account of its mechanisms and the types of communication it made possible. One feature emerging from this epistolary correspondence is a longing for “unmediated converse,” that is, for a transcendent presence of the other without the need for the mediating material form of the letter. Yet at the same time, these letter writers thrive on the absence of their correspondent; these prolific senders of letters rarely meet each other in person. Here again is the “strange paradox indeed” of disembodied presence, which Milne traces throughout her study.

The next stop on the journey is the postcard, originating around 1865. Milne sees this media form as the transitional phase between old-fashioned letter writing and email. Communication on postcards was truncated, written quickly and dispatched; these were messages of the
everyday sent by ordinary people rather than the literary middle class. The messages on postcards were also potentially public, at least to anyone who came across them. Yet Milne demonstrates, through a close reading of 140 cards sent by the Australian soldier William Robert Fuller to his sister from the battlefield of WWI, that intimacy, and hence the presence of the writer, could be conveyed by the postcard. This section of Milne’s historical survey, however, is under-developed in comparison to the studies of the letter and of email.

To this latest stage on the journey, Milne devotes considerable energies. She sketches the origins of the internet, investigating claims of its military origins before settling into an examination of presence in email communication, using the list Cybermind as source of examples. The immaterial nature of digital information adds a further twist to the presence/absence paradox, yet Milne uncovers the persistence of the desire for presence in the digital age. This is the theme of her book: that over a 200 year period, spanning different media technologies and distribution systems, the longing for the presence of the other has endured. Milne counters the idea that the progression from letters to emails entails a new distance and loss of personal warmth, by pointing to the abundant evidence of intimacy in email correspondence. She argues that “despite the potentially disruptive, interactive and theatrical nature of email discussion lists, subjects are able to express feelings of intimacy, warmth and affection for one another.”

The strengths of Milne’s book lie in its supple treatment of complex ideas. She is careful in analysis, aware of the pitfalls of overstated theorising, such as claims for ‘revolution’ in media, or the supercession of old media forms by the new. The historical perspective is enlightening, bringing a depth to the study of communication. Claims for the newness of high volume email communication are placed in perspective, for example, when it is remembered that in 18th century London the mail was delivered up to 12 times a day. Milne’s detailed analysis of correspondences made using letter, postcard and email are a valuable feature of her book.

There are weaknesses, however, mostly derived from the book’s origins as a PhD thesis. These are most apparent in the overly dense referencing of secondary sources and the unnecessarily guarded qualifications (“arguably” is used far too many times when stating a position). Some of the long excursions into media history are tangential to the main argument, so that the book becomes bogged down in peripheral details of the pre-history of email or the speed of mail coaches. These rather fruitless excursions come at the expense of some other considerations, which are strangely absent for much of the book. For example, Milne does not discuss the differences between writing a letter by hand and word-processing an email until near the end of the book, and then only by quoting another theorist. Yet surely handwriting—unique in each case—is a major contributor to the specific sense of presence generated from letter writing.

Similarly, Milne mentions only in passing that emoticons were invented in 1979 in response to the “loss of meaning” in computer-mediated communication—but again she makes nothing of this media-specific development. Part of the difficulty here is the reluctance by many academic media scholars to appear ‘technological determinist’ or media determinist—yet considerations of this type are necessary to some degree in this area of study. At least Milne does not succumb to the spurious ‘metaphysics of presence’ arguments perpetrated by Derrida and his followers, although their influence does obscure her theorising at times. Overall, Milne’s arguments are insightful and persuasive, leading us through a 200-year fascination with presence.

Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence, Routledge, New York, 2010

ARRIVING EARLY AT THE SEYMOUR CENTRE, I HAD INTENDED TO JOIN IN THE SEAM PRE-CONFERENCE WARM UP SESSION. WITHOUT A YOGA MAT OF MY OWN I BECAME AN OBSERVER AS THE GROUP OF DANCERS MOVED ELEGANTLY THROUGH HARDCORE PRACTICE. HOWEVER, THANKS TO NEURAL MIRRORING I FELT ALMOST AS INVIGORATED AS IF I HAD BEEN PART OF THE ROUTINE MYSELF AND READY TO ENGAGE IN SOME EQUALLY HARDCORE THINKING.

SEAM 2010: Agency and Action—a month- long program of workshops, forums and exhibitions—was co-presented by Critical Path and the University of Western Sydney. As with any transdisciplinary venture, especially one exploring subtle energies, somatic practices, distributed bodies and mediation, a loss in translation between presenters, exhibitors, performers and audiences was inevitable. However the diversity of presentation styles—from storytelling, dance, philosophical musings, autonomous robotic performance, command line interaction and rabbit training—transcended some of the language barriers.

Doris McIlwain and John Sutton opened the event by demonstrating how verbal ‘touch’ influences bodily position, posing questions around embodied cognition, collaborative decision-making and affective experience. Our verbal, conscious and conceptual access to physical and cognitive performances are mysterious realms, full of unconscious couplings and ghost gestures. Researching remembering and forgetting, Kate Stephens is developing tools to ascertain if the contemporary dance audience experience can be enhanced by kinesthetic learning prior to performances—or not. Mike Leggett unravelled temporal perspectives and relocations: the documentation process of his 1970s Unword performance works, with the then absolutely new medium of video, has changed their meanings.

Unexpectedly, Ruth Gibson of igloo (UK) lay down on the stage prior to speaking, illustrating the art of letting go. Trained as a dancer, Gibson facilitated a three-day workshop on the Skinner Releasing Technique for SEAM earlier in October—a process of unlearning and wakening the primal. Gibson and Bruno Martelli, as igloo, create poetic 3D virtual and physical installations grounded by presence, gravity and place. Gibson playfully introduced the concept of ‘hypersurface’—an informed topology that unlocks culturally instituted dualities like the real and the virtual by intertwining them into irresolvable complexities to create a ‘middle out’ perspective.

Sitting with her back to the audience, Nancy Mauro-Flude uncovers—visually opening up—the insides of the operating system behind our daily computer interactions. Through enquiring conversations, the amplified sound of Mauro-Flude’s fingertips dancing across the keyboard beautifully conveyed the poetics and isokinetics of machine and human intelligence. With her dual background as artist and Feldenkrais practitioner, Lyndal Jones spoke eloquently of the centrality of empathy in creative dialogues—setting up visual scenarios where empathy is demonstrated by mirroring, until the notion of self disappears. Jones, like several other presenters, tapped into Eastern philosophical notions of Mindfulness, and conjured up the palpable presence of philosopher Brian Massumi.

In a double identity shift, the silhouette of choreographer and media artist Hellen Sky emerged from backstage lurking, wrapped detective-like in a trench coat to co-present with Garth Paine (UWS). Their dialogue morphed between academic and witty exchange and bio-sensing performance to illustrate elements of the Darker Edge of Night research project. The importance of timing in gesture research was elaborated by keynote speaker Frédéric Bevilacqua, Head of the Realtime Interactive team at IRCAM (France), as he presented outcomes from the SEAM workshop he had facilitated on software tools for motion tracking using optical cameras.

Christian Ziegler (Germany) had also facilitated two intensive SEAM laboratories, developing works with a choreographer and dancers within his “wald-forest” interactive environment during his Critical Path residency. Ziegler was joined at the final public forum and exhibition at Rushcutters Bay over the last weekend in October by Volker Kuchelmeister with Deconstructing Double District, and the outcome of Brad Miller’s research residency, titled augment me.

Forgoing the enacted or observed yoga, I slid straight into the zone on day two with Kathy Cleland discussing the emergence of non-human and quasi-human performers. Cleland examined how mirroring and mimicry were central to building empathy and understanding, exploring the fluid distinctions and similarities between human and robot speed and movement.

When working with robotic performers, one needs to acknowledge their capacity to act up. The machine desire of In Serial embraced chaos and entropy. This multi-talented group—Linda Dement, Petra Gemeinboeck, PRINZGAU/podgorschek and Marion Tränkle—is interested in the uncontrollable fluids and escalating generative interactions between non-human protagonists. The emergence of robotic agency, with defiant robot mops attempting to escape their task of mixing smelly viscous fluids and veering off stage, admirably demonstrated ‘entrainment’—a term used by the team to describe how their behaviour had been brought into coherence by the machine’s determination.

Careering down the expansive rabbit hole of nano-technology, Paul Thomas threw in a heady mix of Bergson, code duality, matter vibration and the primacy of consciousness for good measure. Scott McQuire evoked McLuhan’s extension of man in his discussions of the production of urban public space by networking large screens in Seoul and Melbourne. My synapses were imploding with the implications of immanence, imbrications and irretrievable intertwinings. Luckily Lars Marstaller was undertaking a cognitive ethnographic analysis of the extended SEAM program, to ascertain how the available resources could create meaning and solve problems.

We were re-grounded by Kate Richards’ investigations of affordance, affect and audience interactions with screen-based media in the arts and entertainment industries. Her documentation of a mediated journey into the supernatural realm at Macau’s City of Dreams Casino’s immersive 3D Bubble Theater evoked affective resonance in crowds. Choreographer Vicki Van Hout’s Busy Hands Speaking Country traversed the seam between Indigenous knowledge, dance and painting. Her work on co-location—being in the dreaming and in the dance, creating a virtual spiritual atavistic experience, and replacing the ancestral voice with technology—raised issues of tangibility and transportability of traditional form.

During a symposium break, Margie Medlin’s empathic Quartet robotic dancer provided an engaging spectacle in the foyer in a subtle to violent duet of synchronised flesh and machine. Trapped in a glass cage next to the performers, Stelarc’s Articulated Head bobbed up and down on its mechanical arm. I could not ascertain if its mesmerised movements were akin to being snake-charmed by the adjacent human-robotic action, or if it/he was looking for attention like a fluffy puppy when all eyes were focused elsewhere.

Later, the big head, a virtual Stelarc delivering a Deleuzian keynote in synthetic monotone, appeared almost vulgar after the subtle, considered enquiry and nuanced somatic states of previous sessions. Disappointingly, although autism was mentioned several times, it was not followed through. At a conference about altered agency and embodiment, an engagement with differently wired bodies—bodies with other physicality and cognition—would have augmented the program. The thinking of Erin Manning and others around autist Amanda Baggs’ short video, In My Language, could have brought the intensity of movement and the affective proto-language of gesture and sensation into play.

Picking up on the thread of playfulness and mindfulness, the Thinking Through the Body project, brought together by artist George Khut and curator Lizzie Muller, staged a significant presence. Practitioners drawn from across media forms, programming, sound, sculpture, dance and Feldenkrais spoke with respectful contemplation of their process of internalisation. Unfolding awareness of breath, touch, balance, proprioception and stillness has brought a new depth of consciousness and embodied intelligence to their individual and group practices.

Chunky Move’s Glow (RT78) was also performed during SEAM, with artistic director Gideon Obarzanek speaking of the ongoing choreographic dialogue between dancers and Frieder Weiss’s artificially intelligent lighting and tracking software (RT84). Playing out the tensions between technological rationality and the anxiety of humanity, a dancer appears to be trapped on a scanner bed. Inventive effects and mirror neurons aside, viewing Glow from the low-raked seating at the Seymour Centre compromised the experience. I ached to be up high—looking down into the performance—immersed with the technogenic body, rather than a distant spectator.

SEAM successfully addressed many aspects of agency and embodiment altered by interactive technologies with the inspired placement of performative installations in the foyer—reaching a general audience of curious theatre-goers as well as opening specific dialogues in spatial and cognitive arenas that should be continued. Next year’s conference will focus on architectures—exploring the need to construct spaces that can flexibly accommodate differing modes of performance, technology and audience interaction.

SEAM 2010: Somatic Embodiment, Agency & Mediation in Digital Mediated Environments, Critical Path (Director, Margie Medlin), University of Western Sydney (Dr Garth Paine), Symposium, Oct 15-16; http://seam2010.blogspot.com

LINE DANCES IS THE LATEST COLLECTION OF SHORT CINEMATIC WORKS FROM NEW ZEALAND CHOREOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER DANIEL BELTON. AFTER THEIR LAUNCH IN DUNEDIN, BELTON INTENDS TO TOUR THE PIECES. THEY ARE HOWEVER PRINCIPALLY DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED ONLINE.

Belton’s early training as a painter is again evident in these works. He references many of the visual and thematic concerns of his previous films and multimedia dance pieces (RT92)—lines of perspective and sketched trajectories evoking Renaissance illustration, architectural drawings, as well as influences from Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the delicate, minimalistic version of Modernist painting seen in the work of Paul Klee. Belton indeed cites Klee’s lectures at the Bauhaus School of Art during the 1920s as a key influence.

The Bauhaus is known for promoting the notion of colours possessing specific correspondences to each other and to spiritual sensations. With the exception of a few geometric blocks of red recalling the work of Piet Mondrian and the Constructivists, Belton’s Line Dances, though, are largely black and white.

This suits Belton’s purposes well. It gives Line Dances an antique feel consistent with the broadly Modernist visual iconography, as well as establishing a link between these allusions and earlier Baroque and Rococo architectural settings and theatrical modes. The commedia dell’arte Harlequin—or his representation as a figure of ironic playfulness and visual fantasy in Modernist art by Cocteau, Picasso and others—appears, as does a generic, white-attired Columbine ballerina, along with clockwork, automaton-like figures, angular acrobats (looking as if they have stepped out of Meyerhold’s productions) and line drawings of fantastic spaces and buildings with indeterminate, shifting dimensions (shades of Klee’s Room Perspective With Inhabitants, 1921, and The Great Dome, 1927).

Klee’s influence is manifest principally in the work’s conceptualisation. He saw abstract art as based on transparency and opacity, enabling multiple perspectives and viewpoints to be layered to make up a larger, composite picture. Belton either follows suit, or produces similar effects, by dividing the screen into repeating and varying fragments. The reproduction of dancers, figures, motifs, lines and even sounds across the field of perception is a marked feature of Line Dances’ aesthetic.

The onscreen figures are light as paper. Lines of movement or shape are carefully traced across the screen, and then morphed into lyrical smudges. This recurrent theme gives a curious immateriality to the figure. Belton explains in his program notes that he sees the screen as an inherently “artificial” realm, hence his bodies have no weight. They arc, glitch, twitch, curve, multiply and swing, but never thud, hit, crash or stop. The look of the piece, as well as the movement of objects and human shapes, is of constantly evolving insubstantiality.

It is the conditional sketchiness of Belton’s films that provides their central structural conceit, as well as their curiously unresolved ambience. Although often described as a producer of “dance films,” Belton’s relative lack of concern for bodies qua bodies, and his construction of the body as merely one element among a number of parabolic, architectural, painterly and photographic motifs (notably stop-motion photography, as in the work of Anton Bragaglia, Étienne-Jules Marey and its painterly versions by Umberto Boccioni) means that his cinema is perhaps best characterised as moving painting, akin to that of avant-garde filmmakers Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and Len Lye, whose work Belton’s intermittently evokes.

Klee contended that art should represent a “multiform world…[a] branching and spreading array”—which Belton literally shows in one film, offering an ever diminishing series of budding miniature figures sprouting from rods held at the shoulder of an initial character—and which Klee compares with the “root” and “crown” of a tree. Like Klee, Belton constantly oscillates from one point, outcome or physical position (the crown), through to a root, and then back again. The ideal metaphoric structure for Belton and Klee is therefore the Golden Ratio of mathematician Fibonacci and Cubist theorist Albert Gleizes: the recurrent spiral, such as one sees inside a Nautilus shell. These films never resolve, but microcosmically coil and repeat internally at an ever-reduced scale. Whilst this approach underpins Modernist painting, it is perhaps less effective for the movement in time of the screen space or of the music (which is also simple, repetitive and variational).

The planetoids threading their way backwards and forwards along a white parabola running behind the dancer therefore epitomise this cinematic cycle. Complex and sophisticated though Belton’s films are, they function more as sketches than as final paintings; as a provisional, thoughtful set of lines, or as Klee might say, “a line going for a walk.”

Daniel Belton & Good Company, Line Dances, director, performer, editor Daniel Belton, co-producer, performer Donnine Harrison, piano Anthony Ritchie, Metro Theatre, Otago Festival of the Arts, Dunedin, New Zealand, Oct 10-12; www.goodcompanyarts.com/good-company-arts-line-dances.htm

IT’S A GREAT THING THAT THE KIND OF THEATRE THAT IS BRANCH NEBULA’S SWEAT HAPPENS IN SYDNEY. DEMOCRATICALLY DEVISED, POLITICAL AND EMOTIONALLY CHARGED, SWEAT PERFORMS A CHALLENGE TO EXPECTATION AND CONVENTION.

However, Sweat is also a diluted dream of a Sydney Front (1986-1994) production: unsurprising considering that John Baylis, onetime Front member, is the dramaturg. The sharply confronting material sometimes demanded a more robust performative substance than these young performers could provide but Claudia Escobar, Marnie Palomares, Erwin Fenis, Ali Kadhim, Ahilan Ratnamohan and Hirofumi Uchino are courageous, committed and focused.

Escobar is especially potent. She opens the piece by welcoming us with a hospitality smile that matches her waiter’s uniform. In heavily accented English she asks us politely but firmly to leave and re-enter with more alacrity, as our first entrance was not sufficiently rhythmic or efficient. This is classic Front: casting the audience as performatively responsible. And not only responsible—but uncomfortable—as Escobar asks various audience members to remove pieces of her clothing. In the undoing of buttons, witness is made oppressor as she asks me directly, while lying near naked on the floor, to stop looking at her.

Escobar’s accented text set the political narrative as determinedly racial. As we gathered in uncomfortable clumps we stood accused—of leaving all the dirty tasks of a wealthy society to people with dark skin and foreign accents. These are people who have migrated into invisibility and voicelessness, where once, in their countries of origin, they were trained, educated and skilled.

This shameful narrative is the abiding and structuring force of Sweat. The piece veers from situations of tedium and degradation to displays of skill that reveal the hidden value of these ‘shadow’ people.

In the blackened and cavernous space cleaning trolleys become sentinels and aliens, careening beams of light into an atmosphere thick with despair and repeated words. These are perhaps the most densely theatrical moments, clothing the audience in nightmare, surrounding and engulfing us.

Then there is a falling away as we are herded into groups, each with a quadrant of space and a designated performer. The shadows are filled in with the individuality of capability, with back stories of soccer, hip hop, martial arts and contemporary dance. These practices are moved as markers of worth and dignity in a world that would make them silent and invisible. This Australian story must be told and it is important that Branch Nebula is telling it.

But who are they telling it to? Certainly not to the greedy bastards of industry who deserve the full accusatory force of Sweat. And despite the textually direct ‘you’ of these accusations, they sometimes appear limp. They don’t have the force of, say, the fully furious curse of Melvin van Peebles’ bag lady in Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971) wishing all our children turn into junkies and prostitutes. That iconic rant was fuelled by a quietly authentic ferocity that swept the audience up into it, crushing resistance. So, at times Sweat generated annoyance more than fury. Herded around the space, the generic passivity and meekness of the theatrical audience was not subverted but extended.

Contrastingly, Sweat performed the young nubile body; displayed, revealed and aestheticised. The bodies of these performers are rich with symbolic, physical and cultural capital—bodies bathed in admiration as they exhibit their skills: bodies rich with potential, capable of enacting power, bodies at odds with victimhood. What of the older migrant worker, like the 60 year-old Indian man picking up the garbage of teenagers on Town Hall Station? Where is his story?

Towards the end, Sweat’s ‘last supper’ scene invites 12 lucky audience members to put their heads through holes in a heavy plastic tablecloth that serves as a collective bib. A good thing, for it is about to get ugly. Serenely, two waiting staff pour water and wine, left arms tucked respectfully behind their backs. This sedate ritual segues into the serving of food as art: pineapple rings with a spoonful of peas and a ‘little boy’ frankfurter. Yellow, green and red are, at first, delicately dotted on white plates. But the service gets boisterous as the servings become ludicrously generous; speedy dollops of red tomato slurry are spooned onto overflowing plates and the table starts to swim with a melange of colour disgusting to eye and palate. Horrifyingly, one waiter starts to eat the scraps: the middle-class leftovers that sustain the oppressed. He disrobes and swims face first and naked down the centre of the table, his butt crack serving another unexpected course to the guests, these disciples of excess. The last touch is confetti, sprinkled liberally over the festivities, completing the festering mess, turning the party and the world of work upside down.

Sweat, Branch Nebula, director, co-creator Lee Wilson, designer, co-creator Mirabelle Wouters, noisician Hirofumi Uchino, performers, devisors Ahilan Ratnamohan, Ali Kadhim, Claudia Escobar, Erwin Fenis, and Marnie Palomares; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Oct 19-30

ALAN BRISSENDEN AND KEITH GLENNON’S AUSTRALIA DANCES, CREATING AUSTRALIAN DANCE 1945-1965 IS AN OBJECT AS MUCH AS A BOOK, AND A BEAUTIFULLY PRESENTED OBJECT AT THAT.

It does not demand to be read from cover to cover in sequence. If you follow the pages one after the other the dates, people and locations merge in a blur of numbers, names and dance titles. The detail is astounding, for example the authors list (what appear to be) all the possible name changes of companies and organisations throughout the period. But if you choose instead to wander through the amazing array of photographs and replications of wardrobe and set designs, dipping in and out when an association takes your fancy, you will be equally amazed at the writers’ attention to historical detail and avoid the vertigo.

Critical framing of dance in its social, political, economic and cultural context is not the intention of this book. There is a lot of who, what, where and a little bit of how but not a lot of why. Instead, the expressed intention of Australia Dances is to “share in building an awareness of a community of interests, stimulate the interchange of ideas, and provide a record of the exciting period when so much creativity was energising Australian dance.” This it does admirably.

There is, however, a sprinkling of ‘why-not’ as the authors offer up the occasional reflective commentary on the demise of companies and organisations and the lack of innovation in much early local dance (particularly ballet), along with the occasional critique of some of the work. It is interesting (read depressing) to discover the fledgling dance organisations in this period faltered and died one after the other, and rose again, and again, when more funds could be secured. (Reading through this replicated saga I was reminded that the resilience of Australian performing artists also has a history.) The authors also accuse companies like the Borovansky Ballet of not meeting their “obligation to contribute to the vitality of the art it represents.” A revival of old works might satisfy an audience but it “is a truism that no art form can progress and develop without experimentation.”

There are moments when local artists get an ever so gentle, but slightly acerbic ‘serve’. Words like “slight” are used to describe Petite Mozartiana (1939) by Borovansky and Garth Welch’s work for the fledgling Australian Ballet. Rex Reid’s choreography for Melbourne Cup (1960) is called “highly derivative” owing a large “debt” to Les Sylphides and Aurora’s Wedding. Although her creations have a “firmness of purpose and clarity of vision,” a dependence on “the improvisation of individual dancers […] together with her concern for asymmetry, led to a certain untidiness in some of Gertrud Bodenwieser’s ballets.”

This book has had an incredibly long gestation period. As Alan Brissenden recalled at its launch in July: “We wrote the book during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when so much was happening in dance in this country.” Keith Glennon was responsible for collecting a lot of the material, travelling from state to state interviewing artists and writing follow-up letters on leads he’d acquired in the field. Asked how Glennon financed his trips, Brissenden recalled that “he hitchhiked a lot of the time. But when he got to Adelaide he didn’t want to face the Nullarbor, so he cabled a great-aunt in England for £50, and she sent it!” Brissenden left for England in 1960: “I had a contract in my pocket and [the book] was to be published in 1961; but a recession rolled in and put a stop to that.” When he returned to Australia he joined the English Department at Adelaide University and, with Glennon, updated the book and tried to get it published again, “but no one was interested.” The letters, photos, clippings and transcript “were stored in a garage” and when Keith Glennon died in 1983 his brothers donated the 22 archival boxes to the Barr Smith Library at Adelaide University and there it all sat until Alan Brissenden retired in 1994 and began to revise the manuscript yet again.

These two men were not only great collectors but also well-connected fellow travellers of the dance community. Glennon was a trained dancer, a theatre technician with JC Williamson and the founding administrator of the Mornington Island Dancers. Brissenden has an Order of Australia for services to the arts and is one of the country’s leading dance critics. They were aficionados. Between them they saw a lot of the work they describe here, and it is those moments when the ‘eye-witness’ nature of some accounts breaks through the stricter historiography that the value of this book is enhanced. We get great moments of description that can only come from being there, like this on Laurel Martyn’s Sentimental Bloke (1952): “To convey changes in time and provide atmosphere, the choreographer left dancers immobile when not immediately concerned in the action of a scene. This provided the ballet with a photo-album quality, clipped the incidents into tidy, page-like sequence, and yet blended them one into another so that there was a continuity of action. This buoyancy was carried through to the ballet’s conclusion; at the end the audience was involved as a wedding photographer, for the curtains opened and closed like a camera shutter on poses contrived by the bridal party.”

There are some oddities as well: the excellent description of the touring and the dancing of the Aboriginal Theatre (1963) is corralled under the title of “Ethnic Dance” and I also thought it odd that the Modern Dance section begins with a return to the Greeks. We move from them to the Romans, the early Christians, dance in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and are swept on to Isadora Duncan and the early 20th century…all in three paragraphs. I also found the lack of contextual framing in the book a small frustration. Tantalising details of who-made-what-with-whom in a strange ballet like Terra Australis (1946) makes you wonder what it would have been like to be in the room as Tom Rothfield (who wrote the ‘book’), William Constable (décor), Esther Rofe (music) and Borovansky (choreographer) negotiated their way around the ballet’s construction and content. How did these people work together? Why did they make the work? Another interesting, unframed moment is the image of Robert Olup ‘blacked up’ as the “Negro” in Rex Reid’s The Night of the Sorceress (1962). Photographs such as this stimulate interest that is not satisfied in the text.

Generally Australia Dances offers the facts but does not spend much time unpacking or speculating about the meaning of the action in context and time. But, again, that is the intention of the book: to stimulate more research, to give scholars and students a place from which to begin. This publication does not do the work for us: its lack of detailed referencing means the location of much of the material remains ‘secret.’ But this will not bother everyone, and those who are inspired to burrow beneath what Australia Dances has to offer will still need to do the work, scratching at this book’s beautiful, polished, inspirational surface to reveal the stories that lie beneath.

Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon, Australia Dances, Creating Australian Dance 1945-1965, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2010

AFTER A PROMISING START IN 2009, THIS YEAR’S EDITION OF SPRING DANCE AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE EMPHATICALLY CONFIRMED THE FESTIVAL MEANS BUSINESS AND IS HERE TO STAY. IT HAS, IN FACT, THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND STIMULATING DANCE FESTIVALS IN THE COUNTRY. CURATED BY THE OPERA HOUSE’S HEAD OF THEATRE AND DANCE, WENDY MARTIN, SPRING DANCE 2010 IMPRESSED WITH ITS ECLECTIC DISPLAY OF WORKS BY A WIDE RANGE OF NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL DANCE PRACTITIONERS AND OFFERED SOMETHING FOR PRACTICALLY EVERY TASTE.

sidi larbi cherkaoui, sutra

A box-office success story since its premiere at Sadler’s Wells in London in 2008, Sutra is a collaboration between celebrated Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and 17 Buddhist monks from the original Shaolin Temple in China. The pared down set consists of 21 wooden boxes designed by Turner Prize-winning UK sculptor Antony Gormley.

At the beginning of Sutra, Cherkaoui and a boy monk sit on top of one of the boxes placed at the edge of the stage, hunched over a miniature model of the set. They reconfigure the model boxes into various patterns and forms, foreshadowing what the audience is about to witness. Soon enough, the two are sucked into the life-size world onstage where the kung fu-trained warrior monks reign supreme, engaging in a dizzying fusion of whirling combat and meditative stillness. Powerful kicks alternate with daring backflips and spectacular jumps off the man-sized boxes.

Suddenly the monks execute Tai Chi-style movement sequences with great poise and grace. The boxes are dragged, lifted and heaved into an array of configurations that are as quickly destroyed as they are constructed. The multi-functionality of the boxes allows them to transform into everything from coffins, hiding spots and shelves to bunk beds, lotus flowers and skyscrapers— ideal for the monks to hide in, spring from, balance on or topple like dominoes.

As for Cherkaoui, during the first half of this East-meets-West extravaganza, he appears to be an onlooker, a visitor in a foreign community drawn into its microcosm. It is not until later in the piece that he engages in more direct interactions with the monks, such as a breathtaking dance-off, displaying his own extraordinary flexibility that at times takes on near-contortionist dimensions. For all its action-packedness, Sutra is infused with a beautifully measured humour often stemming from the interactions between Cherkaoui and the boy who acts like a liaison between him and the monks. This is a powerfully poetic, deeply human work. It is easy to see why it has attracted more than 100,000 people to performances all over the world. (See also Douglas Leonard’s review.)

asphalte

So far, French choreographer and dancer Pierre Rigal has been known to Sydney audiences only through his intricately structured solo creations performed in a highly physical, almost acrobatic movement style. In Asphalte, he joins forces with five non-professional street dancers whom he selected during auditions in Paris in 2009. The youthful energy and commitment the hip-hop artists bring to the work is infectious and one of its biggest assets. They break, pop, lock and krump, like urban warriors, through a series of semi-narrative scenarios depicting modern street life.

As often is the case with hip-hop dancers, the physical feats seem to defy the laws of nature and perceived anatomical restrictions. Individual body parts are isolated, as if with a life of their own, moving in sharp angles one moment and dripping with liquidity in the next. Asphalte is set against a giant light box that glows in ever-changing colours, bright and saturated. The dancers are often silhouetted which makes them appear like comic-strip characters. As the work progresses, humanity is further contested as scenarios turn more absurd and even monstrous. Bodies get ‘blown up’ and deflated like balloons, fingers attack a dancer’s head like leeches, shoot-outs are simulated. The movement becomes increasingly machine-like, transforming the dancers into strangely deformed creatures battling urban reality.

Asphalte’s colourful pop-art aesthetic and the sophisticated lighting design make this a beautiful, positively slick production. The explorations of modern street life often border on the gimmicky, however, and the piece’s structure becomes predictable after a while, with each of the dancers executing a solo and then being joined by the group in some sort of confrontation, sometimes playful, sometimes latently violent. Asphalte is nonetheless a highly entertaining dance work, attracting audiences who might not usually attend contemporary dance performances.

singular sensation

Singular Sensation marks the welcome Australian debut of Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder. Together with her five dancers, Godder explores how, in a world characterized by relentless activity and overstimulation, physical experiences become more and more extreme in order to register on the increasingly numbed mental scale of sensation. Dressed like oversexed teenagers, in mini skirts and tight pants and with fake red finger nails, the dancers strut the stage, hell-bent in their search for thrills. Self-consciously, they look around to see if they are being watched. Real interactions seem to have become impossible and are doomed to fail, drowning in dysfunction. This futility is reflected in the movement language. Apart from half-heartedly executed lifts and fleeting moments of synchronized movement, there seems to be no dance left in the dancers. Instead they slap themselves, stick their tongues out, flutter their eyelids and grimace wildly. They smear their bodies with green paint and red jelly and wrap their heads in pants and their faces in clingwrap. Their insecurities end in self-obsession that prevents any sense of release. Their actions might become more random and messy, but certainly no more debauched or wild. Admittedly, this makes for rather bleak viewing. What is impressive about Singular Sensation, though, is that Godder sticks to her guns and resists trying to make the work palatable. Her conceptual rigour is matched by the physical commitment of her dancers.

Quite different from crowd pleasers like Sutra and Ashphalte, Singular Sensation is not for everyone, but its inclusion in Spring Dance was crucial. It is vital that Australian audiences are not only exposed to international hits but are given the opportunity to discover new and important dance practitioners whose work has not previously found its way to our shores. I hope Spring Dance will continue with its forward thinking programming.

Spring Dance 2010: Sutra, director, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, visual creation, design Antony Gormley, music Szymon Brzóska, performers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Shaolin monks, Concert Hall, Sept 16-19; Asphalte, conception, choreography, lighting Pierre Rigal, set, lighting Frédéric Stoll, Playhouse, Sept 21-26; Singular Sensation, concept, direction, choreography Yasmeen Godder, The Studio, Sept 14-19; Sydney Opera House, Aug 31-Sept 26

IN ITS SECOND YEAR, THE SPRING DANCE PROGRAM AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE HAS BEEN A FEAST FOLLOWING THE CITY’S 2010 CONTEMPORARY DANCE FAMINE. AN ALMOST OVERWHELMING FOUR-WEEK PROGRAM PRESENTED DANCE FILM, LIVE PERFORMANCES AND AN ONLINE CHOREOGRAPHIC COMPETITION. TWO OF THE AUSTRALIAN PREMIERES WERE BY ESTABLISHED DANCE ARTISTS NARELLE BENJAMIN AND GIDEON OBARZANEK.

in glass

Narelle Benjamin’s creamily athletic choreography folds, flicks, rolls, curves and dips in an admixture of textured rhythms and flowing ‘through-ness.’ The body of the choreographer is deeply inscribed everywhere on the bodies of its two magnificent dancers, Kristina Chan and Paul White—in the deep, deep flexion of the joints, in the rolling through and across positions, in the display of extreme flexibility and balanced strength born of yogic alignment, in the often triangulated and turned out legs and in the choreographic obsession with folding and opening. While Chan and White dance with their avatars created by five onstage mirrors, the dominant avatar is the absent/present choreographer whose powerful embodiment determines and inhabits In Glass.

Chan and White’s virtuosity is refined and knowing. In certain moments their temporal attunement is so delicate and deep it is delicious. Time and time again the world is made a beautiful place by this pre-lingual togethering. But time is not the only thing they mutualise. Spatially they see each other without having to see. He picks her up, right where he should, right at her centre, and the lift is velvety smooth, full of arc and curve, rich in its articulation of unspoken gravities and kinetic uplift.

But why does she not lift him? Chan is muscular and strong, trained in the vagaries of weight and momentum. But in a baffling defiance of this muscularity Chan plays the little girl lost in a baby doll dress. In Glass becomes surprisingly gendered, bleeding into a traditionalist fantasy that irritates its technological thrusts.

Sam James’ video art plays on the mirrors that become cinematic screens. Morphing from reflective surface to filmic depth, these mirror-screens create rippling waves of space and action, multidimensional zones that morph as in a dream. Prior to performance, the mirrors reflect the audience, casting them within the stage space and then turning them upon themselves. As the dancers dance we see their backs, taking us behind, beyond a performing surface, only to have these visions thrown back at us, encircling and involuting the performative image. Then James steps in and tunnels us into deep, deep space where we chase avatars and where images shrink into oblivion.

As mirrors, the screens produce the other selves: reflections, invisibilities, ghosts and fleeting images only just caught. A bearded White stands before the mirror/screen as three clean-shaven Whites stare back. Dance with them, I urge. Dance with these other selves. But Benjamin has established a performative rhythm that is quick and once an image flashes it dies. White turns and walks away. There is to be no duet with self.

In Glass constantly turned away from the choreographic potential of reflection, avatar and ghost. Images, situations and interactions were only fleetingly established before they were abandoned. Always moving on, this performance laboured under a plethora of unfulfilled ideas that became flaccid in their fleetingness. Gorgeous aesthetic images of a multi-armed Shiva-esque Chan suggested the choreography might dip its toe into the pool of possibility that is reflection, but then it just went away again and I was left wondering what Shiva had to do with Eve or Narcissus.

faker

Gideon Obarzanek is so well known in Australia as the artistic director and choreographer for Chunky Move that dancing a solo now, after so many years of telling performers what to do, makes him seem fascinatingly vulnerable. Obarzanek says that he has no great desire to perform and gets no great joy from doing it; he merely has an interesting story to tell and only he can tell it. Bold. Clean. Simple.

In the black box of the Sydney Opera House Studio, at the very back and centre of the stage sits a desk with an open laptop. Obarzanek enters in casual black pants and a vivid green T-shirt. Bold. Clean. Simple, angular and symmetrical.

Faker is a performance carved up into clear and clean episodic sections, alternating dance and text evenly. Each time he dances Obarzanek accumulates a new technological toy: iPod, timer, Bose dock, in a property accumulation that is quietly masculine. Clear. Clean. Even.

This guy knows how to put on a show. In this clear, clean crafting lies his heritage and history: years of arranging, designing, forging and forming dance theatre. Even the relaxed demeanour, the understated set, the casual costuming speak of this confident crafting born of time spent and attention paid.

This tempered yet testosteronic confidence eventually leads Obarzanek to strip down to the contemporary dance ‘costume’ of undies—the harshly bright lighting regime revealing the truth of his age. Disconcertingly the house lights remain bright too: making Faker a shared space in which we are directly addressed—a still and obedient body of bodies. The performance accrues a density of spoken word as Obarzanek reads—from the laptop that sits as a barrier between us—a real e-mail from an apparently real protégé. The language of the message is simple, clear, heartfelt, if sometimes seeming slightly too crafted to be real. Obarzanek’s voice is confident and steady, clear and clean.

As he reads aloud the dancer’s impression of him, the essential narcissism of the solo is reaffirmed and doubled in a presence both here and there, real and virtual, present and historical, subject and object. In claiming the protégé’s voice Obarzanek generates a self-deprecating egoism that colonises her accusatory story.

Thus thickened, this solo becomes a duet, as Obarzanek channels the protégé, performing her absence. A lonely form, the solo is pared back and sweetly sad, yet Faker’s potential for poignancy and vulnerability is tamed by the angular masculinity and the virtual partnering.

The first two choreographic sections of Faker could be called non-dance: the loungeroom solo we have all danced, singing in the strangled language of words he doesn’t quite know, casting his age by dancing to a Prince song of the late ’80s, making us laugh. Atop softened knees it is a dance of hands and arms. The second anti-dance seems to push the point as he paces himself with his second toy: a digital timer. He flaps and wiggles into silliness.

He sits. Ghostly comments from the young woman in the machine keep coming in thick and delicious detail, even to accusations of “macho posturing” and “superficiality.”

Obarzanek takes off his shoes and I can almost hear the audience sigh, “here we go, here it is, he is going to really dance now.” But not quite. As he sheds his clothes, the traces of silliness fade. This dancer’s dance is made religious with chanting soundtrack and cathedral lighting that both parody and substantiate the pointed feet of a real dancer. In a repetitious motif of sweeps, dives, bridges, lunges and folds Obarzanek does what he had to do. He dances the dance, the dance that proves he can still dance. Applause. He heads to the dressing room: solo at last.

For more on Spring Dance, see Martin del Amo’s review of international works in the program, and RT99 for Keith Gallasch’s report on Ngurru-Milmarramiriw—Wrong Skin. For Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Sutra also see Douglas Leonard’s report from the Brisbane International Arts Festival.

Spring Dance: In Glass, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, composer Huey Benjamin,visual design Samuel James, costume design Tess Schofield, lighting Karen Norris, The Studio, Sept 7-12; Faker, concept, choreography, performance Gideon Obarzanek, lighting Gideon Obarzanek, Chris Mercer, creative consultants Aimee Smith, Lucy Guerin, Antony Hamilton, Tom Wright, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Sept 21-26

THE DISCRETE CHARM OF ANDREW ROSS, DIRECTOR OF THE BRISBANE POWERHOUSE, LIES IN HIS WARM DEMEANOUR COUPLED WITH AN INNATE SENSE OF PUNCTILIO; HE IS NOT GIVEN TO HYPERBOLE. NEVERTHELESS, HIS BLUE EYES TAKE ON A FIERCE QUALITY WHEN HE ENUNCIATES UNFASHIONABLE IDEAS LIKE “PASSION,” “INSPIRATION,” “COURAGE” AND “TRUE GRIT” AS HIS CRITERIA FOR CHOOSING WORKS FOR THE EXPANDED WORLD THEATRE FESTIVAL (WTF) AT THE BRISBANE POWERHOUSE IN 2011—ITS CHEEKY BYLINE IS: “WTF ARE YOU DOING IN FEBRUARY?”

These are all works that, in Ross’s view, were not formulated to subscribe to market-driven values, but spoke in the first place to the concerns of their audiences in different contexts, works that if they are ‘real’ or ‘any good,’ speak to an audience anywhere. Ross resists the notion that such works necessarily reflect contemporary performance practice, believing this terminology to be misleading and exclusory, preferring the more pluralistic term “current practices” to apply to multiple works that have been independently produced and have, so to speak, their own faces, “investing in different priorities to commercial theatre.”

Ross built his reputation in Perth as a promulgator, devisor and director of new works. These included Jack Davis’ The Dreamers followed by No Sugar and Jimmy Chi’s Bran Nue Dae. He went on to found Black Swan Theatre Company which gained a formidable reputation nationally and internationally for new work, and launched the careers of many Indigenous performers such as Ernie Dingo and Leah Purcell and writers Jack Davis, Jimmy Chi and Sally Morgan. Ross specifically attributes his work with Indigenous theatre as helping to sharpen his eye for performances that interact with an audience hungry, desperate for the experience, just as he had been as a young man at the Pram Factory in Melbourne. It also alerted him, as did his travels in India and Indonesia, to the roots of theatre emanating from the ritual, even religious nature of a festival.

Ross’s concern for socially transformative experiences in the theatre causes him likewise to reinvent the ritual of theatre that goes well beyond the physical act of attending a performance by creating an exciting environment that “destabilises the formalised presentation of culture, creating a space to hang out…stimulating conversation, opinion, engagement, connection and personal interaction between artists and audiences” (Press Release). WTF has the boldly stated aim of reviving within three years the “ritual of gathering for live performance for collective contemplation and conversation about life…a distinctly social act.”

Ross points out that Brisbane has the lowest national theatre attendance per capita. By changing the way theatre and performance is delivered, WTF challenges prevailing perceptions of live performance. It aspires, in Ross’s words, “to bring audiences, local artists and leading national and international artists to Brisbane to form a critical mass for performance culture.” WTF’s accessibility has been assured in a commitment to affordability with the provision of cheap food stalls and a low cost ticketing strategy and initiatives to subsidise industry workers from interstate.

The pilot scheme earlier this year in the first WTF genuinely lived up to expectations. Audiences revelled in it, and it completely won me. The marvel was that the most interesting work came from Queensland, and was commissioned by the Brisbane Powerhouse: Brian Lucas’s amazing one-man show, Performance Anxiety (RT96, p30). It more than stood on its own alongside forceful products from overseas. In 2011 the solo work similarly being premiered under the auspices of WTF by Melbourne-based Real TV is the gritty, poeticised drama, Random, written by UK playwright Debbie Tucker Green and performed by Zahra Newman who both share a Jamaican heritage. Its theme—the death of a young black man and its effects on family—is, sadly, all too relevant in Australia. Otherwise the program divides even-handedly between mainstage productions and Scratchworks, new Australian works in development.

The international section of the program has been scheduled mainly from Europe and America (in subsequent years works will be chosen from the demographics Africa/Asia and Eastern Europe/South America). From the UK comes Super Night Shot by Gob Squad (see p4). Filming commences one hour before the audience arrives with four video cameras wielded by four performers who have set out on a semi-scripted, semi-improvised scenario of adventures and encounters in the vicinity of the Powerhouse. The performers return, meet their audience and the tapes are played back unedited on a four-way split screen, imploding the parameters of live performance. Kassys from the Netherlands brings Good Cop Bad Cop to the program using this company’s signature juxtaposition of film and theatre to build upon texts and editing techniques from reality television. I saw their production of Kommer (Sadness) at the Powerhouse in 2008, and regard it (along with Performance Anxiety) as one of the most memorable shows of the decade. It’s difficult to describe how their quirky brand of physical comedy conveys worlds of feeling and absolutely nails the absurdity of everyday lives. Also bridging the gap between cinema, performance and visual art, from the USA comes Americana Kamikaze in an Australian exclusive, an uptake on Japanese ghost stories by Temporary Distortion (New York/Japan). This promises to be the most visually rich, trance-inducing and disturbing contribution to WTF where actors perform minimally in boxes in front of a large screen to add another layer (in a dual sense) of projection. As Matthew Clayfield wrote from New York, “While some of the horror elements of the production were indeed quite frightening, it was as much [a] Möbius strip-like quality, the sense of having the formal and generic rugs pulled out from under you, that made the production most unsettling” (RT95).

From New Zealand, Hackman’s Apollo 13: Mission Control takes over half the Powerhouse Theatre in yet another extension of the theatre experience as we join flight director Gene Kranz and become responsible for helping guide the famous space shuttle home. It’s been lauded by critics and loved by audiences for its innovation and imaginative design. Well-received at both Edinburgh and Dublin Festivals, Diciembre is an intense, highly charged and passionate piece from Chile’s Teatro en el Blanco in which personal and autobiographical events impinge on the drama, including experiences of racism, protectionism and patriotism. Sydney-based performance-maker, writer, teacher and curator Rosie Dennis was last seen at the Powerhouse with her production Fraudulent Behaviour earlier this year. Her current work, Downtown, an exploration of belonging and connection, will be created day by day in Brisbane across the festival for a final day/night showing featuring Brisbane’s Gay and Lesbian Choir. Finally there is the mainstage appearance of the winner of the Melbourne Fringe Festival Brisbane Powerhouse 2010 Performance Award, The Waiting Room by Melbourne’s Born in a Taxi & The Public Floor Project. This highly physical, non-verbal work involves a live, real-time sound score which makes each performance an unrepeatable event.

There are seven brand new Australian shows in the making in the 2011 Scratch Series. WTF finds spaces for artists to take wild flights in front of an audience, and an informal atmosphere in which to discuss and absorb feedback from the audience. Personally, I find this arena for nascent works fascinating, often discovering that the process of polishing loses much as the rough beast is tamed. Gorgeous national and international performers like Christine Johnston and Lisa O’Neill are on hand, creating musical/performance vignettes with Peter Nelson in order to develop their RRAMP band sound and aesthetic; well known Polytoxic scrambles a new, high flying work; Daniel Santangeli’s Room 328 will drive you to drink (no, I loved their commitment and dark carnivalesque in its first incarnation, and look forward to seeing it again; see review); Black Queen Black King by Steven Oliver explores the lives of four Indigenous gay men culminating in a celebration of strength, pride, sexual and cultural identity; and Elephant Gun by The Escapists looks like being an intriguing site-specific work for a small audience.

These six specifically Queensland works are complemented by the Drawing Project (Open Studio), a multi-arts project by Fleur Elise Noble from Adelaide and featuring Erica Field as the performer. There is also a Masterclass and Forum Series running throughout the festival. The keynote speaker is Jude Kelly (Southbank, UK), her talk centres on community engagement with creative spaces and how cities are identifiable in the art they’re producing. This series is open to tertiary students, local artists and industry. What to do in February? Come to WTF!

World Theatre Festival 2011; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 9-20, 2011; brisbanepowerhouse.org

I WENT TO NEW YORK IN OCTOBER TO TALK TO ARTISTS AND ARTS WORKERS ABOUT SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE, SPECIFICALLY CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE AND DANCE. I GOT A NUMBER OF GUFFAWS AND SOME EYE ROLLING, BUT ONCE THE CYNICISM SUBSIDED, IMPASSIONED CONVERSATION SOON FOLLOWED.

Like all arts stories, it started with government funding cuts. In April this year, the Governor of New York announced an almost 40% reduction in arts funding for the state. After much public and political resistance, the budget was passed with ‘only’ a 15% reduction on 2009-10 levels.

As funding diminishes, the number of artists and arts organisations applying for support is only increasing. From 2002 to 2006, the number of unsuccessful applications to the New York State Council on the Arts grew by a staggering 210%. New York-based arts organisations offering residencies, small commissions and mini-grants are reporting similar increases.

Many of the larger organisations are feeling the squeeze. Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) and 3LD Art & Technology Centre were all burdened with major capital campaigns prior to the crash, so they had little room to move. In April this year, The New York Times reported that DTW’s mortgage was about $2.9m and they were slated to merge with Bill T Jones Company, a move many speculate is financially driven. In July, DNA rallied City Hall in a plea to keep their relatively new downtown space, which they moved into after an outpouring of support after 9/11. They are still in negotiations with their landlord and the city.

The city and state funding cuts are exacerbated by a broader national context. Philanthropic organisations such as The Greenwall Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and The New York Times Foundation have stopped their support of the arts since the financial crisis. Others have significantly scaled back their arts programs, including some of the larger ones such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Many have moved away from supporting general operating costs and will only support capacity building initiatives, national projects or re-granting through service organisations.

For organisations such as PS122, support from foundations represents around 30% of their income. Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, PS122’s Director of Development, believes a new economic model is needed. “The situation with foundations is not going to get better. Arts institutions like us need to shift to a more independent business model, with more diverse and robust contributed-, partner- and earned-income streams that stem directly from their missions and programming activities.”

Despite the Rockefeller Foundation’s diminishing arts dollar, it launched the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund in 2007. Two projects were supported that directly addressed the issue of sustainability for performing artists.

One project was Economic Revitalisation for Performing Artists (ERPA), an ambitious entrepreneurial lab run by The Field, a strategic consultancy for artists (established in 1985 by our own Wendy Lasica). Described by Jennifer Wright Cook, The Field’s Executive Director, as “experiments in making money,” its premise was that the traditional philanthropic model is no longer working. Out of 116 applications they received, seven were selected for grants of up to $20,000 each to develop their ideas. Four of these received implementation grants and their projects are detailed in the publication, We Are No Longer Strangers.

Stolen Chair Theatre Company used the model of Community Supported Agriculture, in which members provide seed money for a local farm in exchange for a share of the harvest, only in this instance the harvest was a theatre production. While they didn’t meet their original financial targets, Jon Stancato says he learned that it’s not just the final product that has value. “By opening up our process, we built an audience along the way.”

Our Goods, another ERPA awardee, removed money from the equation and developed a website for artists based on an exchange of goods. The site only launched a couple of months ago, so it’s hard to gauge its success. Their belief is that more work gets done in networks of shared respect and shared resources than in competitive isolation.

The other Rockefeller Cultural Innovation project was MADE HERE, a documentary series and website produced by the HERE Arts Centre which focuses on the challenging and eclectic lives of performing artists in New York. “We wanted to talk about issues from the artists’ perspective, how they’ve struggled and solved some of the problems they’ve faced,” explained Katrina Mangu-Ward, HERE’s Associate Producer. “There is a young core of artists who are reinventing the wheel, so we wanted to consolidate that.”

Season one, which rolled out from May through September 2010, covered five topic areas: Day & Night Jobs, Creative Real Estate, Family Balance, Activism, and Technology. Season two comes out in 2011.“People are isolated,” stressed Mangu-Ward. “We need a sense of community.”

Community support is at the heart of a number of alternative funding models that have proliferated in recent years, many of which are based in Brooklyn. Sweet Tooth of the Tiger, run by independent curator Tracy Candido, is part DIY food service project, part participatory art project. It used the model of a bake sale to fund small-scale residencies for artists in Brooklyn.

In a similar vein but with a stronger philanthropic push, FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics) is a recurring public dinner designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically fund new and emerging artists in Brooklyn. Similar models are emerging across the United States, building a network of organisations committed to rethinking how art is financed and experienced communally.

In the past two years, FEAST has hosted eight events and supported 20 projects. However the money raised is modest: $12,756 since it started in 2009. “These projects are developed because they’re needed,” says Candido, who wound up her renegade bake sales earlier this year. “They start as scrappy, original, independent projects; they succeed, they grow. But how do you sustain that?”

Modest in scale, DIY platforms for presentation mirror community-based arts funding in that they too have emerged (and proliferated) in New York as a necessary alternative to mainstream channels. To name just a few: Catch, a multi-faceted, multidisciplinary, rough-and-ready performance series curated and hosted by Andrew Dinwiddie and Jeff Larson; Throw, curated and moderated by Sarah Maxfield, which provides artists with a platform for ideas-in-progress and audiences with insight into performance-making; and AUNTS, founded by Jamm Leary and Rebecca Brooks, which is “about having dance happen.”

A key issue is the degree to which these alternative models are supported by volunteer labour. In his article “The Mental Labor Problem,” published in 2000, cultural studies theorist Andrew Ross states that “artists and other arts workers accept non-monetary rewards, the gratification of producing art as compensation for their work, thereby discounting the cash price of their labor.” Arguably, an over-reliance on volunteer hours also favours younger artists, creating a reduced pool of mid-career and established artists able to survive long-term absence of adequate financial and job security, and associated healthcare benefits.

Many of the people I spoke to stressed that the system was problematic well before the financial crisis. In that way, the GFC has had less of an impact on the arts as opposed to other industries; artists were already living below the poverty line.

“Since the 60s, artists in this country have worked in challenging economic circumstances,” explains Barbara Bryan, Executive Director of Movement Research, a leading laboratory for the investigation of dance and movement-based forms. “But there is greater pressure on this generation of artists. The cost of living for rent and food for all New Yorkers has increased. We’re at a tipping point.”

Critical Correspondence, a project of Movement Research, developed a video project titled “What Sustains You?” which asks dance artists about money and sustainability. Like MADE HERE, it aims to galvanise community through collective storytelling that investigates how something seemingly unsustainable continues to survive. In one video, performance maker and writer Clarinda Mac Low relates her experience of burn-out in the late 90s. “I knew that if I did continue making work it would have to be in a very different way. It would have to not rely on money. It would have to rely on exchange of resources, creating networks.”

While talk of sustainability consistently returns to notions of community and shared resources (many of them online and non-monetary), it seems the biggest challenge was identified by cultural academic and commentator Arlene Goldbard when she spoke at the launch of The Field’s findings from their ERPA grants. Goldbard insisted that society needs to value the artist, a paradigm shift to which we should all contribute.

“Artists are the stem cells of the body politic, generating the many forms of beauty, meaning, and connectivity essential to our survival, our resilience—indeed, to all hope of a sustainable future.”

THOUGH YOU MAY NOT HAVE SET FOOT IN SYDNEY’S PACT CENTRE FOR EMERGING ARTISTS, YOU HAVE DOUBTLESS FELT ITS INFLUENCE AS ITS ASSOCIATES ARE NOW WORKING AS ARTISTS, PERFORMERS, PRODUCERS, WRITERS AND LECTURERS AROUND AUSTRALIA. PACT CAN’T TAKE THE CREDIT ENTIRELY AS MANY OF THESE WERE ALSO TRAINING ELSEWHERE, CHIEFLY AT THE UNIVERSITIES OF SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES, WESTERN SYDNEY AND WOLLONGONG, BUT IT HAS BEEN A SIGNIFICANT MEETING POINT AND CREATIVE HUB, ABOVE ALL FOR EMERGING PERFORMERS.

Unsurprisingly, former and current associates feel a strong sense of ownership and follow its activities closely, so when artistic director Regina Heilmann retired from PACT in mid-2009 all eyes were on her successor Cat Jones. This year former associate director Chris Murphy has also moved on, with Julie Vulcan recently replacing her. I spoke with Jones and Vulcan about their plans for PACT.

a meeting of minds

Prior to joining PACT, Jones was working as creative co-producer for the inaugural Splendid Arts Lab and before that as the co-director of Electrofringe and a staff member of the Theatre Board of the Australia Council. In addition to these producing and curating credits, she has also worked as a devisor or performer (she originally trained in performance at QUT) with pvi and The League of Imaginary Scientists, among others, as well as on her own catgURL series. Like Jones, Vulcan has worked across many mediums. She originally trained in video art at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, exhibiting in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. From 1993 she worked as a co-devisor and performer with Icarus Performance Troupe, Frumpus and Unreasonable Adults, touring nationally and internationally. More recently, she has been working on a series of small solo works.

Jones and Vulcan first met in 2002 at the Time_Place_Space 1 hybrid arts laboratory which both agree was a pivotal moment in their respective careers because of the collaborations that resulted. When I ask them about how their practices fit together eight years later, they identify four areas of overlap. The first, says Jones, “is that both of us have really diverse backgrounds artistically,” working with “a really broad palette.” The metaphor itself speaks to their second common characteristic, which is what Jones calls a curiosity about “the link between the visual and the performative.” Both are interested in devised performance rather than more conventional forms of theatre and, last but not least, they have a strong interest in audience interaction though they can’t agree what to call it: the friendly to and fro is obviously the key to their creative partnership.

ensemble thinking

Central to PACT’s program is the Ensemble (formerly called the imPACT Ensemble), which provides professional and creative development for up to 20 emerging artists aged between 18 and 30 years. Successful applicants undertake physical and vocal training and develop and produce a new work, which runs for three weeks at the end of the year. This year, says Jones, they have kept the ensemble program largely intact “because it’s the first year and we need to test it out as close to its original form as we can; we need to know where we’ve come from in order to know where to go.”

Yet Jones has already started to make changes: this year’s program is shorter, the cohort is smaller and the creative process more intense. Whereas in previous years training commenced in May, Jones says that this year’s participants “have only been meeting once a week from August and that only stepped up to twice a week from October.” Jones says that the shorter program was necessary because, as Heilmann and Murphy reported in their RealTime interview in 2008 (RT90, p19), students now, for a variety of reasons, “struggle to commit” to extended development periods. Ensemble 2010 is also slightly smaller group—12 as opposed to the usual 16 to 20—and the group started developing their final show from their very first session, instead of roughly halfway through the program.

This short time span caused Jones and Vulcan to engage working methods to develop the group’s creative shorthand very rapidly. “Even before we started working with them,” says Jones, “we had a night where we brought everyone together in order to set up a dialogue…We talked about definitions of ensemble and performance and we started on the first round of creative tasks.” Vulcan also compiled a list of YouTube clips of contemporary performance, which included “everything from Forced Entertainment to Guillermo Gomez Pena to Spalding Gray.” Not only did this establish what Vulcan calls a “visual and shared language” it also enabled them, as Jones puts it, “to show the ensemble some of our influences without actually showing them our work, because the whole process isn’t about us as individual artists, it is about them.”

Jones and Vulcan are contemplating several changes to the ensemble and the wider program which could be summarised by the prefix inter-: interdisciplinary, international and interactive. Currently, says Jones, “the base model is all about producing performative outcomes from everyone in the ensemble. We’re talking about an ensemble that will also include a designer or other creative practitioners to expand the entire collaborative process.” While this obviously reflects Jones’ and Vulcan’s own interests and practices, it also stems from Vulcan’s observation that “there is a dearth of up-and-coming show designers—there’s very little place for them to grow. We’re thinking ‘Well, why can’t we nurture that as well?’”

a growing presence

Beyond increasing its already interdisciplinary approach, PACT is also looking to grow its national and international presence. This year the program was advertised nationally, included interstate auditions for the ensemble and several interstate artists in the program. Next year and beyond, for the wider program, Jones and Vulcan are looking to incorporate their own international networks in order to supplement what is happening locally. This will affect both “process and outcomes,” says Jones, so that some collaborations will happen via “remote hook-ups” and other “projects might have a physical realisation here but will be web-streamed overseas.”

Though the ensemble is key to PACT’s mission, its other activities are also important because they provide ongoing opportunities for working and networking. Jones and Vulcan are taking a varied approach to these programs, maintaining some schemes, formalising or augmenting others and then adding some new programs of their own. One of the programs they plan to maintain is Vacant Room, which offers emerging artists the opportunity to develop an idea or a project with the support and mentorship of the company. In addition, PACT will also remain the central point for the Erskineville Performance Art Festival (currently known as Tiny Stadiums) which not only provides a forum for emerging curators but also for emerging live artists with the entire event peer-programmed.

Jones has also introduced a new venture called The Space Program, which effectively formalises what was already happening on an informal basis whereby PACT provides subsidised space for creative developments for emerging artists. In addition, Jones is also seeking to augment the PACT Presents…program, which Heilmann and Murphy started in 2008 with Janie Gibson’s Whale Chorus and then continued in 2009 with Georgie Read’s The Paper Woman and Sally Lewry’s Back of Bourke. This year, PACT has presented as many shows again as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival (see p37), and next year it will present a total of eight shows, including dancer Matthew Day’s new show, Cannibal, which is part of the 2011 Mardi Gras program, and Grit Theatre’s production Us. But perhaps the most exciting development of all is that PACT is commissioning six Indigenous artists—all of whom worked with Wayne Blair as part of the Incubate program in 2009—to create a work during May and June which will then be performed in July for NAIDOC week.

Commissioning artists is an expensive endeavour and it has only become possible through a combination of new money, new team and new structure. Restructuring had already been under way to make the Artistic Director and Company Manager positions full-time and a Communications Coordinator role has been added. PACT’s first triennial funding from Arts NSW means that staff hours will be able to increase further, as will the company’s ability to support and encourage emerging artists. These are exciting times in Erskineville and PACT’s impact looks set to reach even further afield.

clockwise from top left – Toby Schmitz, Ewen Leslie, The Wild Duck; Robyn Nevin, Neighbourhood Watch; Lucy Guerin Inc, Human Interest Story; John Gaden, Maeve Dermody, The Seagull

BEYOND THE APPEAL OF THE SELECTED PLAYS AND ARTISTS, THEATRE COMPANY SUBSCRIPTION BROCHURES DON’T USUALLY PROVIDE EXCITING READING, BUT THE 2011 BATCH IS EXCEPTIONAL ON SEVERAL COUNTS. SAMPLING THE BROCHURES FOR BELVOIR, SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY, GRIFFIN THEATRE COMPANY AND MALTHOUSE, REVEALS SIGNIFICANT TRENDS WITH REGARD TO THE CLASSICS, NEW AUSTRALIAN PLAYS, WOMEN AND INDIGENOUS ARTISTS, OTHER FORMS OF PERFORMANCE AND ADD-ONS TO ATTRACT AUDIENCES TO THE THEATRE. INDIVIDUALLY THE BROCHURES ARE TELLING IN TERMS OF DESIGN, ATTITUDE, THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION AND THE EXPRESSION OF THEMATIC CONCERNS—SOME ARE ACTUALLY A GOOD READ.

belvoir

Belvoir’s 2011 booklet-brochure design is strikingly spare, exuding a certain European seriousness and stylishness, its string of performer portraits suggesting that actors share a common stage and the productions a collective strength. The notes are equally spare but are convivial, energetic and purposeful. As well, there’s a very marked sense of newness—new title (Belvoir instead of Company B Belvoir), new artistic director (Ralph Myers), new logo (chair+boot=horsey; that’s the magic of theatre), new roles—resident director (Simon Stone, associate director Eamon Flack and an associate artist, composer Stefan Gregory)—and upstairs and downstairs programs as part of a continuum. The very openness of the design underlines the freshness of the venture.

The notes are pithy and sometimes drolly ironic. For Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, to be directed by Stone, they read: “At the core of [Ibsen’s] work is the idea that anything less than total honesty and an exhaustive conscience will sow the seeds for future tragedy—which makes Ibsen the ideal dramatist for contemporary Australia.” The Business, based on Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova and transposed to an Australian setting, “relates to one of the great Australian themes: how we hauled ourselves out of our working class past and set out on the road to a relaxed and comfortable future.” For Shakespeare’s As You Like It, to be directed by Eamon Flack, the note reads, “At its heart is a heroically foolhardy attempt to begin society all over again, which makes this a perfect end to the first year of the new Belvoir.” Myers’ earnestly impassioned introduction is likewise tempered with a photo from the rear of him holding a copy of Bluff Your Way in Theatre.

Classics make up a large part of the program; these days they’re bound to be challenging interpretations in the hands of Simon Stone and Benedict Andrews. The latter will direct Chekhov’s The Seagull with a very strong cast: Emily Barclay, Gareth Davies, Judy Davis, Maeve Dermody and John Gaden. Neil Armfield is to direct Ray Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, with Robyn Nevin, Yael Stone, Helen Thomson and Dan Wyllie, while The Business will be directed by Cristabel Sved who has adapted the Gorky text with Australian playwright Jonathan Gavin.

Other new writing includes Melbourne playwright Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch, “a comedy about hope, death and pets,” directed by Simon Stone and featuring Robyn Nevin. Duncan Graham’s The Cut is to be directed by Sarah John; Susanna Dowling will take on four short works by Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Peter Goldsworthy and Guy De Maupassant grouped as The Kiss; and Leticia Caceres is to direct Brendan Cowell in Brisbane playwright Angela Betzien’s utterly chilling award-winner, The Dark Room.

Given the concerns loudly voiced earlier this year about limited opportunities for female artists at Belvoir, the allocation of directorial roles to Sved in the upstairs theatre and downstairs to John, Dowling and Caceres will doubtless be welcomed. As well, Kylie Farmer (seen in The Sapphires) will direct Roxanne McDonald in David Milroy’s Windmill Baby, an account of Aboriginal life on a pastoral station half a century ago with tragic dimensions. The other Indigenous work in the Belvoir program is Ilbijerri Theatre Company’s Jack Charles V The Crown, coming after its successful Melbourne International Arts Festival premiere (see review).

Belvoir has adopted Malthouse’s well established policy of including dance and contemporary performance works in its program, encouraging audiences to take a broader view of the performing arts and acknowledging the the changing nature of theatre itself. Version 1.0 and Post appeared at Belvoir Street this year and next year Melbourne’s collective “anti-institution,” The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, make their Sydney debut with Gareth Davies’ And They Called Him Mr Glamour—”a pathetically hilarious tale of a man, alone on stage, desperately seeking the audience’s attention.” (The team also appear in the 2011 Queensland Theatre Company season with the large-scale work I Feel Awful.) Belvoir also now offers dance to its patrons in the form of Lucy Guerin Inc’s spooky account of the impact of mass media triviality, Human Interest Story (RT99).

sydney theatre company

Sydney Theatre Company’s vivid brochure is the antithesis of Belvoir’s. STC continues in the vein of its 2010 publicity in which every show had its own design, but this year each is more vivid, more richly coloured, suggesting a theatrical cornucopia. Even more than this, it’s a publication that offers plenty of reading: a lively and thoughtful introduction from artistic directors Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, detailed notes about each play, testimonials, something from John Birmingham about the nature of Sydney and a page for your own notes.

In line with Blanchett and Upton’s determination to develop a cultural precinct for Sydney from Walsh Bay to the Botanic Gardens, there are engaging hand-drawn maps of the area indicating venues, eateries, walking and transport routes, including discount offers for STC subscribers.

The artistic directors write of their selection of plays from the 20th century, “We feel theatre gives you a chance to lead many lives, to experience many more moments than those (too few) allotted to us by fate. At the theatre we are outside looking in; sometimes in awe, sometimes in terror, always further. This year’s throw is loaded with the force of history. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century it seems timely to have a think about the 20th…Two World Wars, two A-Bombs, various forms of Fascism and an array of failed revolutions. Oddly for such a dark century there is a farcical quality to much of the work that emerged from it, a pitch black comedy that cuts through, delving beneath the hysteria, the fanaticism and the g-force change-rate that characterises the Age of Extremes (as Eric Hobsbawm christened it).”

As for the purpose of the selection, “The 20th century never looked crazier. The past never looked so close and snapping as it always is at our hurrying heels. Hurrying on to the future we are. A future that we convince ourselves will be better than the past we have either erased, ignored or sentimentalised. No, let’s face it. Let’s stop and take a bit of time and wonder who, what, where and why?”

The highlight of the season should be Botho Strauss’ epic, Gross und Klein (Big and Little, which was seen in productions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney in the 80s) with Blanchett as Lotte who wanders through an opaque, ungiving and increasingly bizarre world—either Lotte or society is disintegrating. The English language version is by leading UK playwright Martin Crimp, who shares not a little stylistically and thematically with Strauss, and the director is France’s Luc Bondy, a figure usually associated with major opera productions and one who should ably manage, like Blanchett, the work’s huge demands.

Among other 20th century classics are Andrew Upton’s adaptation (already successfully staged in London) of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard, Raimondo Cortese’s adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, directed by Michael Kantor with performers Paul Capsis and Eddie Perfect in a Malthouse co-production, Joe Orton’s Loot (director Richard Cotterill), and Harold Pinter’s rarely seen No Man’s Land, perfectly cast with John Gaden and Peter Carroll and to be directed by Michael Gow in a Queensland Theatre Company-STC co-production. I saw the premiere production in London in 1975 with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and can still recall the play’s disturbing power, emanating from its variation on the ‘unwelcome guest’ trope intensified by the faltering memories of the aged antagonists. The Malthouse production of Brecht’s Baal and a new production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding to be directed by Iain Sinclair with a cast that includes Lynette Curran and Leah Purcell, complete the substantial set of classics in the 2011 program.

New writing in the program includes the much-anticipated premiere of Zebra, an STC commission by Ross Mueller, one of the current handful of Australia’s brightest playwriting talents. Set in New York, it’s described as “a fast-paced, mid-life crisis comedy…ruminating on who we are post-GFC. What has plummeting from the dizzy heights of prosperity done to us as a society and as individuals? How has humiliating failure altered our self-image? Will Australia’s obsessive love affair with all things American end acrimoniously in the wake of the fall?” Zebra features Bryan Brown and Colin Friels; as with No Man’s Land, another interesting male pairing.

Also much-anticipated is Bloodland, the Indigenous component of STC’s 2011 program. From a concept by Stephen Page, story by Kathy Marika, Stephen Page and Wayne Blair, script by Wayne Blair and direction by Page, Bloodland will be performed in Indigenous language and pidgin “incorporat[ing] spiritual and physical languages, ceremonial traditional dances and mimicry of modern western culture, filtered through Aboriginal tradition.” The cast will comprise “both traditional Yolgnu people and well-known actors, to compose a new Australian work that dramatises the bitter tug-of-war taking place in a community which, despite being wracked by pain and division, hums with hope.”

In their introduction, the STC artistic directors emphasise the season’s many great roles for women; this is evident in directing as well as acting. Lee Lewis directs Zebra, Pamela Rabe takes on Sarah Ruhl’s In The Next Room, or The Vibrator Play and Sarah Goodes stages Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness while in the Education Program Naomi Edwards stages her adaptation of Hamlet, Sarah Giles directs Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon and Roslyn Oades revives her innovative Stories of Love and Hate, originally produced by Urban Theatre Projects.

There’ll be a welcome return visit by Belgium’s provocatively experimental Ontroerend Goed (Once and for all we’re gonna tell you who we are so shut up and listen, RT93; RT89) and the 2011 Next Stage program will be announced shortly.

griffin theatre company

Griffin Theatre Company’s relatively small ouput is exceeded by its influence in pinpointing talent and developing plays that will go on to have long lives. Its achievement is celebrated with a return season of Andrew Bovell’s Speaking in Tongues which was developed by former artistic director Ros Horin and premiered in 1996, later becoming the screenplay for the Ray Lawrence feature film Lantana (2001). The play will be directed by Griffin’s new artistic director Sam Strong.

Also on the program is Lachlan Philpott’s Silent Disco (a Griffin, Hothouse and ATYP co-production, directed by Lee Lewis), focused on the problematic youth world “of Speds and Bitches—fuelled by Red Bull and iPods.” The script, “with its incendiary language and defiant theatricality,” won the 2009 Griffin Award. And No More Shall We Part, by Tom Holloway, the most exciting of Australia’s younger playwrights, will receive its Sydney premiere, directed by Strong, after winning the 2010 AWGIE for Best Play and the 2010 Louis Esson Prize for Drama. The play focuses on a couple parting after a lifetime together. Local writing comes in the shape of Jane Bodie’s This Year’s Ashes, directed by Shannon Murphy, tracking the fate of a young woman in a “reluctant romantic comedy about Sydney, grief and cricket.”

Strong writes of his 2011 program, “Coming in for special attention this year is the need to connect with other people that drives us into relationships (and for that matter the theatre).” The theme is extended to Griffin Studio which will bring together writers Ian Meadows and Kate Mulvany and directors Shannon Murphy and Paige Rattray to focus, as part of their duties dramaturgical and otherwise, on the development of Museum of Broken Relationships for production in 2012. The team will invite the Griffin audience to contribute to objects and/or stories about relationships past, thus “playing a part in Australia’s very first narrative museum.” It’s an interesting way in the Facebook era to engage with an audience who’ll doubtless come looking to see if they’ve made it onto the stage.

The Griffin brochure, with its distinctive criss-crossing of text on the cover and woven through its pages—a reminder of the company’s preoccupation with words—sticks to the facts. There are no wry references to matters political or philosophical or what the director thinks Australian society needs—the plays will speak for themselves.

malthouse

The Malthouse Season 1 brochure is attractively produced as an elegant, dark green notebook with floral endpapers and the frontispiece announcement “This is a beginning, Like all beginnings.” Marion Potts is the new artistic director of Malthouse.

Rarely sighted classics are strongly represented. Potts will direct the late Jacobean tragedy by John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, with music by Andrée Greenwell; Eamon Flack directs Robert Menzies in Samuel Beckett’s The End (a co-production with Belvoir); and Bertolt Brecht’s early work, Baal, will be directed by Simon Stone in a new translation by Stone and Tom Wright. Former artistic director Michael Kantor will direct a major new work by Lally Katz, A Golem Story: “if God has turned his back on the world, who has the right to take His place?

The company’s continued commitment to dance is more than evident in the Malthouse component of the 2011 Dance Massive festival—Chunky Move’s new work Connected, Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass (see review), BalletLab’s Amplification (see review) and Gideon Obarzanek’s Faker (see review).

Pamela Rabe will direct Australian playwright Vanessa Bates’ Porn.Cake , described by Playwriting Australia’s Chris Mead as “politely ferocious and charmingly obscene.” And there’s also a return season of the much praised, Moth, a Malthouse/Arena collaboration (RT97). And that’s just Season 1.

a good read

Yes, they’re brochures not books, but they are very telling, about a period of theatre in transition, one engaging with a larger performative and cultural framework, offering more opportunities to women and Indigenous artists, hard-nosed in their treatment of classics and the nurturing of new talent (never enough room), and alert to the need to engage audiences in extra-theatrical ways (talks, post-show music etc). As well, compared with a decade ago, even five years back, current programming is rich with co-productions that ensure we see works that might never have travelled beyond their points of origin or indeed had second lives, or more. There’s also a great sense of communality, of sharing and overlap between companies of directors, writers, designers and actors and with this a growing sense of an Australian theatre both richly local and national. That’s worth reading about.

THE SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF ANTON CHEKHOV’S UNCLE VANYA LAYERS A PATINA OF THE ACCENT AND LIGHT OF MID-20TH CENTURY RURAL AUSTRALIA OVER THE PLAY’S LATE-19TH CENTURY RUSSIAN SETTING. ITS PRODUCTION OF SAM SHEPARD’S TRUE WEST, PLAYED BY AUSTRALIAN ACTORS, ONE OF THEM INDIGENOUS, IS RIGOROUSLY AMERICAN IN VOICE AND EMBODIMENT. UNCLE VANYA IS DIRECTED BY A HUNGARIAN, TRUE WEST BY AN AMERICAN. CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATIONS AND FIDELITY TO TEXTS HAVE YIELDED MORE THAN MERELY MEMORABLE THEATRE.

In each production a pair of superb male performances, Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh in Uncle Vanya, Wayne Blair and Brendan Cowell in True West, provides the volatile dynamic that unleashes new realms of feeling and insight.

uncle vanya

In the beginning, harsh sunlight glares into a huge barn of a room, flies buzz persistently, a worker in the distance chops wood. At the play’s end, the walls have closed in, the light dimmed and cut logs fall through an open door as if in readiness for the internal exile imposed by the coming winter. In the meantime relationships have unravelled to the point of violence. Talk for talk’s sake, denial and alcoholic release have failed to veil the disappointments of love and ideals unrealised.

Central to Tamas Ascher’s direction, as it was in his Ivanov for the 2009 Sydney Festival, is a superb sense of rhythmic momentum: stillness followed by sudden propulsion, outbursts, reflection, dancing, subtle personal moves (Yelena’s hand momentarily on Vanya’s), household comings and goings and obstructions—a large door that comes to symbolise emotional barriers. These alternations are embodied in the performers’ characterisations: the doctor, Astrov (Hugo Weaving), energetically and loquaciously idealistic, immediately has an eager- to-dance bounce in his loping step. Richard Roxburgh’s Vanya is awkward, restive, his clothes don’t fit and his hair sticks out at odd angles—it’s as if he’s just got out of bed and is trying to make sense of a world with which he is out of step, making him all the more frightening when he moves, gun in hand, with the energy of a killer.

Cate Blanchett’s Yelena is, as one of the characters sarcastically puts it, “a sleek, beautiful ferret,” elegant, 1950s stylish. She attempts to move smoothly through the irruptions created by her husband’s self-pity, Vanya’s advances and Astrov’s attractiveness, her self-contained rhythm only broken temporarily in a bout of loose-limbed, tipsy playfulness with her step-daughter, Sonya (Hayley McElhinney), or in a desperate, passionate embrace with the doctor. Elsewhere her empathy for Vanya and Sonya can’t be allowed to get in the way of a necessary obtuseness that goes with a protected, if loveless, life with her wealthy husband, Serebyakov (John Bell). Sonya, on the other hand, is stolid and pragmatic, her stabilising presence and her physical assuredness soon undone by her passion for Astrov, as is the comforting rhythm of managing farm life with Vanya.

What is striking about Ascher’s account of the play is his perfect balancing of tedium and tension with immediacy and viscerality—when Vanya sees Astrov and Yelena embracing, he is like a man winded; when Yelena is exhausted by Vanya’s courting she slumps from the waist almost to the floor; when Vanya and Astrov dance it is almost dangerous; even the hypochondriacal Serebyakov confined to his chair bristles with an explosive nervous energy. These are not people living in a reverie of hope and despair or slow-motion rural life; body and soul they face a crisis. And although their jobs, their roles remain the same, we have seen them change, learn, suffer—Sonya’s first yearning for love, Yelena’s glimpse of love with Astrov, Vanya’s knowledge that he is unloved, the death of friendship between Vanya and Astrov. Life will go on as before but, equally, will not.

Performances overall are excellent, vividly detailed and constantly surprising. Roxburgh and Weaving together constitute the production’s greatest strength, partly because their joint dynamic is embodied in the writing—these friends are emotional and philosophical opposites and their shared attraction to Yelena the thread around which much of the play is delicately woven. In performance, the actors’ characterisations are idiosyncratic, contrastive but compatible, and each has a particular energy, emotional and physical—Roxburgh’s fascinatingly lateral, Weaving’s forthright. This is felt right to the end when Astrov has to retrieve the stolen morphine with which Vanya might suicide.

Andrew Upton’s adaptation is lucid, the language unlaboured, unadorned (effectively homing in on a few key words like “disgusting” and “nothing”) and peppered with just enough of the vernacular in the mouths of the minor characters to make sense of the unforced cultural transposition.

Ascher’s Ivanov for the Sydney Festival in 2009 located that earlier Chekhov work in 1960s Hungary (the effect, both seductive and disturbing, as I mentioned at the time [RT89], was not unlike watching one of Czech director Milos Forman’s 60s films). With its broader, less centred social palette and Ascher’s large company, Ivanov allowed for radical stage invention and an acute sense of analogies drawn between different eras. The STC-Ascher Uncle Vanya is much more restrained in its transposition; doubtless the play’s tighter structure left little room for anything more than Australian ambience in sound, light, occasional diction alongside uncluttered, un-rhetorical contemporary playing. Chekhov’s ecological sensitivity voiced by Astrov, still feels starkly contemporary. This surprised some in the audience who suspected adaptor Andrew Upton of updating the play because the STC has just gone seriously green at its Wharf venue (www.sydneytheatre.com.au/visit/greening-the-wharf).

true west

A suburban home outside Los Angeles: kitchen, pot-plants, a writer at work, someone standing in the dark behind him. The sense of threat is immediate (the set thrusts out almost into the audience) and is sustained throughout American actor and director Philip Seymour Hoffman’s account of Sam Shepard’s True West.

The threat develops an increasingly delirious edge as the renegade desert-dweller Lee (Wayne Blair) takes over the life of his screenplay writer brother Austin (Brendan Cowell), goading him into crime (Austin opts for the non-violence of stealing toasters), usurping Austin’s contract with a producer so that he can get his ‘true’ western made, and forcing Austin to help him script it (“I want to do it myself…just help me get the talking right”). Lee, however, becomes preoccupied with the very art he has hitherto viciously derided (“What? You’re paid to dream?”) while Austin begins to reject anything that will compromise his integrity as a writer. He declares there is no true West (the streets of his childhood now look to him like replicas) and grows seemingly insane, but appears, at the very least, to be his own man. Art becomes too much for Lee who decides to return to the desert, despite having admitted that it has never constituted freedom so much as a refuge from the punishing suburban life that rendered him an outsider in the first place.

Shepard, like his near contemporary Harold Pinter, generates menace by creating in Lee a master manipulator who uses the ambiguities of language to trap his less verbally skilled prey with skewed logic and rhythmically forceful delivery. Lee’s aggression is compounded by physical threat, driving Austin to hide ineffectively amidst the pot-plants and to reluctantly comply with his wishes. Lee likewise repeatedly smashes the typewriter that will not yield the words he wants and, with Austin, eventually trashes their mother’s home as their joint reality becomes increasingly unhinged.

Blair’s Lee speaks with an almost movie-gangsterish growl, occupies space as if it was his alone, moves suddenly from sheer stillness into attack mode, and, most frighteningly, in his moments of revelation, stares wide-eyed into the distance as a prelude to some act of nastiness. Cowell’s Austin is tight, hands kept close to the body, his speech and walk neat, verging on fey. As the role reversal unfolds, Austin manically asserting himself (making a mountain of toast) and Lee rattled by the demands of art, the mood and body language changes: Austin becomes the threatening, psychotic presence. Blair and Cowell execute the reversal expertly, on the way adroitly playing out the episodes Shepard binds to riffing arguments about Idaho plates, art, golf, movie car chases and scriptwriting (a rare moment of hilarious unanimity over the rightness of, “I’m on intimate terms with this prairie”).

Wayne Blair, Brendan Cowell and Phillip Seymour Hoffman have finely realised True West’s raw, scary, scintillating portrait of brotherhood—loveless, intimidating and, finally, deadly, revealing how exclusion, the broken family and (as the nearest-to-hand excuse for Lee) Hollywood-fuelled creative ambitions can combine explosively. True West is a further step in STC’s welcome engagement with American theatre, its plays and its artists, while the invitation to Tamas Ascher to direct Uncle Vanya has proven to be even more cross-culturally inspired.

Sydney Theatre Company: Uncle Vanya, writer Anton Chekhov, director Tamas Ascher, performers Richard Roxburgh, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, John Bell, Hayley McElhinney, Sandy Gore, Anthony Phelan, Jackie Weaver, Andrew Tighe, designer Zsolt Khell, lighting Nick Schlieper, composer/sound designer Paul Charlier; Sydney Theatre, opened Nov 13; True West, writer Sam Shepard, director Philip Seymour Hoffman, performers Wayne Blair, Brendan Cowell, Alan Dukes, Heather Mitchell, designer Richard Roberts, lighting Paul Jackson, composer, sound designer Max Lyandvert; Wharf 1, STC, Sydney, opened Nov 2

THE SYDNEY FRINGE FEATURED SOME 200 SHOWS OF WHICH I CAUGHT A MERE HANDFUL AT PACT AND CARRIAGEWORKS. IT GRABBED A LOT OF MEDIA ATTENTION, ATTRACTED LARGE AUDIENCES FOR SOME SHOWS (ESPECIALLY AT CARRIAGEWORKS), SMALL FOR OTHERS (SOME ARTISTS COMPLAINED TO THE PRESS ABOUT LACK OF MARKETING SUPPORT), HANDED OUT MANY AWARDS WITH ITS SPONSORS AND TRUMPETED HUGE TICKET SALES, 35,000, AND MASSIVE BENEFITS FOR THE LOCAL ECONOMY. WISELY FOCUSED IN INNER CITY SUBURBS (REDFERN, ERSKINEVILLE AND MARRICKVILLE), THE SYDNEY FRINGE MAY WELL HAVE GAINED SUFFICIENT TRACTION IN 2010 TO GUARANTEE ITSELF A FUTURE.

matthew day: thousands

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. Day, who studied at the University of Western Sydney and the Victorian College of the Arts, describes himself as a choreographer and dancer who works across dance, performance, film/video, queer cabaret, drawing and theory. Watch out for more from Matthew Day.

skye gellmann: retinal damage

Skye Gellmann, of Scattered Tacks fame (RT97), likewise induces an altered state in his audience. Two small rows of us face each other across a narrow performance space, plunged into darkness save for the flickerings of a slide projector that enable the artist to undo our perception of space. We see Gellman appear and disappear; we feel the rush of air and the too-near proximity of his body as he somersaults between us in the dark; we watch with the scary luxury of a close-up as, inches away, hands on wooden blocks, he walks upside down. As with Matthew Day, the proximity of the performance, the artist’s control, focus and inventive visual play, and a sense of risk, make for a very special experience of the body.

appelspiel: appeloft

Appeloft is performance taken to the nth degree of informality and apparent happenstance. Again, intimacy rules, but skill and focus are out of the picture—calculatedy elided in favour of building an aura of spontaneity. We’re seated on ancient lounge suites, fed homey cakes and treated like acquaintances who’ve wandered into a student party and are expected to participate, if with minimum pressure. The performance climaxes in a collective dance in sleeping bags. It’s painless fun with stories that don’t go anywhere (these people remind us just how slick Forced Entertainment are), games that don’t make sense and a silly making of a radio play that amusingly toys with vegetables and the relation of image to sound. But threaded through the non-sense are matters that are not played for their drama but nonetheless suggest deeper concerns: a female performer who is losing her eyesight decides she wants to cut the fruit that will be handed out to us, and an odd tale is told of the opening of revealing letters to a presumed-to-be-dead previous tenant. This is amiable performance, hovering between script and improvisation and dependent on the company’s ability to consistently riff in the party manner, which it largely did. I look forward to seeing what Appelspiel (whose members studied together at the University of Wollongong) can get up to beyond the party format.

elbow room: tiny chorus

Elbow Room’s well-travelled, much praised, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney Fringe festivals’ audience favourite, A Tiny Chorus is a clever take on the mechanics of clown duos of the ilk of Laurel and Hardy but, significantly, without manifesting the physical violence that typically results from dumb errors, envy, greed, embarrassment and one-upmanship that characterise the form. These are all on show in A Tiny Chorus, but crystallised into near stillness, slow, slow burns, simple motifs (a red straw and scissors) and routines (involving variously a jar of gherkins, jelly and a balloon) and climaxing with the requisite pathos as one clown gives the other heart, and a voice. The director and performers clearly know their clown stuff, even if it is stripped back and very knowing, delivering a meticulously crafted production, occasionally funny, if never hilarious.

aerialize: clammy glamour from the curio-cabinet

The sense of risk and mortality inherent in circus is made palatable by the pleasures of clowning, spectacle and the erotic. In Clammy Glamour from the Curio-Cabinet, Annabel Lines and Simone O’Brien, directing for the Aerialize circus training centre, heighten the engagement with death (a skeleton man, a possible killer) and sexuality. They weave together a large cast of skilled performers in an impressionistic, Edwardian gothic saga of seduction, rivalry, abduction and murder where the tools of the circus trade (ribbons, ropes, nets, trapeze and hoops) become the means not merely for virtuosic performance but equally for entrapment. The variety of characters (a lizard-like green imp, a hare, a clockwork doll, ‘diabolical’ twins), routines and layered deployment of the large performance space lend Clammy Glamour (there’s not a little sweat exuded) an epic quality that overrides the opacity of its delirious narrative. A little trimmer, more organic re-working would be worth a return season.

tantrum theatre: peepshow

Newcastle’s Tantrum Theatre presented a version of their March 2009 production Peepshow, a site-specific response to the architecture and history, real and imagined, of the city’s Civic Arcade. Inevitably that specificity was lost when transposed to PACT’s courtyard, foyer and performance space, but we did get a glimpse of some of the talent of this youth company’s senior ensemble. We were led through a series of solo performances, entailing encounters with a scary homeless guy blessed with tunnel-vision wit; a feckless party hostess determined to keep imaginary sexist male guests at bay; another hostess, anxious that we know our place and manners; an abrasive, sexist porn filmmaker who corralled us into auditioning; and, finally, a business woman frantically grappling with a whiteboard with a mind of its own—a finely sustained piece of comic business. While most of the performers got the tone right for their personae, the overall impression of Peepshow in this setting was of incomplete episodes and an absence of overall structure and context, for which the calibre of the performers was some compensation.

The Sydney Fringe: Matthew Day, Thousands, sound design James Brown, PACT, Sept 18-25; Skye Gellman, Retinal Damage, www.skyebalance.com, PACT, Sept 10-17; Appelspiel, Appeloft, PACT, Sept 17-25; Elbow Room, A Tiny Chorus, director Marcel Dorney, performer-devisors Eryn Jean Norvill, Emily Tomlins, CarriageWorks, Sept 10-25; Aerialize, Clammy Glamour from the Curio-cabinet, directors Annabel Lines, Simone O’Brien, CarriageWorks; Tantrum Theatre, Peepshow, director Brendan O’Connell; PACT Sept 16-23

OBVIOUSLY BIENNALE FATIGUE HAD SET IN! I HAD DESTROYED MY FAVOURITE PAIR OF SHOES CRISS-CROSSING LIVERPOOL BUT WAS STILL HAUNTED BY THAT UNDER-NOURISHED SENSATION: SURELY THERE MUST BE MORE? AND WHERE WAS THAT MYSTERIOUS SOUND ART SHOW ANNOUNCED ON THE SMALL FLYER I KEPT SPOTTING IN VEGAN CAFES?

I knew I was getting close, somewhere on a cobbled side street just off the Rope Walks, in Liverpool’s manic club zone. I finally stumbled into a doorway with the correct address, but no, just a very funky record store, with a bunch of feral dudes setting up piles of well worn equipment. “Some kind of sound art show around here?” I ventured, “Sorry pal, maybe over the street like.” It looked interesting though, so I hung around a bit; there was even a record cutting lathe in there and heaps of old vinyl—but I was on a mission, my cultural stamina flagging and pressed for time, so across the cobbles I went.

The light switched on only a day or so later while I was discussing the Biennial with Asher Remy-Toledo the curator of No Longer Empty on the Road. I realised the funky record store was indeed an art project, but so convincing a simulation that even the roadies were duped!

Ted Riederer recreated his Never Records project which had made its debut in January 2010 in the old and abandoned Tower Records store in New York City. Riederer’s angle was to propose the record store as a site of social exchange and cultural production, part shop, part archive and part recording studio (hence the roadies with all that gear). During the Biennial, Never Records worked directly with the community, running performance and recording sessions and cutting and publishing vinyl—the local musos were very impressed!

No Longer Empty (www.nolongerempty.org) is a relative newcomer to the New York cultural scene but has already been astonishingly prolific. NLE is a volunteer-run program that takes over empty buildings and public sites, transforming them with temporary site-specific installations and events, often with little or no financial support. Not some flakey, mural painting hobby group, it is structured around professional museum curatorial practices, but is also plugged into the grass roots of artistic production in NYC and offers a platform for young arts professionals to volunteer their services in curatorial, management and PR roles. Asher Remy-Toledo, the co-founder and co-director of NLE, has recently branched out with an international version, NLE on the Road, with the first incarnation at Liverpool (so watch this space).

Okay, just across that cobbled street is a large semi-industrial building, either half-finished or half-demolished, another of those grand architectural projects that ran out of cash, another still-born investment. But just because it didn’t make it as a suite of IT or architects’ offices doesn’t mean it can’t resurrect as a great venue for sound art! Normally contemporary architecture makes a vile context for the sonic arts but this structure is so unfinished and labyrinthine that the 10 audio projects survive without too much cross-talk.

I head for the basement where traces of harmonic pulsing are seeping up the fire stairs. As I fumble around in the darkness of this bunker-like space the harmonics rise and fall, accompanied by swirling, circular traces of LEDs. The eyes acclimatise and the skeletal towers of Ray Lee’s Murmur come into focus, each topped by a rotating jib armed with a speaker, a visual ballet mechanique but sonically closer to the drone of a million industrious honey bees. Concerned about the work’s capacity to hypnotise, I head upstairs.

Turning a corner I narrowly miss falling into Phil Jeck’s Pool of Voices, a whimsical sculptural re-working of 1960s vinyl record players and paraphernalia. Jeck discovered three large pits sunken into the concrete floor and developed a site-specific work around them, literally turning sections into pools in which vinyl discs sink or swim, whilst others contain serried ranks of late valve or early transistor-powered turntables playing a chorus of voice fragments and synthetic sound. Jeck, a Liverpudlian who has worked with records and electronics since the 1980s, focuses on the excavation of meaning and poetry from the traces of history and memory that infuse abandoned technology, as one of his aptly titled prior works announces—Vinyl Requiem.

Leaving the domestic and anecdotal metaphors of the Pool of Voices, I enter a mausoleum-sized space to the sound of Old Glory and a visual horizon formed by five large and very black coffins. Giuseppe Stampone’s Play is inspired by the five countries that have contributed most effectively (and generously) to the collapse of the world economy. Play is a disarmingly simple work, at once theatrical and sinister and as such not unlike any normal funeral. This medley of national anthems is a wake for the wellbeing of millions in which profits have been privatised and debt has been made public—are you still proud enough to sing along?

I have run out of time (and space) and have to jump on a train (and plane) to get back to my own sound art show in Finland, but just before I go, around the corner from Lime Street station is another sound work in the historic Renshaw Hall, now incongruously (one might say savagely) gutted as a car park. Marina Rosenfeld’s soundscape Public Address No. 2 emanates from old-style spectral speakers mounted in the gods of the building, sweeping the transient vehicular traffic with fragments of an abstract composition. To broker a deal to install sound in a public space is one of the trickiest things ever, ergo the almost total paucity of permanent public sound-works. We make a polite and concerned tech-check with the lads in the pay booth and ask after their tolerance for really loud sound art. They grin; as we already know, Liverpool lads are pretty tough!

No Longer Empty on the Road, curator Asher Remy-Toledo, SQUAT program (Social Questioning Using Art Today), www.squatliverpool.com, Liverpool Biennale 2010, Liverpool, UK, Sept 18-Nov 27

THE GUTTED QUEEN’S THEATRE IN ADELAIDE, A HERITAGE-LISTED GALVANISED IRON AND BRICK CAVERN WITH AN ASPHALT FLOOR, IS THE SITE FOR THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION (AEAF) EXHIBITION (TO) GIVE TIME TO TIME, A GROUP SHOW SURVEYING EPHEMERAL AND TIME-BASED ART PRACTICES THAT HAVE EMERGED SINCE THE 1970S. COLOGNE-BASED ARTIST JOHANNES SISTERMANNS’ PERFORMANCE, IN TIME IS TRANSITION, TAKES PLACE AMONGST THE OTHER WORKS IN THE SHOW, INCLUDING HIS OWN INSTALLATION, INTUITION ROOM.

In the back corner of the theatre, lengths of kitchen clingwrap are tautly stretched between two pillars and the wall to demarcate a small space—the Intuition Room. Two piezo transducers attached to the wrap transmit a high-pitched but barely audible sound recording that lightly vibrates the stretched surface. The wrap reflects ambient light from other exhibits, overhead windows and the distant doorway. This fragile, whispering, Art Povera enclosure contrasts with the barren grandeur of the empty theatre, eliciting a sense of the uncanny.

Sistermanns enters from the far doorway pulling a thick roll of cling wrap, the end of which is attached near the entrance. He walks slowly, stretching the wrap to breaking point behind him, and more sound emanates from tiny loudspeakers in his pockets. He winds the plastic around another pillar and continues his walk, stopping occasionally, sometimes pushing his face into the wrap and singing a wordless falsetto through it that becomes a growl, vibrating it like a piezo and finding the theatre’s sonic resonance. He mimes eating the material before finally reaching the Intuition Room and so connecting the building’s entrance to this temporary space. The boundaries between performance and installation and between installation and site seem deliberately vague, as if they are a continuum. The slowness and abstraction of Sistermanns’ movement suggest powerful emotions on the verge of expression but ultimately withheld, inviting the audience to join in this pre-conscious and even cathartic moment.

Sistermanns later revealed that the sound is a mix of birdsong and ambient noise recorded at Oratunga in the Flinders Ranges, blended with ‘room tones,’ the standing waves created when sound is used to map a room’s sonic character. He has conducted performances at Oratunga in collaboration with architect and academic Gini Lee. This performance is an extension of that project, bringing to the city the sounds of the distant Flinders Ranges, a site that is significant for its Indigenous heritage and for being the location of some of the world’s oldest fossils. Time there is measured in eras.

Sistermanns’ 30-minute performance speaks of wrapping, not in the literal Christo & Jeanne-Claude manner, but symbolically, with the creation of a new space and the transient projection of sound into it to shift its form and character. Transparent plastic wrap can be made visible in the right light and, when transmitting sound, the insubstantial material acts as a carrier of information. Sistermanns has installed such work in a variety of locations and even in a garden to show how sound and space function in relation to each other. The location itself is appropriated as a novel element of the work and renews the audience’s perception of that space. The addition of the performance makes the awareness of sound in space still more acute, even poignant.

Australian Experimental Art Foundation, (To) Give Time to Time: Johannes Sistermanns, Intuition Room and In Time is Transition, Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide, Sept 11

I GOT LOST, THE CHAMBER MADE OPERA SIGN HAD FALLEN DOWN IN FRONT OF THE ELWOOD HOME, AND I WAS GREETED AT THE DOOR BY A LABRADOR PUPPY, BUT EVENTUALLY I WAS MILLING AROUND THE OPEN PLAN LIVING SPACE WHERE THE ITCH WAS TO BE STAGED.

Chamber Made Opera’s initiative is bold and timely: to address the arts’ fixation on government subsidy by producing a series of chamber operas in living rooms around Melbourne. The audience commission the work through buying tickets, while the host provides the site and context for the performance. As the lights of Fiona Sweet and Paul Newcombe’s kitchen were flicked on and off, the patrons seated themselves for the itchiest night of their lives.

The 19th century music theorist Eduard Hanslick diagnosed as “pathological” music whose principal effect on the listener was a “morbid irritation of the nervous system.” Beyond the physical excitations of rhythm and melody, music needed form if it was to satisfy the mind as well as the body. Though Alex Garsden’s agitating timbral creations for viola, cello, double bass, and female voice are fitting examples of Hanslick’s “pathological” music, they find their form as the physical side of an allegory, which I would like to call the “itch-scratch” model of the creative process developed by director Margaret Cameron. If Garsden’s music provides the itch, then the scratch is the dramatic form provided by Atul Gawande’s article from The New Yorker, June 30, 2008. If the itch-scratch model applies to all creative activity, then it also applies to Garsden’s compositional process. His use of both traditional and graphic scoring techniques not only represent the creative itch, but also influence the dramatic form of the work.

Gawande tells the story of M who awoke one morning with an itch on her scalp. The itch would not go away: not after medication, surgery nor scratching through her skull to her brain. Gawande likens M’s itch to a phantom limb resulting from a neuropsychological misrecognition of what is really going on in the body. Phantom itches are particularly easy to conjure: I have scratched my scalp three times just writing this paragraph. As The Itch demonstrates, Hanslick’s physical and Gawande’s mental pathologies are closely connected; thinking words such as ‘itch’ and ‘scratch’ is nothing compared to hearing Garsden’s score.

Himself informed by a bout of chicken pox during the composition period, Garsden conjures phantom itches using the most physical of musical resources. With a string trio scraping, rasping and rubbing their instruments for the better part of an hour, the composer makes it impossible to forget that every bowed instrument comes with half a metre-odd of taut, coarse, sticky, powder-coated hair. There are moments of simply unbearable tension produced through brutal, grinding bow-strokes contrasted with niggling tremoli on the edge of hearing.

Performer Carolyn Connors’ seemingly limitless timbral repertoire carries the audience through M’s bildungsroman-like battle with the itch. The audience feels a visceral sympathy with the woman as she resists the temptation to scratch with hair brushes, paint scrapers, gardening forks and bread knives. At least one person had to excuse herself in a (I like to think) sonically induced coughing fit. Though uncomfortably effective in its physical communication of itchiness, Cameron believes there is more to The Itch than meets the ear.

To the director, the itch is a “creative proposition,” an irresistible desire to create that cannot be directly satisfied. As Cameron suggests, “you can develop a relationship to it, a congruent relationship, a kind of equivalence between form and content.” M’s “congruent” answer to her itch is religion, a non-resolution that sees her exhaustedly croak a creepy chorale, holding aloft a crucifix of wire brushes. The pained chorale gives momentary form to her fathomless itch. She holds the crucifix immobile, as a ward against the temptation that previously saw her draw brushes and knives closer and closer to her vulnerable skin, or carve open a grapefruit filled with viscous, green fluid.

If M seeks momentary respite from her affliction through religious rituals and artefacts, Cameron seeks to allay the creative itch with dramatic structure, a process that she frames in terms of making dramatic sense of Garsden’s music. However, Garsden’s own congruent itch-scratch informs the dramatic structure of The Itch through his juxtaposition of traditional and graphic scoring techniques. Garsden’s graphic scores are collages of blood, bone and brain, unfortunately obscured from the audience’s view by the performers’ music stands. The performers read the scores using parameters set by Garsden. The horizontal axis determines duration, while gradations of shade and hue indicate timbre and pitch respectively. As Garsden noted, while the traditional score was made from a sonic basis by sampling and arranging workshop recordings, the graphic scores were produced through a primarily visual process. Like M and her crucifix, Garsden’s graphic resolution to the musical itch evades the fraught business of musical scratching.

In the context of The Itch, Garsden’s juxtaposition of traditional notation and graphic scoring results in contrasting moments of intense, timbral sophistication and freer, wandering movements. While performers and composers attempt to make the rendering of graphic scores as precise as possible, much relies upon a performer’s ability to improvise around a score’s parameters. In this instance, Garsden gives the performers freedom to wander on the vertical axis of the score as they move horizontally through the image, gaining access to different timbres and pitches. The performers also improvise dynamics and the techniques they use to render the timbral and pitch specifications. Providing moments of reflective calm between Connors’ tortured recitatives, they add interest to a performance that threatens to become a too-literal setting of Gawande’s article. Graphic and traditional scoring then form a cross that informs the dramatic structure of the piece. With its restless combination of dramatic form and pathological music, The Itch is itself an example of creative congruency.

Chamber Made Opera, The Itch, composer Alex Garsden, director Margaret Cameron, performer Carolyn Connors, viola Phoebe Green, cello Judith Hamann, double bass Anita Hustas, conductor Brett Kelly; private home, Melbourne, Nov 19, 20

ALEX MONTEITH’S ACCELERATED GEOGRAPHIES IS ONE OF ONLY THREE SHOWS IN THE GOVETT-BREWSTER GALLERY’S 40-YEAR HISTORY THAT HAS COMMANDEERED THE ENTIRE VIEWING SPACE. AT THE ENTRANCE, VISITORS ARE ISSUED WITH FLUORESCENT YELLOW EARMUFFS, THOUGH MOST PREFER TO ABSORB THE FULL POWER OF THE HOWLING AND THROBBING THAT PERMEATES THE GALLERY SPACE.

Monteith has put the audio back in audio-visual, and long before you have sighted the full spectrum of multi-screen video installations, your eardrums have become acquainted with their soundtracks, blending subtly, and not so subtly, into a sonic whole that makes the gallery pulsate.

Works are numbered but there is no need for sequential viewing. There is no ‘narrative’ and in a sense all Monteith’s works do the same thing differently, riffing off each other as different angles or points of view trained on the same territory. And territory is one of the things Monteith’s work is all about.

It’s tempting to ascribe the artist’s fascination with the politics of place to the fact that she grew up in Northern Ireland, which perhaps also offers a clue as to why military vehicles (helicopters and airplanes) figure so prominently in her landscapes. It might also explain her deep sympathies with the Maori sovereignty movement, in which issues of land, ownership and occupation remain barely healed wounds.

But there’s another, more immediate aspect to Monteith’s practice which both augments and destabilises her politics; her love of danger and the throbbing machine. Not since the Italian Futurist Marinetti eulogised speed as the only beauty worth celebrating and the motorcar as its ultimate incarnation, has an artist derived such thrills from where the rubber meets the road. Apart from the surfing video Red Session #2, 2009 (Monteith was herself a surf champion), the entire exhibition can be read as a love letter to the internal combustion engine. Unlike Marinetti’s impassioned manifesto, however, Monteith’s digital love letter comes post-peak oil, where the future of excess consumption is uncertain at best. But Monteith’s political persuasions are the polar opposite of the proto-Fascist Marinetti, which makes her 21st century reworking of his macho-machinist lexicon all the more confounding.

But therein also lies the key to her success—for Monteith the petrol-head, the adrenaline junkie is deeply engaged in the communities of pilots, surfers, activists and motorcyclists she portrays. This isn’t some relational art junket where the artist travels the globe forcing dictatorial outcomes upon people she’ll never see again. Alex Monteith is committed to the sports she portrays; whether surfing or motorcycling, she’s just as likely to be in shot as out of it. When this attention is transferred to another community of expertise, for example the Royal New Zealand Air Force, her up-close and personal experiences with the technicalities of risk and speed allow her access to worlds that remain closed to most of us. Speaking a kind of universal language of controlled acceleration, she is, in effect, one of the blokes. Yet her non-bloke status gives the works a subtle nuance, another level in the discourse around insider/outsider, another perspective on territory and community.

The first work the viewer is confronted with is also the most recent, Composition with RNZAF No. 3 Squadron Exercise Blackbird For Three-Channel Video Installation, 2010 (Monteith’s titles are all very Kosuthian in their ‘what you read is what you get’ logic). Three Air Force Iroquois helicopters take off from the South Island’s Leese Valley, tussock grass billowing like tousled fur. I use the furry metaphor deliberately, because for a show all about machinery, there’s a strangely animalistic evocation in the gallery, a growling presence. Perhaps it’s the wildness within that we designate as animal because it scares us? The helicopters are plenty scary as they hover, black and brutish, over misty mountain peaks, the sublime natural landscape matching the magnificence of the war machines. The US Military named the majority of their helicopter models after Native American tribes, and ‘Iroquois’ graced the machine that is forever linked to the Vietnam War, a bitterly ironic label given its use in the attempted subjugation of an indigenous population.

The flipside to military might occurs in a quiet room, where Red Session #2 laps away along four screens, while two protest videos play back to back on a diagonal screen. These aren’t images of people marching or shouting, rather, in keeping with Monteith’s predilection for the motor, and in the era of the shopping mall and the drive-thru, they are vehicular. One features two red Land Rovers flying Tino Rangatiratanga (Maori sovereignty) flags in the Taranaki region, while the other depicts a small phalanx of vehicles, similarly decked out, being escorted by police over the Auckland Harbour Bridge on Waitangi Day 2008 (subsequently, the government decided to allow the flying of the Tino Rangatiratanga flag from the bridge on our national day). Monteith has dedicated Red Session #2 and the Taranaki protest work to the late Te Miringa Hohaia, who was a bridge between Maori and Pakeha activist and artist communities. Hohaia put Parihaka back on the map as the legendary Taranaki site where Maori prophets Te Whiti and Tohu gave birth to passive resistance while Gandhi was still a boy. Parihaka, as much as the Govett-Brewster, has brought artists of a political persuasion to Taranaki, particularly the collective Local Time, of which Monteith is part.

In all this talk of communities, however, let’s not forget the art community, to whom Monteith pays homage with the intense rigour and formalism she brings to each project. The video screen can be likened to an abstract picture plane, and nowhere is this more apparent than Ascents and Descents in Real Time, V1 and V2, 2008, in which motocross riders traverse a sand dune, carving brushstrokes across a great golden canvas. In Composition with RNZAF Red Checkers for Five-Channel Video Installation, 2009, the five yellow tail wings maintain a central verticality while the landscape tilts, other planes loop and veer, and contrails billow across the blue sky. And in Looping Manoeuvre with Shaun Harris and Onboard Dual-Cams for Two-Channel Video Installation, 2008, the motorcycle champion creates lurching diagonals, which are either mesmerising or sick-making, depending on your constitution. It’s a kind of Stargate Sequence for would-be racers, an opportunity for voyeuristic thrills. But what differentiates Monteith is that she is not a voyeur, but a participant. Her work is about delivering her audience that coveted point-of-view shot, so that they, too, can be up close and personal with the action. Her work does not describe these worlds, it lives these worlds, presenting them to us with palpable integrity.

Alex Monteith, Accelerated Geographies, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand, Sept 25-Nov 28; www.govettbrewster.com/

RIVERS EVOKE JOURNEYS AND A SENSE OF PASSAGE. ON A QUIET SUNDAY MORNING AT THE CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE, IT WAS THE GRINDING WHIR OF A MOTOR THAT FIRST DREW ME TOWARD JUN NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA’S HALLUCINATORY TRIPARTITE FILM, THE GROUND, THE ROOT AND THE AIR (2004-07).

I soon found myself transported to Laos as I followed a flotilla of boats carrying art students painting at their easels, gliding down the Mekong, the brisk pace of the boats and the amplified volume of their engines at odds with the slow and tranquil activity of making art. The contradiction alluded to the ways modernity can run in opposing currents to tradition and was just one of the many explorations into the psychological and physical terrain of the river that visitors were invited to undertake at the Arts Centre’s latest exhibition, The River Project.

In fact, the notion of opposing currents offers an apt avenue into not only The River Project but also the debate over waterways generally, as the current difficulties the Murray Darling Basin Authority faces in negotiating competing economic and environmental demands clearly demonstrate. The River Project didn’t deal specifically with this river system: however it did take the Campbelltown Upper Georges as its starting point, then extended its reach to arteries throughout the Asia-Pacific from China, Korea, the Philippines and India, to Vietnam, Papua New Guinea and Laos, offering a kaleidoscopic view of the diverse factors driving rivers toward crisis point. Yet as much as this interdisciplinary program exhibited a strong environmental conscience, it didn’t feel like an eco art show since curator Binghui Huangfu appeared more concerned with engagement than activism. In this way, most artists departed from literal responses in favour of more open-ended and sophisticated styles of visual poetry, resulting in a surprisingly diverse, nuanced and frequently absorbing program.

Particularly affecting was Reena Kallat’s installation 2 Degrees (2010), which responded to the geopolitical volatility of the Indus River Basin on the border of India and Pakistan where most recently disastrous flooding from severe monsoonal rains cost thousands of lives and rendered over 20 million people homeless. With just a soundtrack of gushing water, a hybrid tree—half Indian Banyan, half Pakistani Deodar—painted directly onto the wall with henna and a row of ceramic vessels seismically split down the middle and marooned in a sea of broken shards, Kallat imaginatively transported the viewer to a flooded riverbank, eliciting empathy via the senses. Drawing the viewer into the aftermath, the installation rendered universal the sense of loss and vulnerability humans experience at the hands of natural disasters as well as the painful divisions that can be forged between nations over water.

The displacement of human communities and natural resources was likewise conjured elliptically in Zhuang Hui’s suite of black and white photographs which depicted geological close-ups of holes in the ground the artist had dug over a decade ago in regions to be affected by the Three Gorges Dam, Longitude 109.88E and Latitude 31.09N (1995, 2008). The holes now deeply submerged, video footage of the Yangtze on the opposite wall pointed to the cause and effect relationship, the void in between creating an air of elegy and melancholia. Vietnamese artist Tiffany Chung, meanwhile, responded to annual flooding of the Mekong with varying degrees of light and shade in a series of five topographic maps including one charming mixed media work that mapped the migratory routes of local fish species. Like a spider spinning cobwebs across a canvas, Chung plotted a dense network of sprawling tracks with pearlescent beads, trails of brightly coloured stitching and clusters of silver grommets, offering an optimistic and joyful celebration of the rich diversity of life that abundant water breeds.

Works by Cao Fei, Ringo Bunoan, Minouk Lim and MM Yu among others exhibited a strong focus on Asia. Meanwhile a selection of specially commissioned works by prominent Sydney artists responding to the local landscape reflected the program’s role as a key component of the three-year Upper Georges River Urban Sustainability Project. Indigenous artist Graham ‘Nudge’ Blacklock’s painting The Point, The Georges River (2010) employed highly expressive, radiating brushwork to capture the region’s spiritual resonance while Elisabeth Cummings’ deft, painterly treatment revealed the land’s lyrical beauty to be marred by evidence of subsidence from longwall mining. Along with a suite of cryptic photographs by Bonita Ely that married reportage with more poetic meditations, these works offered aesthetically interesting inroads to discussion, although their location at the entrance, rather than in the main gallery spaces integrated with the international works, made them appear somewhat adjunct.

Mike Parr, Gotaro Uematsu, Pure Water Into Polluted Water 2010, Georges River, performance still

Given rivers have long symbolised flux and impermanence, the restaging of three seminal performance works was particularly well suited to the exhibition’s theme and highlighted the unstable meanings of performances over time. In addition to Chinese artist Song Dong’s ongoing gesture of writing calligraphy with water, Water Diary (2010), and the repetition of a 1995 action of scrubbing down frozen blocks of polluted water by the Beijing-based Yin Xiuzhen, Washing River (2010), an invitation was also extended to Sydney artist Mike Parr to revisit a performance from 1971, Pure Water into Polluted Water. Initially the action saw Parr drop a plastic bag filled with distilled water into the Georges River to produce a Minimalist-style “hole in nature”; however, when Parr came to revisit the gesture he soon realised the plastic bag had become a too heavily loaded material. To regain some of the gesture’s initial conceptual potency he revisited the action with a clear perspex cube and in an accompanying community discussion noted how this sinking message in a bottle epitomises our psychological problem as humans—“we want to have an effect.”

Community involvement took an unusual turn, too, in the form of a formidable Maori Waka canoe restored and carved by young local job seekers, led by Verdun Walker and Peter T Elers, and moored in one of the gallery’s main spaces amidst an installation of contemporary and traditional art from Papua New Guinea, The Sepik River Project. Something of an exhibition within an exhibition, and one that could warrant its own review, The Sepik River Project was a fascinating exercise in cross-cultural exchange, presenting cultural artefacts acquired by independent curator Dr Susan Cochrane alongside portraits painted by Port Moresby artist Jeffry Feeger on a recent trip to the Sepik River. The pair had in fact navigated their journey along the river by canoe. There were also paintings created by local artists when Feeger and Cochrane gifted the Sepik some contemporary art materials. According to Cochrane, “within two days, some 30 paintings and drawings of Kambot ancestral stories were produced, and the painting session was still going when it was time to leave.”

Making my way out of the gallery, I paused to admire a tableaux of 36 photographs documenting another performance by Song Dong, Stamping the Water (1996). Propped on the surface of the Lhasa River, the artist lifted an archaic wooden seal carved with the Chinese character for water high above his head then plunged it with great physical exertion into the water as if trying, however futile the effort, to imprint the uncontainable. Like Parr’s Pure Water Into Polluted Water, this was an action of conceptual sophistication that also held something of the charm of riddles. It was the slippery, more mysterious and elusive moments like these that arguably proved The River Project’s most compelling. If it lacked anything it was a sense of the fury and passion surrounding contested and polluted waterways; however by engaging the imagination these quietly powerful works revealed how rivers are not only vital natural conduits and givers of life, but also deeply connected to memory, desire, cultural identity, spiritual pilgrimage and mental transformation. When it comes to reasons to get the balance right to ensure their future survival, how many more do we need?

The River Project, curator Binghui Huangfu, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Aug 28-Oct 24

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF NOVEMBER, AS TWILIGHT REACHED PERFORMANCE SPACE AT CARRIAGEWORKS SO DID THE WEATHER. THE CHANCE ACCOMPANIMENT OF RAIN TO NIGHTSHIFTERS, BEC DEAN’S THOUGHTFULLY CURATED SHOW OF MOVING IMAGE INSTALLATIONS, SERVED TO HEIGHTEN THE EXHIBITION’S EMPHASIS ON THE INTERRELATIONSHIP OF SPACE AND SUBJECTIVITY. A BACKDROP OF ENSUING DARKNESS AND FLEETING SILHOUETTES ALONG WITH THE SEASONAL ELEMENTS ADDED TO THE ROMANTIC MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF THE SHOW’S NIGHTTIME STAGING ACROSS THE FORMER EVELEIGH RAIL YARDS.

Despite the theatricality of the site’s industrial ‘ruins’, Nightshifters did not engage in nostalgic rehearsals of the past. Instead, the eight exhibiting artists were invited to broadly respond to the location, both within the gallery complex and on the grounds outside, in ways that drew upon and extended their existing practices and conceptual concerns. As such, the openness of Dean’s curatorial brief meant that the exhibition’s trajectory didn’t develop into an overdetermined history lesson. The show responded critically to the site’s immediate and comparative geography through a diverse staging of personal memories and public histories, with notable works by Cordelia Beresford, Kate Murphy (with Bill Hogios) and John Tonkin.

Filmed on location at Cockatoo Island and relocated inside CarriageWorks, the architectural kinship of Beresford’s work Night Watchman (2010) threaded subtle allusions to the industrial and cultural histories shared between these sites. Both locations were originally places used by the first Australians, the Eora people, before colonial invasion. In the 19th century the sites were developed industrially; Cockatoo Island went through myriad uses, from convict prison to girls’ reform school and maritime building yard. In a small, free-standing enclosure resembling a cell, Beresford’s three-channel video of still and moving images presented the imagined journey of a contemporary night watchman’s (Djakapurra Munyarryun) encounter with the colonial past of Cockatoo Island. Against a sustained reverberation of vocalised sound, the ritualistic dance performance of the watchman drew forth the ghosts of two young women (Narelle Benjamin, Miranda Wheelan), who appeared as previous tenants of the island’s reformatory. The assemblage of empathic movements shared between the three performers across each screen presented a sombre meditation on the marginalised histories and spaces of Australia’s colonial heritage.

Kate Murphy’s Yia Yia’s song (2010) also drew upon the concept of shared memory. Using an eight-channel video and nine-channel sound installation, the work’s narrative centres upon a found acoustic recording of Diamanda Psihogios, the grandmother of Bill Hogios, Murphy’s collaborator on the piece. Like much of Murphy’s previous work, such as Prayers of a Mother (1999), Yia Yia’s song explores the role of witnessing and memory in response to a central familial figure. The installation of the work within a dark and otherwise empty train shed lends an operatic quality to Psihogios’ singing, as her sonorous tones fill the cavernous space. While it plays, the viewer is able to watch nine video portraits of the Psihogios’ family, filmed listening to a recording of the song. As each recorded face maps and mirrors a series of emotions back to the viewer, the interplay between the filmed and live audience creates an uncanny atmosphere of intimacy and pathos.

When the vocals conclude, Psihogios’ son and daughter-in-law, presented on a raised split screen at ‘the head’ of the semi-circular installation, proceed to reflect on the song’s meaning and relevance to their own lives. Through their analysis, it becomes apparent that Yia Yia’s song was their grandmother’s tale of grief over her children’s migration from their homeland of Greece to Australia. Charting the course of domestic history through a genealogy of embodied remembrances and shifting stories, Kate Murphy’s work traces a compelling exploration of loss and its counterpoint within the home.

Closer: eleven experiments on proximity (2010), by John Tonkin, also placed the viewer’s body in a series of affective encounters with the everyday. Drawing on the unmonumental poetics hidden within life’s daily habits, Tonkin’s two video projections on opposing walls of a purpose-built corridor screen a series of vignettes based on ordinary objects and common spaces. Whether it is a kettle beginning to boil, a plastic water bottle caught in the step-feed of an escalator, or the quiet grace of a young woman’s head resting on a laminated menu in a restaurant, the durational dynamics of each scene are intensified through Tonkin’s placement of interactive sensors within the installation. Building on his ongoing interest in the interstices of time that make up our cumulative experience of duration and motion, the work choreographs the viewer’s body against the changing speed of the scenes as they play. Running or walking, advancing or retreating in proximity to the work serves to change the tempo and narrative progression of each video, from fast to slow, forwards or backwards, respectively. By using the audience as a wayward metronome, Tonkin highlights the body’s liminality in relation to time’s unfolding.

The constant slippage between past and present narratives underpinned the exhibition’s structure as a whole, with each work operating as an internalised conversation across time. This self-reflexive structure offered provocative insights into the performative threshholds of the moving image as well as the opportunity to connect with CarriageWorks as a repository of the city’s living history through its reinvention. Like the imagined world of the somnabulist lost between night and day, Nightshifters gave viewers a way to navigate and reconnect with the changing history of the space against the imagined certainty of life’s waking routines.

Nightshifters, curator Bec Dean, artists Cordelia Beresford, Alexis Destoop, Sam James, Angelica Mesiti, Kate Murphy, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Dominic Redfern, John Tonkin; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 4-13

IN THE LEAD UP TO THE 2008 BEIJING OLYMPICS AS CHINA’S CAPITAL RAPIDLY REDEVELOPED TO GREET WESTERN CAPITALISM, SO DID ITS ART SCENE. CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART BECAME THE ‘NEXT BIG THING’ AS GALLERIES AND ART ZONES OPENED UP ALL AROUND THE CITY, WITH INTENSE INTEREST FROM INTERNATIONAL DEALERS AND COLLECTORS. IT ALSO SAW THE ADOPTION OF VIDEO AS A MEDIUM BY MANY MORE CHINESE ARTISTS. LAURENS TAN, AN AUSTRALIAN ARTIST OF CHINESE ORIGIN RELOCATED TO BEIJING IN 2006 AND THE VIDEO EXHIBITION, ARENA, WHICH HE HAS CURATED FOR THE HAZELHURST GALLERY, REFLECTS ON WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN BEIJING AFTER THE INITIAL FRENZY.

Not surprisingly, many of the works exhibited deal with the changing cityscape and the built environment. The most engaging of these is Nan Hao’s Chi 3 (2008) in which Hao performs Tai Chi in the middle of eight lanes of traffic. While it could be seen simply as an act of bravado, Hao’s performance is humble and contained, shifting through small gestural sequences occasionally obscured by large trucks. At one point he holds his hands forward in a stance of resistance, and for a fleeting moment we think that he has succeeded in stopping the oncoming cars, but it’s the traffic lights that have this ultimate power. The footage is low quality, but it adds a sense of intervention and immediacy to this simple yet powerful work.

Beijing Ballet (2010) by Allan Chawner explores similar territory. An Australian artist, in-residence at the Red Gate Studios in Beijing, Chawner has captured a street scene in moody dusk light. Watching the ebb and flow of traffic, he focuses on a man on a bicycle carrying an unbelievably large load. Stranded in the sea of cars he exhibits patience similar to Hao’s, however Chawner aestheticises the experience by replacing the traffic sounds with a version of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The music heightens and poeticises the visual material but, verging on cliché, steers the piece towards a romanticised western vision of the contemporary east, in effect flattening the power of the original footage and, played at volume, it dominates the gallery space.

Also using Beijing streetscape as his material is Miao Xiaochun in the photomedia work Beijing Hand Scroll (2009). Drawing on the ancient art of hand scrolls, which by tradition depict cityscapes in intense detail and can reach to over five meters in length, Xiaochun has used a 360-degree camera to capture panoramas of Beijing streets. Exhibited as stills over eight screens, these panoramas illustrate city crowds, street markets, decrepit lanes and new high-rise developments. The images are manipulated using something like the ‘find edges filter’ in Photoshop creating a density of detail that resembles etching. The images of humans are treated with a variety of smudging tools, giving both a sense of movement and a dreamy insubstantiality to the figures, in contrast to the precise representation of their environments. As you can never take in the whole image at once, the depth of detail is both fascinating and overwhelming. Further exploration of Miao Xiaochun’s vision of the city was not possible as his interactive work, Bejing Index (2009), was not functioning.

Wang Qingsong’s Skyscraper (2008) is perhaps the most explicit in its presentation of the rapidly changing environment. A time-lapse exploration of a building growing into the sky, the work takes on more weight when research reveals that the artist and 40 workers in fact built the apparent skyscraper over a month, specifically for the shoot. This level of commitment is perhaps what make’s Qingsong’s work particularly impressive.

In Ironman (2008), Qingsong himself appears to be repeatedly beaten around the head until he is bloody and disfigured, hair and teeth missing, yet still laughing at his oppressors. The sharp rhythmic editing and time-lapsing of images makes the work shockingly brutal. The angle of the head to the camera references an old propaganda poster that prompted people to live with strength and dignity in the face of adversity. Qingsong’s joyous expression at the end is ambiguous—is he laughing victoriously or has he cracked under the relentless violence?

However Qingsong’s third work, 123,456 Chops (2008) is even more disturbing. In a darkened space a pool of light illuminates a large wooden platform. A man enters with the body of a dead goat and chops it into pieces with two cleavers, as if preparing it for cooking. The chopping continues, but now in time-lapse—over many hours the meat is diced, minced and pulverised and it is finally sprayed around the entire space, creating a velvety red carpet. Qingsong presents this obsessive behaviour as a means to vent “anger, violence, suffocation, sadness and disappointment” (artist statement). The work certainly raises questions about sanity and violence, and how a society deals with or, in fact, contributes to these.

Animation also featured strongly in Arena. Two works by Rei Li, one of Beijing’s up and coming artists, employ a quirky hand-drawn approach that playfully explores ideas of conformity. In Magic Cube and Ping Pong (2010), figures with mixed up Rubik’s Cube heads wander through an intricate futuristic city but run the risk of being set to normal—all colours in order—unless saved by the touch of love and a ping-pong ball. Each to their own metaphor. His second work, Pear and Alien (2008), is particularly visually appealing: drawn only with red and blue pens on graph paper, it explores our fear of the other, which is revealed to be just ourselves turned upside-down.

Wu Junyong (previously featured in Mu:Screen at the UTS Gallery, RT98) also contributed a series of animated works, Carps (2007), When We Are Rich (2005) and two interactive pieces, Central Park (2006) and Pixel Underground (2007). This artist’s idiosyncratic symbology is dominated by naked figures, each wearing a dunce’s cap: they expose their phalluses, wave flags, urinate or blow money out of their arses. Junyong’s absurdist scenarios offer incisive criticism of nationalism, capitalism, greed and decadence. Zhang Xiaotao’s Scar (2009), which draws more on 3D animation techniques, is particularly impressive in its exploration of the macro and micro, as the POV vision zooms across landscapes and delves deep down into the cellular level in gaming style, exploring a tangled environment, half reality, half hallucination. The work was diminished somewhat by an inaudible soundtrack.

With 21 works works in total, several approaching feature film length, it was not possible to view everything in its entirety. Perhaps a screening program would have been more beneficial for some works such as Total Eclipse (2010) by Gao ShiQiang. Presented in black and white, shot at high-frame rates and beautifully lit for noirish effect, it presents a series of poetic metaphors. Factory workers and their boss, standing in a circle, gradually begin to laugh and float up towards the ceiling. Another man stands laughing amidst his possessions, strewn about in total chaos, but then all the objects gracefully return to their rightful order—the reversed footage revealing that the man himself caused the disorder in the first place. Perhaps the most potent image is of a group of people ‘rock climbing’ into the corner of a low-ceilinged room, clustered like a hive of bees. This image resonates for Arena: A Post Boom Beijing as a whole— an exhibition which offers an intriguing insight into a nation that is in a complex process of renegotiating the individual’s aspiration within the collective pursuit of national prosperity.

Arena: A Post Boom Beijing, curator Laurens Tan, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, NSW, Oct 16-Nov 28

THIS INSIGHTFULLY CURATED AND COMPELLING EXHIBITION BRINGS TOGETHER SEVERAL ARTISTS WHOSE WORK EXPLORES OUR SOMETIMES DESPERATE NEED TO EXPRESS UNHAPPY THOUGHTS AND TALK TO SOMEONE. TAKEN TOGETHER, THE WORKS EXAMINE SIGNIFICANT ISSUES IN MENTAL HEALTH AND PERSONAL RELATIONS IN A COMPLEX, ELECTRONICALLY MEDIATED WORLD. VOCAL THOUGHTS IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS, ACTING LIKE A CUBIST’S ANALYSIS OF AN OBJECT, IN THIS CASE HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY, IN WHICH WE SEE MANY FACETS SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Firstly, Daniel Johnston’s drawings of a fantasy world of comic book heroes such as Captain America and his enemies depict life as a contest between good and evil. These cartoons question the heroes we turn to for aid—Captain America might represent a USA unable to deliver promised assistance. Johnston is best known as a musician and his art is an alternative voice. In the context of this exhibition, the story of his apparent mental health issues prompts us to address the nature of society’s response to those calling for help.

In Anna Davis and Jason Gee’s video Biohead Actualised (2008), a ventriloquist’s dummy lectures us on the power of positive thought, for example, “think wealth,” “poverty is a mental disease” and “never discuss your problems with anyone except a financial counsellor.” The dummy implies control by unseen forces, and the work parodies self-help books and critiques the materialist values that conflate health with wealth. The video screen can also be seen as a mirror, where the viewer becomes the dummy, helplessly parroting empty liturgies that become increasingly negative and disturbed, like our own inner dialogues. Adjacent is Kate Murphy’s video The Appointment (2009), showing a consultation with a psychologist from the client’s perspective. The therapist asks typical questions and pauses while we privately answer, perhaps revealing more to ourselves than we would to a real psychologist. But, juxtaposed with Davis and Gee’s creation, we wonder if counsellors are just Bioheads preaching nonsense. Both works invite us to consider the possibilities and likely effectiveness of pre-programmed online therapy.

These themes develop in different ways in the remaining works. Chris Howlett’s three animations, Homesteads, Homesteads I and Homesteads II (2009), resemble The Sims VR games, but here the characters play out predetermined routines and we can’t interact with them. Homesteads shows a dysfunctional family accompanied by dialogue sampled from talk shows in which members of the public tell tales of loneliness, vulnerability, bullying and abuse of all kinds, including online predation. In Homesteads II, the Grim Reaper stalks a Kevin Rudd lookalike, the vision accompanied by the soundtrack of an ALP political advertisement, a discussion of the controversy surrounding Bill Henson’s photography, referencing Rudd’s much publicised comments on the matter, and a US soldier’s account of his role in a fatal military blunder in Iraq. Howlett’s work critiques our dystopian world and especially our selfish disregard for the welfare of others. But it also speaks of the essential human need for communication and self-disclosure.

Dani Marti’s two videos provide contrasting perspectives on the individual seeking intimacy and personal connection. Time is the fire in which we burn (2009) is an emotionally charged interview conducted by the artist with a lover in bed, evidently one of series in which the artist encourages his subject to speak openly about his life and feelings in such a setting. This absorbing documentary presents the tragic personal account of the subject but also renders us as voyeurs intruding into an intimate moment. Projecting the video at an enlarged scale and showing it in a curtained space (to meet censorship requirements) amplifies the intimacy and makes our voyeurism seem uncomfortably acute. But, unlike Murphy’s psychologist, Marti is actively intervening in his subject’s life by establishing an intimate relationship with him. Whether Marti is catalysing his partner’s self-awareness or his partner is self-consciously acting a role, we see how, in any relationship, we might recreate our persona for our partner.

Marti’s second video, Andrea greeted with a pubescent smile (2008), is a soliloquy in which a young woman speaks of her social encounters through the internet, another example of self-disclosure that reveals how we have come to rely on the superficial companionship of chat rooms while guarding ourselves against predators with fake identities. Marti’s video is a profound commentary on the impact of the internet on social interaction, and both his works are extraordinarily candid and deeply affecting personal accounts that ache with loneliness. When seeking friendship, information or advice through the internet, we open ourselves to abuse and colonisation by quacks, lovers, voyeurs and fakes—gamers of all kinds.

As if to reassure us, the final works in this exhibition offer the semblance of real life. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta–Kalleinen organised a series of amateur choral performances in St Petersburg, Tokyo, Chicago, Helsinki, Hamburg and Birmingham, and recorded them on video as the Complaints Choir (2006). We see ordinary citizens of all ages happily singing their complaints about their lives—unsatisfactory relationships, workplace difficulties, incompetent and uncaring governments, incomprehensible technological gadgetry and so on. In this exhibition, the Complaints Choir seems more like group therapy than activism and we readily identify with these people and their wish to be heard. Their camaraderie is both palpable and uplifting.

Vocal Thoughts is an essay in human communication, intimacy and relationships. The themes of vulnerability, emotional and psychological disturbance, confession and the nature of self-awareness run throughout, making the exhibition richly illuminating. If technological development has brought us to the verge of a radical form of post-humanism, Vocal Thoughts reminds us of the privacy and humanity we risk losing, and urges that we understand our own psychology better before proceeding. As well as revealing the potential for communications technologies to mediate self-awareness, Vocal Thoughts demonstrates the level of sophistication artists have attained in using video and animation. The art lies in positioning the work in the interstices between cinema, documentary, web page, game and cartoon so as to capitalise on the power of those media and synthesise new forms and effects. The inclusion of Johnston’s drawings in the show locates each medium in a broader perspective, revealing its relative authority and reach.

Vocal Thoughts, curator Peter McKay, artists Anna Davis and Jason Gee, Chris Howlett, Daniel Johnston, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Dani Marti, Kate Murphy; Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, Sept 10-Oct 10

perth festival

If you needed a reason to head west this summer, some of the offerings at the Perth Festival should float your boat. When we saw Trust at Berlin’s Schaubuhne last year, we hoped that this innovative theatre-dance work would hit the festival circuit and here it is! Trust is a socially critical and sometimes comical work in which Falk Richter’s lateral text is spoken but also inventively danced/moved by a multi-skilled team of actors and dancers co-directed by Richter with choreographer Anouk van Dijk (RT95). The program also features Out of Context: for Pina, Alain Platel’s Les Ballets C de la B tribute to Pina Bausch which our writer Jana Perkovic described as “emotionally penetrating and deliriously enjoyable” (R98). Lucy Guerin Inc performs its disturbing Human Interest Story (RT99); Steve Reich presents the Australian premiere of his acclaimed new work 2 x 5; and Bang on a Can All Stars bring rivetting works by Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Thurston Moore, Steve Martland and David Lang. 2011 Perth Festival, February 11- March 7; www.perthfestival.com.au

ten days on the island

True festival junkies will then move on to cooler climes for Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island in March. We’ll have a full preview in RealTime 101, but a sample of the program might whet your appetite. Power Plant from the UK will transform the Botanical Gardens into a series of sound and light installations “where the nocturnal beauty of the gardens is the real star.” New works and commissions from local and interstate artists include Craig Walsh’s magical Digital Odyssey projections at Sullivan’s Cove. In Dance Marathon, Canadian company bluemouth inc somehow creates a “fun show” inspired by the dance endurance contests of 1920s and 30s America. Chamber Made Opera presents the first part of their Minotaur project, a contemporary chamber reconstruction of Monteverdi’s lost opera, L’Arianna. Launceston’s youth dance company, Stompin’, premieres I Love Cars, “a site-specific, multi-art mash-up exploring our enduring love affair with motor vehicles.” Tasdance’s Artery brings together four choreographers—Trisha Dunn, Alice Lee Holland, Solon Ulbrich and Adam Wheeler—and Scottish composer/ choreographer/musician/writer Billy Cowie’s Stereoscopic combines “stereoscopic filmmaking with inventive dance choreography and sound scores for an immersive 3D encounter.” In the Dance Hall series you can dance yourself silly to music “from Greece to Haiti, from Trinidad and Tobago to Zanzibar, and with the sounds of Pacific reggae.” Ten Days on the Island, March 25-April 3, www.tendaysontheisland.com

stop(the)gap

Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion is a major international Indigenous moving image project developed for the 2011 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival (BAFF) in partnership with the Samstag Museum of Art. Curator Brenda L Croft has selected works that “challenge preconceptions of contemporary Indigenous expression and address themes of human rights, environmental concerns, cultural security and negotiating diversity.” She says, “Some of the most provocative and illuminating moving image work today is being created by Indigenous new media artists—yet there has been no international focus on this work until now. Despite physical distances, Indigenous communities around the globe are linked through their shared colonial histories, each bearing scars borne of dispossession, injustice, inequality and misrepresentation.” The project explores the connections between cinema and the visual arts, and will feature moving image exhibitions, film screenings, outdoor projections and discussions. Filmmaker Warwick Thornton has been commissioned through the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund to create a new work for the project. Other participating artists include r e a and Genevieve Grieves (Australia), Dana Claxon and Rebecca Belmore (Canada), Alan Michelson and Eric Lord (USA) Nova Paul and Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa /NZ). Stop(the)Gap, Samstag Museum of Art, Feb 24-April 21, 2011, www.unisa.edu/samstagmuseum; www.adelaidefilmfestival.org

push international festival of performing arts, vancouver

Director Norman Armour describes this year’s PuSH program as engaging with ‘cityness’. He writes, “The 125th Anniversary Series (a suite of performances and events that looks at questions of urban experience, the everyday, our history and civic identity) is our single most ambitious curatorial undertaking to date…There are a number of boundary-pushing works that invite you to venture from the theatre and out into public spaces. It’s a time to speak to the values and vision we have as a city. It’s a time to affirm how profoundly art impacts individuals, and how radically it can transform societies.” The Antwerp-based company Berlin will present a documentary installation on Canada’s smallest capital, the Inuit city of Iqaluit, and a cinematic portrait of a desolate mining town (Bonanza). Rimini Protokoll continue their 100% series and, after 100%Berlin and 100%Vienna, create an accurate demographic synecdoche of Vancouver on stage, using 100 randomly selected local participants. Boca del Lupo, Vancouver performance company, collaborate with Argentinian writer and director Mariano Pensotti on La Marea (The Tide), a dramatic work presented throughout the urban space over the course of the evening, while the incidental audience can read the characters’ inner thoughts through projected subtitles. It is hard to do justice to the riches on offer. Visit the PuSh website and see for yourself, then make your way to Vancouver. PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 18-Feb 6, 2011, http://pushfestival.ca

womadelaide

Adelaide is the place to be in March when Botanic Park will again be the setting for WOMAdelaide, Australia’s iconic four-day celebration of music, arts and dance from around the world. This year’s potent line-up includes Angus and Julia, Afro Celt Sound System, Amadou and Mariam, Joanna Newsom, punk-reggae icon Don Letts, UK DJ Norman Jay, Nigerian singer-songwriter Asa, The Necks, Irish rockabilly singer Imelda May and the big band Juan De Marcos Afro-Cuban All Stars. As always there’s much more than music: France’s Le Phun will spend three weeks leading up to the festival “building six magical installations for their performance piece Les Gûmes (a play on the French word for vegetables), where a surprising society has taken root in a vegetable kingdom and mutated into half-human, half-plant beings.” Dance, with more exciting music, comes in the form of Breathe, a collaboration between Leigh Warren & Dancers, Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Frances Rings and didgeridoo player William Barton. Womadelaide, March 11-14 March 2011, www.womadelaide.com.au

the now now, sydney

In recent years, there’s been a marked increase in experimental music activity over summer. To a large degree this is due to The NOW Now festival, which in 2011 celebrates its 10th year and swaps the crisp air of the Blue Mountains for the gritty city over two weekends in three venues—the Red Rattler in Marrickville, Serial Space in Chippendale and a “secret” venue—People’s Republic of Australasia. As always, an abundance of artists will be ready to spontaneously make music in all manner of combinations. The Un-Australian String Quartet features Jon Rose, Hollis Taylor, James Rushford and Judith Hamman; from Zurich, Jason Kahn will perform on analogue synthesiser with Matt Earle and Adam Sussmann of Stasis Duo fame on electronics; Roil brings together Chris Abrahams, Mike Majkowski and James Waples; and then there’s the warped wonder of Sky Needle—Joel Stern, Alex Cuffe, Ross Manning and Sarah Byrne (see earbash review). Add to this more international artists also presented at Sound Out (read on). The NOW now, Red Rattler, Serial Space, The People’s Republic of Australasia, Jan 21-24, Jan 26-28, Sydney, www.theNOWnow.net

sound out, canberra

The NOW now is no longer alone in the summer time slot, since 2009 there’s MOFO (see interview with curator Brian Ritchie) and now an even newer kid on the block. Canberra’s Sound Out director Richard Johnson spruiks his festival as celebrating the “tremendous growth and maturing within the experimental and new music scene in the Canberra region.” This new event creates an attractive touring circuit in Australia over January for international artists. The NOW now and Sound Out have the joint honour of presenting Yan Jun, pioneering noisician from China; drummer Tony Buck and Berlin-based pianist Magda Mayas; Duo Vulgarités from Canada, who appear to play just about everything from batteries to trumpet; guitarist Kim Myhr from Norway; pianist Cor Fuhler from Germany; and Scandinavian trio The Thing, with Mats Gustafsson on saxes, Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ingebrigt Haken Flaten on double bass. Sound Out, offers four concert sessions over two days at the Street Theatre and will also feature Australian musicians Dale Gorfinkel, Laura Altman and Monica Brooks as well as artists from the healthy local scene such as Spartak, Shoeb Ahmad and Evan Dorria. Plenty of good reasons for a road trip to the national capital! Sound Out 2011, Street Theatre, Canberra, Jan 29-30, 2010, www.thestreet.org.au http://soundout2011.blogspot.com/

OON THE CUSP OF THE COMMERCIAL CRACKDOWN ON SKATER CULTURE DURING THE EARLY 80S TWO SKATE MAGAZINES CHAMPIONED OPPOSING MOTTOS: ‘SKATE AND CREATE’ WAS PITTED AGAINST ‘SKATE AND DESTROY’ (SEE THRASHER MAGAZINE [1982] AND TRANSWORLD SKATEBOARDING [1983]). AS TWO ASPECTS OF CHAOS, THE DESTRUCTIVE AND THE CREATIVE ARE PRESENTED AND EXPLORED IN THE EXHIBITION SUSPENDED MOTION CURATED BY JAMES HENSBY AT ARTRAGE’S NEWLY REFURBISHED BAKERY COMPLEX.

These themes are not so much polarised but rather conjoined under the banner of ‘creative transgression.’ The exhibition offers a unique interpretation of the conjunction of art and skateboarding by diverging from the art genres generally associated with skate (street art, illustration and graphics), to deliver a contemporary cross-media display of design, installation, video, performance, sculpture, print, paint, kinetics and an accompanying publication of glorious creation and construction shots.

The opening night witnessed an excitable crowd enthusiastically drawn to artist Ben Barretto’s painting machine and performance. This piece had local skaters pull tricks back-and-forth within the shipping-container spaces of the Bakery and trigger the production of quasi-Modernist paintings. The machine was a sophisticated but also visually awkward contraption and amidst the crowds it was difficult to discern how the real-time action and raw presence of the skating prompted the movement and execution of the multicoloured wheel-like forms on canvas.

The physicality of skating was perhaps more directly communicated in the works displayed in the Black Box space. In Morgan Campbell’s piece, a bench sits alongside a video to bring the creative/destructive collusion to the fore. Violence in the action of skating is demonstrated in the repetition of surface damage; the denting, scratching, staining, scraping grind of not only the surfaces the skate-board hits, but the board itself. A stop-motion video displays the accumulation of paint from a bench transferred to the underside of a board alongside a video of the same board used to pull tricks on the bruised bench, which sits before the video with an air of well worn pathos.

On the opposite wall, a video by Cam Campbell traces the destructive effect of a board as it literally rips through sheets of paper. A ribbon of paper is messily splayed and bundled on the gallery floor and what resembles a loop of this paper is transformed into a ramp that dominates the corner of the room. Again, the evidence of action is present in the ramp’s scarred surface, the process of which can be witnessed on a monitor embedded in its cut-out core. This room has it all—props, documentation, traces of past actions, impact on the built environment, demonstration of tactical manoeuvring and sound to match. It also communicates the high degree of physicality inseparable from the act of skating. Movement is more remembered than suspended and tightly interconnected with materiality and context.

In the Bread Box gallery the works resonate more with abstraction and less with the rawness of the physical act of skating; they are about the conceptual, the minimal, form and design. Tom Muller’s mirrored plywood spine-ramp peaks like a Swiss Alp and recalls the mirrored effect familiar to classic skate videos. Unlike works in the previous room this piece is far removed from the grind of wheels, but it is also a tease because it is skateable. Skateability is then utterly banished in Jason Hansma’s sculpture which also reconfigures the aesthetic of skating through mirroring. It borrows the form and dimension of the ramp from the opening-night performance and reflects it to make a diamond shape. The surface of this shape is overlayed with slick black Perspex, its gleam clearly stating ‘don’t touch,’ its clean, reflective properties celebrated with a thin neon strip placed on the adjoining wall.

The video works in both rooms are distinct in their own right, but it is difficult to read them without being reminded of Shaun Gladwell’s classics, such as Kickflipping Flaneur (2000), where skating as creating is mesmeric and portrayed in conversation with art history. Like Gladwell’s works, the video pieces in the show operate on a different level from the familiar fast, choppy, fish-eyed aesthetic of many traditional skate videos. In continuity with the other works in the show, they meditate on the act of skating as creative and visually compelling, if not romantic, as well as rough and dirty. This re-emphasises the themes of destruction and creation which come together in Suspended Motion to culminate in what is ultimately a dynamic and original engagement of art and skateboarding.

Suspended Motion, curator James Hensby, artists Ben Barretto, Cameron Campbell, Morgan Campbell, Jason Hansma, James Hensby, Tom Muller; the Bakery, Breadbox Gallery, Oct 23-Nov 4

CHIARA GUIDI ESTABLISHED HER FIRST CHILDREN’S THEATRE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL IN 1995 IN CESENA, THE REGIONAL ITALIAN BIRTHPLACE OF ANOTHER WELL KNOWN THEATRICAL PROJECT SHE IS INVOLVED IN, SOCÌETAS RAFFAELLO SANZIO. THE INVITATION FOR CHILDREN TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS THEATRE WORKSHOP WAS POSTED AROUND THE TOWNSHIP.

The young participants could play “a game of war without killing anybody,” or “suffer hunger but never be hungry.” “With my theatre you can do all the things that don’t exist,” because, pointedly, she winks: “theatre is to pretend to be someone who is doing things that are real.”

Guidi’s language, a kind of elegiacally spoken poetry (translated by Elio Gatti at her public talk “The Art of Play within the Contextual Work of the Fairy Tale” at Campbelltown Arts Centre in September), is full of such simple but biting profundities, which underpin what for her is the true condition of theatre. Theatre does things that are real by engaging in pretence. It is a “substitute language” for “words that are poor of world.” It feels, hears, sees, touches and tastes in ways that “reason cannot.”

The adult repertoire of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has been well celebrated for its treatment of the sensory materiality of the theatre, a practice that connects intimately to their dramaturgical inversions of real time stage action and fictional image. As theorist Joe Kelleher has written, for example, the infamously brutal bashing scene in BR#04 Brussels (see Lucy Taylor’s review in RT58 and Adam Broinowski’s online) displaces our shuddering reception of the work to become—poignantly—an “image that suffers” on its own terms.

Guidi’s logic, it seems, is that children are less interested than adults in understanding hypothetical divisions between reality and fiction, materiality and language, and hence can intuit how images might suffer and also how to make them do so. She is candid about her reliance upon the genius of childhood for inspiration. This process is a “reverse pedagogy,” she explains, “we are needy of children,” “I need the games of children” to “explore their ability to see through the senses.” This is not merely a theatre for children, nor really even a theatre for childhood, it is a childhood of theatre, and from within it, an adult outsider might just glimpse the time before reality overtook imagination, or indeed, language overtook sensation.

Guidi’s Sydney talk was part of a two-week masterclass for a selection of adult artists and local children to translate and share a kind of prototypical process borne from her Cesena School. One might conjecture that Guidi was teaching artists in Sydney how to teach children to re-teach the adults themselves about the world of theatre. In the documentation images of both her process at the Cesena-based school and the Sydney masterclass, however, this inverse/reversed pedagogy looked both like something never quite seen before and a genuine—although at times intensely dark—collaboration between generations of theatrical imaginers.

The Cesena process began as an experiment with seven meetings over three months. It evolved into a three-year journey, depicted in Guidi’s talk through images that convey the “otherness” of the theatrical world she was co-assembling with her ensemble. For the second year of their journey, for instance, the children wore only white, they focused on gesture and repeated actions and words in a completely white space, they practised how to hear vocality “underneath language,” they imagined “all the weight of a reality”—the precise components that might write their ultimate theatrical scenography. A white horse dreamt up by a child appears in the documentation footage, dancing against a shadowy backdrop, becoming almost-unicorn in the rehearsal space. This is indeed the land where the things that we do have magically real effects. The children—with their painted white faces, white gowns and hoods—crouch around a low-lit dining table of sorts, part mini Ku Klux Klan, part angels. This is the complex dramaturgy that envelops them.

The Sydney artists spent a week with Guidi workshopping her process before the children arrived. Guidi’s structure for the children’s week involved the unfolding of a fable of opposing forces—light and dark—over the length of five days. On each day, a new sensorial perception was explored in the blackened theatre space, as the narrative battle between lightness and darkness (played as characters by the artists) developed. The artists worked all day in preparation for the arrival of the children for a two-hour slot each afternoon, planning and rehearsing, remembering how to imagine the theatricality that a child might take for real. The children’s relationship to the theatrical world expanded over time such that, by the final day, the disappearance of a dog from within the story was cause for despair. This theatrical real feels real; it hurts.

If the world of childhood presents each of us too briefly with the world of theatre, then Guidi, it seems, both encourages the children whom she works with to take their theatrical imaginaries for real, and relies upon those imaginaries to recall the childhood of theatre to herself and others. In an Australian cultural context where working with children is currently so deeply politicised and fraught, Chiara Guidi’s anti-alarmist impulse for a purity of imagination, somehow, cuts straight to the heart of the matter.

“The Art of Play within the Contextual Work of the Fairy Tale,” Public Talk by Chiara Guidi, Sept 30; International Masterclass in Contemporary Theatre for Children, director Chiara Guidi, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, in collaboration with Jeff Stein, artistic advisor Jason Cross, produced by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Sept 20-Oct 1

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