IN THE BIBLE, GETHSEMANE IS THE PLACE WHERE JESUS CRUMBLES, FOREKNOWING HIS OWN DEATH, FEELING ABANDONED BY HIS GOD. THE RABBLE WILL TURN HIM OVER TO HIS CRUCIFIXION. THROUGH HIS INTENSELY PERSONAL SUFFERING, CHRIST DOES NOT GIVE UP; RATHER, HE GIVES OVER: PEOPLE WILL DO AS THEY WILL DO. THIS FEAT OF ACCEPTANCE IS PROVOCATIVE AND DEEPLY MOVING.
Gerard Brophy’s Gethsemane follows quite a different trajectory. The five textual passages around which the performance is shaped depict snapshots of life, struggle and death in contemporary Calcutta in a journey across the city from dawn to dusk. The musical form winds and unwinds around these passages. I have an image of spirals within channels of decay—like the labyrinthine passages of this ancient ‘city of joy,’ like a worried angel overlooking a putrefying feast.
Martin del Amo’s first solo dance passage is accompanied by an ascending electronically generated scale which begins in unison but proceeds to divide. His arms and torso—rising, falling, being pulled and propelled—struggle like cells parting ways. The dance becomes thicker, as if spiralling through honey. This is a slow death.
A later dance becomes thinner, sowing its struggles in water, thence becoming brittle, as if broken apart in wind. The Song Company as chorus also works its struggles, shuddering and shuffling in alleyways, trembling as if scattered by internal quakes. A final, jagged scavenging, as if trapped within a thin cylinder of breath, is quieted by the blow of conch horns, sounding the gates of hell (or the other place). The soprano saxophone, a cobra’s dance, calls the final chant; the figures become translucent and turn to their deaths.
Throughout, the choir—always exemplary in their vocal work—is comfortable in its motions; for each member their movement decisions seem entirely in place. The choreography as a whole displays an admirable restraint in tone, letting me sit within the experience.
The weakness for me is in Brophy’s text. Even the Song Company’s website describes it as ‘florid’; as an actor, I would find it very difficult to know how to pitch it. The main issue, I believe, is that it is overwritten, and the narrative of ambiguous disposition—horror? disgust? wonder? Its delivery lies just on the edge of scorn. Even after reading the text and then watching again, it remains very hard to grasp in real time. The imagery lacks tautness and coherence—especially in comparison with the music, which has both these qualities.
The vocal writing is spare, almost plainchant, nodding towards the Flemish masters (Lassus and Tallis) whose lamentations Brophy did not want to imitate, but which recognise the power of sound quality—whether vocal, instrumental or electronic—to carry experience from the deepest chambers of human experience. I am still haunted by several glorious, sparse melodies. Eastern tonalities resonate, without making the mistake of imitation. This work is grounded in the concrete timbres of sound and transcendent of specific geography. It carries a landscape of soul.
By its final moments, I am left strangely opened, yet also closed: moved, worked on by grief, but also strangely neutered. What has happened here?
Song Company director Roland Peelman initiated the project by pointing Brophy to the Lamentations of Jeremiah, where he watches the city of Jerusalem burn. As a prophet, warning his people about the impending wrath of God, he had been reviled and jailed. But Jeremiah’s lamentations as he watches his beloved city fall express an intensely personal grief that is also full of love for the very people whom his God destroyed.
I expect this compassion is what is missing from Brophy’s text. The story, the lecture on the city’s filth, corruption and waste, the finger pointing to its social injustices throughout the program notes, are confusingly angry yet ungrounded, disgusted and yet aloof. What makes us care is the ache in the movement, and the music: simple rising scales with raised fourths and lowered sevenths, played on chimes or bells whose pure and complex timbres sound the world; the electronic aural landscapes that prise space apart; the spiralling motions of the dancers and the dance, the shudder of their struggles against the limitations of the alley and the wall; the struggle to move beyond, but being held back.
Calcutta is not a destroyed city, as was Jeremiah’s Jerusalem. It is teeming, fetid, dangerous, tangled with contradiction, but it is also ‘the city of joy’, full of life. If only this Gesthemane could perfect its passions. I could then sit with its musics and motions and be fired with passion, sorrows and compassion, for all the days of my life.
With thanks to Roland Peelman and Timothy Constable for discussing Gesthemane with me.
Song Company, Gethsemane, concept and music Gerard Brophy, texts Gerard Brophy, plus Bible adaptations, director Roland Peelman, dancer, movement director Martin del Amo, performers Song Company, Synergy Percussion’s Timothy Constable and Alison Pratt, saxophones Christina Leonard, sound design Bob Scott; St Paul’s Church, Canberra, NSW tour, March 21
Satsuki Odamura, Wakako Asano, Mayu Kanamori, Vic McEwan, In Repose
photo Jenny Evans
Satsuki Odamura, Wakako Asano, Mayu Kanamori, Vic McEwan, In Repose
PHOTOGRAPHER MAYU KANAMORI, DANCER WAKAKO ASANO AND KOTO PLAYER SATSUKI ODAMURA ARE JAPANESE-BORN ARTISTS WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO SPEND THEIR LIVES IN AUSTRALIA AND, EVENTUALLY, TO BE BURIED IN THIS ADOPTED HOMELAND. THEIR PROJECT IN REPOSE (ALSO WITH SOUND DESIGNER VIC MCEWAN) REPRESENTS AN ARTISTIC EXPLORATION OF WHAT THIS DECISION MEANS NOT ONLY TO THEMSELVES BUT ALSO TO THE MANY JAPANESE WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY MIGRATED AND DIED HERE.
The In Repose project has been under way since 2007, with a range of performances, exhibitions and community workshops in Townsville, Broome, Thursday Island, Port Hedland, Roebourne and Cossack. In each the group performed a version of ‘kuyo,’ a ceremonial offering to honour the spirits of the dead. This involved lighting incense and pouring water on the graves to slake the thirst of the spirits, and in their contemporary adaptation also incorporated music and dance. In many places this ceremony was opened up to involve the local community while in other smaller locations the acts were more private.
The performance lecture, presented in 2010 amidst the photographic installation at the Japan Foundation, brings these outcomes together. Like Kanamori’s photographs—close-ups of the weathered texture of inscribed rocks, native grasses entangled with headstones—the performance, with the addition of music and dance, offers a more impressionistic retelling of events. It is not overladen with information, but rather offers fragments, anecdotes and space for reflection on the project.
Japanese Cemetery, Broome, In Repose
photo Mayu Kanamori
Japanese Cemetery, Broome, In Repose
What becomes quickly apparent is that there can be no discussion of the Japanese sense of ancestral spirituality without acknowledgement that the graves are on the lands of indigenous Australian peoples. It is the cultural exchange that takes place around this that makes the project particularly interesting. In Broome the connection is most obvious as many Japanese pearl divers married local Indigenous people. In Repose’s title image, taken in the Broome cemetery, shows small, honey-brown hands on a sand-coloured gravestone that Kanamori describes as the “the colour of the skin when Indigenous Australians have children with Japanese.”
On Thursday Island one of the workshop participants makes a short video discussing the local beliefs surrounding death and the passage of the spirit, which Kanamori tells us is particularly resonant with Japanese culture. In Port Hedland, visiting Japanese video artist Shigeaki Iwai wanders over the hill from the graveyard to discover the local Indigenous people. Initially they mistake his tripod for a gun, but then they get to talking and he asks if their ‘mob,’ can look after ‘our mob.’ In the small town of Roebourne, the team discover that the graves they’d been told about have been cleared to make way for housing for the local Indigenous residents. In an impromptu ritual, the team honours the dead, but also passes on the story to the local kids, so that this ‘new’ history may be added to the old history of the land.
Wakako Asano, In Repose
photo Jenny Evans
Wakako Asano, In Repose
The performance itself, is restrained and contemplative. McEwan joins Kanamori as a lecturer, offering the perspective of an Australian of Scottish origin, with gentle wit, and the small moments of banter between them loosen the formal lecture feel. Between the textual vignettes, Satsuki Odamura plays pieces commissioned for the project on koto and bass koto while Wakako Asano dances. There are some beautiful duets, atmospherically lit in the challenging gallery surrounds by Amber Silk. Asano works closely with the rhythmic complexities and ethereal harmonies of the music, and it is always a privilege to hear Odamura’s virtuosity on these wonderful instruments. However while these moments, sometimes accompanied by projected images, offered time for deep reflection there were perhaps a few too many for the structural balance of the work. Interestingly, most of the music was commissioned from western composers, and similarly Asano’s choreographic language is predominantly western contemporary. Initially I yearned for a more ‘Japanese’ dance-style, more earthed than the float and extension of the modern style, however the combination of western influences in both the music and the dance serve to illustrate the cultural duality that these artists have chosen in their move to Australia.
In Repose represents a very personal journey for the all the artists involved. It treads softly around the more contentious issues of colonisation, racial conflict and the White Australia Policy, instead highlighting the power of personal connection through the significant cultural and generational exchanges that took place within a range of communities. Through the retelling of these events it also opens up a space for the audience, rare in contemporary western culture, for our own reflection on death, spirituality, ancestry and a sense of homeland.
In Repose, photographer, storyteller Mayu Kanamori, koto player, sound Satsuki Odamura, dancer, choreographer Wakako Asano, sound design, storyteller Vic McEwan, lighting design Amber Silk, video Shigeaki Iwai, compositions Satsuki Odamura, Mark Isaacs, Rosalind Page, Michael Whiticker; Japan Foundation, Sydney, exhibition April 1-May14, performance April 10, May 1, May 13; http://www.mayu.com.au/folio/inrepose/; www.jpf.org.au
theatre director Subramaniam Velayutham, Minister for the Arts Virginia Judge MP, actor/singer Tama Matheson
at the Small to Medium Performing Arts Forum
courtesy of StreetCorner.com.au
theatre director Subramaniam Velayutham, Minister for the Arts Virginia Judge MP, actor/singer Tama Matheson
at the Small to Medium Performing Arts Forum
IIT WAS QUITE A SURPRISE TO RECEIVE IN THE MAIL AN INVITATION FROM ARTS MINISTER VIRGINIA JUDGE TO PARTICIPATE IN A FORUM AT PARLIAMENT HOUSE ON THE TOPIC OF NSW’S LONG-SUFFERING SMALL TO MEDIUM PERFORMING ARTS SECTOR. IT WAS ODD HOWEVER THAT THE INVITATION WAS NOT FROM ARTS NSW (A DIVISION OF A DEPARTMENT TITLED ‘COMMUNITIES NSW’, SUCH IS THE LATEST NON-ELITIST RELEGATION OF THE ARTS) EVEN THOUGH IT IS INFAMOUSLY ALOOF AND NON-CONSULTATIVE. INSTEAD HERE WAS MINISTER JUDGE DIRECTLY FORGING HER OWN RELATIONSHIP WITH ARTISTS IN A SERIES OF FORUMS FOLLOWED, NO LESS, BY ACTION AND FOLLOW-UP TALKS.
Cynics considered Judge’s move as election-minded, agnostics prayed that there would be more to it than ‘improved networking’ (the funding bodies’ mantra of the decade as was sponsorship to the 1990s) and optimists hoped for small improvements, but doubted that the cold, hard reality of under-funding would even be broached. The palpable Carr legacy to the arts was very much bricks and mortar—CarriageWorks in the city and arts centres across Western Sydney—creating new niches for artists and bringing local government into play. Councils have shown increasing commitment to the arts and, in some cases, have provided artists with funds otherwise not available. However, the overall state of the small to medium sector in NSW remains parlous—whether state or federal, the last thing any politician appears to want to do is raise the standard of living for artists, despite the mountain of evidence of dire need from successive reports by arts economist David Throsby.
not so empty space
Minister Virginia Judge begins with a quote from The Empty Space, Peter Brook’s 1968 treatise on the state of modern theatre, in which the director addresses the importance and potential of the theatrical form. She links those in the room with Brook’s ideals mentioning “presence, immediacy and experiment” and tells us she’s passionate about this sector.
I am among the “leading representatives from the performing arts” invited to discuss challenges for the small to medium creative industries sector: “how to promote and expand the vital role that performance, dance and theatre plays in the community.” The organisers had to rearrange the venue in Parliament House when over 100 representatives from the sector from across the state accepted the minister’s invitation. The gesture is generally welcomed, breaking the long drought in dialogue between artists and the arts bureaucracy in NSW.
The Minister assures us that “investing in the cultural sector is a key part of the Keneally Government’s strategy to stimulate the economy and create vibrant, diverse communities.” She is keen to hear suggestions as to how the government can “support this sector to benefit the industry and the community as a whole.” “The forum will give small to medium performing arts organisations an opportunity to explore new ideas to empower the industry to expand its skills and audience base.” Sounds good.
This is the third in a series of Creative Industries forums. Others brought together practitioners working in the live music industry (with a focus on jazz) and in visual arts and artist-run spaces. Next up will be the film and screen sector (a new Arts NSW program, oddly inherited from Screen NSW) followed, importantly, by an all-in gathering of representatives to discuss the implications of the forums on government arts policy and strategies. Even better.
The Minister is proud that the recent abolition of the restrictive Places of Public Entertainment (PoPE) licenses has created more jobs and opportunities for musicians and performers. No disagreements on this one either.
Mary Darwell, Executive Director, Arts NSW (within Communities NSW) talks about creativity, sustainable business models and access as priorities. She mentions the Arts NSW booth at the recent Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM) in Adelaide, promoting NSW artists. She tells us that structural changes in Arts NSW have been taking place over the last 18 months and that in the last six, the priorities have been Aboriginal arts and culture, opportunities for employment in the Creative Industries and how to reach diverse audiences.
The following statistics are shared. NSW is home to 37 percent of the nation’s creative workforce, accounting for five percent of the State’s workforce or 150,000 jobs for people working in film, music, design, publishing, advertising, architecture, visual arts, television, performing arts, radio and electronic gaming. 39 percent of all creative industry businesses are located in NSW, accounting for 27,000 or four percent of all businesses. The NSW Government’s $42 million Arts Funding Program supports 11 of our major performing arts companies, regional galleries and community-based organisations as well.
By now, we should have been impressed by the scale and largesse of NSW’s commitment to the arts, but as the struggling providers of “presence, immediacy and experiment” it offered little consolation. The empty space for small to medium sector artists is the one felt in the pocket.
where are the artists?
As well as the opportunity to be heard, the gathering was paid respect in the choice of keynote speaker, Sarah Miller, a great supporter and contributor to the sector in her work as former director of Performance Space, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and now as Head of the School of Music and Drama in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong.
Miller argues that, given the problematic status of artists, their obligation to an increasing number of ‘stakeholders’ and a general lack of clarity about the ‘creative’ society being built for the future, “our governments need to develop clear and reasoned philosophies and strategies outlining just why they provide support for art and artists.” However, on looking at Arts NSW’s strategic plan, Miller “found not one word dedicated to artists of any kind; not one mention. Arts yes, communities yes. Programmes, yes. There’s even a bullet point that promotes advocacy for the arts and promises to improve sustainability for the arts, but nothing about supporting artists—the people who make the ART. Does anyone else find that extraordinary?”
Miller goes on to argue for “locating artists and practitioners at the heart of arts policy development and recognising that the relationships between government and company, funding body and artist is a partnership—not a master/slave or an employer/employee relationship. It means informed, committed, staff supported within the bureaucracies to grow policy development and arts funding programmes in a sustained and bipartisan fashion.” If this could be achieved, it means that “…the development of the sector, the role of the arts and culture in society and so on, will have a completely different complexion, particularly if artists and theatre makers of all kinds are invited to sit at the table when developing policy—which is arguably what the Minister is doing by setting up this forum today.”
Miller says that from this, “a whole lot of other things follow: we can recognise that people need spaces to live and work in; we can identify career pathways, and support artists and companies to develop, mature and flourish. We need artists AND we need infrastructure. It’s a symbiotic relationship—not an either/or one—working through—as Performance Space Director Daniel Brine has identified—both the ‘what “we” need’ (the infrastructure map) and the ‘what “I” need’ (the artist’s map).” But this kind of progress will need artist input—“With an effective advocacy network you can make the case for improved funding.”
Miller acknowledges areas of improvement which Arts NSW should more energetically embrace: “The development of regional, national and international touring circuits have seen small to medium companies flourish in a range of arenas, and Arts NSW should not shy away from supporting such initiatives on the basis of some misplaced parochialism.” She also calls on Sydney Festival to create more opportunities for NSW artists and companies (this should be extended to the Sydney Opera House’s New-York-out-of-town VIVID Festival). In this vein, Miller concludes with extolling the virtues of collaboration and partnerships across the state.
small breakouts
We are then mustered for Breakout Sessions in which groups of 12-15 representatives are consigned to corners of the room with butcher’s paper (always a depressing prospect) to come up with quick responses to a basic agenda.
One hour is allocated to this discussion. A colleague whispers: “How do you convey desperation in an hour?” And, of course, you don’t. Nor do you get even close to the complex needs of a sector that has been denied real recognition and equitable treatment for so long. The groups assembled represent a wide range of creative endeavours and scales of operation. Dancers seemed under-represented. Nevertheless, there was a sense that the gathering was in basic agreement on the answers to the three key questions put to them by the Minister:
1. What have been the successes of the small to medium performing arts sector to date and what can we learn from them?
2. What are your long-term aspirations for the sector?
3. What do you regard as immediate priorities?
successes
The breakout groups proudly declare the sector’s capacity, against the odds, for survival: the ability to remain robust and flexible and, of necessity, multi-skilled. They point out that the sector invests in research and the development of talent in the way large organisations will not, and fuels the festival circuit and new arts centres thus improving infrastructure. Significantly, the bulk of work touring overseas is from this sector. The elimination of the PoPE venue licence restrictions is seen as a particular success.
long-term aspirations
The NSW Government has long been preoccupied with what goes on in the arts within its borders and is rightly proud of its regional arts infrastructure. It has, however, lacked the national and international vision of some other states. Some participants argue for the government to build on the international potential of its artists and companies. Quick turnaround funding is proposed (and has now been implemented; see below) to allow for immediate response to invitations from overseas festivals and other opportunities.
Also suggested is the commissioning of a report on the economic impact of the arts in NSW, incorporating information on working conditions and professional development. These include the need to urgently address the supply of training facilities, especially for dance, circus and physical theatre, and assistance for artists in professional development and with ‘brokerage.’
Infrastructure needs are seen as including how the small to medium performing arts sector connects with others, with a desire for a closer relationship with the education sector to enable more access for artists to young audiences. Similarly the position of the sector in the relationship between Arts NSW and local government is seen as needing clarification, as are connections between various development and touring schemes.
Some of the points raised address fundamentals for the sector. Because its work is often engaged with experiment, long development time is crucial and this needs to be understood when funding decisions are being made. More difficult in an era of accountability, benchmarking and KPIs is the development of a culture of risk aversion and a concomitant fear of failure. What happens then to “presence, immediacy and experiment”?
Even more fundamental is the survival of the artist. It’s argued by forum participants that NSW government and artists should lobby the Federal Government for a recalibration of the unemployment benefit system to acknowledge the value and work of independent artists. This was hoped for in 2009, but Arts Minister Peter Garrett altogether sidestepped the opportunity with further investment in emerging artists funds—welcome in some respects, but always leaving the question begging: emerging into what?
immediate priorities
Urgent need is again expressed for space: affordable, flexible for rehearsal, development and production. Venues like CarriageWorks and those in Western Sydney are significant improvements, as are the Queen Street Studio and like schemes, but still do not meet the real need.
Participants feel that it’s not just the amount of space but its effective use, management and distribution among artists. Suggestions included the establishment of a database, brokerage on behalf of artists, a think-tank about needs and opportunities, and a rethink about how current venues are used.
Sarah Miller’s suggestion is taken up that a peak body for NSW performing arts would give the small to medium sector a united voice and opportunities for conversation and sharing knowledge. Above all, concern for individual artists is strongly expressed, reliant as they are on auspicing companies, organisations, producers and venues to secure funding in NSW.
getting to the point
These responses to the set questions are delivered politely by the team leaders from each group. At one point someone asks me, “Are they speaking your language?”
Finally, there is a refreshing break in the pattern as Grant O’Neill from Legs on the Wall sums up for his group the range of successes—expansion, growth, resilience, partnerships, improved focus, support from local government (regional centres especially)—“very few (of which) have to do with any policy instigated by Arts NSW.”
He goes on to add a list of ‘disasters’, under which category his group identifies a range of misfires by Arts NSW, namely: the recent funding restructure, the way it deals with applications, the nature of its announcements (“not remotely acceptable”), absence of known methodology, barriers to communication (nobody authorised to speak), lack of any understanding—especially of the independent arts sector. O’Neill finishes with a creative flourish, returning to the Minister’s reference to The Empty Space, but as miscommunication.
And finally, Nick Marchand, formerly artistic director of Griffin Theatre Company and now director of the British Council in Australia, eloquently sums up his group’s discussions. Judging by the approving murmurs, he and Grant O’Neill get closest to the feelings in the room. Among the sector’s successes Marchand lists resilience, innovation, collaboration, touring, “ensuring its own longevity outside of Arts NSW,” providing opportunities for artists—emerging, transitional and established—and “creating the bedrock of arts culture.”
Marchand’s group argues the need for government to recognise and acknowledge the individual artist within the system. One size does not fit all. Focusing, like O’Neill, on the absence of dialogue, he tells us that Arts NSW representatives are not approachable: “When you speak to someone on the phone, you need to speak to people who have authority to speak.” Dialogue between state and federal governments is similarly problematic. This group believes Arts NSW should be driving business development and, crucially, opening dialogue between sectors, infrastructure organisations and artists.
are we really talking?
For a first meeting between the small to medium performing arts sector and Arts Minister Judge this was less a conversation than an opportunity for the minister to listen and the sector to have a voice with which to express its mutual, on-going concerns. Critically, Sarah Miller’s keynote address drew attention to the ‘artist’ as the missing agent in Arts NSW policy and to the need to address in a balanced way the relationship between infrastructure and the individual. Much that followed in the responses to the Minister’s set of questions pivots around this issue of the role and place of the artist in our culture, whether individually or in companies.
In a letter (April 30) to forum participants, Minister Judge suggests that “The need for affordable and accessible performance space was the strongest issue that emerged.” As well as reminding us of the reform (PoPE) regulations, Judge writes that the Renew Newcastle model might extend across NSW and that she has asked her department “to examine further options for affordable rehearsal spaces within its current property portfolio as well as exploring other practical options.”
Judge sees networking and advocacy as the second major issue of the forum. She advises the sector to “get together on a more regular basis to share ideas and resources and to represent shared interests to the Government.” She also acknowledges “that there needs to be better communication between the Government and the sector.”
On the position of artists, Judge writes, “I am looking at ways Arts NSW can better engage with artists and arts organisations, in particular improving the Arts Funding Program and support mechanisms for individual artists.”
On May 5, Judge sent out an email announcing “a Quick Response project category which will be offered four times a year to assist individuals and organisations who need to apply outside the annual funding cycle. There will be a six-week turnaround for applications to the Quick Response Category and closing dates are 2 August 2010, 1 November 2010, 7 February 2011 and 2 May 2011. The inclusion of this new funding category is a direct response to issues raised in the three forums that I have hosted for the industry at Parliament House.”
For Project Funding, individual artists in NSW have to find an organisation willing to auspice their grant; it’s not always an easy task to find like-mindedness and it’s quite competitive. The Quick Response application does not appear to require auspicing (although it’s not absolutely clear on the final page who should sign the form). It looks like a breakthrough for artists and a more realistic government attitude to the realities of responding to the marketplace. Mind you, Quick Response funding will presumably be money re-allocated from Annual and Project Funding, which raises the issue again of overall funding levels. As Sarah Miller quipped in her keynote address, “Maybe for the next forum we could invite the Treasurer along as well.”
Just what “improving the Arts Funding Program and support mechanisms for individual artists” will add up to is difficult to imagine in economically challenged NSW and with the limited vision of Arts NSW, but with an election coming we must take Sarah Miller’s prompting seriously. Is it time for small to medium sector artists to act collectively, to stake a claim in the state’s cultural future, the one they themselves are building? Arts Minister Virginia Judge has listened, acted and promises further conversation and action. Let’s define that action with her—the empty space between government and the arts just might begin to fill.
Small to Medium Performing Arts Forum, Parliament House, March 19
In RealTime 92, Dan Edwards wrote from Beijing about Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Caochangdi, an ambitious initiative to give photography a recognised place in contemporary Chinese art see RT92). We've just received the bad news that Caochangdi, home to many other high profile galleries and leading artist Ai Weiwei's house, has been slated for demolition by local authorities. Protests have been mounted but help is needed. The organisers write, “We are artists, curators, representatives and friends of art institutions who support the Chinese art community and its vibrant environment. In conjunction with the Caochangdi PhotoSpring festival, we are launching an effort to collect 10,000 signatures from art supporters around the world. The goal of this effort is to protect and preserve the current state of the Caochangdi Art District. We want to launch negotiations to explore reasonable ways to resolve this issue. The effort to collect signatures for this petition ends on June 10, 2010. The signatures collected will make up a formal petition to be presented to the Beijing City Government.” You can sign the petition at http://www.threeshadows.cn/qianming/index.htm
reeldance festival: eve sussman
Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation's The Rape of the Sabine Women (see RT87) is one of the featured films in this year's Reeldance International Dance on Screen Festival in Sydney. In 2008 Carl Nilsson-Polias saw the 83-minute film and interviewed the maker for RealTime about her interpretation of the historical tale and the influences, classical and modern, on her art. Nilsson-Polias wrote that Sussman and her collaborators “brought the story into the aesthetics of the 1960s and with that came the concomitant cinematic references of that decade. Foremost among these is the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose distinctive visual style utilised long focal-length lenses to produce abstract graphical compositions with flat areas of colour, in the tradition of painters such as Barnett Newman. Sussman readily admits to having rewound again and again across “millions” of frames of Antonioni’s films for inspiration, as well as those of Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes.” Also on the 2010 festival program are works by visiting UK filmmaker Shelly Love with her distinctive brand of fantastical imagery (www.shellylove.co.uk). ReelDance International Dance on Screen Festival, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, May 13-16, www.reeldance.org.au
Superdeluxe@Artspace
sydney biennale: superdeluxe@artspace
SuperDeluxe@Artspace will present a dynamic program of DJs, sound artists, dancers, music, films and informal PechaKucha Nights over 12 weeks in a program co-curated by SuperDeluxe Tokyo, KDa, Namaiki Joni Waka, Artspace and the Biennale of Sydney. Friday and Saturday nights will feature DJ’s, sound artists, performers, musicians and guest curators including Rosie Dennis, Rice Corpse, Phil Dadson, Scott Donovan, Wade Marynowksy, Oren Ambarchi and Jeff Stein, Gail Priest, Alex White and a swag of Japanese and other artists.
One of the bonuses of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney is the film program, Magickal Songs, Mythical Histories and Fictitious Truths, works selected by Jack Sargeant (director, REVelation Perth International Film Festival) and Biennale director David Elliott. Each Sunday May-July rarely seen, adventurous films will be screened at SuperDeluxe. True to the Biennale's theme, the films “reflect on spirituality and indigeneity; and on the power of art and its place in traditional culture and contemporary politics.” Filmmakers include Harry Smith, Ira Cohen, Mark Baldwin, Nick Zedd, Owen Land, Jessica Yu, all USA, Fanny Brauning (Switzerland), Shen Shaomin (China), Eileen Simpson and Ben White (UK) and, from Australia, Indigenous filmmaker Allan Collins (Spirit Stones), Kenta McGrath (Three Hams in a Can) and noko (Order 41 Conjuration of Beelzebub, a film about some very remarkable performers). Artspace, SuperDeluxe, from May 13; for programs see http://www.superdeluxe-artspace.com.au
Wittenoom and the Cancerous Breeze, Jason Nelson
jason nelson: digital poems
The ever inventive Jason Nelson (who lectures on Cyberstudies, digital writing and creative practice at Griffith University in Queensland), has released onto the net three “semi-newly birthed digital artworks/poems inspired by Australian locales.” Sydney’s Siberia, “an interactive and infinitely zooming digital poem”, layers strange texts (“city planners continue to be suspicious of growing a concrete cactus from a temporary pavillion”) over sometimes doodled-on, still images (“Siberia, a winter without temperature” overlays a warmly lit cottage and a spindly, drawn tree). You can move in on a detail in each image until it becomes a huge picture quilt into which you further zoom, dizzy by now, and choose another image. Gradually you come to recognise certain images and build yourself a strange vision of Sydney.
Wittenoom and the Cancerous Breeze, Jason Nelson
Birds Still Warm from Flying is “an interactive/re-creatable poetry cube” that you can fill with small moving images and turn three-dimensionally, reading its lateral lists. Less enigmatic and not a little spooky is Wittenoom and the Cancerous Breeze: Set “1450kms north of Perth and 460m above sea level is the valley of death, a town of airborne threads, fibres from the industrial boom and if these carcinogens as residents (the harsh gateway to the Hamersley Ranges) built their own lungfull and fearsome town…” Over a series of 10 images of a desolate town (Wittenoom is a former asbestos mining site and now ghost town), texts fall and turn in sometimes beautiful configurations or an image is enveloped in a big, bloody bubble, while texts exude surreal menace: “They carry re-wind men and their houses open”, or “Armed stars, segmented knives for desecration.”http://www.secrettechnology.com
24HRS at dancehouse: the interviews
In the March 29 In the Loop we told you about the Jo Lloyd-curated 24HRS at Dancehouse, four choreographers each creating a new work over 24 hours—one for each Friday over four weeks. While the works by Phillip Adams (May14) and Luke George (May 21 ) are still to come, Lloyd has been interviewing contributing artists Natalie Cursio and Shelly Lasica about the experience. Read the interviews at http://www.dancehouse.com.au in the performance section.
Opening the CD package, I notice that the disk and inside cover are decorated with drawings of ants running about, and I immediately think of manuscript notes that have left the stave and run off, perversely out of control—a portent of what I am about to hear?
On first listening, however, Mike Majkowski’s choice of notes seems deliberate and carefully calculated. This is a solo CD for double bass in which Majkowski builds on the musical languages that have emerged during his engagement with Splinter Orchestra and related musicians—Jim Denley, Chris Abrahams and others—using his highly evolved playing techniques to produce some dazzling pieces. There seems to be growing interest amongst contemporary musicians in the use of the double bass as a solo instrument, possibly because of its great range, tone and timbre and the amazing effects that can be produced. This CD, Ink on Paper, recorded in Sydney in 2008, does not appear intended as an exemplar of bass literature, but is rather focussed in a particular area, and for the most part, the bass is not made to sound like a bass at all, but like other, sometimes novel, instruments.
The title of the first track, “Pizzicato,” correctly describes the method of playing but does not convey the extraordinary way in which Majkowski plays, nor the complexity of the composition. The work begins with a series of rapid, cascading notes, punctuated by stabbing glissandi, all in the higher registers of the instrument, with occasional bowed gestures in the lower registers. As it develops, we hear background breathing and wordless vocalising, with light tapping on the bass’s body and on the strings. There is no central melodic line, but rather a series of note clusters. It sounds so dextrous, you wonder how it could be performed by one person. The deepest sonorities of the double bass are rarely evident in this track, though when they appear they contrast and thus emphasise the high, chattering notes that evoke ant conversations.
The short second track, “Foam and Straw”, combines high-pitched bowing with an intense vibrato that produces a series of atonal, warbly squeals and screams, which then segues into extremely fast bowing in the lower registers. It sounds like the bow is skittering across the strings, and one can imagine Majkowski’s bowing arm looking like a soft blur as it moves. “First Words, Dribble” is the intriguing title of the third track, demonstrating further extreme bowing with, at one point, double stopping and, later, whistling and vocalisation, the whistling and wordless voice harmonising with the bowed sounds, showing how the bass and the human mouth can mimic each other.
Most startling is the title track, “Ink on Paper,” a series of short, sharp gestures that sound like they come from a synthesiser capable of playing microtones. Multi-tracking is used to build up these squeaky notes into an increasingly chaotic and dense weave, as if we are listening to a gigantic colony of sea birds all squawking their heads off.
The final track, “Current,” begins with strumming across all the strings, with long intervals to emphasise the harmonics and resonances that follow each gesture. These pauses make for a meditative work, and again, the emphasis is on the nature of the sound that can be produced and its musical possibility.
Majkowski’s CD is an extended study of how the double bass can be played and, particularly, how it can be made to generate an entirely new range of sounds. Each of the five tracks is a study based on different playing techniques. Evidently the work is improvised, but Majkowsi is clearly familiar with these techniques, and the combinations and permutations of the musical figures he generates presumably draw on extensive explorations of the instrument. There is presumably some detailed planning behind the track “Ink on Paper,” the result emerging from the overdubbing and mixing as much as the playing, producing a highly calculated work.
This CD reveals new languages of sound as well as of form and technique. This is cerebral, exploratory music. It's about breaking sound down into its most fundamental constituents and then rethinking it, taking elemental material, such as a bowed or plucked note, a strummed chord, a glissando or even a resonant interval, and building up a collage from these fragments. The balance between improvised and composed elements, between the spontaneous and the planned, is not the only interest; rather it is the sonic material and how it is worked that establishes the aesthetic. The music does not overwhelm or obscure the sonic ingredients, but sits in parallel with them—a possible metaphor might be appreciating pixels and picture simultaneously. The result, in the intelligent hands of a composer-performer such as Majkowski, is an entirely new and involving musical experience, a reinvention of music.
Chris Reid
Tape Projects. 100 Proofs the Earth is not a Globe
courtesy Next Wave
Tape Projects. 100 Proofs the Earth is not a Globe
CONSCIOUSLY OR NOT, ARTISTS HAVE LONG PUT AT RISK THEIR BODIES AND SOULS, AND SOMETIMES THOSE OF THEIR AUDIENCES. THEY HAVE TEMPTED THE DISFAVOUR OF CRITICS, AUDIENCES, GOVERNMENTS, MONARCHS AND DICTATORS AND LOST INCOME AND CAREERS.
For much of the 20th century, risk-taking was encapsulated in the notion of a formally and politically disruptive avant garde. In the 21st century the avant garde has been replaced by a multiplicity of agents for change, now busily reclaiming the right to risk as an aesthetic prerogative, and with utopian potential. Such an agent is Melbourne’s increasingly international Next Wave Festival, for and by young adults, directed, for the second time, by the ever energetic and clear-sighted Jeff Khan.
In an era when the artistic manifesto has been usurped by the business plan and society has become increasingly risk-averse (while contrarily wreaking environmental and financial destruction in the name of the free market), the call to experimentation is growing. If hardly a new concept for the arts, the ways in which artistic risk are being realised are evolving differently from their Modernist avant-garde antecedents. I asked Khan about the kinds of risk entailed in the works in this year’s festival.
The theme of the 2010 Next Wave Festival is, rather grandly, “No Risk Too Great.” It’s easy to say, but who and what are at risk in your program?
People inside and outside of the arts have become increasingly ‘risk averse’ so we wanted to open up a space within the festival to critically look at risk from many different angles, including the micro-management of ourselves and our behaviour in a broader cultural context—OH&S, fear of crime and all of that, which are focused on the individual, our rights, our property. We need to look beyond that in our fraught times, of environmental meltdown, of the big systems which are proving to be untenable. We need to be citizens who can step outside of our own comfort zones.
You’re doing this through art but also through talks and discussions.
Where we can drill down into the subject and address the complexity of risk.
Aesthetic risk?
Every act of creation is a risk—starting with nothing and taking a position. A risk averse culture is contrary to the artistic process putting at risk, in turn, the scale and ambition of artists’ projects.
Since at least the 1970s and 80s risk has increasingly manifested as cross-artform, intercultural and multimedia, entailing new performer-audience relationships and a pervasive engagement with media technologies. What kinds of aesthetic risks are being taken in Next Wave 2010?
It’s definitely about the dissolution of boundaries between artforms, collaborations between complementary and sometimes contradictory practices, and especially the engagement with art in a non-art context. One of the things that most excites me has been a real ramp up, for this festival, in the number and rigour of site works that make interventions into the public arena.
What are the risks for site-specific work?
It’s about making meaningful interventions but it’s also about speaking to a non-arts audience at the same time as to an arts audience.
It takes courage as well, or foolhardiness. Both are aspects of risk-taking.
It’s also about the choice of sites, of public spaces. This year’s Sports Club Project evolved out of using night clubs as sites in the last festival. This time we’re establishing a deep engagement with two sports club spaces: George Knott Athletics Reserve, which is a suburban track and field training facility and the MCG, one of the most iconic sports venues in Australia. To really meaningfully intervene in these spaces with integrity is a huge challenge. The artists visited each venue once a week for six weeks, not only getting to know the architecture, but meeting with the sports people and the stakeholders—sports administrators, little athletics clubs, security guards, operations people—to learn about the function of the space both in an operational and a cultural sense. So the artists’ works will be genuine responses to these sites.
Now they’ve assimilated these places, what will they then do in them?
There’ll be a durational event in each venue over eight hours beginning in the afternoon and comprising roving and spot performances and media art works installed in nooks and crannies. People can come and go at any time and will find themselves immersed in these altered environments.
Immersion, sensory deprivation or amplification, one-on-one performances, mass durational events, unusual locations—these are increasingly indicative of the tasks artists set themselves to attract or challenge audiences, to build them into the work.
Ashley Dyer, And Then Something Fell On My Head
courtesy Next Wave
Ashley Dyer, And Then Something Fell On My Head
Parts of the program are very immersive, very experiential, like Great Heights, which is staged across Melbourne rooftops. There are performances which are very physically confronting—Ashley Dyer’s And Something Fell On My Head is a full-length performance made entirely of objects that are choreographed to fall from the ceiling of the space towards the audience who are fitted out with safety goggles and hard hats. There are also works where audiences will become participants in unfamiliar places. The Melbourne new media arts collective Tape Projects’ 100 Proofs the Earth is not a Globe is essentially a tour of the Victorian Space Science Education Centre with performance, video and sound, transforming the educational tools. It’s a work that requires the curiosity of the audience as well as a real sense of adventure. A lot of the festival’s projects have a sense of stepping into the unknown.
Mish Grigor, Jackson Castiglione, The Short Message Service
Mish Grigor, Jackson Castiglione, The Short Message Service
We’re used to the idea of performers tempting fate, as in physical theatre, but now different kinds of risks are being broached. What about Mish Grigor and Jackson Castiglione in The Short Message Service (a collaboration with Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart and Leah Shelton), where the audience text the performers instructions they must carry out? In performance art this kind of approach has sometimes been physically dangerous for the performer.
The success of the show will depend on the fearlessness of Mish and Jackson and how they handle the SMS commands from the audience. The risk is that the premise could result in something banal or something completely out of control, but what tempers it is that fearlessness and the performers’ incredible proficiency in channelling the instructions into creating situations that are dramatic and spontaneous.
And doubtless their skills at improvisation in interpreting the commands.
There’s such a complicated backend tech and media system which underpins the performance, but what elevates it is the quality of the two performers.
Paula van Beek, Dangerous Melbourne
courtesy Next Wave
Paula van Beek, Dangerous Melbourne
I’m intrigued by Dangerous Melbourne, an advisory session on how to handle the city’s perils.
It follows the format of a community information night and will be presented in a series of town halls across Melbourne where Neighborhood Watch meetings might normally happen. It’s equally a photography and performance event. Paula van Beek’s been doing surveys and research to establish what various samples of the Melbourne population find dangerous about the city. Her photography is a sometimes literal, sometimes abstract interpretation of those fears. People will be given tea or coffee and name tags and a slide show which will accurately represent their fears but also poke fun at big irrational fears in the collective consciousness.
This criss-crossing of fact and fiction is fascinating. Doomsday Vanitas likewise engages with the facticity of fear by being located in Melbourne laneways inhabited by works of art: “sharp, hologram-like projections [creating] a series of ominous still lives” in “a video game-like labyrinth.”
There’s a lovely connection with Dangerous Melbourne here, because Nicole Breedon takes iconography from literature, film and largely computer gaming culture—the icons you ‘collect’ on your visit are everyday objects but become weapons and tools of survival. Both Dangerous Melbourne and Doomsday Vanitas are about being held in thrall by our fears but also about being entertained by them while the world around us melts. What kind of gothic fantasies, for example, will be spun out of the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland?
Managing the growing scale of Next Wave must in itself involve risks. It see that your international project is aptly titled Structural Integrity.
Structural Integrity is the biggest exchange that Next wave has undertaken, with artists from the Asia-Pacific region in residence at the Meat Market. We’ve brought together 11 artist run initiatives and art collectives from across Australia and around Asia. Each is building a pavilion structure to house or represent emerging art in their region. It’s been conceived as a melancholic world fair [LAUGHS] rather then celebrating the values of nationalism. It looks at how grassroots cultures balance their work with their geopolitical position. There’ll be different takes on this. Post-Museum from Singapore are apparently meeting with 20 non-profit organisations from around Melbourne—climate change, anti-domestic violence, arts groups and charities who all believe they can change the world for the better—to organise a collective action which will determine the structure of their pavilion. It’s a utopian collectivity which really reflects the group’s position in Singapore where they support arts projects and live art but also provide a meeting point for activist organisations, as an intersection of art and politics.
The utopian aspect looks like a seriously appealing antidote to risk-aversion.
There’s a strong sense in Structural Integrity of art collectives and artist-run initiatives as providing an alternative social structure. The project is bigger than Ben Hur but it’s looking pretty stunning at the moment.
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In a speech about Next Wave 2010, Jeff Khan cited as inspirational the words of French philosopher Simone Weil who in 1943 wrote of risk as an “essential need of the soul,” arguing that “[t]he absence of risk produces a type of boredom which paralyses in a different way from fear, but almost as much.” Next Wave invites its audiences to accept exciting and unnerving challenges—to enter unusual non-art spaces, to become essential ingredients in or agents of creation, to be open to new forms and experiences and to talk risk, in the Risk Talkers program, as well as engage with it as art.
The demands are sometimes epic: Ultimate Time Lapse Megamix is an eight-hour dusk-til-dawn video art marathon on Federation Square’s big screen with works from Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Others are intimate: in Private Dances “audiences will be indulged with a lavish banquet and immersed in a series of private rooms, for one-on-one encounters with some of Australia’s most brilliant young dance artists.” Stranger is Bennett Miller’s Dachshund UN which will “convene a meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights populated entirely by live dachshunds.” While I Thought A Musical Was Being Made promises “a large-scale performance on the intersection of Russell and Lonsdale Streets that the audience will watch from windows high above the on-street action.” Or you might choose to be spooked in a church crypt by the Sisters Hayes’ A Good Death or find yourself literally inside the performance of Hole in the Wall (RT95). Dive in.
The full 2010 Next Wave program can be found at http://2010.nextwave.org.au/festival/program. Participants in Structural Integrity are: Art Center Ongoing (Tokyo), Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space (Brisbane), FELTspace (Adelaide), House of Natural Fiber (Jogyakarta), Locksmith Project Space (Sydney), Post-Museum (Singapore), Six_a Artist Run Initiative (Hobart), TUTOK (Manila), Vitamin Creative Space (Guangzhou), West Space (Melbourne) and Y3K (Melbourne).
SALT BEGINS WITH ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING OPENING SHOTS OF RECENT FILM. WE’RE ON LAKE EYRE. LIKE THE MIRROR LAKES NEAR MILFORD SOUND IN NEW ZEALAND, WHEN LAKE EYRE HAS WATER, THE SKY REFLECTED IS SO CRYSTAL CLEAR THE JOIN BETWEEN LAND AND SKY MAKES A NEW LANDSCAPE.
A black speck emerges from right of frame. It’s difficult to make out as it glides towards us. An ambiguous image. Like a Rorschach inkblot brought to life. Is it a sea creature? An alien? A two-headed monster? As the speck hurtles towards the screen, it becomes a man on a bike, carting his photographic equipment on a trailer. It’s like he’s cycled down from the clouds.
Murray Fredericks is a landscape photo-artist. For six years he has been camping on Lake Eyre (alone for up to six weeks each time, often twice a year) and setting up his tripod, searching for “a landscape devoid of features,” pointing his camera “into pure space.” From 2006 to 2008 he also took a video camera, capturing his day to day musings on art, nature, family, grief and the complexities of surviving as an artist—in a video diary interwoven with time-lapse photography and stunning images of the lake.
Salt, a joint effort by Fredericks and co-director Michael Angus, is an amazingly accomplished short documentary considering the isolation and the difficulties of shooting in various weather conditions on the lake. With no crew on board, the lone Fredericks frames each shot carefully, capturing stillness rather than motion. His monologuing, his intimacy with the camera as we sit in the tent with him, capture his moods, etch into the silent landscape. Fredericks has a talent for words as well as images, and there’s poetry in his everyday observations or in his conversations with his wife on the phone, describing meals (his favourite, porridge, over a camp stove), honestly questioning his art-making or meditating on the nature of self and loss in such an overpowering landscape.
As with the documentaries, Contact (Martin Butler, Bentley Dean, 2009; see RT93) and Night (Lawrence Johnston, 2003, see RT83), in Salt the landscape takes over the frames, dwarfing the protagonist and his tent. Fredericks describes how being completely alone, “to the point where [he] can’t see land any more” for 360 degrees, brings him into a dream state, immersed in a void, where even the smallest sounds—brushing his teeth—become magnified, where you end up “watching your thoughts…like a television.” He drifts into a life of rituals—preparing meals, cleaning his camera equipment, continuing to work at all costs—to fight off the “negative spiral” of depression that nips at his heels, the fear that he’ll surface at the end of the trip with no wonderful images: “Is there anything lasting?”
This short film is elegantly structured with the answer to that question revealed at the very end, after the video camera is switched off. As an artist Murray Fredericks is interested in exploring “why landscapes (or images of them) move people.” His still frames are so subtle, delicate and Rothko-esque they become impossible to forget.
Salt had its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2009 and screened in March 2010 on ABC TV’s Artscape program. The DVD can be purchased from www.saltdoco.com.
Salt, director, producer Michael Angus, director, camera Murray Fredericks, original music Aajinta, editors Lindi Harrison, Ingunn Jordansen, sound design Tom Heuzenroeder, James Currie; Jerrycan Films, 2009
“TUNNELLING WAS CONSIDERED AN UNGENTLEMANLY WAY OF CONDUCTING WARFARE, IT WASN’T CONSIDERED HONOURABLE. THE GENTLEMANLY WAY TO CONDUCT WARFARE WAS TO CLIMB OUT OF A TRENCH, OVER A PARAPET AND RUN TOWARDS ENEMY LINES WITH A RIFLE…WITH AN AVERAGE AGE OF 42, A LOT OF THE TUNNELLERS HAD DUST ON THEIR LUNGS FROM THEIR MINING DAYS. THEY WERE SICK AND DYING MEN WHEN THEY WENT TO WAR…AFTER THE HOSTILITIES THEY FADED AWAY VERY QUICKLY.” Ross Thomas, Executive Producer, Beneath Hill 60
Jeremy Sims’ first feature Last Train to Freo (2006) was notable for its intense sense of foreboding. A woman caught on a train late at night, trapped by the cat-like menace of an unpredictable man fresh out of prison and hell-bent on confrontation, the film’s real-time unravelling created an acute atmosphere of fear and isolation, that moment when life suddenly spins out of your control. Producer Bill Leimbach (who directed the documentary Gallipoli: The Untold Stories) imagined Sims might be the perfect director for another claustrophobic tale—but here on an epic scale—about a group of Australian civilian miners, called up in World War I, given two weeks rudimentary training, and sent to the hellhole Western front, to start digging and laying mines under the German-held Hill 60.
With the opening scene—a soldier tying his bootlaces up, adjusting his belt, putting his sword in its sheath—we are introduced to the detail of soldierly life. But mining engineer Oliver Woodward (Brendan Cowell) is not your regular soldier. As a civilian, he (and the audience) are rapidly deposited into the tunnels near Armentières, northern France, 30 feet below, where carrying a candle through the darkness, scuttering about like a rat in a maze, his introduction to the men, as their new commanding officer, is: :I can’t seem to find my way out.”
The men use an instrument like a stethoscope to hear through the walls, catching any sounds that may be Germans digging tunnels themselves, or sinking mine shafts. A young boy, Frank Tiffin (Harrison Gilbertson, outstanding as Daniel in Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed [2009], and starring in Andrew Lancaster’s recently released Accidents Happen alongside Geena Davis), paralysed with fear and alone in the dark, is introduced to Woodward. He says he thinks he hears something. With a tap tap, Woodward reveals to the boy that he’s hearing his own heartbeat. As bombs explode around them and rattle the scaffolding, the men hold their cups of tea steady.
Although the underground world is dank and closed in, at least it’s sheltered from noise and rain. As Woodward surfaces for air, his short walk to the officers’ dug-outs (dramatically realised by DOP Toby Oliver, who also worked on Last Train to Freo and, more recently, David Field’s The Combination [2009]) brings home the true horror of men in the trenches, squirming in the mud and rain, bloody body parts left to rot, the continual sonic assault. An introduction to British officer Clayton (Leon Ford) is a reminder of other Australian classics of the war genre, Gallipoli (1981) and Breaker Morant (1980), with laconic Aussies pitted against the English class system in the shape of officers with little pity for the soldiers they’re overseeing. I wish for shades of grey here, beyond the clichés, some insight into these obnoxious Brits, but it’s clearly the way they were seen by many Australian soldiers—the stereotypes persist.
Harrison Gilbertson, Beneath Hill 60
photo Wendy McDougall
Harrison Gilbertson, Beneath Hill 60
Sims has extensive theatrical experience and his strength as a director is clearly in terms of working with actors, especially the younger cast, and ensuring wonderful delivery of idiomatic Aussie dialogue, which rises above sentimentality or uber-nostalgia and goes beyond the well-worn treads of mateship. Although a fine actor, always exciting on screen, the casting of Cowell, however, just doesn’t quite fit: he’s been through so much 30-something angst (the TV series Love My Way; Matthew Saville’s Noise [2007]) that all the soft lighting and makeup in the world can’t make him a believable lad in his 20s, coveting a 16-year-old girl.
The flashbacks to the Queensland homestead, where he teases and seduces the girl (Bella Heathcote), take away crucial pace from a film trying to recreate the dramatic tension of men risking their lives underground. It’s such a long and complicated plotline that by the time the men actually reach the Hill (the bloodiest battle on the Western Front, along the Messines Ridge in Belgium), where the tension should be peaking, the dramatics have started to soak back into the soil, slowly oozing out rivulets from the mine, like the reluctant pump Woodward sets up in front of his superiors. I longed for the tension created in a similar film caught in confined spaces, Das Boot (Wolfang Petersen, 1091), and think with a more focused script and fewer ‘diversions’, Sims and writer David Roach could have achieved it. He also chooses to focus on two German miners on the other side of the wall and while this could have made a wonderfully dramatic connection between the Germans and Australians, the narrative device too leaks the tension rather than building it.
The men, by tunnelling into the blue clay of Flanders beneath enemy lines, are able to lay enough explosives so that the bang, when it arrives, is the largest that the world has ever seen. Sims does well to give a big budget feel to a film that doesn’t have one, transforming sunny Townsville via a rain machine into the quagmires of France and Belgium. It’s an immensely ambitious project with a captivating story that’s taken 90 years to reach the surface. For the most part, Sims and his strong ensemble cast bring the feature to life with more force than many US action flicks can manage.
Beneath Hill 60, director Jeremy Hartley Sims, producer Bill Leimbach, writer David Roach, cinematographer Toby Oliver, composer Cezary Skubiszewski, editor Dany Cooper, production designer Clayton Jauncey, www.beneathhill60movie.com.au
Zen Zen Zo's engagement with the classics has included intensely physical realisations of Dracula (see RT80) and The Tempest (see RT92). Now it's The Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy by mediaeval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a wonderful opportunity for the company, in a long line of artists across the centuries, to conjure its own images of Hell.
I asked Stephen Atkins, associate director with Brisbane's Zen Zen Zo, why the company had chosen The Inferno in particular. He explained, “It's been on the backburner for the directors for a number of years and fits the trademark image of the company—the naked form of the human body, images of the grotesque, but always alluding to hope and light in the darkness. That's their performance aesthetic and it really does parallel the content of Dante's poem. The company has tackled classic texts for a long time and they work especially well with physical theatre of a visual and edgy kind. It's a perfect fit. When I came over here from Canada in 2007 to do an internship they asked me to come back and eventually do The Inferno.”
The press release for the show says that The Inferno will be re-imagined in terms of modern Australia. Atkins explains how this transposition is being achieved: “It's done through reading the heart of the poem. It's a secular poem, one of the first ever written in the new language of Italian instead of Latin and was meant for the common man. It's also a political satire, a dark criticism of contemporary Florence. Dante was a philosopher as well as a poet, had many political enemies and a stern point of view, opposing corrupt clergy including the popes. However, a literal transposition that would include the personalities he criticises would have been alienating for a contemporary audience.
“We have taken Dante's concept—the geography of hell, each one of the nine circles punishing more progressively serious sins—and transposed this to our society but with a wry sense of humour, an edgy cabaret sense in the way that Weill and Brecht could make fun as well as poke fun. It's not the poem so much as its shape, although there are condensed sections guiding the viewers through the performance. The audience is going through the same hell as Dante, but 700 years on.”
I ask if the audience will have a guide—Dante has Virgil. “Yes, but updated,” says Atkins. “Dante's text is not very theatrical and a bit like a travelogue, so our guides are tour guides.”
The Divine Comedy is secular is the sense of being written in the vernacular, but it is deeply religious. How, I wonder, will the viscerality of the mode of Zen Zen Zo performance capture more than the punishing torments of Hell. Atkins replies, “Hell is a place of punishment so that performance aesthetic of viscerality and visual impact is very present in our production. But also Hell is a just place where punishments fit the crime. Also, people arrive there from their own choices and a misguided sense of self—they're not sent there by an authority. I think this is what makes it appealing to a secular, humanist audience—it doesn't follow the popular idea of Hell, of the devil on a throne dishing out punishment. According to Dante, Lucifer is the most punished person. If Hell is created by people from their own choices, the light at the end of the tunnel is that we have the keys to our own well being. So we must have the courage to go deeper into dark places in order to come out.”
I ask Atkins to describe something of the performance. He chooses The Circle for Heretics scene: “These are the followers of false wisdom and the corrupters of beauty, meaning of creation. The circle is one of the most severe in upper Hell. Where we have tweaked it is through using images of the distortions of the beauty industry—plastic surgery and the bodies beautiful of models—and what it does to people's self-esteem. These are projected onto the bodies of the dancers. In each of the little vignettes in the work we see the core of the misguided soul and what brought them there. We also see that the soul is unable to get itself out of its state and see beyond. We don't just want to see people being punished—it's about falling into states without examining them.”
I'm curious if, with his large-ish cast, Atkins can also capture some of the epic scope of Dante's Inferno. “The original has images that go from horizon to horizon, with millions of souls,” says Atkins. “But we'll concentrate more on the ideas and the emotional journey through each of these hells. I've tried to incorporate the scale with a couple of large numbers with the entire cast of 19. In the middle of the show, which we have nicknamed “the feeding frenzy”, the whole cast is choreographed by one the company's core members. Dale Hubbard's musical score for the work is as rich and varied as the visual influences from Dante's poem, from swamps to flaming deserts to ice cold wasteland.”
The Inferno will be performed in the heritage-listed Old Museum Building in Bowen Hills, Brisbane offering the audience a distinctive journey through the circles of Hell. Atkins says that circularity is important in the work, “Many of the stations we're setting up are circular.”
Stephen Atkins is the director of Vancouver's Human Theatre and teaches at the Capilano University, but currently spends half his year in Brisbane as Associate Director with Zen Zen Zo: “I'm lucky. And the art scene here is very vibrant, young and very inclusive and accepting of new ideas. I'm having a fantastic time working with the company and we look forward to a very long relationship.” Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre, Dante’s Inferno—Living Hell, Old Museum Building, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, May 8-20, www.zenzenzo.com
melbourne international jazz festival
With a theme of “celebrating the common chord”, the festival embraces a remarkably wide range of jazz forms and experiences curated by Michael Tortoni and Sophie Brous in a huge program with 400 performers, 95 events and 20 free concerts, 16 world premieres and 21 Australian premieres incorporating film, visual art, public art installations, forums and master classes.
Famed participants include Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, Ahmad Jamal, Mulatu Astatke, Avishai Cohen, John Hollenbeck, Theo Bleckmann and John Abercrombie. But for those looking for edgier jazz and cross-overs, a variety of spaces in Melbourne Town Hall will be home to Overground which features European improvisers Peter Brotzmann (a festival coup, from Germany), Han Bennink (Holland), Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, USA) with Seth Misterka (USA), My Disco (Australia), Mick Turner (The Dirty Three, Australia); Kim Salmon (Australia); Kram (Spiderbait, Australia), Cor Fuhler (Holland), Kim Myhr (Norway) and Oren Ambarchi, Evelyn Morris AKA Pikelet, Bum Creek, Anthony Pateras, Paul Grabowsky with Sean Baxter (Australia).
Elsewhere on the program The Australian Art Orchestra and Paul Grabowsky will present a tribute concert: Miles Davis—Prince of Darkness. Paul Capsis will perform Songs of Love and Death with the Alister Spence Trio and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will embrace “the interaction between exploratory improvisation and symphonic music with the Metropolis Series.
At the National Gallery of Victoria, as part of the cross-artform Visions of Sound program, Hybrids & Folklore features The Dead Notes, Hi God People, Joel Stern, Snawklor and Clocked Out Duo working with David Chesworth, in an interactive installation curiously described as “focusing on psycho-folkloric sound-making and improvisation in the natural environment.” The Places In Between features Chris Abrahams of The Necks in an immersive sound and light installation in Federation Square. Melbourne International Jazz Festival, May 1-8, www.melbournejazz.com
lynette wallworth does opera
Among video works for live opera, Bill Viola created enormous images for Peter Sellars' production of Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, and now Australian artist Lynette Wallworth has been commissioned to make works for new opera productions in Europe by major composers. In April, The Netherlands' company De Doelen toured a production of Gyorgy Kurtag's Kafka Fragmente, in which the writers' texts are scored for piano and soprano, with Wallworth's projections as “a third protagonist, a woman making art.” London's Young Vic, in a co-production with the ENO (English National Opera), is currently presenting Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers, directed by Fiona Shaw. For this production Wallworth has created an interactive video installation, responding to the actions of the performers and “inviting the audience to directly engage with the video.” Elegy for Young Lovers, Young Vic, London, April 24-May 8; www.youngvic.org/whats-on/elegy-for-young-lovers
adam geczy performs in gent, belgium
Remember to Forget the Congo is a five-day gallery performance (also webcast) by Australian artist Adam Geczy in Belgium. In a blackened room, he will write in white paint the entirety of Andre Gide's Voyage au Congo, an early 20th century text exposing the iniquity of the Belgian imperial exploitation of the Congo. The consequences live on. Geczy says that although Gide's text has been little remembered it was quite influential when published. The artist describes his action as “simultaneously enact[ing] political and social remembrance of trauma, whilst at the same time being complicit in its repression, since the end result is a white room…a dense palimpsetic residue of words, a skein, that is both beautiful and menacing, acting as both conscience and amnesia.” A performance by Adam Geczy, Croxhapox Gent, May 1-5; presentation May 6-30; www.croxhapox.org; webcast www.ustream.tv/channel/croxhapox
BRIAN CARBEE IS THE WRITER OF DIRECTOR ANDREW LANCASTER'S FIRST FEATURE FILM, ACCIDENTS HAPPEN. IT'S ALSO CARBEE'S FEATURE DEBUT, A SCREENPLAY THAT EVOLVED FROM A DANCE WORK INTO A NOVEL AND INTO A SCRIPT.
The film premiered in 2009 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and then at the Sydney Film Festival. I met with Carbee as the film’s Australian season was about to be launched prior to American distribution in cinemas and on demand. I asked Carbee to detail the evolution of the film and to place it in the context of his career as an actor, dancer and choreographer and how those roles have influenced the way he writes for a film and collaborates on its making.
background
Born in the United States, Brian Carbee trained as an actor at the University of Connecticut, worked as a dancer and choreographer in Boston and New York and then migrated to New Zealand in 1986 where he created works for Limbs Dance Company, danced with Douglas Wright Dance Company and produced works for his own company, The Jump Giants. Carbee moved to Sydney in 1997 and made In Search of Mike, a 30-minute dance theatre piece which he adapted into an eight-minute film (see RT44) directed by Andrew Lancaster. He created Glory Holy! (see RT41), a much praised text-based dance work for One Extra’s 2000 season of Foursome and the following year made Stretching it Wider (see RT42) in collaboration with Dean Walsh. In 2004 he won the IF Award for Best Unproduced Screenplay for Accidents Happen and in 2005 the script was chosen to be part of the FTO NSW Aurora screenplay development project.
early evolution
How did the film evolve?
Its genesis was an exploration of language in the relationship I had with my mother. At that point it was a duet with a choreographic and a large textual element. I have a background as an actor. That’s where I started dancing, in drama school. So over the years I started to develop work that incorporated text because that was another skill I had and it was really interesting melding the two. It started to morph into various other forms. I did a bit of the material as stand-up once.
I moved to Sydney in 1997. I was approached by Leisa Shelton to be part of Inter-Steps at Performance Space. I thought, let’s re-work it. I was new here and I just wanted to land on something I felt secure with. So I made it into a solo and expanded the choreographic element and kept much of the textual component. Andrew Lancaster was in the audience one night—one of four. He just bailed me up afterwards and said, “Look that was really interesting. I’m a filmmaker and I’d like to make a short film out of it.” And I thought, who is this guy? But he was serious, though it took us quite a while, til 2000, to make In Search of Mike. It kinda sat around on various funding bodies’ desks. It didn’t quite fit the model of what short films were at that point.
Did it involve dance?
I’d basically eliminated the dance element. There’s one little dance piece in it. Up to that point Andrew had made short films, using sound and movement, and music videos and he wanted to branch into dramatic storytelling. He liked the material and thought this would be an interesting way to go. He hooked me up with a computer for the first time and I wrote a script. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing but he got me through it. In Search of Mike was a big hit. It did really well, sold overseas. We even made a bit of money, which is unheard of. And it actually made the funding bodies take notice. First they weren’t going to fund it at all…then [someone] called us and said, “This is fantastic. Ask for more money.” It was completely surreal. I took all the choreographic elements out [which meant] we were left with the kind of harsher elements of the story which I didn’t feel did my mother much justice. It was a very ‘rough’ piece.
My mother was quite ill at the time. I loved our relationship. I thought it was a great, full relationship. It wasn’t easy but it was rewarding in so many ways. And I just thought, hang on…So I wrote a novel and Andrew read it and optioned it. As the screenplay was nearing production, it really separated quite strongly from the book. The book is quite epic.
The necessary economising that comes with a screenplay.
Yes. Characters went flying out of it—all that stuff. So, 1995-2010, for 15 years the story has been kind of shifting through various media and forms.
developing the script
I wrote a first draft and got money [from Screen Australia, then the Australian Film Commission] to write the second draft. Then after another two drafts, it was accepted into the FTO’s Aurora Script Development initiative. So we had a year focusing and that was the stage that was meant to bring it up to finance-ready, and it did.
Was Aurora helpful?
We had a good year. It worked really well for us. Not that it gives you any answers. It just ups the ante around the film, it shifts your thinking. And it brings a lot of interest to bear on it, which causes you to lift your game as well. As a new writer it really made me feel I had business doing it because, you know, Gus Van Sant was there giving me feedback, and John Sayles and Alison Tilson. It was really confidence-building because they liked it. They thought it had lots of potential, which was the reason it was there.
structure and emotion
What kinds of issues were you addressing in script development?
The real shift that Aurora made was that the script had been a black comedy. At that point it shifted to really bringing up the emotional core of the characters. That was really satisfying to me. It kind of went back to why I wrote the book, which was to bring more depth into what the relationship initially was. They helped mine that.
Geena Davis, Accidents Happen
The gradual tonal shift in the film is very interesting, from grimly comic to deeply emotional as the repressed grieving opens out.
It was a real challenge to mix that and to varying degrees of success. People criticise it either way. It’s a tough little balance to get. I think what little tragedy unfortunately I’ve had in my life has been the source of quite amazing humour. How we deal around those extremes of existence is quite broad.
Gloria (played by Geena Davis) puts up so many shields about grief that at the funeral, she’s asking [about the overweight dead man], “What did he do, eat an ice cream truck?” She’s so good at insulating. Then after the wake she breaks down. That wall is such a façade. The trick with her is to find the humour that’s a weapon, but mostly it’s a shield. It’s what keeps her from falling to bits.
So the structure was constantly being addressed so you could get closer to this depth?
And the whole causal effect that really starts to kick in in the film, once the boys make up lies about where they were—it all starts to unwind.
location, location
We were really keen to make the film in America because it’s an American story. It appealed to our sense of adventure and enterprise to do it there. But then, upon investigation and very close to production, the fringe costs and the labour costs and travel costs just blew the budget to such a degree that the percentage of the budget that was actually going to make it onto the screen was so minimal compared to what was going to be spent. Then we talked about, well, can we do it here? You know, there have been enough films made here, set in America, that we have the infrastructure to do it. When we started auditioning, we discovered the kids’ American accents were much better than the older actors. They grow up with it now. So it became an interesting possibility to do it here.
And that was embraced, was it?
It was a hard fight because you go back to funding bodies [who ask] “Why are we making it here? Why are we funding the second-best version of this film, the best being one made in America?” Fortunately, we’d been down that road and we could say, this is actually the best version because we can put a better quality film on the screen for the budget we have. So that was persuasive. In the meantime, Geena Davis got involved because we had been going to make it in the US and that suddenly lifted the finance possibilities.
It was interesting when we were doing Aurora, part of the process near the end of the year involved a follow-up workshop when actors came in and read the workshopped scenes. We said “just use your voices; don’t try to make accents.” And as they were reading, they naturally went into the American vernacular. There was something about the language for them to feel true doing it, they needed the accent. And many of the set pieces, whether about the bowling ball, the baseball, the drive-in, felt much more American than Australian iconic. We had to find the last drive-in in this country to shoot the film in! Then when Geena became involved, we thought well, we’re not gonna have her doing an Australian accent. That would be silly. She jokes that she came over here and her Australian accent was so bad everyone else had to learn American accents.
We got some private money. A British company called Bankside [also handling international sales] and quite a new Australian film funding group, Abacus Film Fund—we’re the first cab off the rank for them.
the re-writing mindset
Were you still writing at this stage?
I was writing right up to production. As it gets closer, all kinds of budget considerations come into play, location and scheduling issues happen. “We can’t afford to go to that location. We have to travel too far. The schedule doesn’t permit it. We need to combine those scenes.” All that stuff. But as a story it was settled.
You didn’t find this stressful?
No, there were so many changes over the years for various reasons and, because it had changed form, I was used to it. My promise to myself was that at any point the challenge wasn’t to change it but to make it better, to accommodate the change. I really feel I was able to achieve this. Even though we had “You can’t go there” and “We have to chop that scene.” It’s like, okay, well how is that a blessing?
When the film was being shot, were you present?
I visited very sparingly. That’s the kind of culture there. It was difficult, but prior to filming I had a great deal of influence really, during casting and location decisions and design.
the writer as collaborator
Andrew and I have a long history, and I was the resident American, the ‘expert’ if you will. The autobiographical nature of the film has been played up, but it’s a fictionalised memoir to a ridiculous extent. But there’s a basic truth to it because elements of it bleed through in terms of the basis of some of the characters. It was important that I have an input into the casting, to really understand and to secure the right people. So I was really lucky. Writers don’t normally get that kind of influence. They’re usually kept to the kerb.
What about in post-production?
Back into the game again. I was giving notes on picture edits, sound, music and marketing—I had a hand in some of that. So from one film, I’ve got a pretty broad knowledge of how the system works.
the dancer's vision
What did your experience in dance and other performance bring to filmmaking?
Over the years I’ve directed shows and had dance companies so I’m used to the production role and working collaboratively. Dance is the great collaborative artform, particularly contemporary dance. Film is also incredibly collaborative. But I think on the dancer level, the great evolution of dance over the last 30 years has been the empowering of the dancer and their artistic expression.
Rather than being the tool of the choreographer. So is dance still a part of your life?
I still perform with Chunky Move when they do Tense Dave. Hopefully they haven’t retired it because I think it still has legs. We had a month in New York with it at one point and a couple of small tours around the States and around Australia. I teach contemporary technique at Sydney Dance Company, and stretch classes and yoga around various gyms. I make my living in a very physical way. The writing is new. I’m still trying to get the novel published and that could finally put that story to bed and I can move on.
Is there a relationship between writing and choreography?
Well I’ve had two writing experiences, one is the book which was very solitary, with the occasional agent or friend’s feedback. The film screenplay has continual feedback, weekly. Both work really well. I really like the collaborative element with the film. It’s how I’m used to working historically. As a dancer, you’re constantly criticised. It’s just part of how it works. So I kind of fell into that. It’s nice having that energy. I’ve read thousands of books but I hadn’t read many screenplays, so it was nice to have that support in terms of the language. I discovered I’m quite good at imagining what something is going to look like on the screen. Being a choreographer, I’m used to seeing visual images. So it played into one of my strengths.
You know when words are not needed.
That’s one of the things that dance has taught me, the power of an image and that the whole comprises many things, not just a performance. There’s a soundtrack, there’s lighting, the composition of each scene. So I intrinsically understand that and know that all the pieces make the story.
film or dance?
The film adventure came along and it was very seductive because suddenly there was all this support and interest and funding and I got swept up in it. At the same time, the dance world was really difficult to penetrate for me. Funding was impossible without going through years of development funding and all this step by step funding. I’ve been doing this work for so long, I’m just not interested in that. I’m a mature artist and I want to make work. And I’ve applied in the past and I got so discouraged because the whole process of asking for funding actually encourages you to lie. And that’s just no way to start an artistic contract. Or if not lie, to fantasise about “What do you hope to learn?” If I knew I wouldn’t need to do this. “How will it benefit the community?” “Why do you want to work with these people?” Well, because they’re fantastic and brilliant and they’ll inspire me and they’re people I want to spend time with.
going deeper
Lastly, I'd like to come back to what you were saying about moving the script away from black comedy into more something more deeply emotional.
That actually brought me home in terms of what I wanted to achieve with the relationship between mother and son and the power of Gloria, who is ball-breaking and totally devoted at the same time.
Did Geena Davis live up to your expectations?
The great thing about Geena is that while the role is at times so unpalatable, she brings a history of likeability. So you cut her a break because you can’t help but like her. She’s adorable. So you go, okay I’m gonna stick with her.
Conversely, Billy appears likeable, but when he starts lying and covering up, if sometimes from altruistic motives, you think that perhaps Gloria's right, that he's selfish, or heading that way. But that's unfair and her wit is cruel: “I’d always hoped you’d amount to something. Maybe I wasn’t specific enough!”
It’s like he doesn’t know quite how to be bad. It’s like the scene with him and the girl next door, Katrina, with the cigarette and the kisses. They’re both trying to act up but they don’t really have the DNA for it.
When Gloria asks Billy about remembering his dead sister, he confesses to a blank—until he’s made to think about it. This amongst others of the later scenes adds considerable depth of feeling.
It was one of the struggles. Early in development, they wanted me to lose Linda altogether. She’s one of the ones I fought for. I thought poor Linda has never been grieved for because she’s been eclipsed by this person, Gene, who’s in limbo, keeping the family in stasis. The double grave is half-empty, waiting for him.
next: the american market
How is the US distribution of Accidents Happen being handled?
That’s the next hurdle, which will happen sometime late their summer. At the moment, we’ve negotiated a couple of screens in major cities and a 12-city tour of Australian films, with Accidents Happen being the headline film. The cinema release will allow Geena again to do publicity tours. Two companies have been contracted in the US, one does the theatrical release and the other is doing ‘movies on demand,’ which is the new basic avenue for getting independent films distributed. It comes via the internet to your TV. It eliminates all the costs of cinemas and prints and publicity. Hopefully it will allow a return somewhere down the line and allow the film to find its own audience.
Harrison Gilbertson, Geena Davis, Accidents Happen
GRIEVING—ITS NATURE, ITS STAGES (AS IN THE DISPUTED KÜBLER-ROSS MODEL), AVOIDANCE OR REFUSAL TO LET GO OF IT—IS ONE OF LIFE’S MORE IMPONDERABLE STATES OF BEING. ITS SENSE OF LOSS IS DEEPLY BOUND UP WITH REFLECTIONS ON LOST OPPORTUNITIES AND UNFULFILLED DREAMS AND IS SOMETIMES IMBUED WITH FEELINGS OF GUILT, OF HAVING CAUSED HURT OR EVEN DEATH.
This is the raw material for director Andrew Lancaster and writer Brian Carbee’s remarkable feature film, Accidents Happen, a nervy, funny suburban parable about a family and their neighbours enmeshed in a web of accidents, the causes sometimes innocent, and the complexities of grieving, loyalty and responsibility. Gradually the film’s tone shifts from ironic detachment to demanding emotional engagement as grieving and denial each reach critical mass.
The film opens in 1974 in lower middle class American suburbia with a nasty accident—a neighbour sets fire to himself and stumbles in slow motion, flaming, towards a small boy, Billy, playing beneath a garden sprinkler. It’s an ugly scene but a curiously beautiful one, as if a child’s dreamlike recollection. A little later the boy’s family go to a drive-in where they watch The Three Stooges (with their trademark mix of malice and accident) and suffer eldest son Gene’s bad public behaviour, enacted with his close friend Doug, a neighbour’s son. On the way home the resulting argument plus Billy’s move to the front seat and the father’s distracted driving result in a serious crash. These early scenes, a retrospective prelude, establish the initial mood of the film, brisk, shocking, witness to the role of chance and the complexities of cause, effect and responsibility.
Now it’s 1982: Billy (Harrison Gilbertson) is 15. His father (Joel Tobeck) has left the family for a new marriage, his mother Gloria (Geena Davis) is in bitter denial, keeping the world at bay with dark witticisms and refusing to see Gene, who is in care and visited regularly by Larry (Harry Cook), the second eldest boy, who blames Billy for the car crash (and, cruelly, for the fiery death of their neighbour). Billy, in the manner of his own grieving, emulates Gene by befriending Doug (Sebastian Gregory) and tempting him into misadventure, but their brief partnership causes a very serious accident. From this flow the events that—regardless of the resistance of the protagonists—will bring not today’s much vaunted ‘closure’ but at least release from the stranglehold of grief.
As tense and explosive as this scenario later becomes, the filmmakers nonetheless sustain just enough distance (Gloria’s jibes, Billy’s retorts, glimpsed character eccentricities, coincidences and smaller accidents) to maintain an essentially comic rather than tragic vision. There’s even a touch of deus ex machina in the plot resolution, but in the meantime the emotional drama deepens—trust is betrayed, physical pain inflicted on self and other and relationships are sundered, but equanimity is finally achieved and frozen lives are allowed to thaw and begin again.
A great strength of the film is its ensemble playing with uniformly good performances, script and directorial attention foregrounding each of the characters. It’s quietly done, for example, in the case of Dottie (Sarah Woods), whose suspicions never corrupt her neighbourliness, and more acutely with Ray, Billy’s feckless father, who comes into clearer focus as the film progresses: “But we can’t just wait for Gene to die, Gloria. We’ll waste away with him…Lose all feeling. Turn into vegetables. Make a salad.” Even the most minor figures are deftly sketched: the girl who must hug everyone suddenly and too vigorously at a wake, or Aunt Louise who disruptively appears there too: “Here’s to the living. You know what they say? When God closes a door he opens a beer.” Another neighbour, Mrs Smolensky, the wife of the immolated man, appears briefly if recurrently in what becomes a key symbolic role in a tightly crafted screenplay.
Geena Davis’ Gloria is central to the film, although she’s not always on the screen. Gloria’s loss of two of her children, then her husband to another woman, of her uterus to a hysterectomy and later her trust in Billy is a load she struggles to bear when not withdrawn—playing Bingo with friends, going on a date, always joking (“If I’m lucky, the Department of Health will board me up”). There are revealing moments when she cracks, for example after the wake: “I always think the next funeral will be Gene’s. I can’t go home,” she weeps. When she fears that Billy is turning into the delinquent Gene she atypically can barely speak. When Billy says he can’t recall much about his dead sister Linda, Gloria’s fury demands that he think again, which apologetically he does, because he can with his mother.
The relationship between Billy and Gloria is of easy intimacy, in the way he advises on the choice of earrings before her date or joins in droll exchanges: “Gloria: I’m so hungry I could eat a crowbar and shit a jungle gym. Billy: Good. All those loose screws you have will finally come in handy.” Davis invests power in Gloria’s facade, reveals its fragility and displays a warmth in her relationship with Billy. But hoping to see the overt smiling charm of Davis in this tough mother role risks missing the subtleties of a strong performance.
When Billy finally confesses the full extent of his sins, he argues, “I was trying to protect you.” Gloria retorts, “I don’t need protecting, Billy. I need someone who is on my side, damn it.” In Harrison Gilbertson’s fine performance as Billy, we see an adolescent trapped by accidents not all of his own making, but complicated by lies and loyalties and a rapidly escalating number of ethical crises—dealing almost simultaneously with discrete problems involving his mother, father and Doug and the police. Gilbertson plays Billy with a quiet charm, who at his lowest point sounds not unlike his mother: “I’m sorry you lost your father but this could turn into a great big shit shower with, like…no soap.”
Afforded the luxury of two viewings of the film and a reading of the screenplay, I’m convinced that Accidents Happen is a significant Australian film. Yes, it’s written by an American about his America of the early 1980s, and, yes, Geena Davis aside, it’s directed, acted and otherwise made by Australians and filmed here. For some that’s a problem. But the writer has lived in Australia for 15 years and the film is faithful to his vision. The actors’ accents are largely fine, as accurate if not more so than certain Australian actors who frequently play in Hollywood films with their trans-Pacific accents. Some criticism of the film reminds me of the rejection of Frank Moorhouse’s novel Grand Days from consideration for the Miles Franklin Award on the grounds that it was set in Europe, even though the principal character was Australian. Other criticism finds it difficult to locate the film, as if it’s totally alien. Surely, if with its own idiosyncrasies, it sits firmly in the tradition of the domestic dramas of American indie filmmaking (recently, Little Miss Sunshine, The Savages, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Juno etc) and more commercial ventures in the same idiom like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road (both by British director Sam Mendes).
Accidents Happen is bracing cinema—funny, cruel, suspenseful and wise, never letting the viewer off the moral hook with loveable characters and a predictable tale. Its tonal, structural and thematic integrity is supported by the slightly heightened aesthetic of the production and art design (Elizabeth Mary Moore, Angus MacDonald) and the cinematography (Ben Nott), evoking the 80s while intensifying the everyday in what is a very contemporary, shadowy parable—and something more than mere realism. It’s a tale underscored with an essentially comic vision that allows for redemption and regeneration in a small suburban cosmos, if against the considerable odds of an accidental universe. Great writing, directing and acting make Accidents Happen’s wickedly tough, idiosyncratic vision of grieving a truly memorable experience.
The world premiere of Accidents Happen was in April 2009 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and in June 2009 it was shown in the Sydney Film Festival. Australian screenings commenced April 22, 2010.
Accidents Happen, director Andrew Lancaster, writer Brian Carbee, cinematography Ben Nott, editor Roland Gallois, composer Antony Partos, producer Anthony Anderson, production design Elizabeth Mary Moore, art direction Angus MacDonald, Redcarpet Productions; http://www.accidentshappenthemovie.com/
John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), Bright Star
THE LIFE OF A WRITER IS HARD TO BRING TO DRAMATIC LIFE ON SCREEN. WRITING CAN BE A SOLITARY JOURNEY WHERE THE RAW DRAMA IS INTERNALISED, GOING ON IN THE MIND, THE BODY, THE FRENETIC PACING OR ANXIOUS WAITING OF FINGERTIPS, HOLDING A PEN, ON THE TYPEWRITER, THE KEYBOARD. TRANSLATING THAT FRACTIOUS INNER WORLD CAN BE A CHALLENGE, SO BIOPICS OF THE LIVES OF WRITERS TEND TO FOCUS ON THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS, THEIR ADDICTIONS OR THEIR HARROWING PATH TO SELF-DESTRUCTION.
From The Edge of Love (Dylan Thomas) to Sylvia (Plath) to Factotum (Charles Bukowski) there’s usually a scene where the writer self-combusts, tearing the room apart, smashing a plate or glass, throwing his/her manuscript out the window, grabbing a knife or a gun. Hell, it looks good on screen, and gives actors a chance to flex their dramatic muscles. It sure beats staring glassy-eyed at a computer screen, adjusting the venetian blinds, making a tenth cup of tea to procrastinate, curling up on the lounge underlining passages for future research, and waiting hours for the manuscript to print.
Jane Campion has always had literary leanings in the filmmaking projects she takes on. In an early interview, she spoke about how seeing Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (the Miles Franklin biopic) proved to her that directing was a possible career choice for a woman (Deb Verhoeven, Jane Campion, Routledge Film Guidebooks, UK, 2009). Her first feature, Two Friends, was based on a short story by Helen Garner. The critically acclaimed An Angel At My Table, originally a mini-series, was based on the life of New Zealand writer Janet Frame who spent many of her formative years in institutions with incorrectly diagnosed schizophrenia (in one scene, pre-empting Campion’s latest work, Bright Star, Frame’s best friend Poppy quotes Ode to a Nightingale at length in a cow paddock: “We have to learn it by heart”; later, becoming more and more isolated, Frame says, “My only romance was in poetry and literature”).
Campion’s less successful Portrait of a Lady and In the Cut offered very different subject matter but were film adaptations of successful books, nonetheless, and Gail Jones argues the strong impact of Emily Bronte and the poets Blake, Tennyson and Byron on the mood of The Piano (The Piano, Australian Screen Classics, Currency Press, Sydney, 2007; reviewed RT80, p34). Campion even took the unusual step of publishing ‘novel’ versions of her films, The Piano and Holy Smoke. Her latest offering, Bright Star, tackles the relationship between Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw) before the poet’s death at 25. After making In the Cut, Campion told the media she was planning to take four years off. When interviewed about her time away from filmmaking, she commented, “I didn’t think I would want to do anything much, but I found that after a year or so…I was doing things like embroidering pillow slips and very crafty simple stuff.” Out of the quiet and silence, it seems, Bright Star emerged.
In The New York Review of Books, Christopher Ricks argues that Campion’s film is mistaken about the nature of imagination when it comes to a poet, especially Keats: “film cannot but show in pictures” (New York Review of Books, vol. 56, no. 20, Dec 17, 2009). He is hard on the director, stating that a film should never picture what a great writer has already beautifully captured, allowing us to imagine instead. He gives an example where Keats talks of snow and we simultaneously see snow in the image. When he speaks of being ‘pillowed’ he is lying with Fanny, resting his head. But in the course of writing, a novel for example, a writer may repeat herself many times, making overlapping allusions to make things clearer for the reader. And it works here within the film’s frames, especially if a viewer is not as conversant with Keats’ poetry as experts like Ricks. Campion’s view is inclusive and the linking of text with image acts as a springboard for our imagination: the images, like Keats lying as if in the clouds amid the treetops, are often so exquisite (cinematographer Greig Fraser) they bring the words to life, rather than trampling them underfoot.
Some of these scenes are also based on historical account. In a letter, Keats’ friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), who in the film tussles with his seeming love and envy of both Fanny and Keats, described the background to the writing of Ode to a Nightingale, where the bird had built a nest near the house. Keats loved her song and took his chair out to the plum tree to listen for hours (Elizabeth Cook ed, Introduction to John Keats, Selected Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1998). Those moments of silence, of being able to be still, to listen, to observe nature, to compose, are captured well by Campion. She’s always been interested in the link between silence and expression. In The Piano, the central character Ada (Holly Hunter) is mute, unable to express herself except through her music; in the final scene of An Angel At My Table, Janet Frame is most happy in solitude, after finding the daily struggle of communicating (other than writing) a punishing act. As she works alone on her manuscript in a caravan, reading aloud the final lines, Campion, writes Gail Jones, “affirms a connection between silence and creativity, and indeed affirms the paradoxical ‘wording’ of silence.”
Ricks argues that “Jane Campion’s mind sought to imagine into another, and yet it did not really put its mind to imagining, let alone imagining into the mind’s eye.” But like Keats’ star that watches and gazes—in the sonnet from which the film takes its title—Campion is a sharp observer, and yet she also allows, throughout her films and contrary to Ricks’ criticism, a “sense of touch” to be “imagined by the reader.” Vivian Sobchack argues that The Piano is less about vision than touch, the “capacity to implicate the viewer’s body” (Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004). She talks specifically about fingers, and in Bright Star we tend to focus on Fanny’s senses rather than Keats’: her hands as she crafts stitches onto a pillowslip, copying a tree outside the window. An exquisite example is the wall that divides the two almost-lovers as they position their single beds in adjoining rooms. They’re so close they can hear the sounds of sleep; if the wall were to be removed they would be together, lovers in a double bed, but, apart, their longing is palpable as Fanny traces the surface that separates them, the viewer imagining Keats feeling her touch. As Fanny lies on the bed letting the wind caress her—through the window against her layer-upon-layer of lovingly stitched clothes—it’s her mind and body we imagine into, not those of Keats which are further removed.
Ricks even goes so far as to say Campion does not respect Keats and his writing. This seems hard to justify, given her record of sensitive cinematic interpretation of writers’ lives. Campion said, “With An Angel At My Table I felt any treatment that interfered with your relationship to Janet Frame would feel like a filmmaking conceit. You needed to keep it very simple” (cited in Verhoeven). Helen Garner describes the process of working on Two Friends: “I was surprised at how Jane could take an idea of mine and take a different slant on it, and yet understand exactly what I was on about. She’d find a richness I didn’t know was there” (cited in Verhoeven). In Bright Star, there’s a great sense of tragedy in the loss of Keats, of his talent, of his strength, of his compassion, of the “negative capability [that] generated poetry that depicted changing sensations rather than articulating settled meanings.” (Sophie Gee, “Bright Stars”, The Monthly, Melbourne, Dec 2009-Jan 2010).
Elizabeth Cook comments that “to an unusual degree Keats writes in active and conscious relationship with others” and Campion stresses this. The men’s work, and the writing, is collaborative: they prance through meadows, they read aloud to each other, they lie dramatically awaiting inspiration; but Fanny’s art is done behind closed doors, alone, dreaming, embraced by the body—until a late scene where, finally, she walks over the threshold to breach the men’s creative space. Campion prefers to focus on women’s work, the seamless stitching, beautiful threads, so precise and delicate they might go unnoticed.
Like Keats, Jane Campion is an artist who trades in the realm of the senses. As with An Angel At My Table, her Bright Star is a sensuous delight, which successfully evokes the work and vision of being a writer (or seamstress) without excessive drama or sentiment: the time alone, the collaboration at times, the critical thinking, the musings in the meadow at nothing or everything, the recreation of a shared moment into the shape of love. Campion also creates space for the viewer’s imagination, a longing for more words, a desire to seek out Keats’ poetry as Whishaw’s voice reads it aloud after the final image fades and the end credits roll.
Bright Star, director and screenwriter Jane Campion, actors Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox, Paul Schneider, producers Jan Chapman, Caroline Hewitt, Mark L. Rosen, cinematography Greig Fraser, editor Alexandre de Franceschi, production design & costume Janet Patterson
Influx Controls, Boyzie Cekwana, performed at the Panorama Festival, Rio de Janeiro
photo Valério Araújo
Influx Controls, Boyzie Cekwana, performed at the Panorama Festival, Rio de Janeiro
Just now it’s a small wave of performances around the world in which audiences provide bodies, decision- and art-making by playing to rules and tasks set by artists to make works. But it’s a rising tide as can be see throughout this edition of RealTime. There’s a simultaneous increase in artworks offering immersive experiences, either through proximity and intimacy or via sensory deprivation—or amplification. Either way the audience makes a greater commitment to art than the usual heightened receptivity. The 2009 PuSh Festival in Vancouver focused on both kinds—small works like Jerk and Kamp that radically re-aligned audience seeing and thinking, or a relatively large one like Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before where a large audience, all with Xbox-type controllers, used avatars to make collective choices and engage not with performers but “experts in daily life.” In the performance event In-habit at Melbourne’s Abbotsford Convent, Jason Maling and Torie Nimmervoll became Colour Auditors, conducting and analysing a 12-day colour coding of the site by people working there, while Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy’s Once brought pairs of strangers into silent contact for 10 minutes each. Elsewhere in Melbourne, Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel, the performer discussed with her audience “the show that should have taken place and the narrative problems it presented.” Matt Prest and Clare Britton’s new work, Hole in the Wall, will require its audience to inhabit and move mobile rooms. In a dance workshop in the Perth Festival, visiting choreographer Robyn Orlin tested guests with a “probe into discrimination by replacing race with arbitrary characteristics like vegetarianism”. For many years interactivity has been largely associated with new media, but now physical correlatives are increasingly appearing in live performance. In Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before the decision-making is digital in a live art context. Meanwhile new media art continues its sustained engagement with interactivity, as in Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles’ You Were in My Dream (for Experimenta’s Utopia Now) where, once you’ve peered into the installation, your face is assumed by the principal character in the work’s stop-animation.
On another level, the prospect of developing a national cultural policy requires artists and audiences to see themselves interactively, as critically responsive to Arts Minister Peter Garrett’s notion of what comprises ‘culture.’ Similarly we can no longer allow the future of Australian film to be determined without collectively addressing the issue of screen culture. What is screen culture and will the making of more and more films alone grow an audience for Australian film? Over to you.
YOU’RE SITTING IN THE FEI AND MILTON WONG EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE IN DOWNTOWN VANCOUVER. AN EASILY RECOGNISABLE POP SONG IS PIPED IN THROUGH THE SOUND SYSTEM. LISTEN CAREFULLY TO THE FOLLOWING LYRICS: “IMAGINE THERE’S NO HEAVEN. IT’S EASY IF YOU TRY. NO-ONE TO LIVE OR DIE FOR. ABOVE US ONLY SKY.”
Upon hearing this peace anthem by John Lennon do you: (a) mull over the composer’s message; (b) reflect on the diverse mix of your fellow patrons; (c) wave your iPhone in the air and sing along? Most Vancouverites in attendance for Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On chose the last option. The show’s choreographers were disturbed: “Why are they singing?” After all, the show provoked a near riot when it opened in Paris ten years ago, not a love-in.
jerome bel, the show must go on
Bel had made a contemporary dance performance that didn’t feature dancing, at least not the kind usually performed by trained professionals. Instead he put bodies on stage: trained and untrained bodies, bodies of various shapes and sizes meant to represent the bodies in the audience. These onstage bodies moved, stood still, observed, listened and sometimes embraced. Invariably they did these things to the accompaniment of well-known pop songs. To David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” they stood and listened, moving to the beat intermittently. To Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly” they ‘died’ slowly and gently while listening to the singer and watching the audience. Spectators at the Parisian premiere were offended. In Vancouver, the former hippie capital of Canada, Lennon’s song provoked a sing-along. Not only did the spectators sing, they got up and danced whenever there was the hint of a groove in one of the Top-40 hits in rotation. Here was the democracy of meaning-making in action at a postdramatic theatre event. You say ‘contemporary art’, we say ‘dance party.’ The audience had wrested control of the event from the artists.
Bel hadn’t intended things to go this far. In his work as a choreographer he has tried to undermine the idea that the performer, by virtue of her/his expertise and position of power on stage, is somehow better than the spectator. For Bel a performance should mirror the socio-political reality of the audience. As he has argued, there is an historical logic to this. Contemporary dance traces its origins to the court of Louis XIV, the ‘inventor’ of ballet. When the king was in the audience the performance was supposed to reflect the image of its royal patron. After the French Revolution, the execution of the king and the shift to democracy, the performance was supposed to reflect a new patron—the bourgeoisie. That’s pretty much the situation we’re in today: educated, middle-class performers dancing for educated, middle-class patrons. In order to truthfully represent this reality of a performance event among social equals, Bel encourages mutual observation: the performer and spectator watch each other. The privilege of the expert performer is broken down by having her/him do things any spectator could do given a few weeks to rehearse.
The encounter between spectator and performer in The Show Must Go On is stark, comical, often surprising, and sometimes very moving. Bel achieves all this by setting very simple tasks for his performers. In one section they listen carefully to songs on their iPods, and very loudly sing the choruses when they come around. Watching an overweight lawyer (and former dancer) in his 50s intently focused on his iPod while occasionally blurting out “I’ve got the power!” was a truly comic spectacle. In another sequence, the performers’ simple action of walking up to each other and embracing to the theme song from Titanic is both absurd and touching. Often the performers simply stand and watch us. There’s something naked about their watching, and it makes me feel naked—and very present. I think this is how Bel wanted it. But when “Kiss” by Prince starts up, the audience is on its feet, shaking it. This is not what Bel wanted. We were supposed to sit in our seats, listen, watch and behave—like well-trained middle-class citizens?
gisele vienne, jerk
The idea of mutual watching is a conceptual thread running through this year’s PuSh Festival. As executive director Norman Armour puts it, the “act of witnessing or bearing witness” in the shared moment of performance is a thematic concern of many of the shows. It’s also the inevitable result of spatial configurations that foreground the performer-spectator relationship. Sometimes the combination of a very intimate performance space and very uncomfortable subject matter is enough to provoke an encounter of intense co-witnessing. In director Gisele Vienne’s Jerk (France) an audience of about 50 people is crowded onto a very small stack of bleachers in breathing distance of actor Jonathan Capdevielle. The room is painted white and fluoro-lit. In this setting Capdevielle is able to watch audience reactions in detail as he performs gruesome murders of teenage boys in real time with puppets. The script is based on serial murders that occurred in Texas in the 1970s. The lighting and close proximity to the performer leave us nowhere to hide as we are forced to contemplate this disturbing subject through various layers of theatrical mediation that include puppets-as-characters, the actor’s arm-as-puppet and the actor as both ventriloquist and dummy. At times I am forcefully dissociated from my own feelings, which themselves become like puppets to observe: feelings of horror, amusement, disgust and impatience. [See more about Jerk, p32.]
Kamp, Hotel Moderne
photo Herman Helle
Kamp, Hotel Moderne
hotel moderne, kamp
Kamp by Hotel Moderne (Rotterdam) is performed at the Roundhouse, a larger space that offers a little more distance from which to witness yet another horror, the genocide at Auschwitz. The concentration camp is presented as a scale model that covers the large stage area. Three puppeteers move hundreds of Jewish inmates through the assembly-line of mass murder, complete with rail terminal, sleeping quarters, officers’ mess, watch towers, supply trucks and the infamous gas chambers. The scale model gives the audience not a bird’s eye view but the one you’d have if you were a CEO taken up on a catwalk by a plant manager who wanted to give you a better look at the factory’s workings. From this perspective, the human figurines, while individually crafted, are made generic by their uniforms, whether prisoner or guard issue. The obliteration of individual character in the context of a militaristic ideology that classifies human beings according to perceived evolutionary type is in itself worth an essay.
Let me briefly note that when asked by a patron why the Nazi guards were given more menacing features than the Jewish prisoners, the artists suggested the perception of difference was all in the uniforms; they hadn’t differentiated between guard and inmate when making the figurines. We’re able to see the figurines in some detail thanks to a tiny hand-held camera the puppeteers use to film many of the sequences. The images that appear on an upstage screen have a gritty, hand-held, journalistic immediacy to them. Even with these close-ups we never lose sight of the fact that we’re witnessing a slaughterhouse in operation. Neither the puppeteers nor the prison figures look back at us from a perspective that is particular or unique. They, and we, have been depersonalised. We have become industry. We have become utility in the service of mechanistic eugenics and skewed Darwinian ideology.
ahke theatre, white cabin
From organised genocide to creative chaos: White Cabin by Ahke Theatre (St Petersburg) offers a life-affirming counterpoint to Kamp, but sit in the front row at your peril. A large, bearded man in partial whiteface, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a pork pie hat, might splatter you with red wine as he empties a bottle over himself or sprays it onto his fellow performers. Bits of newspaper, floating like tiny airships on fire, might make you their landing pad. This is not participatory theatre but, like Jerk, the intimacy of the venue puts the audience dangerously close to the action—and the action is non-stop, carnivalesque and enticing despite the hazards. Who knows why the two large men and the medium-sized woman do hand-stands on tables, try to hang themselves or pour milk on their naked backs? And who cares? Each image unfolds like a live painting featuring playful demons from a world that crosses Russian folklore with 19th-century artist’s garret. Watching them makes me want to knock back some vodka and throw some wine and paint around for myself.
Then something truly wonderful happens. Three large panels of white fabric are dropped across the front of the prop-littered stage. Each has a large window cut out of its centre. The first panel has the biggest window, the third the smallest. It feels a bit like a puppet theatre within a puppet theatre, while also carrying the suggestion of a series of Russian nesting dolls. The performers variously enter the front, middle or back windows and create brief tableaux or moving scenes—they fight, smoke cigars and one of them commits symbolic suicide by holding plastic bags of water to his body and slashing them open with a knife. Because these scenes take place in the shallow space between one window and the next, a visual tension is created by the three-dimensionality of the performers’ bodies against the flatness imposed by the window frames. This perspective is made more disorienting by the two-dimensional paintings and photographs that are projected onto the white fabric. Because these images are usually in zoom-in or zoom-out mode, they give us the feeling of alternately falling into or out of the windows. Sometimes the zooming stops and we are overwhelmed by something else, like the scene in which the performer’s newspaper catches fire: the live fire is matched by a video projection of flame that covers the entire canvas, momentarily creating the impression that the set is actually burning.
what are the rules here?
But it’s an illusion. In all the performances I’ve described so far the artists have carefully shaped their illusions. Even Jerome Bel. Especially Bel. Despite the fact that some of his performers are untrained—non-experts, you might call them—the overall construction of The Show Must Go On is as brilliantly crafted and manipulative as the most revered canonical works of Western dramatic literature. Bel spent two years making his show. We spend less than two hours trying to figure out the extent of our agency— are the performers inviting us to take part bodily, or just mentally? How much freedom do we have to affect the outcome of the event? What are the rules here?
Best Before, Rimini Protokoll
courtesy the artists and the PuSh festival
Best Before, Rimini Protokoll
rimini protokoll, best before
Enter Rimini Protokoll for a dose of genuine interactivity [see RT91, p18]. The Berlin Company’s new work Best Before was commissioned by PuSh and created in Vancouver. It features what Rimini calls “experts of daily life”—non-actors from various walks of life. These “experts”—a flagger, an ex-finance minister, a computer game tester and a game programmer—are connected by the fact that two of them worked at Electronic Arts, one of the world’s largest producers of video games, and three of them drove past the flagger on their way to work each day. So the idea of a daily journey (travel to work) is connected to the idea of something under construction (the site around which the flagger is directing traffic), and both of these are connected to the metaphor of life as a video game you win or lose.
Together with Rimini’s artistic directors, the experts have created a game the whole audience can play at once. Each spectator is given an Xbox-type controller to create and manipulate an avatar on the huge screen that stretches across the back of the stage. Around 200 spectators take part, through their avatars, in practical decision-making such as finding a mate, buying a house, choosing a candidate, supporting military spending and voting on abortion rights. As the title suggests, Best Before is a show about life choices and about taking stock of those choices before your ‘due date’ comes up. When contentious issues are introduced, interaction jumps from the screen to the seats where spectators get into playful or heated arguments. Unlike Bel in The Show Must Go On, Rimini seems to relish these outbreaks. And they’ve given the audience coherent parameters—they provide a playing field, rules and a worthy opponent. The company also risks having these parameters redefined by the spectators. In this sense the spectator-performer relationship is truly levelled.
As in The Show Must Go On, this levelling is made clearer by the fact that the performers are untrained actors. The truth-and-consequence on-screen game is counterpointed by the stories of the experts who talk about life choices that led them to their current circumstances. Each story has its own peculiarity: a woman gives up journalism to direct traffic; a man goes from finance minister to night club owner; another man claws his way through the hierarchy at Electronic Arts only to be ‘rationalised’ out of a job. The experts’ lack of expertise in theatre works against the self-assured authorial coherence of a typical theatre performance. As performance theorist Florian Malzacher writes, “A Rimini performance is never perfect, nor should it be. At the point where the performers become practiced enough to feel secure, begin to build their roles and to act, the piece loses more than just its charm. Insecurity and fragility are the defining moments of what is understood by many to be authenticity. Yet such moments where timing, tension, empathy and presence disappear are also agonising.” These moments make you “feel uncomfortable as an audience member. You suffer too for a moment, feel embarrassed or touched by the efforts of performers who cannot protect themselves through acquired techniques” (Florian Malzacher,”Dramaturgies of care and insecurity”, M Dreysse, F Malzacher ed, Experts of the everday, the theatre of Rimini Protokoll. Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2008).
situating the spectator
Each of the shows I’ve considered asks the spectator to situate her/himself in relation to the performers themselves, and not just in relation to a fiction or an ‘elsewhere’ the performers may be representing. Each event provides a thematic and aesthetic frame in which we meet and reflect on who we might be to each other. In these situations the artists avoid setting themselves up as authorities. Canadian installation artist Vera Frenkel writes that the postmodern artist seeks to undermine the possibility of her/his own charismatic authority and permits us to not “believe so readily in the other as the keeper of our treasure and our disease” (cited in Philip Auslander, From acting to performance, Routledge, London and NY, 1997).
The role of the spectator has shifted from decipherer-of-meaning to co-creator of the theatrical event. Another way to put it is to say that interpretation has been subordinated to encounter, and that it is in the energy of the encounter that meaning is created, rather than having meaning encoded in the event beforehand by the artist. The idea of mutual witnessing probably doesn’t do this justice, since witnessing privileges looking, and looking implies distance between the watcher and the watched. If there is a common goal to many of this year’s PuSh performances it is to break down that distance. The common strategy of levelling the playing field is used in other shows at this year’s PuSh I haven’t mentioned, like Poetics: a ballet brut by Nature Theater of Oklahoma (NY), in which four non-dancers awkwardly perform an entire choreography made up of everyday movements—another version of non-expert performance in an expertly created frame. As cognitive science has shown, spectators tend to respond kinetically to what they are watching. Even though it may not be apparent, a spectator responds to movement neuro-muscularly. If this year’s PuSh is about witnessing, we are witnessing with our whole bodies, so to speak. Often the bodies on stage are as diverse as the bodies in the seats. Thanks to the artists willingly relinquishing control (and even sometimes when they’re not) it’s almost a meeting of equals.
This particular kind of risk-taking is only part of what made this year’s PuSh Festival so remarkable. While past incarnations have featured leading lights of international theatre such as Societas Rafaello Sanzio (Italy), Back to Back (Australia) and Forced Entertainment (UK), this year’s program has been the most insistently cutting edge from start to finish. PuSh has also helped push Vancouver from bystander to participant in the greater creative flows of world theatre. In doing so it has helped local companies to successfully show their wares nationally and internationally, as in the case of Theatre Replacement’s now infamous Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut (2008). Now in its fifth outing, PuSh has taken its place among the best theatre festivals of its kind.
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival 2010: Jerome Bel, The Show Must Go On; Gisele Vienne, Jerk; Hotel Moderne, Kamp; Ahke Theatre, White Cabin; Rimini Protokoll, Best Before; Vancouver, Jan 20-Feb 6; for full production credits go to http://pushfestival.ca
THE END IS EXTREMELY NIGH! DEATH AWAITS! WITNESSING GYÖRGY LIGETI’S OPERA GRAND MACABRE IS LIKE WALKING INTO THE HELLISH SCENES OF PIETER BREUGHEL’S PAINTING THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (C1562), THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS OPERA’S STORY.
Premiered in 1978 and revised in 1996, Le Grand Macabre is a magnificent piece of comic music theatre, complex, demanding and highly entertaining, and this is a wonderful production, with outstanding performances and staging. The story, drawn from the absurdist play La Balade du Grand Macabre by Michel de Ghelderode, tells the story of Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre, who returns from hell to destroy the world with a comet sent by God. Though wreaking havoc, Nekrotzar fails in his quest, and the opera ends optimistically with an exhortation, “Fear not to die, good people all, no-one knows when his hour will fall.” Instead, our profane ways go unpunished, love triumphs and we are urged to embrace happiness.
This production, directed by Valentina Carrasco and Àlex Ollé of Spanish performance group La Fura dels Baus, opens with a projected video showing a woman who is ill to the point of collapse and surrounded by the detritus of gluttonous bingeing. The video then gives way to the theatre set, where we see a model of the sprawling woman, now naked and enlarged to fill the stage, her face frozen in horror. The action takes place inside and around this monstrous, abject figure, which is rotated to voyeuristic viewing positions and strategically dismantled while all kinds of imagery are projected onto it—the comet, a skeleton, heads rolling under Nekrotzar’s scythe, Breughel-like figures descending into hell, and then the fires of hell itself. The surreal play thus appears as the nightmare or hallucination of a sick woman. The staging suggests all kinds of allegories, from Gulliver in Lilliput to a corpse being devoured by rodents. She is inert and helpless beneath her intruders, as the secret police emerge from her intestines and people walk in and out of her head, breast and vagina. Such a representation of woman is provocative and, some might suggest, obscenely incorrect, but she literally embodies our own anxieties, harrassed as we are by the troublemakers of society, and when her innards finally collapse, we feel her torment in our own abdomens.
Le Grand Macabre updates the traditions of opera with those of absurdist theatre, pondering the meaning of life in a licentious, ridiculous world. The setting is the fictional principality of Breughelland, and the characters are caricatures—Piet the Pot, a drunkard whom Nekrotzar enlists to support his mission; two insatiable lovers, Amando and Amanda; the astrologer Astradamors and his dominatrix partner Mescalina; Gepopo, the hysterical chief of secret police; and the impotent prince Go-Go and his fawning, bickering, manipulative ministers and brutal police. The satirical story addresses a range of political and social themes—Nekrotzar (the name suggests a dead tsar resurrected through necromancy) represents dictators from Hitler to Stalin who dominated Europe in Ligeti’s youth, and the comet suggests nuclear missiles. Sex, death and drunkenness are central—Astradamors and Mescalina’s sadomasochism represents the fickle ruler and the ruled, and Amanda and Amando, in costumes resembling anatomical illustrations as if they have been flayed, seek unattainable pleasure. At various times, characters fake death or think they are dead, or are dead and are then revived, as if death is merely an alternative and contingent state. Ultimately, Piet and Astradamors get Nekrotzar so drunk that he fails in his mission (a lesson for us all), suggesting that men are all dissolute failures. Gender issues are also central, amplified by the confronting set design—women can be independent and controlling, and can also be obsessed by desire. Gepopo and Venus are sung by the same actor (the wonderful Susanna Andersson), suggesting the interchangeability of the characters, and Amanda and Amando are both played by female performers, further confusing gender identities.
The brilliant score, opening with a fanfare of car-horns parodying a wind ensemble, is a collage of classical and operatic musical genres, fragments and gestures. Particular instruments emphasise characterisation, such as bassoons for Piet and rumbling brass for Nekrotzar. Scene one ends with a swirl of bassoons, bass clarinet and brass that echoes and elaborates the car-horn introduction. The lovers’ duet is exquisite, but haunted and disturbing, and the passacaglia finale is classically beautiful. A metronome, recalling an earlier work of Ligeti’s, Poéme Symphonique for 100 metronomes, ticks down the last hours of the world like a clock. To suit the action, the music is alternately slapstick, raucous, dramatic, gently melodic or ironic, sometimes underscoring and sometimes mocking the vocal line, or recreating the vernacular sound effects of urban life. The orchestra is heavily weighted towards winds, brass and percussion, with a reduced violin section. Robert Houssart’s conducting of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is excellent, ably supporting the superb cast of international and Australian soloists.
Such music is conspicuously different from the music of any era, challenging both the avant-garde conventions that dominated the early- and mid-20th century and the traditions of earlier opera. Neither classical nor modernist but referencing both, it is postmodernist, a milestone in the evolution of music, and particularly suited to the absurdist mockery of human foibles. Le Grand Macabre thus appears as Ligeti’s personal reaction to the music of his upbringing and to religious and political dogma, a unique statement in his oeuvre. Though it is rooted in the World War II and Cold War eras, it remains highly engaging artistically and still relevant in a world beset by the politicking around terrorism and climate change.
The opera concludes with a return to the opening video, where we see that the woman has recovered and is washing her face in the bathroom. The Fura Dels Baus production acknowledges the new normal of ‘televisual reality’ in 21st-century life, and this use of video as a framing device locates the opera as a cultural and historical document. Le Grand Macabre delivers ironically contrasting messages about the end of the world—selfishness, vanity and overconsumption bring on the illnesses of our society, but ultimately death happens anyway and, in the meantime, life, however meaningless, must be lived.
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Adelaide Festival, Le Grande Macabre, music György Ligeti, libretto Ligeti and Michael Meschke,directors Àlex Ollé, Valentina Carrasco, conductor Robert Houssart, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, State Opera Chorus, a co-production of Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, English National Opera, Gran Teatro de Liceu, Barcelona and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma; Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Feb 26, 28, March 3, 4
Tract, London Sinfonietta and the Young Wägilak Group
photo Matt Nettheim
Tract, London Sinfonietta and the Young Wägilak Group
TWO SUPERB CONCERTS BY THE LONDON SINFONIETTA AT THE 2010 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL ILLUMINATED SOME SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTS IN MUSIC IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES AND ESPECIALLY SHOWED HOW COMPOSERS CAN BLEND MULTIPLE MUSICAL AND CULTURAL FORMS INTO EXCITING NEW WORKS.
The first concert, titled Pacific Currents, opened with US composer Yvar Mikhashoff’s arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Study No 7, a musical revelation that set the tone for the evening. In the mid-20th century, US-born Mexican composer Nancarrow created numerous compositions by hand-cutting piano rolls for the player piano, producing works so complex they could not be performed by a single pianist, and characterised by competing rhythmic structures and layered canon forms. Mikhashoff’s realisation involves expanded instrumentation—strings, winds, brass, harpsichord, piano, celeste and percussion—and it brilliantly captures Nancarrow’s breathtaking pace and complexity while adding some extraordinary textures, drawing out the layering to produce a rapturous work.
Silvestre Revueltas’ Ocho Por Radio (1933) followed, a work for octet that evokes the music of radio in his native Mexico, especially the mariachi bands, and which combines multiple genres into a single, increasingly chaotic work. Unsuk Chin’s electrifying Double Concerto (2002) for piano and percussion blended virtuosic solo instrumentals by Lisa Moore and Owen Gunnell into a complex series of cascading musical structures that build and rebuild, drawing prepared and natural piano passages into balanced intensity with the percussion and creating a dialogue exploring all kinds of percussive sonorities. John Cage’s Credo in the US (1942), for piano, percussion and either a radio or a phonograph, was originally written as a dance piece and prefigured Stockhausen’s use of radio in performance. In this realisation, a laptop was used to supply the recorded material, including fragments of Chopin, ragtime and other popular music that dramatically contrasted with the live elements and echoed Revueltas’ concern with the cultural impact of reproduced music.
The first concert concluded with John Adams’ highly rhythmic Son of Chamber Symphony (2007), which has also been choreographed to and includes fragments of his opera Nixon in China. Though less cerebral and more accessible than preceding works, it is complex and absorbing. The program for Pacific Currents was both musically enchanting and intellectually demanding, emphasising the impact of rhythm and showing how multiple forms and alternative musical sources could be integrated. All the works use repeated patterns in various ways, showcasing mid-to late-20th-century approaches to composition and the reactions to dominant and avant-garde cultural forms and aesthetics.
The second concert, Wind and Glass, comprised works by two British and three Australian composers. British composer Tansy Davies’ Neon (2004) is based on urgent offbeat rhythms that recall electronic process music, but with more élan and the richer sonorities of miked acoustic instruments. Gavin Bryars’ elegiac The Sinking of the Titanic (1968) is for an ensemble of strings, winds and percussion with a taped voice recalling the event, and the strings performing the hymn, Autumn, that the Titanic’s band was playing as the ship sank. Opening and closing with the sound of tolling bells, the hymn is played by the strings while the rest of the ensemble produces sounds that evoke the ship itself, creating considerable emotional impact. The work has a theatrical feel, with a dialogue between the strings, portraying the final moments of the ship’s orchestra, and the rest of the ensemble.
The concert included the premiere of Brisbane composer John Rodgers’ Glass, a work for chamber ensemble and improvised trumpet developed from the transcription of the sounds created when using a large sheet of glass as a percussion instrument. These sounds were woven into an elaborate composition for the ensemble, and trumpeter Scott Tinkler, for whom Glass was written, improvised in response to the ensemble, creating a scintillating musical interaction. He produced a wondrous range of sounds, from clarion calls to growling and blaring, adding to the profusion of textures and timbres created by the ensemble. A highlight was Brett Dean’s Dream Sequence (2008), a magical work for the full ensemble, wonderfully orchestrated, expressionistic and densely woven, that expands our musical awareness by taking us on a surreal internal journey.
All this prepared us well for the centrepiece of the two concerts, Errki Veltheim’s compelling new work Tract (2009). Commissioned for performance in the festival by the London Sinfonietta and the Young Wägilak Group, Tract is really two pieces of music that coincide—the orchestra performs Veltheim’s score, with Veltheim as violin soloist, while the four-member Young Wägilak Group perform Manikay, traditional songs of their country in North-Eastern Arnhem Land, powerfully sung with clapsticks and didgeridoo accompaniment. The two strands of music progress sometimes together, sometimes separately, with Veltheim linking them with his own playing. In a forum following the concert, Veltheim said that the Manikay operate as a religious text and that he had written a high modernist score that would match the Manikay performance in structure and intensity but would not imitate it. The Young Wägilak Group has previously worked with the Australian Art Orchestra, and, while such collaboration could appear contrived, the result here is a unique and inspiring musical and cultural form. Tract is not a hybrid but rather a cross-cultural dialogue, with Veltheim’s violin as the catalyst, each strand of music acknowledging the functions, traditions and aesthetics of the other. The audience response was overwhelmingly positive.
Some thoughtful programming went into these London Sinfonietta concerts, the second building on the investigative platform established in the first with more radical examples of the simultaneous use of multiple musical forms. The two concerts showcase many ideas: the layering of music through competing rhythms, structures and instrumentation; the reworking of aesthetics that arise from sampling and electronic manipulation; the impact of mechanical and recorded sources of sound, such as phonograph, tape, radio, vibrating glass and piano rolls; and the juxtaposition of disparate musical cultures and traditions. Brett Dean and Unsuk Chin have explored the expressive possibilities of intricate musical structures. The works of Cage and Revueltas show how popular media can generate a musical melange. Bryars has woven his own composition around an existing composition to convey the sentimental impact of an historical moment. Mikhashoff has dazzlingly transformed Nancarrow’s work. And Velthiem has brought two cultures into a thrilling collaboration. The works of Velthiem, Cage, Rodgers and Bryars are challenging and significant experiments that are engaging conceptually and musically, and mark important developments in musical history. The two concerts greatly illuminate the nature of musical development in a globalising world, showing where experimentation can lead and teaching us how to listen more carefully.
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2010 Adelaide Festival, The London Sinfonietta, conductor Brad Lubman, with Lisa Moore, Owen Gunnell, Scott Tinkler, Errki Veltheim and the Young Wägilak Group of Ngukurr, Adelaide Town Hall, Feb 27, 28
A review of theatre and dance works in the 2010 Adelaide Festival will appear in
RealTime 97 June/July.
Peter Garrett, Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts
WHEN THE RUDD GOVERNMENT WAS ELECTED IN 2007 THE VAST MAJORITY OF ARTISTS IN AUSTRALIA SURELY LOOKED FORWARD TO THE PROSPECT OF PETER GARRETT AS MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, DESPITE THE FORGETTABLE ARTS POLICY THE ALP TOOK INTO THE ELECTION. A RESPECTED, PRACTISING ARTIST AS WELL AS NOTED ACTIVIST FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND INDIGENOUS RIGHTS—HELL, HE’S ONE OF US!
As we know, Peter Garrett’s time as a minister has been difficult and, for the environmental movement, tainted by the fact that he has had no choice but to publicly peddle the Labor Party line in order to move towards change in the longer term. But his actions in the arts portfolio have been disappointingly sparse. It took until his speech to the National Press Club in October 2009 for any substantial statement about possible reforms to the arts policy vacuum left by the previous government. That speech was clearly delivered by someone who has real passion for the arts. It described some innovations on the agenda, and importantly was not afraid to acknowledge that the national arts funding and institutional structure is in need of a major overhaul.
The speech also announced the opening of a discussion towards a national cultural policy, an idea taken up from the 2020 Summit. The announcement wasn’t widely reported, and I didn’t know of it until stumbling on the notice on the RealTime website over the holiday break. The National Cultural Policy website (http://nationalculturalpolicy.com.au) contains Garrett’s speech as well as a framework document, ten discussion points and access to a comments forum. Submissions to the current phase of the discussion closed February 1. Despite the limited time, plenty of erudite and knowledgeable arts practitioners have had their say in submissions and made very good points. Mine’s number 50 on the list if anyone’s interested, but RealTime has kindly given space for me to summarise my key arguments.
RealTime readers would know all too well that arts and cultural policies in Australia suffer from a range of problems that reflect, on one side, insufficient understanding by policy makers of what is required to sustain new and innovative arts practice, and on the other, insufficient understanding by creative artists of how to make arguments to government that will result in better policy to support new work. In order to improve this current situation, we need to articulate and analyse things differently. The National Cultural Policy discussion offers an opportunity to put new ideas about arts policy on the agenda.
Unfortunately at this stage the discussion is being framed on the basis of cultural rather than arts policy. This presents several problems. The first, as Garrett himself articulated in his speech, is that ‘culture’ is a term that defies simple definition. A fundamental principle of policy design is to be able to define the space in which it operates, but culture is such an open-ended term that it is difficult to draw these necessary boundaries. For example, electronic media conveys a huge proportion of what most Australians would understand as our ‘culture.’ Should a cultural policy therefore encompass our media organisations, including privately owned television stations and newspapers?
A second problem is that the sense of shared values conveyed by the term ‘culture’ will inevitably politicise it. As cultural theorist Graham Turner noted in 1993, it is virtually impossible to discuss cultural policy without ideas of nationalism and a narrative of our cultural history. Peter Garrett claims the ‘culture wars’ are over; I am not so sure. At some future point we will presumably have another conservative government obsessed with settling old scores and politically interfering with the ABC to impose its version of the cultural narrative. Presumably the National Cultural Policy that might emerge could be demolished as was the Keating Government’s visionary Creative Nation. We should therefore, through this policy, seek outcomes that cannot be so easily unmade.
This brings us to the third problem: the relationship of the cultural policy to the arts is very loosely defined on the NCP website. This seems a significant shortcoming, as the primary policy measures and tangible outcomes arising from the national policy will be in the arts. This is all the more unfortunate because the Press Club speech articulated the relationship between arts and culture quite clearly and seems to give each equal weight.
Surely we need a firmer foundation than this as the basis for the relation between culture and the arts, especially given that the primary outcomes of any national cultural policy will be changes to policies and funding for the arts. The legitimacy of funding for new work will always be called into question by a not insignificant minority, especially when they don’t like what is being produced. This inadequate approach to cultural policy, therefore, will inevitably risk politicising matters of arts policy as well.
As Garrett has pointed out, arts funding around Australia, both Commonwealth and State, is largely locked up in supporting a network of arts organisations. Surely it is time for policy that fully recognises that the arts sector and our educational institutions are inextricably linked. No, that’s not strong enough—the arts institutions that are part of our tertiary education sector are the engine room of the arts and cultural sector and should be incorporated fully into any consideration of funding and policy.
While art institutions perform valuable functions and support many artists, the result, as Minister Garrett notes, has been too little money available to support individual artists or to adequately foster new and experimental work. This could clearly be solved by increasing funding to individual artists, although to truly allow freedom to work outside institutional structures we should seriously consider, as many have suggested, tax incentives for artists or individual direct subsidy for professional artists such as has been successful in Europe.
The welfare and ‘public good’ arguments for subsidisation of artists’ incomes is well known. David Throsby and Glenn Withers laid it out in their 1979 work The Economics of the Performing Arts, still the benchmark on this subject, and yet the ability of artists to make a living always seems to be at the very bottom of the pile of topics for discussion. This is a serious omission: surely, the first function of cultural policy is to lay the basis for the creative work to thrive, and to do this we must ensure that artists are able to make an adequate living while making their art. All else flows from this. It may be that there is a limit to the number of artists who can make their primary living as artists. So why not, for once, clearly state these objectives in a cultural policy?
There is a fourth and more difficult problem, which in my view is critical for a national cultural policy to address: how to have an open, credible, non-parochial debate about the network of major artistic institutions, including in our education systems, which considers the equity and efficiency as well as the excellence of such institutions, and that aims towards building capacity to take us forward, both recognising heritage and allowing new work to grow. This cannot be left in the hands of politicians or bureaucrats, and neither can it be left up to the arts establishment alone—they will of course act, first and foremost, to preserve the organisations they work for and the structures they are comfortable with. We also need to have a broadly accepted understanding of how to close institutions and companies when their time is done, to allow new ones to grow, and how to better handle the relationship between state and federal funding and what level of support is needed to maintain the agreed institutional arrangements.
Artistic institutions are subject to the drastic effects of falling below a threshold of ‘critical mass’—policy makers seem oblivious to the fact that a few seemingly small cuts can bring the whole edifice down. When highly respected teaching staff are made redundant at a tertiary arts teaching institution, because the one-on-one teaching model needed to train professional artists is deemed too expensive by university bureaucrats, that city will find (as we have in Canberra) the best students will no longer come.
The National Cultural Policy should articulate clearly what is desirable for Australia as a framework for our arts and cultural industries; it should mandate in perpetuity an overall level of funding for artists and the institutional structure, including arts education that we as a nation wish to maintain from our taxes. The detail can then be left to the peer funding process along with support from the private sector.
Overall, the statements of the Minister and the points of the discussion framework have much to commend them. However, the National Cultural Policy discussion will remain flawed if simply focused on a loose definition of ‘culture.’ We can hope, now that Minister Garrett’s responsibilities have been lightened, that he can give the National Cultural Policy the attention it deserves.
Canberra-based Gavin Findlay wrote in RT93 and RT94 on the challenges for performance and other aspects of the arts in that city.
The Death of Adonis, 2009, Kent Monkman, acrylic on canvas
image courtesy the artist and Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary
The Death of Adonis, 2009, Kent Monkman, acrylic on canvas
“THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: SONGS OF SURVIVAL IN A PRECARIOUS AGE.” IN ITS MELDING OF AESTHETICS, GEOGRAPHY AND POLITICS, THE TITLE OF THIS YEAR’S BIENNALE OF SYDNEY IS OF A PIECE WITH MOST LATE 20TH- AND EARLY 21ST- CENTURY INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS THAT SELF-CONSCIOUSLY DENOTE THEIR STATUS AS NODES IN THE NETWORK OF GLOBALISATION. YET ARGUABLY THERE ARE POINTS OF DISTINCTION, TOO, IN THIS SOMEWHAT INELEGANTLY CRAMMED TITLE.
For one, there are references that can be interpreted as specific to this place, Sydney, Australia, as opposed to those in so many ‘global’ exhibitions that generically invoke ‘place.’ Further, the title explicitly mentions ‘beauty’, long a taboo word in post-conceptual/post-minimal contemporary art discourse. Finally, the allusion to an artform other than the visual—and a predominantly narrative and melodic form that combines the ineffable expressivity of music with the rational capabilities of words—suggests, perhaps, a more ‘folksy’ curatorial approach.
Upon first reading the title, it is hard not to think of the well-known history of Australia by Geoffrey Blainey that coined a phrase now part of common parlance, The Tyranny of Distance. First published in 1966, twice revised (in 1982 and 2001) and continuously reprinted, Blainey’s account of how Australia’s geographical remoteness has been central in shaping its history and identity has become a classic; indeed Blainey’s thesis has been compared to FJ Turner’s explanation of the history of the United States in terms of frontier theory. In updated versions, Blainey argues that even in the age of digital communications, isolation and distance remain vital to Australia’s development.
John Bock, Fischgrätenmelkstand kippt ins Höhlengleichnis Refugium, 2008, video, image courtesy of Klosterfelde, Berlin and Anton Kern, New York
John Bock, Fischgrätenmelkstand kippt ins Höhlengleichnis Refugium, 2008, video, image courtesy of Klosterfelde, Berlin and Anton Kern, New York
In The Death Of Distance (1997)—whose title purposely cites Blainey’s book—British economic journalist Frances Cairncross suggests that the decline in cost, expanding reach and increasing speed of global communications will make distance less important, and constitute the single most influential development in the early 21st century. Cairncross argues that this will likely lead not only to a decline in global conflict, but also to the reinforcement of less widespread languages and cultures, and preservation of cultural heritage. Blainey counters this view, however, by asserting that distance still matters—albeit now measured by the fast second hand of the clock, rather than by the week in the calendar—and that its effects are not always negative. By dint of continuing to be “viewed by the outside world as a billabong standing some distance from the global mainstream” (2001), Australia’s ‘distance’ can “benefit and protect” fragile environments, national security and traditional cultures, for example. This notion of the benefits of distance is developed by Biennale Director David Elliott in his press releases: distance is cast as integral to the differences between cultures, and to the distinction between art and life.
Whether or not David Elliott was aware of Blainey’s book, his opening curatorial gambit pinpoints a key Australian preoccupation, as prevalent in culture and art—recall the early postmodern debates around the ‘provincialism problem’ and the ‘centre-periphery’ dynamic—as in international relations and domestic politics, for example, the ongoing anxiety about Australia’s status as a player on the world stage, or former PM John Howard’s characterisation of Australia as torn between its geography and its history.
Christian Thompson, Isabella Kept Her Dignity, 2008, C-type print
courtesy the artist and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Christian Thompson, Isabella Kept Her Dignity, 2008, C-type print
Howard’s view of Australia—one that essentially portrays Asian-Australians and Indigenous Australians as outsiders—was ascribed to Blainey himself in the 1980s, following his public expression of doubt about the ability of the Australian public to withstand continuously high levels of Asian migration. Hence to invoke distance (and its ‘tyranny’) in the Australian context is necessarily to invoke both race relations—their painful and contested historical roots and their often troubling contemporary manifestations—and questions that persist about Australia’s identity and agency as a country.
The exhibition appears to take on the specificity of place in a variety of ways. Elliott has selected a relatively large number of Australian artists, both Indigenous and non-indigenous, mid-late and early career. At least two of the indigenous projects appear to have a monumental quality that situates them as exhibition centrepieces: the 110 larraktji (memorial poles or bone coffins) created by 41 Yolngu artists from North Eastern Arnhem Land; and longtime curator and critic Djon Mundine’s permanent memorial to the Eora nation, an engraving of images of Pemulwuy and Bennelong on the rock between the Opera House and the Botanical Gardens.
Marcus Coates, Pub Shaman, Lamp Tavern, Birmingham, UK, 2007, produced in association with Insertspace, UK
image courtesy the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
Marcus Coates, Pub Shaman, Lamp Tavern, Birmingham, UK, 2007, produced in association with Insertspace, UK
Like certain preceding biennales, this one also takes advantage of Sydney’s particular geography, with site-specific works to be installed in spaces around the harbour which are also still strongly redolent of colonialism, such as Cockatoo Island, Pier 2/3 and the Botanical Gardens. In the latter venue, Fiona Hall has again been invited to perform her subtle post-colonial critique. The Australian Aboriginal presence is moreover complemented by the inclusion of a number of important First Nations artists from North America, such as Beau Dick, renowned as a master carver and mask-maker; Dana Claxton, whose performances, videos and installations uncover the history of the Lakota people; Kent Monkman, whose hilarious paintings, photographs and performances imbue the post-colonial gaze with camp; and Annie Pootoogook, whose naïve drawings reveal the bittersweet nature of Inuit daily life.
The explicit recourse to beauty sets the theme apart to some degree from its recent precedents. Redolent of associations with the aesthetic ideals of fascism and bourgeois taste, deemed vacuous and frivolous or distracting of serious purpose, or seen as mere grist for the art market, beauty was for a long time spurned in preference to anti-aesthetic gestures more in keeping with the ugly social reality critical art had in its sights. Yet Elliott does not appear to view beauty as problematic; indeed his definition of beauty in press releases amounts to “a resolution of energy, thought and feeling in aesthetic form”, a view so general that it captures aesthetic, anti-aesthetic and everything in between. In its inclusion of several art world stars, the Biennale will feature artists renowned for their deliberate spurning of positive affect such as Paul McCarthy and the Chapman brothers. Yet the exhibition also includes works whose aesthetic effects can clearly be described as beautiful. Some invoke classical form, such as British Rachel Kneebone’s ceramic sculptures; others evidence intricate craft to critical effect such as in the objects of New Zealand artist Brett Graham or American Angela Ellsworth; others are expertly versed in the beauty of composition and representations of nature, such as the photographs of master Hiroshi Sugimoto, or the paintings of Australian Rosslynd Piggott.
Mieskuoro Huutajat (Shouting Men’s Choir)
photo Timo Heikkala
Mieskuoro Huutajat (Shouting Men’s Choir)
Its third distinctive feature might be the Biennale’s promise to feature music as a key form in a visual arts festival. Elliott was inspired in his choice of subtitle, Songs of Survival, by American ethnomusicologist and experimental filmmaker Harry Everett Smith, who during the 1950s collected, documented and publicised a wide range of American folk music from blues to jazz to gospel, grassroots music that had been lost, forgotten or overlooked by the mainstream, and that represented a very different America to that of the hit parade. Ethnomusicology, like its mother discipline ethnography, of course has its culturally problematic aspects. These are evident in another potential reference in the subtitle, namely the recent album Songs for Survival (2008) complied by Molly Oldfield and Bruce Parry “in support of tribal people.” The producers recorded the music of various indigenous peoples, including the Babongo from Gabon, and then invited professional artists to sample the recordings in original songs. Despite the proceeds flowing to participating indigenous communities, such an undertaking necessarily raises issues of appropriation and cultural exploitation.
The archival impulse at the heart of Smith’s work is echoed in at least two other music projects included in the Biennale, Manchester artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White’s Open Music Archive (OMA), and Australia and New Zealand’s Slave Pianos (Mike Stevenson and Danius Kesminas). OMA aims to “source, digitize and distribute” out of copyright sound recordings now lost to the public through inaccessible media and storage. Slave Pianos, meanwhile, comprises a computer-controlled mechanical piano-player that features the ongoing archive of works of music and noise created by composers who consider themselves primarily visual artists. Along with these documentary-style works, the musical component of the exhibition includes the renowned ‘dark cabaret’ act Tiger Lillies; the Dadaist, Aki Kaurismaki-esque Finnish shouting men’s choir; and the Japanese club sounds of Superdeluxe.
Elliott comes to the Sydney Biennale with many years’ experience as director of flagship contemporary arts organisations, including the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Japan’s Mori Museum. His vision for Sydney appears to balance tried-and-true practices from previous local Biennales with the now generic expectations of global shows, but perhaps to add a welcome element of site-responsiveness together with a folksy touch of grassroots music and a frisson of beauty.
17th Biennale of Sydney, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, May 12-Aug 1, www.biennaleofsydney.com.au
Dancing on Your Grave, a Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh’s production
images courtesy PIAF
Dancing on Your Grave, a Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh’s production
THE 2010 PERTH INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL MAKES NO CLAIM TO THEMATIC COHERENCE AND YET THE FOLLOWING SAMPLING OF PERFORMANCES REVEALS AN ONGOING ARTISTIC CONCERN WITH THE LIMITS OF IDENTITY, WHETHER IN POLITICAL CONTEXTS OR TESTED AGAINST ANIMATE/INANIMATE DETERMINANTS. DEMONSTRATIONS OF SINGULAR IDENTITY CAN SPAWN TENSIONS, OFTEN WITH COMPLEX AND CHILLING REPERCUSSIONS OR, ALTERNATIVELY, CAN FORM UNITIES WHERE COMPLEMENTARY OPPOSITIONS CREATE THE EVENT’S SINGULARITY.
A handful of dead souls who rev up life in a pub of zero intoxication and intone freedom from pancreatic tracts might turn tensions between life and death on their head. Unfortunately, the framing gag of a spectral music-hall with its tight staging, small cast and banjo-strummed ballads sits at odds with the wide-flung technicolour skyline of Perth on a balmy night. How could the imported UK mortuary wit, however clever in its intimacy and comedic lyrics, compete with the external spectacle of nature provided free by the city? In director-choreographer Lea Anderson’s Dancing on Your Grave, the Cholmondeleys (an all-female contemporary dance company) and the Featherstonehaughs (its male equivalent) were in short supply which only emphasised the show’s reliance on Burch and Blake’s original songs delivered live at Beck’s Music Box. Lusciously opening out onto The Esplanade, Beck’s Box lacked the necessary ambience of enclosure, crowds and unruliness to realise the production’s odd Dickensian humour.
Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (Seven Boards of Skill)
image courtesy PIAF
Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (Seven Boards of Skill)
Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (Seven Boards of Skill), a French Chinese production, conceived by Aurélien Bory with performers from the Dalian Beijing Opera, generated an inverse effect. The Regal, an old, ungainly theatre commonly used for brash commercial productions was transformed by dreamlike kinetic art propelled by the gliding force of mass and numbers. Huge tangram shapes slid, balanced and cohered under the manipulations and escalations of their human partners. The glancing run of these Chinese acrobats wheeled around the space to upturn triangular mountains and, in the next breath, curled exquisite song and sound through sculptural corridors. Meditative and poetic, the union of landscape and human stirred interpretation. There was a gecko-like trail of humans scaling the block-face in coordinated angles, like Escher’s lizards endlessly advancing towards metamorphosis together with unframed moments of suspension, wherein a single human teeter-boarded a triangular block on its apex, hovering before the configuration tilts and slides into a new wedged form. Awareness of the difficulty for both human and the blocked shape evaporated with the skilful resolution of topological movement and the slightness of its human counterparts in a continuum of unity.
Life and Fate, Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg
image courtesy PIAF
Life and Fate, Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg
In contrast, Life and Fate describes the will of nuclear scientist, Shtrum, to survive with the credibility of his ideas intact in spite of the destruction of society wielding its incomprehensible power around him. The play is based on the novel by Vasily Grossman, adapted and staged by Lev Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre. Leaving aside the difficulties of subtitles in an understandably wordy text and the stereotypical overpopulation of sweeping Russian novels, Life and Fate extricated a bitter blend of condemnation and compassion for the acrobatic propensity of the human conscience within the debris of its set. The horror of entrapment in hydra-armed fear is particular to a revolutionary culture brought to its knees by failed aspirations and unvanquished enemies, within and beyond. An Australian audience probably trip-wires over circumstances in everyday Soviet life where Holocaust and Gulag retribution threaten in equal measure and yet this production, given the stamina of the audience to hold out for its three-plus hours of plot unravelling, does register familiar stings of small lies and self-deception.
The Maly actors skilfully inhabit a stage conflated in time and location, which is at once pre- and post-Stalinist apartment crossed by the symbolic wires of encampment and annihilation. Both life and vodka are cheap and drained in a moment. The significance of this state becomes increasingly clear in the second half which culminates in the barbed belittlement of a band of denuded humanity literally playing the final chords of their condemned lives. It is an extraordinary moment wherein music and bare flesh fuse and are extinguished. The echo of that poignancy-crushed-in-violence emanates through the mother’s final letter just before she too leaves life to her son and his conscience.
Robyn Orlin
photo Olivier Pascaud
Robyn Orlin
Meeting Robyn Orlin, a South African choreographer working between Paris, Berlin and Johannesburg, represents another step in STRUT’s workshop series aimed at informing locals about international trends and extending vistas about what dance might be. In amongst the polished performances of the Perth Festival, this showing at the Kings Street Arts Centre was unashamedly chaos-in-progress. Selected guests entered unawares into a mayhem of fancy-dress and scattered paraphernalia, plied by questions and demands for dollars. The obtuse play seemed cranked towards ordering, via a projected Skype, a sharing loaves-and-fishes-style of one ‘veg’ and one ‘non-veg’ wrap. Division appeared to be an Orlin strategy for creating material as well as a thematic probe into discrimination by replacing race with arbitrary characteristics like vegetarianism. It was a flippant glimpse into what might materialise in the future as a complement to the Russian Life and Fate.
Good Morning, Mr Gershwin presented by Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu from France, rapped nostalgia into explosive exuberance and rhythmical virtuosity. “I got rhythm” speed-splintered through every conceivable nook and cranny of the body, bouncing across dance techniques and spatial configurations like nerve-ends in frenzied delight. Fusion was further promoted in the cast mix of African, Arabic, Asian and European performers and the final Porgy and Bess sequence. While possibly paying too much credence to Gershwin’s political tolerance, Porgy provoked powerful performances from the women whose anguish shuddered bodily, banishing all vestiges of feminine frailty. In overview, playfulness flipped with desire and protest in the same way that Gershwin may have skittered across the piano’s black and white keys. The message resoundingly unified divisive fragments into melodies that are difficult to resist.
Death images struck down by mere humans who refuse to doubt the immortality of song linger after the festival and the orchestrated harmonies of its performances. Perhaps that is what any festival should achieve, an impossible celebration against the odds.
2010 Perth International Arts Festival: The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, Dancing on Your Grave, director, choreographer Lea Anderson, Beck’s Music Box, Feb 23, 24; Les Sept Planches de la Ruse, conception, stage designer, director Aurélien Bory, producers Compagnie 111m Scènes de la Terre, performers Dalian Beijing Opera, Regal Theatre, Feb 5-March 1; Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg, Life and Fate, based on the novel by Vasily Grossman, adaptation, direction Lev Dodin, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 17–23; Strut, Meet Robyn Orlin, facilitator Bianca Martin, Kings St Arts Centre, Feb 26; Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu, Good Morning, Mr Gershwin, choreography José Montalvom Dominique Hervieu, music George Gershwin, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 26-28
For more on the Perth International Arts Festival see the review of Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski’s Nanomandala on page 24.
Exciting news from Melbourne: Willoh S Weiland has been appointed as the new artistic director of Aphids. As we were putting this online edition together, Wieland was flying back to Australia. We look forward to catching up with her once she’s settled into the job of guiding one of the country’s most innovative outfits, renowned for its idiosyncratic hybrid creations and international collaborations.
A young and energetic artist, Weiland looks made for Aphids. Her projects as artist, writer and curator over recent years have been strikingly individual. The ongoing art-science project Yelling at Stars (RT 88, p27) was presented at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl as the closing event of the 2008 Next Wave Festival and then in Glasgow at Less Remote, an art/science symposium running parallel to the 59th International Astronautical Congress. Her 2009 Synapse residency was at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, where she developed Void Love (www.voidlove.tv), “a soap opera about astrophysics” starring Kamahl. Weiland is involved in ongoing collaborations with Spat & Loogie and, as part of Deadpan, with video artist Martyn Coutts—including an Asialink residency in Beijing and NES artist residency in Iceland in 2010.
David Young, the outgoing artistic director and co-founder of Aphids (and now director of Chamber Made Opera; RT 95, p50) sees Weiland as “hugely talented and a perfect fit with the Aphids spirit and ethos.” He thinks that with the current Aphids team, “I really cannot imagine what Aphids will become under her watch—and that’s exactly what I am most excited about.” RT
Pomona Road, photo Katrina Lazaroff
katrina lazaroff’s pomona road, inspace
Major bushfires bring increased pain each year and revive memories of earlier devastating fires cruelly etched in the psyches of many Australian families. Choreographer Katrina Lazaroff’s family is one of these: her first full-length dance work, Pomona Road, reflects on the enduring physical and emotional consequences of the Ash Wednesday bushfire in 1980, but in the end, says Lazaroff, it’s a dance theatre work about family.
Lazaroff is a dancer, choreographer, rehearsal director and dance educator who graduated with an Honours in Dance from WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) in 2001, performed with Buzz Dance Theatre in Perth in 2001, and in 2006 and 2008 with Leigh Warren & Dancers worked as rehearsal director and assistant to the choreographer. She has been Artistic Director of the Youth Dance Festival 2008 (Ausdance ACT), choreographed for Fresh Bred—SA Youth Dance Ensemble, and worked with Restless Dance Company as a choreographic mentor on Debut 1 & 2. She is currently working as a choreographer and performer with Adelaide’s Patch Theatre Company and teaches company class for Australian Dance Theatre. For Lazaroff, the hour-long Pomona Road is “a huge work”, an opportunity to create a totality that draws on her artistic experience and family life and allows her to embrace a wide range of means with which to realise her vision.
In Pomona Road Lazaroff employs dance, theatre and visual and audio design to evoke the enduring suffering, the rebuildling of lives and a sense of home. Unusually for a principally dance work, she also incorporates documentary material—recorded interviews from family and community members. Not surprisingly then the show’s press release declares it “new Australian documentary dance.” Certainly Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness is rooted in the reality of the 1983 collapse of Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge, but it’s not a documentary work per se. Bangarra Dance Theatre, on the other hand, has works in its repertoire based on painful social realities, but the label ‘documentary’ is not apt.
Lazaroff tells me that Pomona Road—in evolution since 2006 and with three stages of development—was never intended as a comment specifically on the social and emotional impact of bushfires. Her first impulse was to explore family, “where we come from.” Stage one addressed her relationship with her sister (“sibling rivalry, kooky and a bit sinister”), and stage two, father-son interaction (drawing on her own family and the experience of her dancers). It was while working on stage three and addressing the whole family that she discovered that the fire experience provided a meaningful framework for the exploration of family life. The Ash Wednesday starting point offered the beginnings “of a journey and a focus on loss—of home, place, identity. And the pain of starting again—the parents tackling it, the kids bumping along.” By 2009, says Lazaroff, the fire scenario had taken over.
Lazaroff decided that she wanted to make a dance work that was documentary in character, capturing the feelings of loss to fire. To this end she interviewed her parents about Ash Wednesday 1980 and victims of the subsequent 1983 Ash Wednesday. She thinks that “feelings and relationships can be sensed” through these voices which the audience hear—sometimes on their own, sometimes in tandem with the dance. The dancers, playing members of a family, also speak, but not in a conventionally scripted fashion, their utterances a form of vocal movement—family bickering, a song, familiar expressions. Lazaroff says that in stage three of the work’s development she learned to give space to the recorded voiceovers, “to let them come first, and provide continuity.”
Asked about her choreographic style, Lazaroff says it’s rooted in the contemporay dance which has been her life. However, the dancers create “recognisable characters whose gestures and character traits fuse fluidly with the dance language.”
Kerry Reid’s set for Pomona Road comprises simple timber structures (originally made by Lazaroff’s partner from materials from her mother’s verandah for the stage three development, but now re-made and evocative of her father and his fence contracting business) and large hanging sheets of white paper that receive the images from two powerful projectors washing the whole stage with impressionistic, ‘textural images of bush and fire.” With Nick Mollison’s lighting and projections, Lazaroff hopes that substantial depth of field will be created. Lazaroff describes the sound design for Pomona Road as “highly collaborative, with a lot of give and take” in its making with Sascha Budimski’s score comprising “sound effects, hums, drones, voiceovers, rhythm beats and Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street”, the 1978 hit which her father played frequently.
I ask Lazaroff what creating Pomona Road has done for her. “It’s been a moving experience, looking back into family history and seeing that there were many more things that happened to us than I realised. As an artist I feel it’s set me free.” inSPACE Program, Pomona Road, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, April 21-24. Pomona Road was part of inSPACE:development in 2009.
jo lloyd: 24hrs
God knows what all the fast turnaround short film and short play festivals are doing to our psyches as artists and audiences—blessed be the slow food movement—and now dance has joined the rush! But what an intriguing race it might be in the Jo Lloyd-curated 24HRS at Dancehouse. Four choreographers will each create a new work over 24 hours—one for each Friday over four weeks. Just to add to the inevitable delirium of commencing work on a Thursday night at 9pm, “the creative process will be twittered and streamed online and the teams must be ready to present the work to a live audience by 8pm the next night.” There goes the privacy associated with the slow boil of the creative process. The stellar line-up of choreographic speed freaks is Natalie Cursio, Shelley Lasica, Phillip Adams and Luke George. 24HRS, performances April 30 (Cursio), May 7 (Lasica), 14 (Adams), 21 (George), Dancehouse, Melbourne; www.twitter.com/24HOURS; www.livestream.com/24HOURS
tony yap, rasa sayang
Rasa Sayang is a new interdisciplinary performance work by leading Melbourne dancer Tony Yap with musician-composers Tim Humphrey and Madeleine Flynn, visual artist Naomi Ota and creative collaborator Ben Rogan. The work is based on research Yap conducted while on a Fellowship from the Australia Council Dance Board into Indonesian and Malaysian shamanistic and trance dance traditions. Sayang, meaning ‘love’ in Yap’s native Malaysian, is the name of his mother, the inspiration for the work which forms part of his Buddha Body Series, an investigation into the positive eastern idea of emptiness. The first in the series, Melangkori (‘melancholy’) was shown in Melbourne in 2009, and the film version has screened in festivals around the world. Since 2008 the Tony Yap Company has performed in Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia and Korea. The Rasa Sayang installation is open free of charge 6pm-7.30pm each night, when audience members are invited to witness the preparations and pre-performance rituals of the artists. Fortyfivedownstairs, 8pm April 22-25; fortyfivedownstairs.com
craig walsh: digital odyssey
Sydney’s MCA is collaborating with leading Australian media artist Craig Walsh on Digital Odyssey, an epic 2010-11 tour to present digital artworks in response to regional environments and communities. Walsh “is travelling in a self-contained, digitally-equipped motor home which is also his mobile living and working environment, designed and fitted with all the necessary technical and AV equipment.” Walsh’s astonishing projections have filled shop windows with water, fish and floating furniture and the Art Gallery of NSW foyer ceiling with giant cockroaches, while elsewhere he has given a tree a human face. Digital Odyssey allows him to create site specific public artworks in collaboration with communities across Australia. Watch out for Walsh at Murray Bridge, SA, to April 11; Alice Springs, NT, April 26-May 16; Winton, QLD, May 31-June 20; Cairns, QLD, June 28–July 18; Mackay, QLD, Aug 16-Sept 12; Gladstone, QLD, Sept 20-Oct 10; Gerringong, NSW, Nov 1-30; Ballarat, VIC, Dec 6-Jan 6; www.digitalodyssey.com.au
Wang Jingyao, husband of Bian Zhongyun, with the camera he used to photograph his wife’s body in 1966 after she was murdered by Red Guards, in Hu Jie’s documentary Though I Am Gone (2006)
WHILE CHINA’S POLITICAL SYSTEM REMAINS DEEPLY AUTHORITARIAN, THE COUNTRY’S OVERWHELMING SIZE AND EXPLOSIVE GROWTH HAVE OPENED CAVERNOUS GAPS IN THE GOVERNMENT’S CONTROL OF CULTURE, THROUGH WHICH A NEW GENERATION OF DV-WIELDING DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS HAS CLIMBED.
“I’ve never heard an independent filmmaker in China ask themselves, ‘Can I do this?’,” comments Hong Kong-based producer David Bandurski. “Independent filmmaking is the freest avenue of expression that exists in China today.”
Independence from state-sanctioned channels of film production is the defining characteristic of a movement that encompasses a diverse array of styles and subject matter. “There were two things that made the change,” explains Beijing-based curator and filmmaker Ou Ning. “The first was pirate DVDs. People didn’t need to go to the Beijing Film Academy—they saw a lot of films through pirate DVDs, which gave them a very rich film history. When people saw this history they wanted to make things themselves, and they found there were cheap cameras that had come out. This technology has had a great impact on filmmaking in China.”
contemporary complexities
One of the most salient features of the shift in Chinese documentary filmmaking is the democratisation of the way contemporary reality is depicted on screen. “Before, history only had one version—by the Chinese Communist Party,” asserts Ou Ning. “Now with digital technology history has different versions.”
This trend is graphically illustrated by Meishi Street (2006), Ou Ning’s feature-length documentary depicting the plight of Beijing residents forcibly relocated from Dazhalan, an area just south of Tiananmen Square, in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics. What begins as an observational work takes a fascinating turn when Ou Ning hands his camera to Zhang Jinli, an eccentric and outspoken restaurateur whose home and business are slated for demolition. From that point, Meishi Street becomes, in part, a film about the way digital technology is empowering ordinary Chinese citizens.
“After just one month I found he was not only shooting, but also narrating his story like a journalist,” recalls Ou Ning. “The most exciting thing for him was an occasion when he hung banners on the roof of his house. The police came to take down the banners…but when he put the camera on them they were very afraid…That made Zhang Jinli realise the camera is a weapon.”
The demolition of Dazhalan, a neighbourhood just south of Tiananmen Square and one of the oldest parts of Beijing, in Ou Ning's documentary Meishi Street (2006)
While Meishi Street depicts a small, if depressingly common drama of contemporary China, Du Haibin’s 1428 (2009) takes on a much larger subject. The devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008 was the first domestic disaster of such magnitude since digital cameras had become readily available on the Chinese mainland. In the chaotic weeks following the quake, several independent filmmakers joined the uncontrolled flood of media personnel pouring into the disaster zone.
1428—named after the exact moment the quake struck on May 12—takes a cinema-verite approach, documenting as well as participating in the heartbreaking scenes playing out in Beichuan, a ruined town near the quake’s epicentre. The film reveals a complex, if at times overly disparate picture of overwhelming grief, graft, solidarity and merciless self-interest among the survivors, a far cry from the self-congratulatory tone of official Chinese media coverage at the time.
The gulf between China’s official media and independent documentaries like 1428 is most tellingly revealed in two scenes that bookend the film. Early on we see soldiers preventing villagers from entering Beichuan when a leader—probably Premier Wen Jiabao—visits the town, surrounded by a media circus. Towards the end of the film, Wen Jiabao returns to the area and an old man bitterly complains about the massive police and military presence preceding his arrival. A younger woman watching the scene remarks, “If you tell the truth, they’ll cut your words from the film.” But this is not state-controlled television, and the old man’s words remain.
the return of history
China’s digital filmmakers are not just claiming their right to document contemporary reality—they are also delving into repressed episodes from the nation’s recent past. Nanjing-based director Hu Jie is the most notable filmmaker working in this area, having produced two extraordinary works detailing stories from the first decades of the People’s Republic (unfortunately no subtitled version yet exists of a third film completed in 2008, National East Wind Farm).
In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004) looks at the life of a young writer through interviews with those who knew her. Initially an ardent supporter of the Communist revolution, Lin Zhao ran foul of authorities when she defended fellow Peking University students denounced during the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957. She was expelled from the university and suffered various other indignities, which only hardened her resolve to speak out. She was imprisoned in 1960, but fought attempts to stifle her writing by penning an estimated 120,000 words of poetry and essays while in jail, using her own blood. In 1968 she was executed by firing squad.
Hu Jie stumbled upon Lin Zhao’s story by chance when working as a cameraman for China’s state news agency Xinhua. “I knew very little about the history of the 1950s and 60s,” the filmmaker explains. “While making Lin Zhao I had the sense that I was feeling around in the dark. Then I found the door of history, opened it and walked through. There I found a lot of ridiculous, cruel stories that really shocked me, and that was the motivation to go further.”
Hu’s next work focused on Bian Zhongyun, who in 1966 was the deputy headmistress of a prominent Beijing girls’ high school attended by many daughters of the party elite. The school was an early incubator of the Red Guard movement that spearheaded Mao’s Cultural Revolution from mid-1966, and on August 5 that year, Bian Zhongyun was beaten to death by her students and dumped in a rubbish cart. The incident marked her as one of the first victims of the revolutionary violence that within months would engulf the entire nation.
Bian’s elderly husband still lives in Beijing, and through the scholar Wang Youqin, Hu Jie discovered that he had secretly photographed the events leading up to his wife’s death and her brutally mauled body. It took six months of persuasion and a viewing of the Lin Zhao film to convince Bian’s traumatised husband to share his story and images with Hu Jie. These interviews and his photographs form the backbone of Though I Am Gone (2006), a profoundly moving memorial to the victims of Mao’s senseless political violence.
Hu Jie’s films are striking not only for the stories they reveal—horrific even by the grim standards of Chinese history—but also for the way they individualise events that have long remained broad, abstract historical episodes for want of recorded eye-witness accounts. More than this, Hu Jie makes these stories tangible. The climactic scene in both In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul and Though I Am Gone sees the filmmaker uncovering physical traces of the long forgotten victims.
While making the Lin Zhao film, Hu Jie discovered the young woman’s ashes were stored in an unsealed box in Shanghai. Locating the box, he lifts the lid on camera, and finds wrapped in a newspaper of the 1960s a thick lock of Lin Zhao’s hair, turned prematurely grey by the tortures she endured. The final scene of Though I Am Gone sees Bian Zhongyun’s husband bring out a suitcase, unopened since 1966, containing the bloodied clothing he removed from Bian’s corpse the day she was murdered. These moldering objects, so carefully hidden for decades, insist with heartbreaking melancholy that we remember this history, and the injustices perpetrated in the name of Mao’s ideology.
a history unseen
China’s flourishing independent documentary sector illustrates how much the country has changed since the imprisoned Lin Zhao was compelled to pen essays in her own blood.
The fate of these films, however, reveals how little the Communist Party’s attitude has shifted when it comes to questions of culture. As David Bandurski explains, “[These films’ existence] is not at all a reflection of government tolerance. These works emerge from the chaos and uncertainty of a China in the midst of social transition. The chaos can offer opportunities for conscientious filmmakers…[but] control of all culture remains a top priority for China’s leadership.”
While controlling expression is increasingly difficult, the Chinese government is much more successful at limiting the dissemination of unsanctioned views. China’s independent documentaries are occasionally seen in small unofficial venues in major cities or on university campuses while informal networks of DVD distribution exist amongst artists, academics and activists. Generally, however, it is extremely difficult for these films to reach domestic audiences. Broadcast, official distribution or appearances at recognised film festivals within mainland China are out of the question. So although these films offer a tantalisingly uncensored vision of a country in flux, they also remain victims of the CCP’s obsessive desire to control the nation’s culture.
David Bandurski produced Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town (RT94), available through dgenerate Films (http://dgeneratefilms.com). Ou Ning’s Meishi Street is available for online rental through the dgenerate Films website.
Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone can be found in 10 parts with English subtitles on YouTube. In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul is similarly available on YouTube, but unfortunately without English subtitles.
OVER AT LEAST THE LAST 50 YEARS ONE CONTINUING AIM OF THE AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMUNITY HAS BEEN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LOCAL SCREEN CULTURE (EARLIER, ‘FILM CULTURE’), SOMETHING THAT WOULD, AMONGST MANY OTHER THINGS, EVENTUALLY INCREASE AUDIENCES FOR AUSTRALIAN FILMS. IT’S AN AIM, HOWEVER, THAT HAS OFTEN BEEN RATHER NEBULOUS AND UNFORMULATED, AND AS A GOAL IT’S RARELY COME EVEN CLOSE TO BEING MET.
So what is screen culture, anyway? Over those years, it has been defined in many and various ways: as the comprehensive nature of screen activity outside the mainstream; as the environment in which screen projects are developed, made, viewed, discussed and appreciated; even, in one lobbying foray, as “the glue that holds the industry together.” The importance of screen culture within the film industry, and within the wider film community, has ebbed and flowed, and the support it has been given, both financial and in kind, has similarly grown or, more often, decreased.
Back in the 1980s and 90s screen culture was actually high on the agenda; funding bodies held forums to define it and determine what their assistance to it should be, while the many and varied organisations and individuals who believed they had a role within a healthy screen cultural sector took part in many enthusiastic debates at festivals and other film events. Lobbying bodies with high-flown names were formed when needed to press the case for support. But, as more immediate issues relating to production, funding and government assistance took priority, screen culture receded as a topic, and has never really regained attention. Today, amongst the often ill-informed debates about the quality of Australian films and why they are not reaching audiences, a serious look at the importance of screen culture in this equation is conspicuous by its absence.
australian film institute
In 1958 a group of film lovers already involved in the early years of the Melbourne Film Festival set up a separate organisation to operate year-round. Aware of similar activities already being carried out in the UK by the British Film Institute, they called this local organisation the Australian Film Institute, and based its constitution on that of its role model. The AFI has now survived for an eventful 50 years, the only screen cultural body (apart from the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals) to do so, but just how secure is its continuing role in the cultural life of Australia’s screen community?
The AFI’s first 50 years have been captured in a book, Shining a Light, by Lisa French and Mark Poole, a relatively straightforward chronological history of the organisation which also records an interesting and diverse range of impressions and opinion on the events along the way. It does contain a very interesting and comprehensive chapter on screen culture, which, the writers contend, is where “the AFI’s pursuits over six decades have centred…this is arguably the AFI’s raison d’être.” Using many sources, articles and interviews, they have compiled a concise but substantial portrait of screen culture, concluding with an idea of what it could have been—and still could be. They define screen culture as including production, distribution and exhibition, but also “critical commentary, educational, promotional, lobbying and other discourses and contexts for the reception of screen products”; it’s “located within government bodies, institutions, film service organisations, industry guilds and associations, as well as those processes, audience engagements and discourses that encompass a film community.”
For them, the AFI’s survival for more than half a century promoting “the growth of a diverse film culture” is a “remarkable achievement, given its non-government structure and its membership base”; and they argue that Australian screen culture and the AFI are “clearly inseparable”, something I find hard to agree with. In fact, it’s the AFI’s role in the demise of several important screen cultural initiatives that the organisation has been most criticised for over the years.
the film society movement
The aspect of screen culture that most people recognise and desire is related to exhibition, to enjoying films that they normally wouldn’t get to see. While in recent years digital technology has made it possible to see an enormous range of restored, rediscovered or just very obscure titles on DVD or through digital download, there’s still that innate desire in most film lovers to see films on the big screen, in the dark, surrounded by friends, acquaintances and fellow film lovers. And while film festivals and other events go some way to satisfying this desire, the dream of a national screening circuit offering, year round, a rich and diverse range of curated programs, retrospectives, other national cinemas, all presented within a contextual perspective, is still on the agenda, despite many disappointments.
This sort of specialised exhibition has long been a major aim for local screen culture. The rapid expansion of the film society movement in the 50s, which coincided with a rise in university film groups and was followed by the early underground and surf film screenings in the 60s and the so-called film renaissance of the 70s, saw in many cases the emergence of new filmmakers from backgrounds involved with such showings. This led to an oft-repeated argument that the exposure to such screenings would not only lead to more informed filmmakers, but to larger and more appreciative audiences; as such it was often put to government funding bodies. And to be fair, there were some short, glorious periods when it actually existed.
the national film theatre of australia
The National Film Theatre of Australia was founded in 1967, and grew rapidly in the 70s, gaining a national membership of over 9,000. Run by an extensive network of volunteers and a small but enthusiastic staff, it managed to screen a wide-ranging and well-curated program of films all round the country for a number of years, including some wonderful imported seasons. However, even as it acquired some funding support from the Australian Film Commission, this led to its demise; the AFC, which was already funding the AFI to provide specialised exhibition (which it had done, but in a much less organised and inclusive way), brought about what was originally portrayed as a merger of the two bodies in 1979. However, the NFTA was swallowed up by the AFI, and while its programming continued under the AFI’s banner for a while, it soon disappeared entirely, leading to some long-held bitterness.
the melbourne & national cinematheques
In many of the lively debates about film culture in the 70s and early 80s there had been much talk about a national cinematheque, especially after the demise of the NFTA. The argument was that not only would audiences profit from such screenings, but that filmmakers and film students could benefit from being exposed to such a rich diversity of filmmaking practice, with the Melbourne Cinematheque, which had been running an admired annual program of screenings put forward as a model. Commencing as the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) in 1948, and changing to the Cinémathèque in 1984, this self-administered, non-profit, membership-driven group of committed cinephiles, determined to screen films as closely as possible to the way they would have originally screened (big screen, 16 and 35mm prints), every year programs a diverse selection of classic and contemporary films, curated retrospectives and thematic series, using both archival and new prints sourced from all around the world. In the late 80s the AFI proposed that it take the Melbourne Cinematheque program to Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema, and in 1993 this became the National Cinematheque, screening around Australia at a circuit of cinemas including the Media Resource Centre in Adelaide and the Film and TV Institute in Fremantle, with the support of the AFC. However, when the AFC told the AFI in 1999 that it would no longer fund its distribution, research and information activities, it offered additional funding for exhibition, which kept the national cinematheque going for a few more years, until it petered out.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The Melbourne Cinematheque still runs a very full and enticing calendar, and screens at the excellently resourced ACMI, which has its own interesting program. The MRC in Adelaide curates a solid annual cinematheque program, as does the exciting and relatively new Arc cinema at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. Sydney’s not totally without alternative screenings: the NSW Art Gallery runs an imaginative program of free screenings allied to its exhibitions; the WEA struggles on screening to a small but very committed audience every second Sunday; and the Japan Foundation, weekly for most of the year, shows a fairly eclectic range of current and archival Japanese films.
goma’s australian cinematheque
But the jewel in the crown is the Australian Cinematheque, located at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, which presents an incredibly rich program of retrospective and thematic films showcasing the work of influential filmmakers and artists. It has two state of the art cinemas, together with a dedicated gallery for screen-related exhibitions and facilities for video production, and could well provide a reason for travelling north.
how to do screen culture: aftrs
Given the current lack of focus on screen culture, it’s exciting that the Australian Film, TV and Radio School is now offering a Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture. The course has just started this year, and is aimed at people who are interested in engaging with ideas, in broadening their knowledge and understanding of screen production practice, history and culture, and in contributing to the shaping of a local screen culture. AFTRS hopes to develop students to function in a range of roles, as critics, commentators, dramaturgs, festival directors, teachers, administrators or project officers, and hopes that people already working in the industry could join the course, learning how to build their community and expand their network of contacts and ideas.
It’s refreshing that AFTRS, which has usually favoured the professional and the technical in its teaching, is offering such a course; run from the Screen Studies Department, where department head Karen Pearlman is hoping “to create a community of well-informed and actively engaged people with an interest in developing and influencing the direction of our screen culture, including production, exhibition and distribution, audiences, experiences, ideas and the level of discourse about what we make, why we make it and who it is for.” She believes that screen culture not only helps Australian films find their audience, but also helps Australian cinema find out where it fits in the wider film world.
Alongside Jack Sargeant’s article on Australian genre films [RT95] , Mike Walsh on Asian film in Australia [p17] and Thomas Redwood’s account of the new Mediatheque based at ACMI [p19], this article is part of an ongoing OnScreen series addressing Australian screen culture.
ACMI Mediatheque, photo courtesy of Australian Centre for the Moving Image
MELBOURNE’S RECENTLY OPENED MEDIATHEQUE (LOCATED AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE) IS THE FIRST ESTABLISHMENT OF ITS KIND IN AUSTRALIA. IT WON’T, I EXPECT, BE THE LAST. OPENED IN SEPTEMBER LAST YEAR, IT’S A FREE AND VERY WELCOMING PUBLIC RESOURCE FACILITY DESIGNED WITH A CONSPICUOUSLY CLEAR PURPOSE IN MIND.
Collections Manager Nick Richardson says it’s a “shopfront” for the nation’s two largest archive collections. A collaboration between the state funded ACMI and the federally funded National Film and Sound Archive, the Mediatheque provides unprecedented access and assistance for anyone interested in viewing archival material from both collections.
To walk inside the Mediatheque is to get the feeling that an intelligent idea is at work in Melbourne’s home for screen culture. Laid out in a cosy but not restrictive space, the centre incorporates 11 very comfortable booths (each seating two to five people, some with universal access), a research desk area and an adjoining room with a 35mm/16mm flatbed Steinbeck for celluloid viewing. Each booth is equipped with a 42” or 32” digital touch screen television, a dual format VHS/DVD player and multiple headphones. With assistance from the collection desk (located at the Mediatheque’s entrance) visitors can access and view any of the 35,000 DVD or VHS films stored on site. To view celluloid archives (none of which are stored on site), visitors place a request with the centre’s retrieval service which can take between one day (for film kept in Melbourne) and 10 days (for film in the NFSA’s Canberra collection).
For the specialist researcher, postgraduate student or film aficionado, the Mediatheque could hardly present more desirable facilities. Using the online catalogue, a researcher can easily locate relevant materials and order them through the Mediatheque staff (by phone or email) for viewing at the centre. If your needs are less clear—you know what you want, but don’t know how to find it or even what the film is called—the centre’s experienced archival staff are more than able to assist. Nick Richardson is immensely proud of his team’s wide-ranging knowledge and abilities. “The value of the Mediatheque,” he emphasises, “is as much the expertise of the staff as the breadth of the collection.” He was very pleased to tell me of many instances when, on the basis of only a few snippets of contextual detail, he and other members of staff have quickly located the film in question. By continually developing the collection’s catalogue in response to these experiences, the Mediatheque team is establishing multiple categories under which any given film is listed, providing different access pathways for different users.
Catering so efficiently to the particular interests of film specialists is, however, not the Mediatheque’s only intended function. The centre also offers much for the wider public. This is perhaps what most markedly distinguishes the Mediatheque as an access and viewing space from conventional archival spaces: it makes a previously exclusive domain more public and inclusive. For so long the dominion of blurry-eyed film initiates, archival collections have now been placed above ground, in the visible world. For the many visitors to Federation Square, for school students, or for those less experienced university students who are only beginning to appreciate the educational possibilities of archival footage, the centre’s digitised collection offers a user-friendly interactive introduction to the historical universe of the ACMI and NFSA archives. Drifting into the archival space, perhaps out of curiosity from a nearby cafe, the visitor can sit down and immediately begin to interact with the touch screen digital collection (which is continuously being added to as more of the archives are digitised).
Richardson has noticed a recurring pattern in such fortuitous unplanned visits. Typically, he told me, the first-time visitor will begin by watching something familiar and comfortable (like Queen Elizabeth’s 1958 visit to Melbourne, or the first episode of Neighbours, or the “Up There Cazaly” commercial). Ten minutes later, however, they have usually moved from the well-known material to engage in something far less familiar, and perhaps far more challenging (historical footage of Aboriginal slave workers for example, or a film by Len Lye). In a few minutes then, history for these visitors assumes a fresh, more complex, open and tangible form. No longer dictated to by an author or commentator, as active participants in the Mediatheque experience their position in history, not in relationship to history, here becomes subject to a sometimes profound revision.
In many cases, says Richardson, such unplanned visits result in an individual returning to the Mediatheque with far more deliberate intentions, to assume a lay role as cultural historian. The effect that such individual conversions have on a culture sorely lacking in historical identity will no doubt come to light gradually, as more and more people discover the Mediatheque and more and more cultural institutions follow its lead. But the effect is equally likely, I think, to be very significant for the development of historical consciousness in the Australian public.
Listening to Richardson explaining the importance that public feedback and viewer statistics have for the Mediatheque’s continued development, what strikes me most is the underlying coherence his responsive approach has with the ever-evolving participatory aesthetic of the moving image. This coherence is, I suggest, a strong indicator of the Mediatheque’s practicality and intelligence of design as a cultural institution. As individual viewers, we see, as many theoreticians of cinema have claimed, what we choose to see in a moving image (though the degree of that choice is dependent on the context in which we view the image).
In the Mediatheque this aesthetic of interactive choice is becoming clearer and more explicit. In the centre’s digitised facilities the moving image is increasingly determined by the eyes, and hands, of the beholder. Not only the interpretation, not even just the perception, but the very selection of what is seen and heard is now far more subject to the viewer’s active control. Call it the death of the author, or the birth of the digital viewer, it seems that recent digital developments in the history of the moving image are now established, refined and reliable enough to constitute the premise of a highly functional and, let us hope, seminal cultural establishment.
THE FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILM LOOKS PARTICULARLY STRONG THIS YEAR, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM MICHAEL HANEKE (THE EAGERLY ANTICIPATED THE WHITE RIBBON: VILLAGE LIFE UNRAVELLED BY STRANGE EVENTS BEFORE WORLD WAR I), MARGARETHE VON TROTTA (VISION—AUS DEM LEBEN DER HILDEGARD VON BINGEN; A BIOPIC OF THE MEDIAEVAL COMPOSER AND VISIONARY) AND THE BRILLIANT TURKISH-GERMAN DIRECTOR FATIH AKIN WITH AN UNEXPECTED COMIC TURN, SOUL KITCHEN (THE TALE OF A RESTAURANT THAT ENJOYS UNLIKELY SUCCESS).
fatih akin
Akin, best known for Head-On (2003) and The Edge of Heaven (2007), both available on Madman DVD, receives warranted special attention in this year’s festival with the screening of his rarely seen early film Short Sharp Shock (1998) and, a personal favourite, the freewheeling documentary Crossing The Bridge—The Sound of Istanbul (2005) which explores Turkish music in many of its permutations—from various traditional forms to street music and punk. The musical diversity is astonishing, capturing the essence of Istanbul as a meeting point of cultures. Young musicians are voluble about their art in casual interviews while the more formal engagements with the elder statesmen and women of traditional and popular music are framed by fascinating historical footage and excerpts from old movies. The Bridge is impressive on the Madman DVD, replete with hours of additional music, but the big screen is the film’s real home, Akin excelling in conveying a vivid sense of the city. With adroit camera work and editing and German musician Alexander Hacke (formerly of Einstürzende Neubauten) as our guide the sense of a personal journey deep into this east-west culture is embracing.
Akin’s Short Sharp Shock follows three men, a Turk, a Greek and a Serbian struggling to survive in Germany by whatever means until fatally entangled with a gangster. The film, nominated for Best Film at the 1998 German Film Awards, will doubtless contrast sharply with Akin’s latest, Soul Kitchen (2009), described in the festival’s program guide as offering “the audience exquisite cuisine in this comedic look at a German-Greek chef running a Hamburg eatery who upsets regular customers when a new chef presents his nouvelle cuisine.” But the run-down restaurant becomes a success. To see how Akin has adapted his skill at carefully developed, closely observed drama with explosions of emotion to the substantial demands of comedy will doubtless provide a special festival pleasure. One thing is certain, Akin hasn’t abandoned his intercultural concerns.
Food, under the banner of Culinary Comedies, is one of the festival’s themes. Others in the category include Anno Saul’s popular Kebab Connection “about a German-Turkish aspiring filmmaker who dreams of making the first German Kung Fu movie while shooting commercials promoting his uncle’s kebab restaurant in Hamburg.” In his fourth contribition to the festival, Fatih Akin co-wrote the script.
shooting the past
The past plays a considerable role as content in the festival, from the middle ages to Haneke’s pre-World War I White Ribbon and an account of the young Hitler after that war in Urs Odermatt’s Mein Kampf, to Jewish sporting stars denied involvement in the Berlin Olympics in Kaspar Heidelbach’s Berlin’ 36, and a 1943 lesbian relationship in Max Färberböck’s Aimee & Jaguar. It’s then on to more recent times with films addressing life in Berlin in Friedemann Fromm’s three-part The Wolves of Berlin, the long-term personal consequences of Baader-Meinhoff-type terrorism in Susan Schneider’s The Day Will Come and the limits of Bosnian-Serbian war crimes trials in Hans-Christian Schmid’s impressive Storm.
Mediaeval history is addressed not only in von Trotta’s Vision (with the excellent Barbara Sukowa starring) but also Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan: “A ninth century woman of English extraction born in the German city of Ingelheim disguises herself as a man and rises through the Vatican ranks.” This fiction, based on the Donna Cross novel, features Johanna Wokalek (Gudrun Ensslin in The Baader Meinhof Complex). The big budget, the English-language shoot and a cast including David Wenham, John Goodman and Iain Glenn suggest the film is squarely aimed at the international market. Prominent German director Sönke Wortmann is one of the festival’s special guests.
The 20th century comes into focus with Haneke’s White Ribbon and then Kaspar Heidelbach’s Mein Kampf, based on a play by George Tabori. The young Hitler in 1910 shares a room with a Jewish bookseller, is rejected by an art school, feels suicidal and, at the bookseller’s suggestion, looks to a future in politics. Doubtless, as with Downfall (2004) there will be complaints about another attempt to ‘humanise’ the fuhrer. Kaspar Heidelbach’s Berlin ‘36 offers an intriguing ‘true story’ of a champion Jewish high jumper forced to return from Britain to train with the German Olympic team. In this way she will save her threatended family and the Nazis will minimise American government opposition to a games without German Jews. The Nazis add a newcomer to their team, a peculiarly masculine young woman on whom they pin their hopes to oust the Jew. It’s a rather plain, plodding film, if occasionally suspenseful and, in the end, rather surprising when you see images of the film’s actual subjects. For an alternative to Nazi machinations, there’s Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe, “the true story of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese lives during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.”
Max Färberböck’s Aimée & Jaguar, Germany’s official entry for the 1999 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is set in 1943 and is another ‘true story’ again focused on women, this time lesbians, one a wife with four children and a husband at war and the other Jewish and in the resistance. Berlin-based Erica Fischer, the author of the widely published non-fiction book Aimée & Jaguar, is a leading feminist and another special guest of the festival.
The Wolves of Berlin
Friedemann Fromm’s three-part The Wolves of Berlin, originally made for television, covers three periods of the city’s history at critical moments in 1948, 1961 and 1989 by focusing on a teen clique as they age and the world changes radically. Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come brings us close to the present. Like a good thriller the film initially makes its audience work at piecing together clues of all kinds about a female farmer and an aggressive young woman who seeks her out. A certain rhythmic sameness and a later inclination to melodrama don’t prevent the film from being an interesting study of how a 1970s terrorist can live in denial and face the challenge of exposure. I liked it better on reflection and as a companion work to the very different Baader Meinhoff Complex.
hans-christian schmid’s storm
Hans-Christian Schmid’s Storm is an impressive inclusion in the program. I was lucky to see a preview of this largely English language film starring Kerry Fox as a War Crimes Tribunal prosecutor thrown at short notice into the trial of a Serbian commander turned popular politician. What seems straightforward becomes quickly and dangerously complex in the manner of a good political thriller. But Schmid pays consistent attention to the realpolitik of the European Union’s attempts to defuse murderous local tensions by overriding ordinary citizens’ need to recount their war experiences.
Storm effectively addresses the big political picture while focussing on the pain of players and victims, with Kerry Fox excellent as a lawyer who finds her own life trapped in these contradictions. Fox creates a laid back persona, droll, determined, often blunt, but increasingly alert to political and emotional nuances that will test her own morality as events unfold. The fine widescreen cinematography embraces both intimate scenes and varied location choices.
One pointer: as Storm unleashes its series of climactic events you certainly need to pay attention to the political and legal machinations as they play out. Storm is suspenseful, moving and memorable, its story an unusual and admirable choice.
There’s much more to the 2010 Festival of German Film: more films on cuisine, thrillers (Anno Saul The Door; Maximilian Erlenwein’s Gravity starring festival guest Jürgen Vogel), more engagements with German multiculturalism (Burhan Qurbani’s Faith; Feo Aladag’s When We Leave) and films for younger audiences. German press and radio film critic Anke Sternborg, another of the festival’s guests, will provide the context in which to understand the diversity, themes and successes of the German film industry.
Audi Festival of German Films: Chauvel Cinema/Palace Norton Street, Sydney, April 21-May 2; Palace Cinema Como/Palace Brighton Bay, Melbourne, April 22-May 2; Cinema Paradiso, Perth, April 22–26; Palace Centro, Brisbane, April 28–May 4; Palace Nova, Eastend Cinemas, Adelaide, May 7-May 9; www.goethe.de/australia
THIS YEAR’S EDITION OF TRANSMEDIALE MARKED A NEW COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE FESTIVAL AND ITS SISTER EVENT CLUB TRANSMEDIALE. THE RESULTING PROGRAM, OVERLAP—SOUND & OTHER MEDIA, BROUGHT A SERIES OF EXPERIMENTAL AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCES TO TRANSMEDIALE’S MAIN HUB, THE HOUSE OF WORLD CULTURES IN BERLIN.
Probably the most anticipated performance was the much-hyped live AV set from Japan’s Ryoki Ikeda. Having been impressed by his immense, exquisitely designed installation data.tron [3 SXGA version] (2007-9) I was hoping Ikeda’s performance would elevate his sublime, yet somehow unsatisfying graphics to a more meaningful level. What a disappointment then, that Test Pattern actually delivered something far less. Against a large square projection, Ikeda stood at his laptop and set loose an onslaught of driving percussion, the minimal beats occasionally disrupted by bleeps and bursts of static and noise. On the screen behind, horizontal black and white lines flickered up and down across two vertical panels—the lines, their frequency and shade constituting a direct conversion of Ikeda’s audio signal. Initially the perfectly synchronised beats and stark graphics made an impressive impact, however as the minutes passed by the effect wore thin. The screen eventually subdividing into smaller sections did little to reinvigorate the relentless, flickering graphics.
Stylistically similar, but infinitely more intriguing was POWEr by Canadian duo Artificiel, a commissioned AV work developed around a Tesla coil. Two cameras and a microphone relay video and audio to Artificiel’s laptops where it is processed and played back live. For the performance the Tesla coil stood to the front left of the stage under a soft spotlight. A large screen hung vertically at the back and Artificiel themselves were as far offstage as to be effectively invisible. The piece started simply, just the coil and the wonderfully powerful, amplified electric current. After this small tribute, a pause and the real show commenced. In a slow, deliberate rhythm Artificiel fired off the Tesla. With each beat a stark black and white still shot of the electricity burst onto screen. The milky white arc was captured in stunning quality, complex rivers and veins set beautifully against black. As the soundtrack progressed and grew more complex, the images started to overlap, replace, repeat, eventually inverting and breaking into smaller panels. Artificiel at times confused the integrity of the ‘live’ footage by mixing in time-delayed samples or continuing playback while the Tesla stood silent.
Continuing the dominant black and white theme, I caught a nice performance, A Cable Plays, at Club Transmediale using openFrameworks open source software. Two artists, Chris Sugrue (US) and Damian Stewart (NZ), both part of the openFrameworks development group, sat cross-legged opposite each other at a black, square board decorated with a tight grid of pins. The artists took turns threading white string through the grid, building up interesting, minimal geometries. Meanwhile a live overhead camera transmitted the scene to a large screen for the audience. The position and movement of the string was analysed in openFrameworks to trigger, warp and distort a live electronic soundtrack. Additional graphics and animations popped onto the main screen occasionally and were ‘pushed aside’ or otherwise affected by the threading of the string. A simple piece, “inspired by the hidden codes of human behaviour and the hidden logic of games,” but well executed.
Another highlight for me was The Long Conversion by American MIT graduates, Sosolimited. Soso hijacked the audiovisual stream of Transmediale’s eight-hour keynote discussion and presented their own subversive remix. Two volunteer typists sat at computers under a large screen and entered the spoken conversation in real time. This text data was then scanned, analysed, and playfully repositioned over the top of the original feed. Presented as info-graphics, the piece subverted the content of the discussion, charting the frequency of particular words, finding ‘hidden’ syntax clues and otherwise messing with the signal. The actual video and audio streams were also manipulated and distorted to render the discussion at times comical, threatening, dream-like or plain false. It was clever, funny and beautifully designed.
In celebration of Transmediale’s new partnership with eArts Festival Shanghai, the festival closed with a special showcase from contemporary Chinese media artists. The first of the two performances started promisingly, with sound artist Zhang Jian hidden behind a screen at the front left of the stage on which a large golden ‘sun’ was rear-projected. He and his instrument appeared only as shadows against the golden orb. Visual artist Aaajiao stood at a console at the right of the stage and controlled a projection of generative cloud formations onto the back wall. Zhang Jian stepped in and out of the projected sun, augmenting the sound from his mysterious instrument (which through later research I discovered to be several of his Buddha Machines placed on a ‘wooden-man’ martial-arts training structure). Meanwhile Aaajiao played with the volume, texture and speed of his ever-drifting clouds, the most interesting moments coming when he amped up the pace of these transformations to build some kind of rhythm. For the most part however, these changes felt awkward and off-time. Also questionable was the decision to generate the clouds onscreen. Watching the little puffs obviously being clicked into existence was disconcerting. The main problem with this show, however, was that nothing really happened before it abruptly ended 30 minutes later.
Next Feng Mengbo took the stage, games console in hand. Immediately we were hit with the bright colour and bouncing electronic soundtrack of his self-developed computer game in which a Chinese character in Communist greens takes over the world country by country (level by level), armed with Coke cans for ammunition. After claiming America, he heads to the moon—at which point, unforutnately, the game got stuck in an irrecoverable loop and, after sitting through two restarts, the impatient crowd forced the performance to be abandoned. The game was really quite good and there was a certain audacity in closing the festival with a Nintendo console performance, but the programming seemed questionable rather than being about maverick artistic intervention.
While it had looked good on paper, Overlap was not exactly successful. Despite some highlights, the works generally felt safe and often just a bit dull. It was disheartening to witness the shortage of fun, poetry and adventure. This is particularly disappointing in Berlin, a mecca for experimental electronic arts of all imaginable forms. Perhaps Transmediale had decided their festival was not the place for a sound performance using algae-generated electricity to search radio frequencies for interdimensional beings. (No, I didn’t make this up.)
IN A BLACKED-OUT ROOM, AS PART OF JOHN CURTIN GALLERY’S ART IN THE AGE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION, THE TIBETAN BUDDHIST SAND MANDALA OF CHAKRASAMVARA GLOWS IN SATURATED COLOURS, PROJECTED FROM ABOVE ONTO A TWO-METRE DIAMETER SANDPIT.
The intricately rendered geometric patterns, human figures, tiny creatures and curling clouds are readable in their entirety for just a few seconds before the image zooms back towards the grains of sand from which the original mandala is constructed.
Quickly the detail recedes into areas of bright colour, localising towards the centre of the mandala, and soon we are looking at ever-growing grains of brightly coloured sand, filling more and more of the circular field of vision. They morph into a micro-landscape of boulders and edges before the rich hues fade and we begin to ‘see’ at the nano-level—a scale at which colour itself ceases to exist and the sandscape becomes flakes and mounds of rippled grey and white. From here begins the slow, meditative return to the macro scale: the looped projection is a 15-minute journey from the visible to the unimaginable and back, across a realm encompassing aesthetic, scientific and spiritual dimensions.
Artist Victoria Vesna and scientist James Gimzewski have collaborated on several projects involving nanotechnology, a field that extends what is ‘seen’ to its outer limits, using instruments that don’t photograph but gather physical data by ‘touching’ molecular surfaces—data that is algorithmically interpreted to produce visual images. Four monks from the Tibetan Gaden Lhopa Khangtsen monastery in India worked full time for a month to create the original mandala for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Vesna and Gimzewski then photographed it at a range of scales from wide-angle to macro lens. The mandala’s central motif was recreated in the laboratory, where it was imaged firstly with an optical microscope and then a Scanning Electron Microscope. To create a seamless video projection that would zoom down to the nanoscale took 300,000 individual frames—around 900GB of data. Rendering the final composition took 36 computers two full days to complete.
Nanomandala, Victoria Vesna, James Gimzewski
courtesy the artists
Nanomandala, Victoria Vesna, James Gimzewski
The intensity of the lab-work resonates with the Buddhist practice of creating the mandala: a process involving extreme finesse and patience in which finely corrugated, sand-filled cones are gently rubbed so that grain-by-grain the image is built into being. The link is not arbitrary: Vesna’s relationship with Tibetan Buddhism goes back to her college days, when she first read Robert Thurman’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “Buddhism and meditation were always informing my practice,” says Vesna, “and to be participating in the creation of the Chakrasamvara was a great teaching and transmission for me.”
The themes of life, death and transition seem to lend themselves to an artistic engagement with nanotechnology: other works in the Art in the Age of Nanotechnology exhibition explore these themes in several ways, creating human interactions at the borderline between the known and the unknowable of objects that are measured in billionths of metres.
The creation of Nanomandala in 2003, says Vesna, has influenced her subsequent work (see Blue Morph or Quantum Tunnel, also collaborations with Gimzewski) both in terms of its interactivity and the sense that the artwork is “manifested” rather than directed, with a specific energy and path of its own. At face value, the ‘interactivity’ of Nanomandala is limited—viewers can sculpt the sand while the image creeps across it, or sift it through their fingers—but in the context of the scale and delicacy of Nanomandala, this seems an almost clumsy interaction with a work that otherwise operates at high precision and high resolution. Watching the entire 15-minute loop, however, is a commitment to a kind of meditation and exchange; and this meditative interaction seems much more to the point.
Nanomandala’s aural component, by sound artist Anne Niemetz, runs parallel in scale to the shifting images: a collage that by turns includes the deep, harmonics-soaked throat-singing of the Tibetan meditation chant and the highly amplified sounds of the monks’ sand-sculpting tools—vibrating, cricket-like rubs and taps that accompany the image as it approaches nano-scale.
The sheer, vivid beauty of Nanomandala—though Vesna points out that terror is equally a part of the mandala image—sets it apart from the other works in this exhibition, as does an engagement with the spiritual that does not look to conceptualism for its validity. Despite both an immense degree of technical production, and its strong engagement with Tibetan Buddhist practice, Nanomandala has an aesthetic simplicity and spaciousness that leaves abundant room for individual response and contemplation.
Perth International Arts Festival: Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski, Nanomandala (2003), exhibited in Art in the Age of Nanotechnology, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Feb 5-April 30
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, 2002, Nano-Scape: user 06, supported by Volkswagenstiftung, Hannover
image courtesy of the artists
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, 2002, Nano-Scape: user 06, supported by Volkswagenstiftung, Hannover
IT’S ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO ‘SEE’ NANO-PARTICLES, AS ALL IMAGING AT THIS SCALE (1NM = 1 BILLIONTH OF A METRE) CAN ONLY CONSIST OF INTERPRETED DATA. SO AS CURATOR CHRIS MALCOLM PUTS IT, THE FIELD PROVIDES “FERTILE GROUND FOR ARTISTS WISHING TO CREATE NEW PATHWAYS TO THE PREVIOUSLY INVISIBLE LAYERS OF OUR MATERIAL EXISTENCE.”
But nano-imaging aside, all five works—both new and remounted art-science collaborations from Australia, the UK and Austria featuring in Art in the Age of Nanotechnology—display an engagement with ideas above and beyond the technology, with the possible exception of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s work, Nano-Scape (2002).
Nano-Scape was developed for the exhibition Science+Fiction at Hannover’s Sprengelmuseum, and consists of a glowing blue table beneath which an array of electromagnets creates constantly shifting forces, stimulated by the movement of the user’s hand—wearing a kind of ‘ring’—over the surface. The camera-tracked movements of the ring are fed to an atomic-force simulator which ‘imagines’ the ring movements as those of one relatively stable atom among a hundred or so others. The user feels the resulting forces, simulated by the electromagnets.
In ‘real life’, such movement would cause all the atoms in the array to interact in a constant readjustment of their proximity to one another. This is the force that Sommerer and Mignonneau aim to demonstrate. In its initial form a screen out of view of the participants showed atomic patterns formed by the simulation. The screen has been removed in this remount, however, to strengthen the purely haptic experience of the impossible-to-equalise system; but without either a detailed explanation of what is simulated or the visible pattern of moving atoms, the work seems to lack artistic purpose, feeling more like a science display.
Both Paul Thomas and Kevin Raxworthy’s elegant Nano_essence (2009) and Mike Phillips’ shimmering A Mote it is…(2009) abound with references to philosophy and metaphysics, at the same time remaining firmly embedded in nanotech exploration. For Nano_essence, a single, cloned (hence potentially ‘eternal’) skin cell was analysed, to compare life and death at the nano level. In a cavernous, darkened space, the viewer breathes onto a plinth-mounted, perspex re-creation of the dying skin cell. In response, on a large wall-mounted screen, a multilayered representation of the cell begins to move in 3-D animation.
We fly beneath and through the layers of the cell, which appear like angular, transparent mountainscapes or a softly haunting 3D game as the square base of the ‘cell’ tilts and turns. Amid low rumblings and tappings, mysterious figures appear, or are they twists of DNA? It’s hard to determine, but the life-giving breath seems to people the subtle, layered landscape with something animate and self-determined. They move in their own shifting geometrical plane and disappear seemingly at will, extinguished somewhere between white ‘sky’ and soft, grey oblivion.
Mike Phillips’ A Mote it is… also employs the raw data of nano-imaging to produce a lush visual metaphor, here abstracted into swirling patterns referencing the elusive nature of both the nano-world and the everyday ‘mote’—that floating speck of dust on the surface of the eye that is impossible to actually see, but that nevertheless persists in peripheral vision. After scanning a mote of dust from his own eye, Phillips devised a constantly moving whirlpool of data-generated ‘particles’ mediated by face-recognition software. When viewed front-on, the swirl is entrancing; a sunburst-coloured play of light accompanied by an electronic soundscape. When the head is turned to one side, something seems to go against the tide—impossibly ephemeral particles appear and disappear, resonating with the ‘creatures’ of Nano_essence, perhaps, but in this case as barely perceptible as the mote itself.
Boo Chapple, Transjuicer, 2009, detail, John Curtin Gallery, 2010
image courtesy of the artist
Boo Chapple, Transjuicer, 2009, detail, John Curtin Gallery, 2010
A series of transformations is at the heart of Boo Chapple’s multifaceted and playful Transjuicer (2010). After becoming aware of the piezoelectric qualities of bone—when subjected to any mechanical stress it generates an electrical charge at the nano scale—the artist set about creating bone audio speakers, using the femurs of cows. Initially fascinated by this constant response of living bone to its environment and its potential as a metaphor for the complex interactions of life and world, Chapple found that the difficult process of trying to make the audio speakers pointed to other complexities, not least of which are the ‘transducings’, or conversions, that come into play between micro technological interventions and the macro social context, between living and dead matter, and between science lab and gallery.
Boo Chapple, Transjuicer, 2009, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, 2010
image courtesy of the artist
Boo Chapple, Transjuicer, 2009, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, 2010
Transjuicer consists of three screens atop rack mounts that house bales of straw, a tank of rotting cow bones, shelves of lab reference books and three audio players with headphones. On the top of each tower sits a highly polished cow femur wired to the small sections of bone that constitute the ‘speakers.’ Tinkling through the headphones, Chapple’s three successful recordings are distant, distorted renditions of “Dry Bones”, “Old MacDonald” and “Good Vibrations”—recordings made, after many unsuccessful attempts, by a laser interferometer. The video screens play loops of cows at the milking shed. Chapple describes Transjuicer wryly as “milking it.” The work’s playfulness trots lightly over the process, but Transjuicer succeeds in illuminating some awkward, absurd and inescapable liaisons between art-making, primary production, the mastery of materials and messing around with living matter.
Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski’s Nanomandala (2003), reviewed separately in this issue, is, put simply, an extended zoom from macro to nano scale and back out again, its focus the Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala of Chakrasamvara, created for the first time in the USA by monks from the Gaden Lhopa Khangtsen monastery. More subtly interactive than some of the other works here, Nanomandala, projected onto a two-metre disk of sand, has meditative qualities; the saturated colours of the mandala inviting immersion in a slowly changing, seamless progression to the limits of imaging. A spiritually focused artwork, Nanomandala also has an illustrative simplicity, displaying the conundrum that grounds all the works in Art in the Age of Nanotechnology: the ability to ‘see’ what is in a literal sense unseeable—particles of matter that are smaller than wavelengths of light.
Art in the Age of Nanotechnology, curator Chris Malcolm, artists Paul Thomas and Kevin Raxworthy (Australia), Mike Phillips (UK), Victoria Vesna (USA) and James Gimzewski (Scotland), Christa Sommerer (Austria) and Laurent Mignonneau (France), Boo Chapple (Aus); John Curtin Gallery in association with Curtin University Centre for Research into Art, Science and Humanity; Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Feb 5-April 30.
You Were In My Dream (2010), Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine
image courtesy the artists
You Were In My Dream (2010), Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine
FOR ITS FOURTH INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL OF MEDIA ART, EXPERIMENTA WAS FRAMED BY THE LURES AND ELUSIVENESS OF INHABITING ‘UTOPIA.’ AMASSING MORE THAN 35 INTERACTIVE AND SCREEN-BASED WORKS FROM AUSTRALIA AS WELL AS INDIA, CANADA, FRANCE, SOUTH AFRICA AND THE UK, THE BIENNIAL CHARTED MYRIAD WAYS MEDIA ARTISTS TODAY ENVISION THE LONGSTANDING DESIRE FOR A BETTER WORLD. WHILE THE TITLE OF THE EXHIBITION, UTOPIA NOW, LEADS ONE TO EXPECT AN IMPLICITLY HOPEFUL ENCOUNTER WITH NEW MEDIA ART, THE SELECTED WORKS RANGED FROM JOYOUS AND HUMOROUS TO DESOLATE AND UNNERVING.
Prompting us to consider a series of possible futures, the theme of the exhibition parallels the concerns of the sci-fi genre where projections of the future function as anxious meditations upon or inspirational extensions of the present day. For myself, it seemed fitting, then, that entry into the Blackbox space resounded with allusions to science-fiction. After passing through a large inflated white façade—itself reminiscent of the gleaming white cities of hope that once appeared in the design of 19th century world expositions and the futuristic city designs of films such as Things to Come (1936)—we are greeted by a suspended garden, Akousmaflore by the French duo known as Scenocosme (Grégory Lasserre & Anaïs met den Ancxt, 2008). Invited to touch the draping tendrils and leaves of the overhanging plants, we discover that this garden can emit sounds and acoustic vibrations.
Akousmaflore, Scenocosme
courtesy Experimenta and the artists
Akousmaflore, Scenocosme
Akousmaflore brings together the human, the natural and the technological to imply harmonious fusion. The work itself is founded upon proximity and recognition: as flesh and flora connect, the tiny concealed sensors that are lodged within the greenery become ‘aware’ of our presence and trigger varying sonic effects. One wonders, however, whether or not this leafy chorus harbours darker undertones. In the greenhouses of the future, will the hybridisation of nature and technology lead us towards social betterment or destruction? Such questions became all the more pressing when an occasional scream issued from the garden. At that point, the captivating ‘song’ of the plants ceded to the potential for a botanical uprising—perhaps along the lines of John Wyndam’s novel, The Day of the Triffids (1951)—and I chose to move on.
I Feel Cold Today (2007), Patrick Bernatchez
image courtesy the artist
I Feel Cold Today (2007), Patrick Bernatchez
One of the most compelling features of the biennial was its notion of a future still to be decided, through a rhythmic alternation between ominous and optimistic scenarios across the assembled works. Thanks to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, the idea is commonly understood as the dream of an ideal society or a perfect world. If utopia is an age-old ideal that speaks to our sun-dappled dreams, then Experimenta rightly chose to pay heed to the aesthetic complexity of its curatorial premise by showcasing the prospect of utopias lost as well as found. Alongside the more humorous artworks of the exhibition—for instance, were video shorts that elicited our laughter through the dissonant and the absurd, such as The Hunt (Christian Jankowski, 1992/1997) in which a man, armed with a toy bow-and-arrow, enters a supermarket and deftly spears supplies (bread, milk, a frozen chicken) with child-like abandon, before proceeding to the checkout—are works charged with nightmarish visions of dystopian chaos. To that end, the elegiac I Feel Cold Today (Patrick Bernatchez, 2007) presents us with the darkened flip side of utopian rationality and order. At once beautiful and imbued with a palpable sense of mourning, the work journeys through floor after floor of an abandoned office building, gradually filling with snow. Instead of people, its scenes are filled with office chairs and windswept paperwork. All that is left of capitalism and economic industry are its vestigial remnants, soon to be covered over by a blanket of post-apocalyptic snow.
Shadow 3 (2007), Shilpa Gupta
courtesy Experimenta and the artists
Shadow 3 (2007), Shilpa Gupta
Often, it is difficult to separate out the ludic appeals of the works on display from their darker portents as both utopic and dystopic possibilities reside within the same piece. Consider the affective implications of the Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s large-scale interactive installation, Shadow 3 (2007). What begins as a playful scenario in which the visitor’s shadow is projected life-sized before them gives way to an unnerving ‘string’ that steadfastly attaches itself to our silhouette. Whereas beforehand we had controlled the actions of our shadowed selves, now detritus begins to slide down the string and affix itself to our shadow. Shadowplay animation leads to our own uncanny automation for we cannot halt the accumulating pile of debris. Eventually, our shadows are overcome by a tidal wave of junk, drowned by the rubbish.
Utopia (2006), Cao Fei
image courtesy the artists
Utopia (2006), Cao Fei
Alternately, Cao Fei’s mesmerising film, Whose Utopia (2006), posits that utopia is where you make it. Set within a light bulb factory in Guangdong, China, Fei’s film entwines scenes of factory workers engaged in mundane and repetitive tasks and the escapist fantasies of four workers. Shots of a ballerina’s poised gestures alternate with images of a man break dancing in the aisles or another man absorbed in strumming an electric guitar, while the drum of industrial machinery, the regimentation of work and the stark lighting of the factory floor persist throughout. Sometimes, utopia is found in the most unlikely or gloomy of places because this is a concept that is tethered to individual hopes and dreams.
Without question, the stand out work of Utopia Now (and a definite crowd favourite) was the Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine commission, You Were In My Dream (2010). As the artists so adeptly prove, even the utopias belonging to long since past traditions of art and entertainment can be discovered again and revitalized anew, within the ‘new media’ sphere of technologically augmented art. You Were In My Dream is a glorious stop-motion animation that recalls media art history from the vantage point of the present. Functioning as equal parts perspective box, reflective display and interactive installation, the visitor is seated at a booth and provides the stand-in face for a child protagonist (fed live into the animation). Equipped with a mouse, we are prompted by the appearance of sparkles on-screen to select our chosen path/storyline within an enchanted forest. The densely textured world of You Were In My Dream consists of hand-cut paper human and animal characters, delicate feathers and fronds–demonstrating how such material still persists within the age of the digital. Unlike the traditional perspective boxes of earlier periods of history, however, this work is not confined to a single-user experience. Indeed, the crowds who gathered around the piece seemed just as transfixed by the exterior projection on the side of the wooden box as I was by the world unraveling within it.
Similarly, William Kentridge’s What Will Come (2007) opts to retell the historic atrocities of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) through the forgotten media art of the anamorphosis, projecting the ‘real’ story of these events upon a cylindrical surface that dates back to the seventeenth-century. Life Writer (Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer) also merges the analogue and the digital: you sit at a typewriter, press the keys and the letters generate different codes that result in insect-like creatures swarming across the projected page. The combination of code and artificially-generated creatures from an older mode of writing seem entirely apposite—it is well known that cyberpunk author William Gibson first conceived of the birth of cyberspace from the purview of his own typewriter.
While many of the works contained in Utopia Now do function as somewhat like one-trick ponies—have your digital portrait taken and watch yourself aged via face-reading and morphing software; press a button, hold yourself against a glass panel and see yourself transformed into a suspended, full-body scan—this should not be taken as criticism. Arguably, much of the strength of Experimenta’s Biennial stems from its negotiation of old and new technologies. To that end, I am reminded of what the early film historian Tom Gunning refers to as the pre-1910 “cinema of attractions” as it invoked a presentational rather than representational experience of film and one that directly addressed the spectator. Towards the conclusion of the short digital animation, Please Say Something (David OReilly, 2009), another favourite of mine, a complicated cat and mouse pair steps forward to take a bow and allude to our own appreciation of the display. This is the great strength of the Experimenta Biennial—its deliberate inclusion of the visitors themselves as embodied and vital participants within the artworks.
Decades on from the techno-utopianism that accompanied the beginnings of digital culture and new media art (what the cultural critic Scott Bukatman aptly terms “cyberdrool”), Experimenta continues to bring together old and new technologies, to suggest that no medium ever completely disappears, and invites us to have fun along the way. This biennial might not have been utopia attained but, at times, it did function as an enthralling place to visit.
Experimenta, Utopia Now: International Biennial of Media Art, Blackbox, The Arts Centre, Melbourne, feb 12-March 14
2010 MARKS TEN YEARS SINCE THE FIRST REELDANCE INTERNATIONAL DANCE ON SCREEN FESTIVAL. THE EVENT HAS GROWN ENORMOUSLY IN SCOPE SINCE THEN, BECOMING AN INDEPENDENT ENTITY, OUT FROM THE UMBRELLA OF ONE EXTRA DANCE CO AND PERFORMANCE SPACE IN 2008, AND AN EMERGING KEY ORGANISATION THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL IN 2009.
In May, Reeldance will launch its sixth International Dance on Screen festival and tour under the banner “A Collision of Art, Dance and Film”, the first to be curated by new artistic director, Tracie Mitchell who replaced founding director Erin Brannigan in February last year.
Mitchell’s background is primarily as a dance filmmaker. Her career spans over 20 years and her films are in the collections of the Tanz Museum, Cologne, La Cinematheque de la Danse, Paris, and at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. She is currently completing a practice based PhD at Victoria University, researching new critical frameworks to describe dance for camera. The basis of her work as a dance filmmaker, researcher, mentor and curator is the broad question “What is dance for screen?” and it is this provocation, as well as her interest in process, experimentation, play and deep passion for the form, that she brings to her role as director for this year’s festival.
Mitchell’s program is diverse. Many of the strands that Reeldance has traditionally offered, like the documentary session (this year Paris is Burning and In Bed with Madonna), international shorts sessions and Reeldance International Dance on Screen Awards, are still in place, but there seems a broader sweep of both high end and low budget films, as well as films made specifically by choreographers and more general art films with an interest in the body and movement. Aptly, the theme for the festival is space—physical, emotional, imaginative space and tensions held in space.
The opening night of the festival represents the high end with the films We have decided not to die by Daniel Askill and The Rape of the Sabine Women by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation (which premiered in Australia at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2008; RT87). Both have enjoyed wide audiences internationally outside of the dance on screen genre, but Mitchell enthuses about seeing them within the context of the Reeldance festival. Askill is a filmmaker with a strong interest in fashion, and therefore Mitchell notes an interest in the body, movement and composition. “I think what’s so interesting about the film is the subtleties of movement and the intimacy of the camera to be able to express the coming together of those forms, to actually express something with meaning, rather than an audience looking at something going ‘oh, isn’t that beautiful’.”
Mitchell first saw Sussman’s film as an installation in North Carolina and then again in feature film format at the Melbourne Festival, and was excited about how it addresses elements of dance for the screen. She is interested in the ways Sussman holds the tension between people and space, people to people, and to the camera.
The Forgotten Circus
There will be a retrospective of films by UK artist, Shelly Love, who will be attending the festival as an international guest and hosting labs in Sydney and Melbourne. These will focus on the festival theme of space and will create an environment for testing ideas, embracing spontaneity and play without the pressure of an outcome. Love trained at the Laban Centre in London and is among what Mitchell calls the first generation of choreographers to come out of training into the strong dance screen culture in the UK in the 90s (such as the BBC’s Dance for Camera series, South East Dance, Dance Video at The Place) and to utilise such opportunities. Love received the first dance screen residency at The Place and has ‘crossed over’ into making video clips for bands. Mitchell hesitates to use the word whimsy in relation to Love’s films, but describes watching her work as similar to dropping into Love’s imagination. Mitchell is also interested in Love as an artist whose first language is dance, and whose filmic choices are made through this dancerly perception.
Send The Cameras Out will launch the second stage of Reeldance’s Indigenous Initiative, taking place over a three-year period and providing opportunities for Indigenous dancemakers, editors and composers to engage with making dance for screen works. The session will screen six new dance works made over the last year as part of an intriguing experimental process. Each of the six choreographers was given a camera and one month to respond to the questions “What is dance for camera?” and “What is space?” The raw footage was handed to six editors who created a six-minute edit over a month, and then in turn handed the films to six composers who created a score. The screening will be the first time the 18 artists will see the finished works, and there will be a forum for the artists to respond to the project. Mitchell sees this as an initial experiment to begin to build infrastructure for the ongoing program, and there will be much consultation with the artists on where to go from here.
Out of The Hat is another session with emphasis on experimentation and chance, and comes out of Mitchell’s recognition that there is little opportunity for Australian dance filmmakers to have public screenings of their work. Based loosely on the chance procedures of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, artists are able to register their works and at the beginning of the session an hour’s worth of films will literally be pulled out of the hat for public screening. Each artist whose work is shown will be afforded time for public response to their work.
From the Archives will launch the opening of the Moving Image Collection (MIC), Reeldance’s database project initiated by former director Erin Brannigan, archiving the accumulation of work in the organisation’s history over the past decade for public access and screening works drawn from the collection. In conjunction, there is currently a window installation at the Australia Council building in Sydney with 10 screens showcasing works from the archives. This installation will tour to Chunky Move in Melbourne and the Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane as the festival travels from state to state.
Beyond the individual sessions, Mitchell is interested in the overarching concept of a festival. She reminisces about days spent at the Valhalla Cinema in Melbourne in the 70s with a thermos of tea and packet of shortbread biscuits, watching films from morning to night, submerging herself in the filmic world. She speaks of the importance for her as an artist early in her career of attending festivals overseas to “meet, be inspired, critically respond, investigate, network and be fed” and to create the connections she felt difficult to maintain in Australia at that time. Mitchell’s vision for the Reeldance Festival is to provide a platform where artists and audiences alike can immerse themselves in the world of dance on screen.
To increase the sense of national convergence and conversation, Mitchell has created Artbus, two buses travelling overnight from Melbourne and Brisbane respectively with dance film screenings every hour and places for 48 people on each, who will be guests of the festival in Sydney with access to all screenings, forums and talks. Mitchell wants the festival to be not only about screening dance film, but about process and community too. She likens the process of her curation to creating a fabulous dinner party: you meet great people who give you stories; the surroundings are divine; the lighting’s perfect; you are served a degustation menu, with each taste like an amazing adventure; and you leave exhausted with all your senses satisfied.
Reeldance International Dance on Screen Festival; Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, May 13-16. See www.reeldance.org.au for national tour dates: Perth, Adelaide, Alice Springs, Darwin, Cairns, Brisbane.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT RIO DE JANEIRO THAT MAKES EVERYBODY GO WEAK IN THE KNEES AT THE MERE MENTION OF ITS NAME? IT FEATURES IN THE TOP 10 MOST DANGEROUS CITIES IN THE WORLD ALMOST AS OFTEN AS IN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL. THIS HAS NOT DIMINISHED ITS ALLURE. SO WHAT DOES AN ANNUAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THIS MOST GLORIFIED OF CITIES LOOK LIKE?
Founded in 1993 by choreographer Lia Rodrigues, Panorama Dance Festival is currently headed by artistic directors Eduardo Bonito and Nayse Lopez. Now in its 18th year, Panorama has developed into one of the most important platforms for contemporary dance in Brazil, if not in all of South America.
(not) a love song
One of the declared aims of the festival is to present international works to local audiences at affordable prices. On offer this year were works by artists from France, Switzerland, Portugal, Uruguay, Japan, French Guiana and South Africa. Among those, (Not) a Love Song by French choreographer Alain Buffard was an undisputed crowd pleaser and it was easy to see why. Billed as a “tragic musical,” it features an eclectic mix of all-time favourites including Kurt Weill’s “Ballad of Sexual Obsession,” James Brown’s “This is a Man’s World” and Public Image Limited’s “This is not a Love Song,” referenced in the piece’s title. The songs are rendered with idiosyncratic verve by the standout cast—Miguel Gutierrez, Vera Montero and Claudia Triozzi—all renowned performance makers who inimitably people the stylish black-and-white stage with all kinds of quirky characters such as ultra glamorous femmes fatales playing air guitar and a movie director whose only direction to his female stars is “hmmm.” There are also ageing divas and a camp personal trainer who speaks at break-neck speed, gradually transforming into a drill sergeant gone mad. The piece’s movement material is inspired by Broadway razzle dazzle routines and cat walk strutting, the self-obsessed posing of the performers becoming increasingly grotesque. They stagger across the stage, losing control, towards the end turning into dog-like creatures. (Not) a Love Song playfully exposes a world enamoured with itself, obsessed with celebrity and self-display.
Influx Controls, Boyzie Cekwana
photo Valério Araújo
Influx Controls, Boyzie Cekwana
influx controls: i wanna be wanna be
Strong partnerships with numerous important arts organizations in Europe, such as Arts Admin in London, the Goethe Institut, Alliance Francaise etc, have enabled Panorama to regularly present works by European artists and companies including innovators like Jerome Bel, La Ribot and Jonathan Burrows. Under the artistic directorship of Bonito and Lopez, there has been a push to present more works from Southern Hemisphere countries, especially South America and Africa south of the Equator. It was no surprise then that the involvement of South African choreographer and dancer Boyzie Cekwana in Panorama 2009 was two-fold. He not only mentored young dancers as part of the festival’s residency program, coLABoratorio, but also presented a work, Influx Controls: I Wanna Be Wanna Be. It’s a powerful evocation of the artist’s struggle to negotiate his identity, both cultural and sexual, in South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. At the beginning of the piece, we see Soweto-born Cekwana clad in black pants and a white corset with what looks like a belt of explosives strapped to his chest. His face is painted black and his lips are bright red. He runs on the spot, his arms executing powerful jabs. It looks as if he is fighting. But who is the enemy? The past? Others’ perception of him? History itself? By the end of the work, Cekwana has undergone a striking transformation. He is now wearing a metal crown of thorns and a tutu with strips of papers attached, like price tags. He suggestively crawls across the audience, occasionally stopping for a brief lap dance. Is this the celebration of a new-found identity, proudly embraced, in full awareness of its flaws…? .
brazilian works
Besides presenting new international productions, Panorama also aims to showcase and promote Brazilian work with a focus on artists and companies outside of Rio. As the fifth largest country in the world, Brazil’s geographic dimensions pose similar difficulties for artists to tour their work nationally as those with which Australian artists are familiar. The scope of the Brazilian work presented at the 2009 Panorama Festival is impressive, to say the least. It ranges from Company Quasar’s electrifying athleticism and extraordinary physical comedy skills to Roberto Ramos’ concept-driven movement research, utterly mesmerizing due to the performers’ physical precision and commitment to process.
One of the most intriguing contributions comes from Company Cena 11. In their Embodied Voodoo Game, the concept of the voodoo doll is explored as a potent metaphor for the correlation between dance and video games, the body and new technologies. The roles of manipulator, medium and the manipulated constantly change throughout the piece. Sometimes it’s audience members who manipulate the on-stage action by giving instructions to the performers. At other times it’s the performers who are in control. Using gaming devices such as joysticks and acceleration and motion sensors, they manipulate sound and image projections. Gradually, a sense of danger and violence creeps in, as in the advanced stages of a computer game. Bodies leap through the air and crash to the ground. A female dancer is suspended by her hair extensions. Heavy rocks are balanced on body parts. In the end, the stage is covered with white feathers, electrical fans swirling them up into the air as the performers spin on the spot. It’s an image of arresting beauty that is simultaneously disconcerting. Aestheticized disarray. Game over.
artistic & audience development
Apart from presenting work, Panorama’s major aim is to create opportunities for dance and performance research as well as to raise the profile of contemporary dance in Rio. Throughout the year, audience development initiatives and activities are conducted in order to heighten the awareness for dance. They include free shows for residents of the favelas in the outskirts of Rio and the handing out of booklets in schools. In terms of artistic development, Panorama offers its residency program coLABoratorio.
For a period of several months prior to the festival, emerging artists from Rio and Teresina engage in artistic exchange, mentored by more established artists, both national and international.
Panorama is a massive undertaking made possible through a large number of income sources, predominantly government funding and corporate sponsorship. The festival is also strongly supported by international presenting partners and arts organisations in Rio including the presenting venues and the city’s Choreographic Centre. It’s partly because of these strong partnerships that Panorama’s success has steadily increased over the years. According to artistic director Bonito, the 2009 edition of the festival was the best attended yet.
And from an Australian perspective? Only one Australian company has presented work at Panorama to date, Branch Nebula in 2007. There is hope this might change. Panorama recently added Dancehouse Melbourne to their long list of exchange partners and Bonito and Lopez have become regulars at the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM) held biennially in Adelaide. It would enrich Australian artists to be able to present work regularly at this diverse and stimulating dance festival.
Alain Buffard, (Not) a Love Song, concept Alain Buffard, cast Miguel Gutierrez, Vera Mantero, Claudia Triozzi, Seb Martel, musical adaptation Vincent Ségal; Boyzie Cekwana, Influx Controls: I Wanna Be Wanna Be, concept and performance Boyzie Cekwana; Quasar, Céu na Boca, choreography Henrique Rodovalho; Roberto Ramos/D.A.M., Continuum, direction and conception Roberto Ramos, performance Catalina Cappeletti, Gustavo Ramos, Roberto Ramos; Cena 11, Embodied Voodoo Game, choreography Alejandro Ahmed and cast, soundtrack and montage coordination Hedra Rockenbach; Panorama Dance Festival 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Nov 5-15, 2009
IN JANUARY, NEW YORK’S COLDEST MONTH, OVER 2,000 DELEGATES FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF PERFORMING ARTS PRESENTERS (APAP) DESCENDED ON THE CITY FOR THEIR ANNUAL CONFERENCE. APAP IS THE EQUIVALENT OF THE AUSTRALIAN PERFORMING ARTS MARKET (APAM) ONLY, LIKE ALL THINGS AMERICAN, BIGGER. IN AN EFFORT TO EXCITE ARTS PRESENTERS FROM ACROSS THE COUNTRY, PS122, THE PUBLIC THEATRE AND ASSOCIATED ARTS CENTRES TROTTED OUT THEIR BEST AND BRIGHTEST.
For the past five years, Performance Space 122 (PS122) has presented COIL during APAP, an annual winter festival of contemporary performance. It’s an alternative to the compromised format of showcases and, in 2010, COIL was pitched as “14 companies in 12 days.” The works were full-length and open to New York’s holiday-fatigued public to enjoy treats of a different kind. Following PS122’s lead, the Public Theatre presented its sixth annual Under the Radar festival, also during APAP, equally ambitious but with stronger emphasis on theatre and international artists. Despite the sub-zero temperatures, audiences brave the cold and this previous dead period for the performing arts in New York now buzzes.
“Audiences and artists alike have a constant thirst for new stuff,” explained PS122’s Artistic Director Vallejo Gantner. “It’s typical of New Yorkers’ addiction to be the one to ‘discover’ someone or something.” I had coffee with Gantner at his local café where he talked about COIL and more broadly the contemporary performance scene in New York. “In terms of hybrid work, [local artists] have moved through the period of collaborations—the investigative styles of Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group. It seems there’s a renewed interest in ‘screwing around’.” The aesthetic is messy, and Gantner explained that current work directly engages with everyday experience—not dissimilar to work in Australia. “We live a hybrid existence. If anything, audiences have outpaced the work being made.” Gantner cited companies such as Radiohole, Temporary Distortion (who presented Americana Kamikaze at COIL; see RT95) and artist Reid Farrington. “These artists delve into the experiential consequence of technology, demonstrating how we deal with information and data.”
richard maxwell, ads
A good example is Ads, a co-presentation between New York City Players, PS122 and the Public Theatre. Conceived and directed by Richard Maxwell, hyper-real, life-size images of ‘everyday people’ are projected onto an otherwise empty stage. One-by-one, they ‘step’ onto a small, raised platform and orate their beliefs. The high-definition projection, supported by sound that captures the shuffle of footsteps and rustle of clothing as speakers step onto their ‘soapbox’, is so convincing that days later, my friend who saw the show exclaimed over coffee, “They really weren’t there?”
The work began with a woman in her 60s, commenting that adults use Blackberrys like pacifiers. Teenagers have heads bowed, not in prayer, but texting in monosyllables. We’re desperate to stay connected via social networking tools such as Facebook, she lamented, but nothing beats the connection between family and friends over Sunday lunch. “The human connection is missing,” said the projected woman. Subsequent manifestos didn’t resonate with quite the same irony, but did provide an astonishing survey of people and their lives, from musicians to real estate agents, parenting at 50 to existential nihilism. “I believe this world has already ended,” says a man in his early 20s with a t-shirt that reads, “Brooklyn Go Hard”.
Jonathan Capdevielle, Jerk
photo Alain Monot
Jonathan Capdevielle, Jerk
jerk
At the other end of the spectrum is Jerk, from France, directed by Gisele Vienne, text by Dennis Cooper and performed by Jonathan Capdevielle. Here the only technology used is a boom box. The work relies on puppets to reveal a disturbing story based on serial killer Dean Corll’s murders of 20 teenage boys in the 1970s. Capdevielle portrays David Brooks, one of two teenage boys who assisted Corll in brutally sodomising his victims. Brooks, in prison serving a life sentence, addresses the audience as if to a group of psychology students at a local university, explaining he will use puppets to reconstruct the murders, and suggesting this may help him take responsibility for his actions.
At first, the puppets appear with masks: Corll in a panda mask and Wayne Henley, Brooks’s teenage accomplice, in a white, fluffy dog-like mask. Given comic voices—one very high, one very low—the hand puppets perform like Punch and Judy, except with knives, creating for the audience a separation from the brutality of the actions, perhaps similar to the disconnection from reality experienced by the murderers. When the masks come off, the puppets are unsettlingly more human. Visceral and base, Capdevielle, at times dribbling, delivers an extraordinary performance that makes such sickness plausible, exploring the dark edge of sex and death. David Brooks’ text, which we are directed to read at certain points from a small booklet accompanied by photos and illustrations of the puppets and possibly the victims, adds another level of detail and depravity. The work was slammed by The New York Times, but it stayed with me like a sick and worrying dream [see also PuSh review of Jerk].
east 10th street
With all the boundary-pushing work on show, it was strangely comforting to see East 10th Street by Edgar Oliver. On a sparse stage with only one light, this seasoned performer took us back to the bohemian days of the East Village. Living as a young artist in a boarding house on East 10th Street with his sister, Oliver described in a slightly camp, Vincent Price-type voice, a bizarre collection of characters and events which seemed to emerge from the shadows around him: Donald Milburn who drank vodka with milk; Frances, the “Lady Macbeth of Rags” who spent more time in the share bathroom than in her room; Edwin Linder, with eight padlocks on his door; and Freddie the midget, who never left or entered the house through the front door, but instead used the old coal shute. Oliver weaves in a love affair with the “brilliant and wildly charismatic” Jason Boner that is never consummated, leaving me with an equal sense of longing. By the end I was nostalgic not just for this ghostly and colourful history of the East Village, but for simple, polished and crafted work delivered by a pro.
l’effet de serge
L’Effet de Serge, presented at 3LD Art and Technology Centre in New York’s financial district was not local fare, being an import from Paris-based Vivarium Studio. But it was a festival favourite of mine, and equally charmed New York audiences with its quirky, low-tech premise and staging. Underplayed to great humorous effect by company founder Philippe Quesne, it began with a spaceman in an oversized helmet, lit from within. He explained that this was a show about Serge, and this was Serge’s apartment, but that each show begins with the end of the last show, which had a spaceman in it, hence the outfit. Serge likes to make things, and does small performances for audiences of one or two.
Quesne’s long and languid body heightened each action, whether unpacking groceries, ordering pizza, testing a new novelty toy or awkwardly taking guests’ coats and offering them wine. Delivered with care and attention, the actions were beyond pedestrian, delightfully deadpan yet seductive in making us invest as much in Serge’s mini performances of light and sound as he did.
Despite the Global Financial Crisis, which is far more palpable in the USA than in Australia, audience numbers seem unaffected, and for PS122, Gantner confirmed that box office has never been better. “The majority of New Yorkers live in 400 square metre apartments so they have to get out. It’s not a case of, ‘Do I have the disposable income or not?’ It’s why you’re here.”
Jason Maling, Triangulation, Second last audit session, In-Habit
photo Tara Gilbee
Jason Maling, Triangulation, Second last audit session, In-Habit
IN-HABIT WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL, INVENTIVELY CURATED MONTH-LONG SERIES OF 11 PERFORMANCE, LIVE ART AND INSTALLATION WORKS SITUATED IN AND AROUND THE ABBOTSFORD CONVENT. INVOLVING NINE KEY ARTISTS, MORE THAN A DOZEN ASSOCIATE ARTISTS AND NUMEROUS PARTICIPANTS, THESE ARTWORKS EMERGED OUT OF A COLLECTIVE RESIDENCY AT THE CONVENT ESTABLISHED BY ARTISTIC DIRECTOR JUDE ANDERSON EXPLORING SITE/PLACE/SPACE AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE.
In One Square Metre the Atherton Community Gardens in Fitzroy are opened to the public for a ‘tour.’ We are greeted in the heat and vibrancy of colour and scent amidst 60 garden beds by Zeynep, a Turkish Australian resident of nearby high rise flats and gardener here since 1969. Zeynep offers everyone dolmades, produce from her garden and the recipe! Jude Anderson serves water and introduces the project and tour. Over 12 months she has cultivated one square metre of garden according to some of the principles of French landscape architect Gilles Clément’s notion of the Planetary Garde: use only seeds offered or found, and no planting—sow as the wind would sow. While also adopting existing rules and practices from the gardeners at Atherton, Anderson’s alternative aesthetic, ethical and ecological practice brought her into immediate, humorous, productive ‘conflict’ and exchange with Zeynep and other Atherton gardeners: bed-ends framing their gardens, a living lattice of wild willow framing hers; theirs organised on pragmatic principles, hers a micro-cosmos of chaos. Anderson, the ‘hopeless gardener’!
It is the fruits of these meetings with community members and the growth of their interactions over time that are made available to us on the tour. Zeynep leads as Anderson and others draw her into conversation. We are introduced to vagabond plants, ‘weeds’, not normally cultivated. Dandelion, for a peppery salad. An Italian woman attending the tour confides, “We survived the Second World War on it. Really, a whole population.” Purslane, common in cracks in the pavement, we learn, is good for constipation. Something of a delicacy in Turkey, the Italians use it in a chicken breast salad. Another tour member tells us it is also being trialled in cardiovascular research. Ah, my vagabond heart! In a kind of culinary ecstasy, we taste, inquire after, debate and receive recipes for Black Sea Cabbage, Sawtooth Coriander, French Sorrel, Stinging Nettle and more.
The work of One Square Metre literally overflows its frame. It is a living artwork and residency in which Anderson creates the conditions for new encounters, competing knowledges, curiosity and exchange. The ‘art’ of the event surpasses her tiny plot of unruly garden, arises in layers of complexity and finds form in genuine reciprocity and learning.
In Triangulation, Jason Maling and Torie Nimmervoll are Colour Auditors. For 12 long days they conduct a ‘prismatic audit’ of the vast Abbotsford Convent. ‘Audit kits’ comprising small coloured flags on poles to be stuck outside room doors are distributed to residents at the convent (staff, artists, health practitioners etc). Participants may change the colour of their flags at any time, on any impulse, for any reason. No prescription is given. At regular intervals throughout the day, Maling and Nimmervoll painstakingly collect and collate the ‘data’ (the colour of the flags) for individual rooms, different floors, separate wings and the convent as a whole. They fashion the results—sectioning, cross-referencing, averaging—into cumulative line graphs and pie charts and present their ‘findings’ to the 50 participants and public in twice-daily ‘briefings.’
These wry, deadpan, faux analyses of the changing colours of the community amuse in their ludicrous seriousness. A possible “politics of Orange” in the East Wing countered by, perhaps, a “collaborative gathering of Green” in the West Wing could, potentially, be the sign of a stand-off! The doubtful sighting by Maling of a blue-tongue lizard in the convent grounds on the very day the data for the whole Convent came up Blue—well, “that was definitely a sign”! But there are no causes, only significances. These briefings are not the most significant aspect of the work. The frame slips. As convent participants are drawn into discussion and gregarious interaction with the performers, it becomes clear that these exchanges are made possible by the live, cumulative progress of the work in which the ‘audience’ have been participants and performers—in chance encounters, meetings, discussions, email exchanges and (suspiciously) clandestine activities — for 12 days. Repetitive and ritual structures already dispersed throughout the project coalesce in these briefings as the participants congregate to share in and further create the work; less to watch a performance than to keep the performance, and themselves, in play. The work finds its significance in the ‘community’ that it helps to form.
Once, In-Habit
photo Thomas Kokkinos-Kennedy
Once, In-Habit
Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy’s Once shifts the performative frame still further. It is a live artwork for two people. Participants, strangers to each other, agree to meet in silence for 10 minutes. They are then invited to share their experiences of the encounter in recorded conversations, separately, with two ‘ushers.’
There is a strange, aberrant tension in the convent’s Bishop’s Parlour. The age and restraint of the space and its imagined histories (vows of silence, ‘audiences’ with the Bishop) creep into the experience. I am seated by an usher at a small table with a lamp in the centre of the room. Left alone for a long moment, the tension is interrupted by the entrance of another. A woman sits and establishes direct eye contact. The lamp is flicked on by the usher. The shadows in the room retreat and harden. Silence.
Fast mind. Rapid passage of thoughts and images. Discomfort manifests in smiles and corsetted laughs. We look at each other and away to the edges of the spongy darkness. Our gaze returns to the stranger opposite—often, more often. Time slows. Somehow we begin a conversation in writing. Are we breaking the rules? What is forbidden? What is allowed? We relax into a playful meditation on the nature and quality of silence. An usher enters…the stranger is gone.
Subsequently, sharing experience with the usher is also charged—it too has its intimacies. Like the first stranger, the usher becomes the human face of an unknowable structure that refuses revelation—of intent, meaning and significance. Here, the work of the piece continues and takes the form of a kind of ‘confession’ of experience and of unusually open avowal.
The silence, the site and the two meetings form and frame the ‘work’ of the piece and its artifice, the pretext of its enquiry. Beyond this, the piece works ‘in’ the participants. Each stranger becomes the site at which a kind of alchemical fusion of projection and introspection lifts itself into consciousness. The work functions as a hiatus, a pause by means of which to see and experience another, to feel habitual avoidance, looking and being looked at, to sense movement towards and away from each other and all of the electricity, e-motion, ethics and responsibility of that…just once.
With In-Habit, Jude Anderson, in close collaboration with key artists, achieves an exciting balance between contemporary art, community project and cultural exchange. The project’s success to date is in its ‘smarts’: an articulate, self-questioning agenda which sets up structures with fluid, mutable frames that generate, ‘hold’ and make possible a range of encounters and events with art-making at their heart. The work is engendered and embodied by the network of participants involved—in a particular project, at a specific site, in an existing community, or in those still in formation.
Punctum, In-Habit, artistic director Jude Anderson; Jude Anderson, One Square Metre, associate artists Tara Gilbee, Cedric Peyronnet, Jacques Soddell, Atherton Community Gardens, Feb 11; Jason Maling & Torie Nimmervoll, Triangulation, Landing Lounge West Wing, Feb 15-26, Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy, Once, associate artists Suzanne Kersten, Clair Korobacz, Bishop’s Parlour, Feb. 6-7; Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, Feb 3-28, http://www.punctum.com.au/inhabit.html
IN THE FLOWERING, WRITER-PERFORMER DONNA CAMERON’S DISTURBING CENTRAL MOTIF CONCERNS RAPE. THE ELABORATION OF THIS THEME DRAWS ON THE GREEK MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE PRESENTED IN TERMS OF A MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP SET IN CONTEMPORARY BRISBANE. THE GLUE THAT BINDS THIS DRAMATICALLY UNEVEN BUT OVERALL POWERFUL PIECE IS JULIE SHEPHERD’S STUNNING CERAMIC INSTALLATION WITH ITS CONNOTATIONS OF THE FEMALE PROTAGONIST’S SCATTERED FRAGILITY. THE PIECES ULTIMATELY COME TOGETHER AS A MANDALA REPRESENTING BOTH THE RESTORATION OF HER WOUNDED PSYCHE AND THE FLOWERING OF HER FEMININE POWER.
Eighteen year old Chloe disappears for a year and, seemingly traumatised, on her return refuses to tell her distraught mother what has transpired in the interval. Her mother descends into a morose state, claiming Chloe is no longer her daughter because “the light has gone from her eyes.” A chronic alcoholic, she succumbs to watching classic Hollywood re-runs on television. The daughter, pursuing an artistic career, continues to visit annually to witness the the garden that flourishes under her mother’s egregious green thumb. One year Chloe fails to make an appearance and when she finally returns, the garden is devastated. She holds an exhibition to which she invites her mother who pointedly refuses to attend. Mother ultimately dies of alcoholic poisoning, and her daughter is driven to confront the unexpressed truth about her absence.
Donna Cameron, the hardworking solo performer, energetically and sometimes gleefully embodies the significant characters in Chloe’s tale although the adult Chloe’s inner journey is never adequately explicated. The most successful of these impersonations for me was the mother chewing the cud of her own bitterness, a ravished voluptuary who had played musical chairs with a succession of lovers, now dethroned by the symbolic elevation of her daughter to queen of the underworld. But is this Chloe’s projection, a question that avers to all the characters impinging on the youthful Chloe’s loss of innocence, or rather the ignorance of youth that comes on as innocence?
There is the Dis figure that Chloe meets at a ceramic exhibition and willingly joins on a subterranean journey through a series of tunnels and sewers to finally emerge in a dank squat. But this dark lord of the underworld, apparently so sophisticated, is revealed as a small-time drug dealer in another kind of underworld who is wanted by the police and hails, like his friend Blister, from Beenleigh. His accent and exotic background have been assumed to hide an unconfident stammer and to get girls. Likewise Blister is portrayed with a chronic nervous laugh. Far from ravishers, these two are also innocents abroad, clumsily responding to Chloe’s overdue desire to be initiated into the mysteries of sex and drugs. When their mundane rather than picaresque journey takes them to India, Chloe and Sissy, a class ally of the boys who is depicted as tastelessly wearing a top too small for her unfettered voluptuousness, are set up as drug mules by these two incompetants. Thankfully, the sympathetic Blister provides money for Chloe’s escape route home, fulfilling his function as Hermes, friendliest of gods to men, who escorts Persephone from the underworld.
At this point the hapless bogans fall out of the symbolic order of the play; gone too is the young infatuated Chloe and so is the comedy created at their expense. The source of middle class Chloe’s trauma is revealed elsewhere. The Flowering is dedicated to the circus girls Cameron had seen in India: “torn from your mothers far too young and living in hell.” Representing the understandable feelings of the author, Chloe attempts to rescue a child who has obviously been molested, but fails significantly when she tries to flee with her through another underworld tunnel. The trope is Chloe’s failure to rescue herself from her identifying role with her mother (as Persephone is classically identified with Demeter). Only after her mother’s death is Chloe free to release the repressed memory of her mother taking on the physical abuse intended for her as a child, revealing her love, and enabling Chloe to distinguish between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother so that in the triumphal closing mise-en-scene she can see as well as finally be seen.
The Flowering, writer, performer Donna Cameron, director, dramaturg Sue Rider, ceramic artist Julie Shepherd, lighting designer Geoff Squires; The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, Feb 9-13
SOLO SHOWS BY WILLIAM YANG, ROSIE DENNIS, ALEXANDRA HARRISON AND MARTIN DEL AMO IN PERFORMANCE SPACE’S FIRST 2010 SEASON AND, SOON AFTER JOHN WATERS AND MIAOW MIAOW (SEE RT97) AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE, STIMULATED MY CASUAL THINKING ABOUT PRESENCE AND CHARISMA AND HOW TO DEFINE THE ENDURING APPEAL AND CRAFT OF PARTICULAR PERFORMERS—ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO ARE NOT ACTORS AND WHO ADDRESS US DIRECTLY, APPEARING TO BE PERFORMING THEIR OWN LIVES.
william yang
I’ve been watching William Yang’s performative slide shows since 1987. Now and then, one of them, like his latest, My Generation, leaps out as very special. This is partly because of its epic sweep, from the 70s—when Yang finds a place in the theatre firmament with Rex Cramphorn, Robyn Nevin, Jim Sharman, Kate Fitzpatrick)—through the 80s and 90s extending the photographer’s world to include the visual arts (Brett Whitely, Martin Sharpe), fashion (Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Flamingo Park) and the richly creative gay culture that overlapped and entwined with these through the likes of Peter Tully. And then there’s Patrick White, a daunting presence in My Generation but at his most apparently vulnerable in Yang’s exquisite portraits. And Tiny Tim. Over such a long period we witness artists and friends grow old or die, careers falter and friendships fail. Although Yang’s tone is light and, as ever, slightly detached if measuredly frank, the sense of mortality in tandem with hard-won survival is pervasive.
Yang’s performance persona across two decades has been remarkably stable. His confidence as a performer has certainly grown, but the basic ingredients, a coolish if affable, slow delivery, short carefully constructed sentences and physical fixity before a microphone all persist. The persona suggests someone who is possibly shy and requires a stable performative format—the rhythm of the slides might change but the spoken delivery varies little. Yang mentions in this performance that someone once described his photography as “not quite candid, a little bit formal.” It applies equally to his performance. Yes, the photographic work is candid, lined flesh and sweat are brightly lit everywhere, and there are the occasional surprises (a litter of post-party, naked bodies), but there are limits—Yang tells us about the photographs that got him into trouble (he is no paparazzi, the people he shoots are often his friends and this kind of work can put friendship at risk) if remaining unclear about how often he seeks permission to exhibit his images. His stage performance is likewise candid, but carefully constructed: like a novelist foreshadowing an incident, Yang will show a photograph, mention that he saw something in its subject that concerned him or was predictive, and quickly leave it. It’s a jolt, but inevitably he will come back to that person. Sometimes Yang’s comments seem unfair because you simply do not have enough information from him to understand what happened, and why, to a friend’s child who barely figures in the narrative—the thread in the weave is sometimes too thin. My Generation is also awash with personalities less well known, if at all, to newer generations, but remains valuable history if requiring clarification here and there.
My Generation is culturally rich with a strong sense of not just people but homes and events (for example, he says, when Mardi Gras used to be a cultural festival), meals shared, collaborations, openings and parties. A sense of privilege and furtiveness co-exist in the pleasure felt at seeing inside the homes of Patrick White and Margaret Fink and empathising with those who lose theirs. When Yang finds a home for himself and decides to live alone, he says it’s the closest to freedom he’s come. If candid about himself in previous works, perhaps Yang goes further in My Generation. As he and we watch other people’s children die or mature on the screen, Yang declares, “The pictures are like my children; they will tell my story when I am gone.” The William Yang performance persona hasn’t changed in any essential way over 20 years, but with each work we learn more about the man and his world. It’s rumoured that his body of work is destined for DVD, a welcome documentation of a life-in-progress, its milieu and the cultural life of Sydney, if likely viewed with the unease that perversely makes Yang’s work popular—that play between formal and candid, which one audience member described to me as passive-aggressive. Of course that might fit any number of people who use the camera as a tool for social engagement. [Sandy Edwards’ appreciation of My Generation is well worth reading at www.arthere.com.au/whatson/?p=92. Eds]
Rosie Dennis, DOWNTOWN
photo Heidrun Löhr
Rosie Dennis, DOWNTOWN
rosie dennis
My earliest memory of Rosie Dennis was of a barely audible voice emerging close by from the shadows in the old Performance Space as Eleanor Brickhill danced among us. These oddly complementary performances were, well, strangely primal, hard to nail down, even in those heady days of wilful opacity and theory-driven performance. Dennis’ amplified voice was distinctive—quiet but urgent, interrupted but oddly coherent, the words almost refusing to be given up. This seemed something more than performance poetry. When I later saw Dennis perform on her own, the surprise was even greater: the work was short, intense, un-miked, close-up, almost scary and sometimes funny as words and movement patterns locked into spasmodic loops, as if the performer was trapped in a moment of emotional recall from which there was no escape. The seemingly obsessive-compulsive drive yielded a memorable poetry and rough-hewn dancerliness that evoked a persona struggling to tell us something important if only the words would flow and voice and body come together.
These days, Dennis’ performances are more formal occasions—framed as a lecture or report, deploying props to illustrate the events in her anecdotalising or ideas in her scientific or metaphysical speculations. These loop back wryly into her stories with a Paul Auster-ish sense of the synchronistic interconnectedness of the cosmos. Perhaps she’ll dance, but wordlessly and privately. Perhaps she’ll sing, but with Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Choir at the end of her latest performance, Downtown. The difference between early and current Dennis appears great—once I was alarmed by a ‘condition’ that shook up the notion of art, now I’m charmed by a presence that takes its all too willing audience (there’s a legion of fans) firmly in hand as confidante.
For Downtown, Dennis set herself the task of “walking and talking with strangers [in] inner suburbs of Sydney” and during a week-long residency at Performance Space reported daily on the construction of her performance which was then delivered complete on a Friday evening as “part process/part product.” Although the 44 people she approached (only three rejections) play a curiously small role in the performance, a funny email exchange with Yoko Ono looms large suggesting a personal ‘chemistry’ which is literalised in an onstage chemical experiment demonstrating “what we can do when we work together.” Downtown is a whimsical, even sentimental, work-in-progress from an artist who surprises us nowadays with subtleties and metaphysical turns but still fixes us as one with a searching eye and vocal rhythms that, although now comforting, still incline to the pulse of poetry, especially when Dennis is not striving to be poetic. While some performance personae stay pretty well fixed, others, like Dennis’, fascinatingly mutate and grow older, and stranger, with us.
Alexandra Harrison, Dark, Not Too Dark
photo Heidrun Löhr
Alexandra Harrison, Dark, Not Too Dark
alexandra harrison
In whatever work she appears, dancer and physical theatre performer Alexandra Harrison exudes a powerful presence. Here I’m seeing her for the first time as a solo performer, in a long dance work of her own making, Dark, Not Too Dark. In a RealTime-Performance Space Forum she described the work as “abstract”, the motivation for it explained in part in her program note where she writes, “My great grandfather wrote to Concetta, his Aeolian island bride, asking her to send him a photo. And when she did he took the picture of her by an empty chair…to a photographer and created another image, placing himself in the chair…her hand on his shoulder.” Another note defines remanence as “the residual magnetism left behind when the magnetising body no longer remains.” In Dark, Not Too Dark, Harrison appears to have absorbed the magnetism of her grandmother, resulting in a gothic channelling, unleashing pent-up gestures and dance movements.
As a voiceover intones the word “forever” over a growing hum and percussive glitching in Bob Scott’s musical score, Harrison, close to her audience, holds out her arms, palms down, sustaining the pose at great length until she begins to vibrate, the music deepening. She is entering another state of being. At last she lowers her arms, looks up and, in a series of moves, leans back, places a hand on her brow, and angles her whole body. The shape of it evokes a heroine locked in anguish in a 19th century melodrama or silent movie. The image of this transformation will recur across the work’s duration. In one of its most engaging passages, Harrison approaches an old gramophone horn which emits a strumming to which she responds with a burst of 20s-style dancing, raising her knees high, as if pulled in and out of the music and into the past as it grows louder. At times she looks like a novitiate, at times a mature woman or a creature caught in a tracking follow spot or endangered by a chandelier—she takes it away, smashes it, a new one, or the same one, descends. The word “forever” returns. As does Concetta, appearing eerily on the photographic studio backdrop.
Dark, Not Too Dark largely defies literal interpretation. The low light, repeated movements and strange images induce a kind of gothic delirium—a la Edward Gorey if without the laughs—but Harrison is, as always, fascinating to watch, driven, possessed, as if working through a very private madness, such is the work’s intensity, but to what end? A dark, but not too dark resurrection of the spirit of a forbear, an experiment that is both frightening and liberating? I’d like to experience the work again, a more economical version and with the sound score restrained (it’s emotionally over-inflated despite its many virtues). In Dark, Not Too Dark at its best, Alexandra Harrison envelops us in her vision creating an ambiguous persona, part grandmother, part herself.
My Generation, words, visuals William Yang, musician Daniel Holdworth, producer Performing Lines, Performance Space, Feb 23-March 6; Downtown, writer-performer Rosie Dennis, assistant Jacob Patterson, Sydney Gay & Lesbian Choir, Performance Space, March 5; Dark, Not Too Dark, creator-performer Alexandra Harrison, sound Bob Scott, design consultant Kate Davis, lighting Richard Manner, dramaturg Benedict Anderson; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Feb 17-20
See Keith Gallasch’s critical appreciation of Tom Holloway’s new play Love Me Tender at Belvoir St.
ONE OF THE PHRASES THAT ALL TOO OFTEN OCCASIONS ME TO SLUMP-SHOULDERED DISAPPOINTMENT IS ANYTHING CALLING FOR A “NEED FOR MORE DIALOGUE.” NOT THAT DIALOGUE PER SE IS A BAD THING—I’D BE A PRETTY BLINKERED THEATREGOER IF THAT WAS MY STANCE. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO DISCUSSIONS WITHIN THE ARTS COMMUNITY, THE “NEED FOR MORE DIALOGUE” IS UP THERE WITH THE “NEED FOR MORE EDUCATION” AND “AGREEING TO DISAGREE.” IT’S A STATEMENT THAT, IN APPEARING TO COMMENCE A CONVERSATION, MORE FREQUENTLY ENDS ONE. WE NEED TO TALK MORE; LET’S END OUR TALK AT THAT.
What happens when a work of performance presents its own internal dialogue? Does it end in the same silence, shutting out its audience by subsuming their role as interlocuter into the work itself? A range of recent productions in Melbourne raised this very question, offering scenarios which weren’t simply open to interpretation but invited conflicting, even incommensurable readings.
at the sans hotel
The self-interrogation of Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel began the moment it registered in a potential audience member’s consciousness, though this wasn’t made explicit until the performance itself began. Advance publicity was strewn with enigmatic images of a half-visible Gunn disguised as a noir femme fatale or a monkey bellhop; textual fragments mentioned a woman trapped in a bathtub or lost in a desert.
What we got was something quite other. A woman with a slightly hokey French accent greets her audience and hands out an invisible questionnaire, inviting us to complete a survey on our experience of the (non-)show so far. Okay, we’re playing pretend. Then we’re given real pencils to use in the process. Is this some kind of joke?
The French woman eventually apologises that Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel won’t be on offer tonight. She instead takes us on an hilarious, sometimes desperate series of digressions in which she discusses the show that should have taken place and the narrative problems it presented. A chalkboard breakdown of structure, themes, metaphors and sources recreates the absent play, and frequent audience involvement is less threatening than engaging. Gunn—and I was never even sure if this was Gunn we were watching—is a brilliantly likeable performer who effortlessly wins over her onlookers within minutes.
It’s this charm that makes At the Sans Hotel such a success. Like UK company Hoipolloi’s exquisite Floating of last year, and with hints of Forced Entertainment’s more accessible work, this is a gift to its audience rather than a challenge. It’s not a navel-gazing exercise into meta-theatre but a bracing, bewitching investigation into presence and absence. Its real subject, which we approach in a curious crabwalk, is the identity unable to step outside of or contain itself. The open nature of the piece is a structural component of this: referring to Gunn’s earlier works, directly engaging the audience, and the whole artifice of that advance media blitz are figurations of the subject that cannot remain for itself a stable and coherent self. That Gunn was inspired by the case of Cornelia Rau, the schizophrenic German citizen and Australian permanent resident, whose identity breakdown made headlines in 2004, helps explain the motivation behind the work’s unique structure, but there is so much more for each viewer to discover for themselves.
the fate of franklin
Just as generous, though with a rougher polish, was Four Larks Theatre’s The Fate of Franklin and his Gallant Crew. Inspired by an ill-fated attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage in the 1840s, its junkyard aesthetic was a visual delight of antiquated seafaring miscellany and lush costuming (not to mention a huge band sawing away on old-timey instruments). But all of this quickly began to feel like empty nostalgia, not for its ostensible historical base but for the exciting narratives of exploration and disaster that filled many a pulp novel and popular rag of the era. Was this just an excuse to play dress-ups and spout period-sounding jargon?
As it turns out, no. My vague disquiet was eventually turned on its head as various characters began to wrest control of the narrative from each other, presenting conflicting versions of the voyage’s outcome. Each proved to have a vested interest in our interpretation of events, and this tussle put to its audience an implicit question: whom do you trust? And, more importantly, why? Is the more thrilling story (brave explorers descending into cannibal savagery) simply more interesting than the possibility that a bunch of men starved or froze to death in an anonymous landscape?
lady grey
US playwright Will Eno is known for his more brutal affronts to his audience. His Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a tour-de-force solo that works up a mystery of childhood trauma by enacting an angry performance of verbal assault on spectators. His lesser-known Lady Grey is a similarly obtuse affair that turns that violence inwards. The eponymous figure is in fact several identities occupying the same mental and physical space—dressed in an historical ballgown, Lady Grey is resolutely contemporary. She tells stories of a girl who may be her younger self, or addresses the audience directly but in a prepared fashion. Seeming spontaneity is revealed as simply another theatrical convention—we’re seeing a character playing a real performer playing a character. It’s a hugely difficult piece, as much concerned with its own inadequacies as At the Sans Hotel or The Fate of Franklin. But like those works, this anxious internal equivocating doesn’t come at the expense of understanding, but in its service.
Furious Mattress, Malthouse Theatre
photo Jeff Busby
Furious Mattress, Malthouse Theatre
furious mattress
And then there’s what may turn out to be the most baffling, bizarre production of 2010. Malthouse Theatre’s Furious Mattress left audiences reeling, uncertain whether they’d witnessed a work of genius or a complete creative car wreck. Its credentials were unimpeachable—scripted by Melissa Reeves, directed by Tim Maddock, and featuring a varied but uniformly accomplished cast. The work was spun from a notorious Victorian case in which a schizophrenic middle-aged woman was killed during a lengthy, tortuous ‘exorcism’ in a rural district. Faith, fear, ignorance and the sundry madnesses of the individual and the crowd suggested themselves as possible concerns here, but as the piece unfolded it flung possibilities far more horrifying in its audience’s faces.
The first half was, for the most part, a grinding portrait of fundamentalists unable to confront the murder they had just committed. Banal rituals of domesticity and small talk were interrupted by unsettling evocations of belief in the supernatural. The point seemed blindingly obvious: religious devotion taken to its extremes had led to a fatal outcome, and these inhabitants of a lunatic fringe were both monsters and victims of their own delusions.
Once the plot shifted to the days leading up to the killing, however, the production shifted gears like a trucker topping a mountain rise. The delusions suddenly became reality, as muted performances gave way to hysteria and histrionics and a general atmosphere of realism was upended by carnivalesque comedy. A giant pantomime rat, an exorcist straight out of Kath & Kim and the ultimate arrival of the animated mattress—more wacky than furious—provoked laughter where we might have expected chills. Serious, even earnest dialogue was met with comically delivered ripostes; at times, it felt as if four or five productions had been mashed together without explanation.
The lack of internal logic displayed by Furious Mattress provided one of those rare moments in which the old intentional fallacy was less a philosophical argument than an unquestionable fact. There was no seeking recourse in program notes to define what this production was ‘supposed’ to be, since they only confused matters more. What we were left with was less a dialogue between the work’s contrasting elements than an irresolvable battle between those same aspects. This wasn’t the dialectic process of self-reflexive theatre, in which the apparent clash of elements results in richer, hybrid new formations—it was a fight where none could escape unscathed, least of all the audience. Dangerous stuff. I’d see it again.
At the Sans Hotel, created and performed by Nicola Gunn, design Nicola Gunn, Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist, Rebecca Etchell, sound Luke Paulding; Theatre Works, St Kilda, Mar 16-27; Four Larks Theatre, The Fate of Franklin and his Gallant Crew, text Marcel Dorney and Four Larks Theatre, direction Jesse Rasmussen, Mat Sweeney, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, performers Justine Campbell, Shane Mills, Caitlin Valentine, Marcel Dorney, Zak Ateka, Bonnie Taylor, Max Baumgarden, Hugo Farrant, Paul Goddard, Reuben Liversidge, Fingal Oakenleaf, Ivan Smith, Genevieve Fry, Esala Liyonage, Greg Craske, Kristian Rasmussen, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Jesse Rasmussen, Mat Sweeney, design Ellen Strasser, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, lighting Geordie Barker, Secret location, Northcote, Mar 12-27; Melbourne Theatre Company, Lady Grey, writer Will Eno, director Julian Meyrick, performer Tanya Burne, lighting Casey Norton, Lawler Studio, MTC, Feb 19-30; Malthouse Theatre, Furious Mattress, writer Melissa Reeves, director Tim Maddock, performers Rita Kalnejais, Kate Kendall, Robert Menzies, Thomas Wright, design Anna Cordingley, lighting Paul Jackson, sound & music Jethro Woodward, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Feb 19-Mar 13
THE BIGGEST NEW MUSIC EVENT EVER IN AUSTRALIA WILL SPREAD ITS EUTERPEAN TENTACLES AROUND SYDNEY FROM APRIL 30 TO MAY 9. THE 23 CONCERTS FEATURING AT LEAST 82 NEW (OR NEWISH) WORKS PLAYING IN VENUES FROM THE VERBRUGGHEN HALL AND ACROSS WESTERN SYDNEY TO ST FINBAR’S CHURCH, GLENBROOK IN THE LOWER BLUE MOUNTAINS, MAKE UP THIS YEAR’S AURORA FESTIVAL COMBINED WITH THE FIRST EVER VISITATION TO THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE BY THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC (ISCM).
This important organisation has been promoting new music, mainly European, since 1922; in 1938, for instance, they put on a concert in London of world premieres consisting of Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Celesta, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Choral Suite! It’s only ever managed to get to America once and that was during the Second World War, though Asia has entered its purview—playing Hong Kong and Yokohama in recent years.
Indeed, the 2010 event was to be in Poland until they recalled that the year might be taken up rather heavily in celebrations of Chopin anniversaries. That left just 18 months for Australia—specifically composer and all-round musical activist, Matthew Hindson—to pull the fat out of the fire. “Matthew’s ears lit up when I first broached the possibility,” recalled John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre and a board member of ISCM since 2002. “‘What an opportunity,’ he enthused, ‘to hold the world’s most prestigious international contemporary music festival’.” Appropriately Davis is now President of the ISCM, chairing meetings that take place during the New Music Days.
Davis had been wanting to host the event in Australia since the late 90s—“and people had been eager to come—even though they recognise that the cultural infrastructure in the Southern Hemisphere just can’t compete with a Donaueschingen or a Gaudeamus Festival. But I could never think of a way of affording it—we have to pay performers, obviously, and host all the delegates and visiting composers; that could be a hundred people. Would they camp on Cockatoo Island? I don’t think so. Fortunately, Hong Kong broke the mould a bit in 2007, cutting back on the size of the whole thing; and then Australia Council International recognised that this wasn’t just a lot of new music but a great way of promoting Australian culture to the world. Plenty of international festival directors (and the President of Croatia, who’s an ISCM delegate) will be here; our performers will be well showcased.”
Performers are headed by Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring—who tackle an amazing three concerts in four days with almost all new scores. “Oh my god, what are we doing?,” says EO’s Damien Ricketson recalling his realisation that the ensemble were about to do a year’s worth of repertoire in one fell swoop. Ricketson, and the directors of other groups such as ABC Classic FM for radiophonic works, the Song Company, Topology, Chronology Arts, the New Zealand Trio and the Goldner Quartet—there’s no Sydney Symphony Orchestra thanks to the short planning period, but the SSO Fellows offer a string band—shared in the selection of their programs with Matthew Hindson from 700 entries world-wide.
“There was a lot of fairly ordinary stuff,” recalls Ricketson, “and somehow it had got through 52 national sections to arrive here. But I’m not embarrassed by anything we’re playing—and I lost a good Thai piece to the New Zealand Trio. Certainly the Australian composers—Matthew tried to get at least one into every concert—will stand up well to the glare of international competition.”
New Zealand Trio
courtesy ISCM
New Zealand Trio
The New Zealanders were a piece of proactivity—lots of composers (including the veteran US-based Annea Lockwood of ‘Piano Burning’ fame) as well as the Trio. John Davis explained that New Zealand had dropped out of the ISCM in recent years and, politically, he was therefore keen to welcome them back with a vengeance; also the Trio was a group with 80 new music commissions under its belt, fully deserving its presence. He’s also inveigled the elite Spectra Ensemble from Belgium to bring music by Bart Van Hecke, Jean-Luc Fafchamps and Bruno Mantovani, a product of a European system which shares the best repertoire around a network of top ensembles. “It was a coup to get them here,” said Davis, “and their sponsorship by the Flanders government and Campbelltown Arts Centre is just fantastic.”
Campbelltown may not be prominently displayed on your mental map of new music in Sydney. But that’s not for want of the centre’s recent efforts. For a start, the ubiquitous Hindson is its music coordinator. Now they say, give the job to a busy man. So it was inevitable to turn to the man who heads the Sydney Conservatorium’s Arts Music Unit, is Chair of the Australia Council’s Music Board (appointed after the ISCM funding had already been granted, he wants to point out), as well as founding the biennial Aurora Festival. Sometimes, he writes music too—which gets commissioned and performed by the likes of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Birmingham Royal Ballet and Canadian virtuoso violinist, Lara St John. His composition for ballet, e=mc2, won a South Bank Award for best dance music in the UK in 2009; the first movement, Energy, will be performed by the SSO conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy on September 2 this year.
Sadly, of course, Hindson has no music in the ISCM New Music Days. But at least 30 other Australian composers do—some familiar, like Ross Edwards, Carl Vine, Peter Sculthorpe, Lisa Lim and Elena Kats-Chernin; others pretty unknown—Katia Beaugeais, Peter McNamara and Daniel Blinkhorn have so far escaped my notice.
There are probably fewer big names from overseas. Elliott Carter and Philip Glass from the US, Rautavaara and Part from the Baltic, Golijov from Argentina are just about it. So we’re going to have to rely on some new names to provide those Britten and Bartok moments. Actually, this is less likely than in previous New Music Days. For the ISCM is in transition. There was a time when a European event would select just the best 12 works submitted from all over the world. But in 2008 they decided that the future lay in the event being more of a showcase for members. This becomes mandatory in 2011, but Matthew Hindson decided to do his best to find music from all member countries as a test of the new system. He managed 38.
“And it wasn’t that hard”, he insisted, “there’s a plethora of young and hungry composers out there, you know.” It’s just possible that knowing who would be struggling through their 700 entries to make the selection could have encouraged composers to “match their choice of music to the buyer,” as John Davis tactfully put it. In other words, Hindson clones may have enjoyed a marginal advantage! Hindson himself is positive: “It was really a pleasant surprise to find that you couldn’t identify the music by the nationality of the composer…South Africans—rhythmic and bright; Greeks—aggressive and noisy! The borders are definitely breaking down. And because this is primarily a chamber music event, I expect the flavour to be intimacy. Maybe it’ll show that the orchestra isn’t the music performance form of the future? Hopefully it will encourage the smaller ISCM sections to take up the baton in that future.”
2010 ISCM New Music Days & Aurora Festival, presenting partners: Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Aurora New Music, ABC Classic FM, Australian Music Centre, New Music Network, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre and Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, April 30-May 9; http://www.worldnewmusicdays.com.au. Eight concerts will be broadcast live on ABC Classic FM and a new ABC digital ‘classical’ music channel will run throughout the event.
RATHER THAN INVENTING A THEME FOR THE 2010 MONA FESTIVAL OF ART AND MUSIC, CURATOR BRIAN RITCHIE SEEMS TO HAVE ACCESSED PERFORMERS AND MATERIAL HE THOUGHT MIGHT BE INTERESTING OR FUN, FOR AUDIENCES TO EXPERIENCE PRETTY MUCH AS THEY WISHED. YOU COULD HAVE ATTENDED NOTHING BUT THE MANY EVENTS IN THE PRINCESS WHARF NO.1 SHED, OR AVOIDED THAT SPACE ENTIRELY, AND STILL FELT TOTALLY IMMERSED IN THE FESTIVAL. AND EVEN WHEN MONA FOMA WAS ARCHLY CEREBRAL, IT WAS PLAYFUL.
John Cale’s presence in Australia is not unprecedented, though Hobart is not really somewhere you’d expect to see him, so his near ubiquitous presence on posters, programs and in performances was astonishing enough before we even got to the content. Labeled “Eminent Artist in Residence” for the festival, he came with a five-screen video installation, Dyddiau Du (Cale’s native Welsh for Dark Days), a very talented young band and varying styles of musical performance. Coming directly to Hobart from the Venice Biennale, Dyddiau Du describes a haunted Wales, mixing long meditative shots of empty rooms, ancient and abandoned stone dwellings, intense close-ups of Cale trudging uphill, breathing hard and finally, some kind of water torture. The images bled out over an hour in a darkened room with a concrete floor. It was cold and uncomfortable, which seemed the intention.
A spirit of endurance was also needed for the grueling intensity created by Michael Keiran-Harvey in his astonishing piano work, 48 Fugues for Frank, at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Influenced by one of music’s great individualists, Frank Zappa, Keiran-Harvey attacked the piano with the vigour of an athlete. Like the music or not, the commitment to the work and virtuosity on display were undeniable, and at times breathtaking. A group of Hobart artists and curator Leigh Hobba, reacted to Keiran-Harvey’s composition, Zappa and the space itself, creating an exciting and witty four-floor installation. Rob O’Connor’s large, colorful F-for-Frank series lay in the dust of the basement’s earth floor, Aedan Howlett’s swirling street style paintings hung from pillars, Mat Ward (a certified Zappa fanatic) sifted through lyrics and filled the top floor with luridly bright sharks, pygmy ponies and poodles while Michelle Lee stretched a shadow along the floor and up the wall into an image of a pianist’s hands. Harvey raced between floors playing instruments, his performance then relayed to his seated audience by camera.
Site and spatial relations between audience and performance were a feature of the festival more generally, with spaces used in unusual ways throughout. In Abe Sada: Sade Abe 1936, Perth artist Cat Hope generated continent shifting feedback bass noise in a storeroom directly under the Peacock Theatre audience, so one had the odd but not unpleasant sensation of vibration coming through the floor and into the seat. That these sounds were felt rather heard was not new, but the context refreshed the idea. Not content with that exploration, Hope did it again, getting an orchestra of bass instruments, played by a collection of local musicians, to create a vast field of sound in the Princess Wharf through which the audience could wander or lie back in and be bathed in sound.
The Chronox installation by Michael Prior and Lachlan Conn was located in the Sidespace of the Salamanca Arts Centre for the festival’s duration. Cheekily described as a machine for “travelling to the present,” the work obliterates space and time with repetition created from sound and animated projection. An engaging and beautiful work, Chronox invites the audience to interact by altering the looping vinyl records that provide the sound—pick up the tone arm, carefully put it down again. As I succumbed to the hypnotising loops and glowing shapes, the edges of the room appeared to wander off into the dark.
Next door, in the Long Gallery, Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning’s humorous moving sculptures—all fan engines playing drums and driving amplifiers—came alive with a brief, clever performance. Attached to a spinning fan motor, a thin rope whirled along the wooden floor, responding to objects placed in its path—plastic, paper, garbage and metal. It seemed frantic and uncontrolled, but a second viewing revealed a sense of composition and even narrative—from scurrying to fluttering to a bell-like shimmer. This small work remains in the memory.
Pursuit, Jon Rose, Robin Fox, Rod Cooper and collaborators
Pursuit, Jon Rose, Robin Fox, Rod Cooper and collaborators
Kinetic sound production on a more ambitious scale was the focus of Pursuit, a performance that transformed the Princess Wharf Shed into a singing bicycle track. Jon Rose, Robin Fox, Rod Cooper and Paul Bryant, all seasoned creators of new noise, directed a squadron of bike enthusiasts on a looping chase around the shed while the audience watched from the middle. The bikes had been altered to make sounds and some looked a little crazy, but as they scraped and squeaked and honked about the space, music emerged: this bike and its horn came and went at controlled intervals; new bikes emerged making new sound; one chap rode about with a camera atop his helmet, giving the audience a perspective from within the work. While each sculpted bicycle had its own sound and character, the effect of the whole thing grew, swelling into an ecstatic moment when all the bikes rang their bells, echoing all the other loops and shimmering sounds to be found elsewhere in the festival’s program.
MONA FOMA 2010 was a huge mixed bag of art and ideas. It was totally different from 2009, and there’s no doubt that 2011, when the actual Museum of Old and New Art reveals its contents, will be just as surprising. If there’s anything this festival is about, keeping people guessing would seem to be it.
MONA FOMA, Festival of Music and Art, curator Brian Ritchie, Hobart, Jan 8-24 http://www.mofo.net.au
OVER THE LAST NINE YEARS THE NOW NOW FESTIVAL HAS CONTINUED TO IMPRESS WITH THE DIVERSITY OF MUSICAL ACTIVITIES THAT IT BOLDLY PROGRAMS UNDER A UNIFYING PREOCCUPATION WITH SPONTANEITY. NOW BASED IN WENTWORTH FALLS IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, ATTENDING THE FESTIVAL REQUIRES A LITTLE MORE DEDICATION, THUS I ONLY MADE IT TO THE FINAL AFTERNOON OF ACTIVITIES. THAT SAID THE FIVE PERFORMANCES I EXPERIENCED EACH EXPLORED VASTLY DIFFERENT STYLES, ACTING AS THE PERFECT TASTER FOR THE RANGE OF APPROACHES TO MUSIC MAKING FOR WHICH THE FESTIVAL HAS BECOME RENOWNED.
Opening the afternoon was Neill Duncan (sax), Alex Masso (percussion, drums), Sam Pettigrew (double bass), Sam Dobson (double bass) and Alister Spence (piano), producing the now well-recognised improv style in which individuals explore extended instrumental techniques and slowly work themselves into a cohesive composition. The background of this group, however, offers a few more free jazz and blues stylings than is often found in this scene. Starting with quiet scratchings, melodic fragments emerge and submerge. Spence has prepared his piano so it alternately sounds like bells and banjos. While Pettigrew provides the occasional swampy walking bass line to ground them, he also explores extra-musical sounds, inserting a zither behind the strings for extra jingle. Similarly Dobson, applies his keys (almost an improv cliché, but nonetheless interesting) to his strings for a bit of jangle. The others seem in their own reveries, but Masso watches them all hungrily, providing shake-up bass drum thwamps, cymbal clash and other angular provocations. Neill Duncan is always a pleasure to watch as he explores the subtler sounds of his traditional washboard vest, as well as providing some of the smokier blues figures on saxophone.
Around 20 minutes in, during a denouement, a little girl’s voice is heard in the audience: “Is it finished?” Her intuition is spot on: it is time, and there is an ending presenting itself, but the group doesn’t take it. Initially annoyed by this tendency of improv musicians, over the years I’ve come to enjoy the results of the missed moment—the hard soul searching involved in justifying continuance and maintaining the energy. This ensemble does well crafting a satisfying epilogue and finding the ‘real’ ending perfectly together.
Zeit Kunst 6 was set up in the smaller side room which is more projection friendly in the afternoon light. The line-up for the ensemble changed slightly during its Goethe Institut sponsored tour around Australia, but for this performance featured Michel Doneda (sax), Kim Myhr (guitar, objects) Matthias Muche (trombone), Clayton Thomas (double bass), Sven Hahne (computer), Clare Cooper (guzheng). It begins with an extended silence, until Thomas sets his bass rattling with his signature SA number plate inserted in the strings, then Cooper bows her guzheng and the wind players’ breath burbles through their instruments. A sudden stab of sound activates the audio responsive video and an array of lines and angles flash across the back wall and the performers. Maintaining a sense of the collectively unknown outcome, each of the performers is incredibly controlled, almost monk-like. At one point, around three-quarters of the way through, they all stop—the light from the video ceases—and they hold…. hold…. hold… hold…only to wind up again for the final intense movement.
In this ensemble it seems that the strings create the under-layer of drone and scumble while the wind players shape the piece into breath-driven phrases. While it might be thought that a lot of improv downplays melody and harmonics in favour of texture and timbre, here you get the sense each musician is deliberately making uneasy harmonic choices though clearly in relationship to each other. Michel Doneda seems the most playful, swooping his sax through the air to create both energetic sonic and physical gestures. Cooper seems the most interested in the cause-and-effect of the sounds on the stark yet dynamic video—actively playing with the it. The samples offered by Hahne on computer, with their squared off digital edges, sit uneasily in the mix, but somehow this makes the combination all the more interesting. The piece concludes with another sustained silence, painful and beautiful in its intensity.
nHOMEaS comprising Josh Isaac (drums), David Sullivan (bass, fx loop), Jack Dibben (guitar), George Nagal (synthesiser) and Aemon Webb (vox, electro gadgets) offers the noise/rock end of the spectrum but is no less considered. This is a dense exploration driven by the emphatic energy of rock drums. Each player is seeking his own epiphany, with elements occasionally joining forces, like Sullivan and Issac creating cohesive rhythm sections, or Nagal on warped synth and Webb on electronic whinnies and vocal wails flinging us into reverby outerspace. Collectively they forge mountains of sound, then let them decay and the result is dark and cathartic.
Billed as Joey and the Calypsoes (mystery band), a nice little interlude was provided by Splinter Orchestra members who teamed up with audience members and called their mobile phones. By moving the speakers of the answered phones close to each other the feedback zings and chirps created a peaceful, contemplative chorus of digital insects. A lovely lo-fi interactive moment and a nice irony given mobile phones are often the bane of music concerts.
The performance that wrapped up the festival was Team Music!—interactive netball, facilitated by Jon Rose, with the local under 16s netball teams. In a tiny makeshift court the width of the hall, the two eager teams fight it out using Rose’s modified soccer ball (he couldn’t get the workings into a netball) which activates a vast range of sound phrases. Rose’s ongoing explorations into interactive music, including riding bicycles and flying kites, continue to impress in their democratising of electronic music making. However, the bleepy alogorithmic computer burbles triggered by the ball are less engaging than the lightning fast adaptability of the live duos—of Clayton Thomas (double bass) and Mattias Muche (trombone) on the side of the white team, and Eivind Lonning (trumpet) and Mike Majkowski (double bass) on the side of the blue team—who are only allowed to play when their team is in possession of the ball. The teams played a full 45-minute game which certainly offered reasonable time to explore possibilities, accompanied by playful mayhem including signs that encouraged audience responses: Stomp, Boo, Cheer etc. It was a fittingly energetic and playful way to end the NOW now festival which continues to explore spontaneous music with a nourishing balance of deep seriousness and childlike joy.
The NOW Now festival, Wentworth Falls School of Arts, Blue Mountains, Jan 22-24; http://thenownow.net
Hostage, video still 2008, Wang Jianwei, single channel video, Edge of Elsewhere
image courtesy the artist
Hostage, video still 2008, Wang Jianwei, single channel video, Edge of Elsewhere
“THE POLITICS I REFER TO HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH POWER, CONFLICTS OR EVEN CONSPIRACY. MY POLITICS IS ABOUT GREATER HUMAN INTER-RELATIONS. AND THIS POLITICS FRUSTRATES ALL ADEQUACIES. AS LACAN SAID, “ERROR IS THE HABITUAL INCARNATION OF TRUTH” AND THAT TRUTH “EMERGES IN ITS MOST CLEAR-CUT REPRESENTATION, THE MISTAKE.” Wang Jianwei
A giant, uncanny, industrial apparatus occupies the central gallery of Campbelltown Art Centre. This is part of Wang Jianwei’s multimedia work titled Hostage (2008) exhibited as part of Edge of Elsewhere (a three-year partnership between Sydney Festival, Campbelltown Arts Centre and Gallery 4A to engage communities in Western Sydney with artists from Asia and The Pactific, Eds). The machinery seems overloaded with engines, valves, piezometers and obtruding steel pipes and it’s almost inundated by plastic foam. One feels haunted and trapped by this object of mythic proportions as if it is blundering through the gallery. I sigh with relief at the sight of a series of bright, framed photographs on the wall to one side: a worker, a farmer and a soldier. These lead the way to a darkened room where a more ambiguous film is screening as part of the same work. Again, my breath halts.
Obeying some invisible discipline, deadened looking people work and rest within a cabined space bound by three brick walls. They live in the era before Chinese economic reform, deprived of their individuality by heavy state ideology. We can only recognise their social functions: worker, farmer and soldier. Repeatedly carrying out their daily routines, they wake at the same time, do collective morning exercise and then work on their respective official duties: technical workers weld; farmers spray pesticides; soldiers keep their posts. Everything proceeds with the utmost propriety—everyone strives to achieve the same objective.
This system runs effectively and with total poise—an early warning that a storm is about to break. The walls are bombed by outsiders and collapse, the perfect order within this space is buried under debris. The system fails and crumbles. The film ends ambiguously with the people squeezed into a white van like sardines and driven away, into the unknown. The film is a metaphor for a system that either totally transforms or collapses when it reaches its maximum entropy. Calmly and sensitively unfolding his narrative, Wang Jianwei cinematically constructs a materially concrete scenario but one which asks unanswerable questions.
Using installation, photography and video art, the artist creates an undivided whole that probes the dilemma of humans seized like hostages by systems of power such as knowledge, history or ideology. Like Kafka’s Josef K, arrested by some unrevealed authority for an unidentified crime, these giant and invisible systems of power impose an imaginary identity which, without any alternative on offer, is accepted.
Born in the 1950s, Wang Jianwei shares the experience of many of his contemporaries—relocated to the country and drafted as a soldier. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, stifled by seven years spent drawing maps for the army, Wang commenced his career as a painter in the mid-80s and was highly acclaimed for his realistic style. In the 80s and 90s, as China filled with the clamour and mania of reform and opening up to the world, installation art, video art and multimedia art were being introduced along with other western trends. Wang promptly sensed the more flexible, expressive capacities of these new art forms to manifest the rapid variations in social structures. He shifted gear to practice video art.
Wang’s early video works had some similarities with the kind of documentary filmmaking used in sociological surveys. However, unlike documentary workers who attempt to catch public attention and advocate to solve social issues by exposing the truth, Wang modestly calls himself an “image collector.” In this way, he carefully studies how complicated relationships overlap and interact within everyday space.
Wang’s 1996 work, Production, is representative of the character of his early works. Juxtaposing the spaces of cultural production and everyday living, the work attempts to cast off the linear process of art production, which usually starts in the studio and ends in the gallery space. It documents the daily life of teahouses in seven counties of Sichuan. The teahouses in the video have no dedicated lounges or interior decoration, just a scatter of stained bamboo table sets—a world away from the middle class frequented high-tea cafés in the metropolis.
There’s an interesting mix of people in the crowd: some are reading newspapers, some playing poker, some having business meetings and some even washing their hair. They habituate themselves to this public but somehow intimate space, continuing the habitus of Sichuan’s history, its thousands of years of teahouse culture. Tension is triggered by the intruding camera: the guests stop their habitual activities, gazing into the lens with curiosity or courtesy. This space for daily leisure has been transformed with the intervention of the artist.
Hostage, 2008, Wang Jianwei, sculpture, Edge of Elsewhere
image courtesy the artist
Hostage, 2008, Wang Jianwei, sculpture, Edge of Elsewhere
In 2000, Wang Jianwei departed from his documentary format to create works that mixed video and live performance with surreal theatrical expression, exploring the unusual in the usual. Ping Feng in 2000 marked Wang Jianwei’s new era of integrating visual art and theatre. Successively performed in Beijing and Brussels, Ping Feng harmonises video, performance and theatre into a whole vision: a man hangs in the middle of the stage, surrounded by a group of ghostly strangers with puppets in hand. While they creep and conspire in the dark, the screen at the back flashes with changing images, among them human limbs, a drowning bird and Chinese painting. Ping Feng’s stories are drawn from the famous screen paintings, The Night Banquet of Han Xizai. The Southern Tang Dynasty (10th century) artist Gu Hongzhong was appointed by the emperor, who was worried his authority might be threatened, to spy on the reclusive scholar-official Han Xizai and paint what he had seen. To steer clear of suspicion and avoid political persecution, Han disguised his ambitions and capabilities with lustful nightly banquets. The mutual probing in this story interests Wang. He cleverly borrows the uniquely architectural element—the screen—as the theme of his work, and metaphorically indicates the psychological dodging and prying inherent in everyday life.
After Ping Feng, Wang Jianwei continued to test combinations of video, performance and theatre. His latest work, Time·Theatre·Exhibition (2009), is evidence of this consistent hybrid style, obscuring the fine line between art forms. The neat and spacious gallery is transformed into a temporary theatre. The curtain unfolds to reveal a mysterious, misty teahouse. People from different eras of history bridging thousands of years—Tang Dynasty officers, Qing Dynasty adherents, the general public of new born China and modern people—gather in this public space and indulge in a variety of pastimes: appreciating their birds, listening to music, urging their crickets to fight, gambling, flirting with prostitutes, taking drugs, singing karaoke etc.
As time and space are emerging into one in this video, struggling modern white-collars appear onstage. They run, stop, talk on the phone, yelling out the ridiculously increasing prices of the art auction or real estate market, losing themselves in the expanding desires of contemporary life. Wang Jianwei creates a live scene of overlapping time and space and proposes “we watch the exhibition in the same way we might watch drama; experience the drama just as we might view an exhibition—at the same time.”
As one of the most prominent conceptual artists in China, Wang Jianwei is difficult to label. He is neither Zhang Xiaogang who embraces the attention of auction houses nor Ai Weiwei who is made a dazzling object under the limelight of western media. Wang’s unique and profound thoughts distinguish him from his peers. Borrowing his methodologies from different disciplines to dig into the complexity of human interactions, Wang’s sheer professionalism in integrating art forms and creating, over a decade, his many investigative live works make him one of the earliest avant-gardists of interdisciplinary art in contemporary China.
The Edge of Elsewhere, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Jan 16-March 7; Gallery 4A, Sydney, Jan 16-Feb 7
BRIAN LUCAS’ NEW SOLO WORK, PERFORMANCE ANXIETY, WAS A SEAMLESS 90 MINUTES OF LACERATING PERFORMANCE THAT OFTEN HAD YOU WITH YOUR MOUTH HANGING OPEN AT THE SHEER BRAVURA OF THE BEAST.
Reeling away after the event, the expansive realisation began to seep in that you had attended an undoubted master work. Lucas has long held a national reputation for his intelligent physical performance works sedulously crafted by a mature artist from his considerable background skills in both theatre and dance. Now he literally leaps onto the world stage at the World Theatre Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse, the venue which had commissioned his first major one man show, Monster, in 2000.
This is not to say Lucas has summarily trumped himself. He emerged fully fledged with most of his salient moves intact. Having followed him along the way, I can say that his earlier, more autobiographical pieces had the same rueful insights. His best talent has always been to describe being in motion, to depict who he was always becoming, vulnerable to himself but also portraying a sense of multiple selves simmering beneath his skin. Hence it was a bit off-putting at first to see him wearing contemporary clothes in his latest work. This break into costume came earlier, in Underbelly (2006), a baroque piece that interrupted Lucas’s plans to complete his personal trilogy, and was vomited forth in response to the media spin of the Howard years. Not much has changed from that perspective, so Lucas has gone on to meet his audience by unleashing other selves fitting for the times and exposing his own fears, his own performance anxieties amidst the moral ambiguities of the media-hyped post-9/11 world.
In line with Lucas’s continual experimenting with form, The Turbine Rehearsal Room has been tricked up for a cabaret performance in the round at “The Loser Bar” by designer Kieran Swann. The ambient success of this integrated vision is also a measure of Lucas’s collaborators. Swann has created a dais fitted out with hidden lights and exits for smoke to create a plethora of effects. It also has a special floor which enables Lucas in an initial moment to rise like a curtain with sheets draped around his waist and to metamorphically extend into the audience through his dance reach. Andrew Meadow’s superb lighting extends from a hermetic bed-chamber to a flare-lit war zone to framing a stunning mise-en-scene of interrogation rooms illuminated by single lightbulbs among the audience. Unfortunately Lucas can’t sing, so he informs us, “although he would like to” (just as he would “like to be an American”, or that he “was more driven to achieve” etc). This point was ironically underscored with an elegant and evocative sound collage by Brett Collery—Handel’s Largo, a baroque chorale, a modern classical boys’ choir, a female dolorosa and, finally, the big band version of “I’d like to teach the world to sing.”
Lucas has his own vibrant tones, of course. As poet-cum-dramatist he decides not to present a case study, but to respond to a quote from James Joyce: “Within the particular is contained the universal.” He presents four different characters who share a sense of anxiety despite the substantial differences in their circumstances: L’Amour, the Torch Singer; Limbo, the War Correspondent; Lunacy, the Orator; and Lachrymosa, the Stand-Up Comedian. And there is the diffident and dyspeptic performance persona named Brian Lucas.
As the audience enters, Lucas is lying down, covered in rose petal sheets and tossing and turning, uncomfortable in his own skin and unable to perform sexually with his partner. Eventually he rises in female guise with sheets clinging to his hips and sweeps into a dance of romantic desire for the Falling Man from the Twin Towers. She tells her psychiatrist, “I had fallen, just as the man had fallen.” Lachrymosa comments in a vocal loop back that, “She finally takes off her skin and lays herself bare—and it’s all in a lost cause.” The next scenario after interval is pure 60 Minutes. Limbo represents the sort of correspondent who can only read his teleprompter: “That’s what they want. So I give it to them.” Captured by the other side, he similarly parrots the script that has been given to him. Lunacy the Orator and an old man ambiguously share sadomasochistic rites. Lachrymosa is a shocker who dies of a heart attack. Lucas brilliantly represents them all at a rapid pace, for good and for evil and beyond both.
Brian Lucas has ever been aware of the daunting trial of self-consciousness and self-creation that is attributed to the artist, but which he rightly regards as our common lot. He genuinely sees himself as an ordinary person who goes through ordinary motions in the world in common with his audience, which perhaps accounts for his immense crowd-pleasing capacity in this unlikely format. What did we take away from his performance that strengthened us, as it undoubtedly did? Beneath the diffidence, beyond the chronic dyspepsia, Lucas’s tacit approach seemed to embody a panacea for the human condition recommended by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Not the least aspect of Lucas’s heterogeneous art is that it seems designed to reinstate the magical arts and crafts of remembrance employed by Mnemosyne and her daughters to keep us safe from Lethe’s fatal river of media-induced forgetfulness.
Performance Anxiety, created & performed by Brian Lucas, sound designer Brett Collerym designer Kieran Swann, lighting Andrew Meadows; Turbine Rehearsal Room, Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 9-13
Habits & Habitat, Patrick Ronald and Shannon McDonell, courtesy the artists
WASHED ASHORE ON THE ISLAND OF BROBDINGNAG, FINDING HIMSELF DWARFED AMONG “ENORMOUS BARBARIANS,” SWIFT’S INTREPID SURGEON LEMUEL GULLIVER UTTERS A TELLING OBSERVATION. “UNDOUBTEDLY PHILOSOPHERS ARE IN THE RIGHT,” HE SAYS, “WHEN THEY TELL US THAT NOTHING IS GREAT OR LITTLE OTHERWISE THAN BY COMPARISON.”
Exploring the artworks recently presented as part of Performance Space’s You Are Here program, I found myself channelling Gulliver on more than one occasion, my certainty of place unravelling before works that playfully turned the familiar into the unfamiliar. Swift’s satirical treatise on geographic and cultural relativity also came to mind as something of a blueprint for some of the driving concerns of Australian art practice today. These concerns are set to intensify in coming months, as David Elliot’s provocative theme for the 17th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age [see p10] brings the politics of place firmly back into focus. And although not connected to the Biennale in any way, the works presented here in fact made quite a neat forerunner to that event.
The title of the program, You Are Here, suggested a more matter-of-fact take on the subject of place than Elliot’s normative statement on geographic extremity, clearly intended to challenge. Still, the questions raised are similar. From among the three media works installed in the gallery and foyer space at CarriageWorks in Sydney emerged common concerns for the relational nature of place, history and memory in the Australian landscape, both urban and rural. And while each work proved markedly different in its realisation, taken as a whole the program was highly effective in dislocating fixed ideas about where we are situated in space and time.
One of Several Centres, Alex Kershaw, courtesy Grant Pirrie
Photographer and video artist Alex Kershaw turned his attention to the desert town of Alice Springs, Australia’s mythic ‘red centre,’ in the multi-screen video installation, One of Several Centres, presented in the gallery space. Kershaw’s videos appeared to eschew a documentary or ethnographic approach, instead favouring a kind of topographical collage in their cumulative tracking of sites both within the town and the outlying bush and scrub areas. Further defying expectations, Kershaw mocks the touristic gaze and its attraction to monuments, homing in on the more mundane or seemingly insignificant features of the landscape while at the same time capturing locals performing a series of Fluxus-style follies. A number involved delineating or marking up space, from a man laying a narrow strip of lawn on a concrete roundabout to a woman walking her dog around the inside perimeter of a disused water tank.
In a nod to Jon Rhodes’ project Whichaway? [documenting the photographer’s extended interaction with the Aboriginal community of Kiwikura, 1974-96, Eds], cited by the artist as an influence, Kershaw draws on the strategy of using sequences charged with absurdity to image new relationships between space and time in the desert. Ultimately, the videos succeed in using play and whimsy to engage audiences while also making a more serious point about the need to move beyond fixed notions of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the Australian landscape. From this focus on geographic relativity also emerges the realisation that, in true Swiftian fashion, many of the mental constructs which shape our perception of the world around us may be equally contingent; the difference between wild and domesticated, inside and outside, tourist and local, habited and uninhabited, traditional and contemporary, all little more than matters of the mind.
Stepping outside the gallery space and into CarriageWorks’ soaring industrial foyer, evidence of its former life as a hub for the construction of Sydney’s rail network is still visible on the building’s skin. At the time of writing, politicians, urban planners and architects were in a wrangle over the future of a more controversial former industrial site, the concrete apron at Sydney Harbour’s Barangaroo, with Paul Keating waging war against the city’s alleged “industrial determinism.” With so much focus on the city’s architectural fabric, it was refreshing to encounter Nigel Helyer’s haunting site-specific sonic sculpture, GhosTrain, which dealt with a far more ephemeral, and hence easily overlooked, form of heritage: the sounds of the city. As Helyer puts it, “the acoustic ecologies of industrial landscapes are prime examples of our extraordinary capacity for amnesia.”
Referencing CarriageWorks’ former use, Helyer’s 60-second sound installation, to be repeated in the forthcoming May-June program, plays the recorded sounds of a steam locomotive starting up, pumping out steam and then quickly accelerating to enact a sonic transportation to another era, another time. Beyond its nostalgic qualities, the work proved interesting for the questions it raised about whether urban sounds should be preserved and archived for future generations. This would entail a broadening of our concept of heritage to embrace senses other than sight and an acknowledgment of the link between sound and embodied space, for sounds signify activity and hence lived presence. A big ask, yet by neglecting soundscapes we risk preserving buildings as empty architectural shells.
While Helyer’s GhosTrain offered a site-specific sonic reading of the foyer space, photomedia artists Patrick Ronald and Shannon McDonell brought an apparent slice of rural life to the site in their installation, Habits & Habitat. In a life-sized, 1:1 photographic diorama of a domestic interior, the glimpse of dry scrub through a window, a kitsch rooster clock on the kitchen wall, a pair of Blundstone boots by the laundry door all lend what otherwise appears a typical family home the context of a rural setting.
But just as the manipulation of scale in Gulliver’s Travels leads the narrator to probe his surroundings as if under a microscope, here slight tweaks in the images lead us to question their authenticity as photographic documents (is that print of the Mona Lisa on the wall, for example, not actually a jigsaw puzzle?). In fact, the artists have applied a unique brand of photogrammetry to the images, a process of intricate digital manipulations which results in seamless composite images. This insertion of unexpected details and the juxtaposition between real and unreal elements results in an uncanny sense of displacement. At the same time the accumulation of detail, writes Performance Space Director Daniel Brine, “investigates cultural transfer, the connection (and disconnections) between country and city, and the ways that the ‘bush’ continues to inform Australian culture and identity.”
Taken literally, visitors to Performance Space’s You Are Here program might have expected to encounter artworks that presented fixed, or even instructive, interpretations of place and landscape. Far from it, a sense of journey emerged from the works that was unconventional in its focus on ‘in-between’ spaces and movement between various cultural signposts. In less skillful hands, concerns over Australia’s geographic and cultural relativities can too easily slide into tedious and repetitive neuroses. One hopes that in upcoming events we will continue to dwell in its fruitful and generative possibilities.
You Are Here: Alex Kershaw, One of Several Centres, Feb 11–March 6, Nigel Helyer, GhosTrain, Feb 11–March 17, May 13-June 5, Patrick Ronald and Shannon McDonell, Habits & Habitat, Feb 11-March 17; Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney
Exciting news from Melbourne: Willoh S Weiland has been appointed as the new artistic director of Aphids. As we were putting this online edition together, Weiland was flying back to Australia. We look forward to catching up with her once she’s settled into the job of guiding one of the country’s most innovative outfits, renowned for its idiosyncratic hybrid creations and international collaborations.
A young and energetic artist, Weiland looks made for Aphids. Her projects as artist, writer and curator over recent years have been strikingly individual. The ongoing art-science project Yelling at Stars (see RT 88) was presented at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl as the closing event of the 2008 Next Wave Festival and then in Glasgow at Less Remote, an art/science symposium running parallel to the 59th International Astronautical Congress. Her 2009 Synapse residency was at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, where she developed Void Love (www.voidlove.tv), “a soap opera about astrophysics” starring Kamahl.
Weiland is involved in ongoing collaborations with Spat & Loogie and, as part of Deadpan, with video artist Martyn Coutts—including an Asialink residency in Beijing and NES artist residency in Iceland in 2010.
David Young, the outgoing artistic director and co-founder of Aphids (and now director of Chamber Made Opera; see RT95) sees Weiland as “hugely talented and a perfect fit with the Aphids spirit and ethos.” He thinks that with the current Aphids team, “I really cannot imagine what Aphids will become under her watch—and that’s exactly what I am most excited about.”
Lillian Starr Pinup Girl, Tina Fiveash, part of Women in Piracy
courtesy the artist
Lillian Starr Pinup Girl, Tina Fiveash, part of Women in Piracy
women and piracy
As the application of copyright laws tighten, creative commons becomes part of the big picture and internet censorship escalates, it’s timely to take yourself to Kudos Gallery to reflect on the good use to which appropriations, adapatations and thefts have been put in Women in Piracy. The show includes works by Penelope Benton, Brown Council, Tina Fiveash, The Kingpins and others. Curated by Marcel Cooper it’s part of the 2010 Sheila Autonomista Festival for queer women’s art and music centred at Red Rattler Theatre, Marrickville. Women in Piracy, Kudos Gallery, 6 Napier St, Paddington, Sydney, March 30-April 10; scooter.org.au/sheila.html
jo lloyd: 24hrs
God knows what all the fast turnaround short film and short play festivals are doing to our psyches as artists and audiences—blessed be the slow food movement—and now dance has joined the rush! But what an intriguing race it might be in the Jo Lloyd-curated 24HRS at Dancehouse. Four choreographers will each create a new work over 24 hours—one for each Friday over four weeks. Just to add to the inevitable delirium of commencing work on a Thursday night at 9pm, “the creative process will be twittered and streamed online and the teams must be ready to present the work to a live audience by 8pm the next night.” There goes the privacy associated with the slow boil of the creative process. The stellar line-up of choreographic speed freaks is Natalie Cursio, Shelley Lasica, Phillip Adams and Luke George. 24HRS, performances April 30 (Cursio), May 7 (Lasica), 14 (Adams), 21 (George), Dancehouse, Melbourne; www.twitter.com/24HOURS; www.livestream.com/24HOURS
Adrift, Nigel Helyer, Memory Flows exhibition
courtesy the artist
Adrift, Nigel Helyer, Memory Flows exhibition
cmai, memory flows
As our major easten rivers and Lake Eyre fill after an epic drought that threatens to return almost as soon as it has departed, the UTS-based Centre for Media Arts Innovation is holding a timely exhibition of underground water basin and river-inspired art. “Australian rivers are conduits that are emblematic of networking systems, travel systems and survival systems. They are also the ground for flows of memory as riverbeds, for instance, hold the memory of water embedded in the land. This project will tap into and out of memory flows—along Australia’s riverbeds and groundwater systems.” The distinctive venue, Newington Armory, and its proximity to some of Sydney’s unique waterways give the exhibition added frisson. The artists are Ian Andrews, Chris Bowman, Chris Caines, Damian Castaldi, Sherre DeLys, Clement Girault, Jacqueline Gothem, Ian Gwilt, Megan Heyward, Nigel Helyer, Neil Jenkins, Solange Kershaw, Roger Mills, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark, Shannon O’Neill, Greg Shapley, Viktor Steffenson and Jes Tyrrell. CMAI, Memory Flows, Newington Armory, Sydney Olympic Park, weekends May 15- June 27; www.memoryflows.net
art for easter 1: sounds unsound festival
Recommended, say the organisers, for people who don’t do Easter, the Sounds UnSound Festival is “a one-day event focusing on the experimental, improvised, noise and left-field musical fringe of Sydney and beyond.” Artists include Japanese noise maestro Defektro, improvisors Forenzics, Chippendale improv group The nHOMEas, Toydeath, glass vocalist Justice Yeldham, audio-visualists Infinite Decimals, bass/drum duo The BZNZZ, Prehistoric Fuckin’ Moron(s), the computerised Scissor Lock, The Not Too Distant Future and Baad Jazz. Sounds Unsound Festival, The Wall (The Bald Faced Stag), 345 Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt, Sydney,April 2, 2-10pm; www.myspace.com/thesoundsunsoundfestival
art for easter 2: arvo pärt’s berlin mass
A special Easter Saturday performance of Arvo Pärt’s immersive Berlin Mass by Sydney Chamber Choir and the ensemble Ironwood will celebrate the composer’s 75th birthday. On the same generous program, directed by Paul Stanhope, there will be selections from Carlo Gesualdo’s Tenebrae and a work inspired by them, Scottish composer James MacMillan’s Tenebrae Responsories. Ironwood will also present a movement from Haydn’s Seven Last Words from the Cross. Via Crucis, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, April 3,
Kate Murphy, The note, 2010
image courtesy Breenspace, Sydney
Kate Murphy, The note, 2010
kate murphy at breenspace: the note
The latest work from one of the leading and more lateral of Australia’s video artists, Kate Murphy, is The note, a 10-minute, single-channel HD video installation in 5.1 surround sound. According to the Breenspace website, the work was conceived when the artist “read a distant relative’s suicide letter. Murphy asked composer Basil Hogios to develop a musical composition based on every word written in this letter.” The result is an aurally immersive video of a mezzo soprano singing in an empty theatre. Kate Murphy, The note, Breenspace, 289 Young St, Waterloo, Sydney, March 12-April 17 www.breenspace.com
Major bushfires bring increased pain each year and revive memories of earlier devastating fires cruelly etched in the psyches of many Australian families. Choreographer Katrina Lazaroff's family is one of these: her first full-length dance work, Pomona Road, reflects on the enduring physical and emotional consequences of the Ash Wednesday bushfire in 1980, but in the end, says Lazaroff, it's a dance theatre work about family.
Lazaroff is a dancer, choreographer, rehearsal director and dance educator who graduated with an Honours in Dance from WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) in 2001, performed with Buzz Dance Theatre in Perth in 2001, and in 2006 and 2008 with Leigh Warren & Dancers worked as rehearsal director and assistant to the choreographer. She has been Artistic Director of the Youth Dance Festival 2008 (Ausdance ACT), choreographed for Fresh Bred—SA Youth Dance Ensemble, and worked with Restless Dance Company as a choreographic mentor on Debut 1 & 2. She is currently working as a choreographer and performer with Adelaide's Patch Theatre Company and teaches company class for Australian Dance Theatre. For Lazaroff, the hour-long Pomona Road is “a huge work”, an opportunity to create a totality that draws on her artistic experience and family life and allows her to embrace a wide range of means with which to realise her vision.
In Pomona Road Lazaroff employs dance, theatre and visual and audio design to evoke the enduring suffering and the rebuildling of lives and a sense of home. Unusually for a principally dance work, she also incorporates documentary material—recorded interviews from family and community members. Not surprisingly then the show's press release declares it “new Australian documentary dance.” Certainly Lucy Guerin's Structure and Sadness is rooted in the reality of the 1983 collapse of Melbourne's Westgate Bridge, but it's not a documentary work per se. Banagarra Dance Theatre, on the other hand, has works in its repertoire based on painful social realities, but the label 'documentary' is not apt.
Pomona Road, photo Katrina Lazaroff
Lazaroff tells me that Pomona Road—in evolution since 2006 and with three stages of development—was never intended as a comment specifically on the social and emotional impact of bushfires. Her first impulse was to explore family, “where we come from.” Stage one addressed her relationship with her sister (“sibling rivalry, kooky and a bit sinister”), and stage two father-son interaction (drawing on her own family and the experience of her dancers). It was while working on stage three and addressing the whole family that she discovered that the fire experience provided a meaningful framework for the exploration of family life. The Ash Wednesday starting point offered the beginnings “of a journey and a focus on loss—of home, place, identity. And the pain of starting again—the parents tackling it, the kids bumping along.” By 2009, says Lazaroff, the fire scenario had taken over.
Lazaroff decided that she wanted to make a dance work that was documentary in character, capturing the feelings of loss to fire. To this end she interviewed her parents about Ash Wednesday 1980 and victims of the subsequent 1983 Ash Wednesday. She thinks that “feelings and relationships can be sensed” through these voices which the audience hear—sometimes on their own, sometimes in tandem with the dance. The dancers, playing members of a family, also speak, but not in a conventionally scripted fashion, their utterances a form of vocal movement—family bickering, a song, familiar expressions. Lazaroff says that in stage three of the work's development she learned to give space to the recorded voiceovers, “to let them come first, and provide continuity.”
Asked about her choreographic style, Lazaroff says it's rooted in the contemporay dance which has been her life. However, the dancers create “recognisable characters whose gestures and character traits fuse fluidly with the dance language.”
Kerry Reid's set for Pomona Road comprises simple timber structures (originally made by Lazaroff's partner from materials from her mother's verandah for the stage three development, but now re-made and evocative of her father and his fence contracting business) and large hanging sheets of white paper that receive the images from two powerful projectors that wash the whole stage with impressionistic, 'textural images of bush and fire.” With Nick Mollison's lighting and projections, Lazaroff hopes that substantial depth of field will be created.
Lazaroff describes the sound design for Pomona Road as “highly collaborative, with a lot of give and take” in its making with Sascha Budimski's score comprising “sound effects, hums, drones, voiceovers, rhythm beats and Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street”, the 1978 hit which her father played frequently.
I ask Lazaroff what creating Pomona Road has done for her. “It's been a moving experience, looking back into family history and seeing that there were many more things that happened to us than I realised. As an artist I feel it's set me free.”
inSPACE Program, Pomona Road, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, April 21-24. Pomona Road was part of inSPACE:development in 2009.
Joanna Dudley and Dirk Dresselhaus AKA Schneider TM, Louis & Bebe
image courtesy the artists
Joanna Dudley and Dirk Dresselhaus AKA Schneider TM, Louis & Bebe
There are many Australian artists based in or working regularly in Berlin: Barrie Kosky, Benedict Andrews, Paul Gazzola, musicians Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas, media artist Jordana Maisie, dancer and choreographer Adam Linder (see RT95) and live art performer Sarah-Jane Norman are just a few who have appeared in the pages of RealTime. One we should know more about is innovative director, performer and singer Jo Dudley. On a brief visit to Sydney recently she dropped into the RealTime office to tell me about her latest work, Louis & Bebe, inspired in part by electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron.
Dudley choreographs, makes installations and collaborates on music theatre works. Her most recent creation, with designer Rufus Didwiszus and electro pop/noise impro composer-musician Schneider TM (Dirk Dresselhaus), is Louis & Bebe. It will appear at the Sophiensaele (where it premiered last year), Berlin, April 15-17, for IETM [International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts]. The video excerpts on Dudley’s website convey some of the work’s musical and physical subtleties and viscerality.
Dudley’s principal music theatre collaborator is Didwiszus. Their work The Scorpionfish was part of the 2008 OzAsia Festival in Adelaide [see RT82]. Another work, Who Killed Cock Robin, was performed with the Flemish vocal ensemble Capilla Flamenca and Dudley’s sound installation Tom’s Song for music boxes and LP players was presented at the 2006 Sonambiente Festival, Berlin [see RT74].
Joanna Dudley and Dirk Dresselhaus AKA Schneider TM, Louis & Bebe
image courtesy the artists
Joanna Dudley and Dirk Dresselhaus AKA Schneider TM, Louis & Bebe
Dudley has studied traditional Japanese music in Tokyo and traditional dance and music in Java, and recently created the choreography for the opera Eugene Onegin directed by leading German playwright Falk Richter and conducted by Seiji Ozawa for Tokyo Opera Nomori and the Vienna State Opera. Dudley has also worked with Sasha Waltz, Thomas Ostermeier, Les Ballets C de la B, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Heiner Goebbels.
Louis & Bebe (1 couple, 3 lives, 3 deaths) is inspired by “forgotten pioneers of electronic music”, the Americans Louis and Bebe Barron who worked with magnetic tape to create distinctive sounds—later regarded as music—which brought them into contact with John Cage, Maya Deren, Morton Feldman and others. The couple also created the ‘electronic tonalities’ score for the 1956 sci-fi feature film, Forbidden Planet.
Dudley says that Louis & Bebe is not a literal account of the work, or the lives, of the Barrons, “we had to abstract it.” A particular focus in this music theatre work is the creation and death of a sound, and the parallel life of the soul. The work moves through three phases: childhood (The Landing, Reaching for the Red Star Sky), full-blown life (Garden, portraits of a Zoomorph couple), and death (Graveyard, A Night with Two Moons). In these worlds dense with sound, “there’s not much movement”, says Dudley, “it’s like still images—snap-shotttish.” The images seen in stills from the production are striking: in Garden the couple wear long-beaked masks inspired by Max Ernst images and symbolic of “soul, flight and heaven.” In Graveyard there’s a similar bird image (“a particular stork that eats dead animals”) in an eerily beautiful altar.
Other than a 20kg bell, small bells and some foliage, the space for Louis & Bebe, says Dudley, is a stripped back Sophiensaele—where the performance “works beautifully.” It would be wonderful if Australians could see more of the creations of Dudley and her collaborators at a moment when music theatre here looks to be enjoying revived promise.
Jo Dudley, Louis & Bebe, Sophiensaele, Berlin, April 15-17; www.joannadudley.com
Recently in RealTime, Jack Sargeant (see RT95) and Mike Walsh (see RT95) have argued for the critical discussion of Australian feature films to start incorporating the ‘invisible’: the B-grade, genre or Asian films that are screening to audiences at festivals like MUFF (Melbourne Underground Film Festival) or multiplexes in the suburbs to NESB audiences—the films not funded by Screen Australia, ones that tend to fall off the radar. These films are also gaining a following via the networking power of Facebook: even in early production, you can become a Fan, tracing the film as it’s being made, finding out about festival screenings, looking forward to its DVD release.
Dave de Vries’ feature film debut is a good example. Made on a self-raised budget of around quarter of a million dollars, Carmilla Hyde is a vamped up revenge flick that won Best Feature at the South Australian Screen Awards in March after winning Best Guerilla Feature and Best Supporting Actress (Georgii Speakman) at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. Now it's been selected for the International Film Festival South Africa 2010. It’s a film that begs an undergrad audience with lashings of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and girls in leather.
The central character Milly (Anni Lindner) is an androgynous looking and awkward woman, revealed to be a virgin, who spends most of her time in her room, reading, until drugged by her housemates in the callous hope of liberating her. Her alter ego Carmilla, is brought on by the mysterious machinations of her psychiatrist Dr Webster—who implants a trigger word when he hypnotises her, and introduces her to a special brand of red wine that, when sipped, unleashes the devil. The vengeful alter ego dons a long raven wig, red lipstick, fishnets and leather boots and is suddenly up for anything, including night-club stalking, back-alley sex and popping pills. The angel/whore dynamic is overtired, and nothing new is added here. It reminds me of the poor librarian in 80s videos who is turned into a goddess by losing the glasses, shaking her hair out of her ponytail and dancing in bike pants. It seems, as we watch Carmilla pash every girl in her sharehouse, and then observe her lasciviously watching a poledancer do a lapdance at a lesbian nightclub, that many scenes are about as tacky as when the lead singer in the band gropes all the starlets in a hiphop video. There’s lots of finger sucking and women having a go at the hubbly bubbly. It’s like watching soft-porn without the sex.
Writer-director de Vries comes from a background designing comics and he’s done well with the look of the film on a shoestring budget. At times it seems loosely based on Dangerous Liaisons (the Buffy version), with scheming women manipulating the desires of Milly (and her wooden lover Nathan [Cameron Hall]) and there’s the obvious titular reference to Jekyll and Hyde. The costume designer has gone to town—the women look at times like they have landed on some 70s sci-fi planet. The script, though, is full of holes, and the acting needs work. The psychiatrist, Dr Webster (Sam Tripodi), in particular, is so over the top that you half expect him to start rubbing his hands and cue an evil laugh. Perhaps that’s intentional but the serious subtext of the film—repressed memories of sexual abuse; men’s violation of women—makes it difficult to take. As the central character(s), Lindner lacks the experience to be able to transform from one character to another, without the help of costume and make-up. Unfortunately, the film’s premise (of altered states) brings to mind the brilliant United States of Tara, and Toni Collette’s completely convincing performance in bringing a number of personas to life; so much acting is in the head as well as the body. The music is so ‘dum da dum dum daaaaa’ that it reveals the mood of the scene before it’s even begun. And the film seems to slip between genres. With a lack of suspense, it doesn’t work as the ‘revenge thriller’ it’s hyped to be. The horror and sex are just glimpsed, not down and dirty enough to class as Ozploitation.
You get the feeling that de Vries needed someone to come in and help him with an honest appraisal. The script needs a good cut—the film could be chopped by a
third. There’s no really strong narrative drive. Characters have dialogue like: ‘We’re outta milk.’ ‘Okay.’ When Britt (Georgii Speakman) finds her friend bleeding in the shower, after a suicide attempt, she says, “Oh, you stupid bitch.” A man from the alley comes into the house and terrorises the women for no reason other than the chance for a gratuitous tit shot in the shower. The male characters are moronic at best. And then there’s the house. The characters appear to live in a magnificent stone cottage by the beach with endless rooms, yet none of them seem to work. Oh yes, one of them says she is a student. Perhaps the rental market is different in Adelaide.
There’s something depressing about a character who, when it’s revealed she has thrown off her shackles of repression, is transformed into a woman whose banal idea of a good time is to go through the motions, seducing all the women and men in the room, always under the watchful gaze of other men (including those behind the camera). As a fantasy it could have dealt with some more experimentation or imagination. Nevertheless, de Vries managed to raise the funds to make it. I imagine with a tighter script, a reigned-in focus and more funds in his pocket, he might come up with something special.
Carmilla Hyde, writer, director, producer David De Vries, producers Fiona De Caux, Tony Ganzis, Andrei Gostin, actors Anni Lindnee, Nina Pearce, Georgii Speakman, cinematographer Maxx Corkindale.
Carmilla Hyde will screen at the Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, dates to be announced. DVD and Blu-Ray copies will be available online from August 2010 at www.darkmirrorpictures.com
In a fascinating exercise in theatrical narration and with near agitprop urgency, Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender directly addresses the contemporary rift in family intimacy wrought by two forces: the premature transformation of girls into women and the fear of sexually abusive fathers.
The play is inspired by, but is not an adaptation of, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (408-6 BC). Pressured by an army approaching murderous revolt, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, sacrifices his daughter so that the gods will provide the winds to drive his stilled fleet to Troy to retrieve the abducted Helen, wife of his brother Menelaus. Euripides’ enduring account is complexly tragic, played out in a field of constantly shifting motives and loyalties. The playwright’s achievement lies in revealing that however much the gods can be invoked to rationalise human actions, the choices made are actually less clearly motivated—they are personal, social and, not least, political—and often not reliable—even Iphigenia changes her mind, ‘heroically’ (as it is often put) accepting her father’s will and going to her death. Filial love is brutally compromised by political pragmatism—Agamemnon still loves his daughter, but not enough to let her live and put at risk his power and the lives of the rest of his family.
In Holloway’s play, the setting is abstractly contemporary—a raised green pentagonal lawn bordered by a low perspex fence has something of the feel of a vividly illuminated specimen case into which we peer, watching what soon appears to be a nasty experiment. In this laboratory a man (Colin Moody) struggles to tell, or to invent, his story, prompted, cajoled and corrected by a chorus-like male (Arky Michael) and female (Kris McQuade) pair. The constant pressure and rapid alternations in the dialogue heighten a sense of improvisation apt for an experiment in which a man conjures a ‘what if?’ world where a father might sacrifice his daughter for the greater good of the community.
The language, as usual with Holloway, is sharply observed everyday Australian frequently delivered in staccato one line utterances, outbursts and interruptions yielding a constant sense of uncertainty, interrogation and of thinking aloud that is nonetheless cumulatively fluent and poetic in its repetitions and reworkings—if requiring an alert audience ear. But it’s more than a matter of style: Holloway’s language reveals from the play’s very beginning that the world we are observing is a socially and imaginatively constructed one and, initially chronologically ambiguous. The diction of the man and his prompters suggests the world of Homer or Virgil (“the sun hits the dust in the air…like pillars of fine, floating flakes of snow…they are ripped apart into…into…Chaos?). The trio’s narrative accelerates: the man rushes home to find another between his wife’s legs—jealousy and anger threaten—but it’s a doctor delivering their daughter. Even so, ambiguity persists: “Her fur and hooves. Now I see her hooves. Wet with placenta and blood.” The sense of a mythic world—with the line between man and animal blurred—is suddenly amplified. Uncertain of his feelings—love? joy?—the man arrives, with prompting, at a state where he experiences “amazing and yet terrible flashes of what is to come and suddenly I am filled with an immense and overwhelming sense of love and horror.” In a matter of minutes the play’s dynamic (of a world being invented) and its layering of the epic and the domestic, of human and animal, and of an event foretold, but not revealed, are immersively at work.
A burst of celebratory optimism—”I think it is the best time to bring a little girl into the world”—details the many opportunities for women these days (run marathons, banks, corporations, visit a strip club, “sacrifice herself for…some great cause”). But it’s immediately subverted by a list of threats to young girls that requires their protection—”It’s almost impossible to keep your children safe these days.” “It’s scary.” “Yes.” “What might be done to them.” “Yes.” “To their little bodies.” “Their hooves. Their fur.” But ambivalence creeps in: “…they taste so good.” “They are succulent like nothing else.” “They get them fresh. Straight from the parks and homes and churches and schools and straight onto the plate for us.” In Matthew Lutton’s production this dialogue is delivered by the man and the male prompter (the printed script does not specify who says what, leaving it a directorial choice), making the inference of co-existing and conflicting male desires unavoidable.
The next dialogue between the two men, where the father expresses pleasure in playing with his daughter and his attempt to understand what it is that passes between them, is undercut respectively by the prompter’s suspicions of sexual interference and his incomprehension of what the father sees as the spiritual nature of the relationship. The prompter is limited strictly to “Right,” “Sure”, “What”, but Arky Michael wrings every shade of suggestiveness and concern from them until the father erupts: “Everyone’s first thought goes to dad teaches daughter how to fuck and suck because that…all that…that is what they know.”
Love Me Tender, Thin Ice Productions
photo Jon Green
Love Me Tender, Thin Ice Productions
Subsequently, the man waters the lawn with a sprinkler. Amidst the spray, his wife (Belinda McClory) dances at a party to a chorus of cries directed at young girls: “Don’t forget your cut-off top!” “Got to show that cute little midriff!” “Are your g-strings showing?” The dance is increasingly and convulsively erotic until the wife collapses before her distant husband. She then becomes a pathetic figure, watching helplessly from the sidelines. She’s certainly no Clytemnestra, the dance suggesting she is complicit in the sexualisation of her daughter.
Having more than firmly established the doting father’s anxieties, Holloway now addresses the man’s public role; he’s a fire fighter chief whose wife wonders why “he has disappeared so much?” “Like he wants to confess some kind of thoughts to me.” “I can’t help but feel that something bad is going to come of all this.” Brief monologues are scattered between the dialogues, some delivered by a Chorus (played as a policeman here by Luke Hewitt), describing a fire-ruined landscape, a destroyed home, a lost girl, or is it an animal (“The ash stains her fur.”) This is the otherworld the father and the policeman occupy. As the fire mounts, the family gather with refugees at a swimming pool. The girl (now “ten-eleven twelve”) is there with “a boy that is a friend.” The father “[i]s standing there…knowing full well that there was nothing at the pool for them. Nothing but the anger of the gods.” He is anxious about “Not being off where his community needs him”, but what fills his mind and pours from his and the prompters’ mouths is a long, tirading litany of all the fears in him that his daughter’s almost pubescent body in a “tight little bikini” elicits—teen dance troupes, increasingly early physical maturation, a daughter catching a father cock-in-hand watching porn, predators at the pool, boy or boyfriend? “And suddenly he wants to let the fire burn!…to burn out all the psychos and freaks and degenerates because the world is fucked!”
Again, this is teamwork, urged on by the man’s prompters. He asks, “Is that about right?” They reply, “Absolutely.” He then feels compelled to sacrifice his daughter. A live lamb, representing the daughter, is brought on stage. The policeman demonstrates elaborately how to cut its throat. The wife, wet, quivering, sobbing, watches from the side. The father exits with the lamb. The policeman recites his own tale of shooting of wounded deer during the fire. The father returns, bloodied from the sacrifice to recount the death of his daughter in more literal terms: cries on the radio from the community for help had drowned out the screams of his daughter trapped in “the car he bought her so she could learn to drive.” He cannot or rather will not save her, watches her die, turning instead to the community “[w]here he needs to be a hero”, but crumbles into the chaos prefigured at the play’s opening. In this penultimate scene Colin Moody allows the father louder passion and pain than previously: perhaps they might have conveyed more if delivered quietly. The play ends with the sadly fatalistic American folk song “I am weary (let me rest)”; in the script it’s described as “Epilogue: Iphigenia replies…” She has accepted her fate.
Love Me Tender is an unusual theatrical experience. The non-literal setting and the manner in which the dialogue and parallel worlds are team-constructed generate a palpable distancing effect which is counterbalanced by a sense of urgency and suspense and of having to, as an audience, make the work intelligible—piecing together the shared first, second and third person accounts of characters and events. The spare, patterned blocking, the playing directly to the audience, the moments of song, the human-animal interplay and the inventive chorus model embodied in the two prompters collaborating with the man in his drive to psychosis aptly if never literally echo Greek tragedy. As a modern version of Euripides’ Iphigenia, the play portrays a like world, but instead of an army in revolt and gods to be appeased there’s a community obsessed with the vulnerability of children, their sexuality and the way it complicates father-daughter intimacy. The father, opting for responsibility to community, to save lives as a fire fighter, abandons his daughter. Ironically it is the same community’s pathological fears that have driven him to sacrifice the child he loves, if he still does. Love Me Tender is at once an indictment of the premature sexualisation of children and of the possible consequences of the fear of it—enacted as the sacrifice of love, not just of a life.
Although a memorable production with performances totally on top of the considerable demands of Holloway’s script, I was left with some doubts about the play. It’s a work by a man about a male plight, one worth exploring, but it does little for its female characters—the daughter is only referred to, save appearing as a lamb, and the mother an onstage cipher. Neither this Iphigenia nor this Clytemnestra can offer an account of their condition, nor defend themselves against the will of the men. They cannot challenge their fate without complicating the playwright’s thrust in what is essentially a monodrama, a very clever and timely one, and almost tragic—though the father is denied any insight into his condition. Love Me Tender’s dynamic is compelling, but in the end its reliance on the play of thematic oppositions into which the feminine is not allowed to intrude limits its capacity to speak beyond the contradictions forced on the father-daughter relationship. As an experiment, not just in submitting a man to the extremities of collective social pathology, but as an exercise in adventurous narrative form, Love Me Tender is exactly what Australian theatre needs.
For another modern version of Iphigenia in Aulis, one that keeps the female roles alive, take a look at novelist Barry Unsworth’s wonderful The Songs of the Kings in which the world of Agamemnon’s army is eerily imbued with contemporary corporate-speak.
Company B Belvoir, Griffin Theatre Company & Thin Ice: Love Me Tender, writer Tom Holloway, director Matthew Lutton, performers Colin Moody, Belinda McClory, Luke Hewitt, Kris McQuade, Arky Michael, design Adam Gardnir, lighting Karen Norris, sound Kelly Ryall; Belvoir St, Sydney, March 18-April 11, www.belvoir.com.au
SYDNEY PERFORMANCE MAKERS MATT PREST AND CLARE BRITTON’S NEW WORK IS HOLE IN THE WALL, DESCRIBED IN A PRESS RELEASE AS “A CONTEMPORARY LOVE ADVENTURE…A HIGHLY VISUAL AND EXPERIENTIAL THEATRE WORK THAT EXAMINES SPACE AND POPULAR NOTIONS OF HOME, BEAUTY, LOVE AND DESTRUCTION.” I SPOKE WITH PREST ABOUT HOW THESE LARGE THEMES WOULD BE REALISED AND IN WHAT WAY THE WORK WOULD BE “EXPERIENTIAL.”
These days, in contemporary performance and live art, “experiential” suggests that an audience will be more than engaged onlookers, becoming an actively creative component in the making of a show. In his report on the 2010 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver (p2), Alex Ferguson describes a swathe of productions in that festival engaging intimately with audiences: “The role of the spectator has been shifted from decipherer-of-meaning to co-creator of the theatrical event. Another way to put it is to say that interpretation has been subordinated to encounter, and that it is in the energy of the encounter that meaning is created, rather than having meaning encoded in the event beforehand by the artist.” Increasingly artists ask their audiences to follow rules, solve problems or make art, while others offer immmersive experiences that require willing physical submission, like enduring sensory deprivation. Of course, there is a long history of works that have mobilised audiences to create their effect (including, memorably, those of Sydney’s Gravity Feed) but the current moment is seeing such approaches multiply and rapidly diversify.
Prest explains that Hole in the Wall is “a continuation of The Tent”, his previous work, in which “the tent provided a focus for the audience experience.” The audience entered, sipped soup and absorbed a laterally-told tale, with puppets and film, about a curious male relationship. The Tent fused an engaging low-key realism with theatrical magic yielding a strange otherworldliness—a hint of the metaphysical. It appeared at the Next Wave Festival and Performance Space’s LiveWorks in 2008 and, fortuitously as you’ll see, in 2009 at Campbelltown Arts Centre.
For Hole in the Wall, Prest tells me, the artists have built “four rooms—four large boxes, domestic in feel, with loud wallpaper and trimmings like skirting boards. They’re stiflingly domestic but without clear function. They could be a bedroom, a study or a cupboard, but there’s no furniture.” Each room will house nine members of the audience, viewing the performance happening outside through a window or a wall that opens out. The rooms are on wheels, are moved by the audience and can become two rooms or one as they join up and Hole in the Wall, says Prest, then becomes “more about an overarching space. Each disorienting move reveals and reframes fragments in a suburban love story.” From within these rooms, through windows or open walls, the audience witness “the psychological, emotional world of a couple seeking the beauty of perfection—the home which will be everything they want—and the destructiveness in the lengths they might go to get there.”
Although drawing on the lives of Prest and Britton as a couple, the work is not autobiographical: “it’s more than ourselves,” says Prest, “but the tricky themes are pertinent to us.” Although there is text (written by Halcyon Mcleod, one of Britton’s partners in the performance group My Darling Patricia)—”monologues, dialogue, scenes”—Prest sees the emphasis in the show as being on the physical and the visual. “Physical as in presence: the delicacy with which the performer enters the space and negotiates with the audience.” He explains that much of the show has been developed on the floor, working with Melbourne-based director Hallie Shellam. Also involved in the show are multidisciplinary visual artist Danny Egger and sound designer and composer James Brown who is also working with Prest and Britton on the animated film which will be part of Hole in the Wall—”a puppet couple in naive looking stop-motion influenced by [Czech animator] Jan Svankmajer.”
Prest pays tribute to Campbelltown Arts Centre for its investment in Hole in the Wall (after it had hosted The Tent) with a four-week residency when the show was just an idea, at which early stage no government funding body would likely support it. Then Campbelltown Arts Centre, Performance Space and Next Wave Festival 2010 joined forces to co-commission Hole in the Wall with the financial assistance of an Opportunities for Young and Emerging Artists (OYEA) Initiative grant from the Australia Council. This means that Hole in the Wall will appear successively at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Next Wave 2010 in Melbourne, and Performance Space at CarriageWorks in Sydney, a wonderful opportunity for a new venture, not least one based on an intriguing performative and thematic premise.
The latest work from one of the leading and more lateral of Australia’s video artists, Kate Murphy, is The note, a 10-minute, single-channel HD video installation in 5.1 surround sound. According to the Breenspace website, the work was conceived when the artist “read a distant relative’s suicide letter. Murphy asked composer Basil Hogios to develop a musical composition based on every word written in this letter.” The result is an aurally immersive video of a mezzo soprano singing in an empty theatre. Kate Murphy, The note, Breenspace, 289 Young St, Waterloo, Sydney, March 12-April 17; www.breenspace.com. Kate Murphy and the MCA’s Rachel Kent will discuss the work on March 20, 3.00pm.
art for easter 1: song company, gethsemane
Atheists and agnostics can join Christians in a celebration of the art that constellates around Easter in Song Company’s Gethsemane. The company’s previous collaborations with choreographers Kate Champion and Shaun Parker offered us intense meditations from singers (themselves bravely and successfully integrated into the action) and dancers, attracting large, responsive audiences.
In a radically new approach this year, instead of the Tenebrae of Gesualdo there’ll be a new score from leading Australian composer Gerard Brophy, informed by a visit to India: “Gethsemane interprets the traditional Jeremiah lamentations from the Old Testament through modern-day accounts of life on the streets of Calcutta to create a contemporary meditation on poverty, abandonment and compassion” [Press Release]. The work, directed by Roland Peelman, will be performed by Song Company and Synergy Percussion with saxophonist Christina Leonard and choreography by Martin del Amo. Gethsemane, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, March 31; tour: Canberra: Albert Hall, March 21, Wollongong City Gallery, March 22; Bowral: Chevalier College Auditorium, March 24; Newcastle Conservatorium, March 25; Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre, March 27; Parramatta: Riverside Theatres, March 29; www.songcompany.com.au
art for easter 2: arvo pärt’s berlin mass
A special Easter Saturday performance of Arvo Pärt’s immersive Berlin Mass by Sydney Chamber Choir and the ensemble Ironwood will celebrate the composer’s 75th birthday. On the same generous program, directed by Paul Stanhope, there will be selections from Carlo Gesualdo’s Tenebrae and a work inspired by them, Scottish composer James MacMillan’s Tenebrae Responsories. Ironwood will also present a movement from Haydn’s Seven Last Words from the Cross. Via Crucis, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, April 3, www.sydneychamberchoir.org
Kerry Fox, Anamaria Marinca, Storm
image courtesy 23/5 Filmproduktion/Berlin
Kerry Fox, Anamaria Marinca, Storm
festival of german film: storm
Here’s early notice that the Festival of German Film looks particularly strong this year, with contributions from Michael Haneke (the eagerly anticipated The White Ribbon: village life unravelled by strange events before World War I), Margarethe von Trotta (Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen; a biopic of the composer and visionary) and the brilliant Fatih Akin in an unexpected comic turn, The Soup: “A run-down restaurant gets a fresh lease of life when the owner hires a temperamental new chef who alienates the regular customers, inadvertently turning the eatery into the toast of the ‘it’ crowd” [Press release].
Mediaeval history is addressed not only in von Trotta’s Vision but also Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan (Die Päpstin): “A 9th century woman of English extraction born in the German city of Ingelheim disguises herself as a man and rises through the Vatican ranks. More recent events are resurrected in a rarely told story in Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe, “The true story of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.”
Hans-Christian Schmid’s Storm is an impressive inclusion in the program. I was lucky to see a preview of this largely English language film starring Kerry Fox as a War Crimes Tribunal prosecutor thrown at short notice into the trial of a Serbian commander turned popular politician. What seems straightforward becomes quickly and dangerously complex in the manner of a good political thriller. But Schmid pays consistent attention to the realpolitik of the European Union’s attempts to defuse murderous local tensions by overriding ordinary citizens’ need to tell what happened. Storm effectively addresses the big political picture while focussing on the pain of players and victims, with Kerry Fox excellent as a lawyer who finds her own life trapped in these contradictions. Fox creates a laid back persona, droll, determined, often blunt, but increasingly alert to nuances that will test her own morality as events unfold. The fine widescreen cinematography embraces both intimate scenes and varied location choices. One pointer: as Storm unleashes its series of climactic events you certainly need to pay attention to the political and legal machinations as they play out. Storm is suspenseful, moving and memorable, its story an unusual and admirable choice. KG. Audi Festival of German Films: Chauvel Cinema/Palace Norton Street, Sydney, April 21-May 2; Palace Cinema Como/Palace Brighton Bay, Melbourne, April 22-May 2; Cinema Paradiso, Perth, April 22–26; Palace Centro, Brisbane, April 28–May 4; Palace Nova, Eastend Cinemas, Adelaide, May 7-May 9; www.goethe.de/australia
Kelton Pell, Geoff Kelso, Bindjareb Pinjarra
image courtesy the artists
Kelton Pell, Geoff Kelso, Bindjareb Pinjarra
bindjareb pinjarra: massacre & reconciliation
The 1995 stage production Bindjareb Pinjarra, an improvised work about the Pinjarra massacre created and performed by Isaac Drandic, Geoff Kelso, Sam Longley, Franklin Nannup, Kelton Pell and Phil Thomson has been revived for a season in Fremantle as part of Deckchair Theatre’s umbrella program. It focuses on “a major incident which occurred in October 1834 between Nyoongahs and the police at a place now known as Pinjarra, 90 kms south of Perth.” [For an excellent account of the massacre and associated history see www.pinjarramassacresite.com.] With a sense of both tragedy and humour, the equal mix of indigenous and non-indigenous makers aim “to show how black and white Australians are all part of the same history, and how by acknowledging that history we can move forward together to create a better future as one people.” Bindjareb Pinjarra, Victoria Hall, Fremantle, March 17-April 3; www.deckchairtheatre.com.au
arts house: future tense
This is a brief reminder that Melbourne’s Arts House has an excellent program of live art and contemporary performance from March 16 to April 3. Rivetting Australian groups Acrobat and Scattered Tacks [see RT90] are programmed alongside the intimate audience-interactive works of Rotozaza (Etiquette; Wondermart); Mem Morrison Company’s up-close wedding reception show (Ringside); and Helen Cole’s magical Collecting Fireworks, reminiscences of pivotal encounters with performance. Rotazaza, Mem Morrison Company and Helen Cole are all from the UK and give some indication of the expansive range of works that constitute live art. Arts House, Future Tense, Melbourne, March 16-April 3, http://artshouse.com.au
sydney dance company: new creations
The Sydney Dance Company’s double bill New Creations opens March 23 with 6 Breaths by artistic director Rafael Bonachela and Are We That We Are by young Berlin-based Australian dancer (most recently with Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods) and choreographer Adam Linder. Read the RealTime interview with Linder about his career and his new work with its focus on altered states of being. Sydney Dance Company, New Creations, Sydney Theatre, opens March 23; www.sydneydancecompany.com
THE YOUNG WOMAN SEEMED DUBIOUS ABOUT SELLING ME A TICKET: “YOU KNOW THIS IS A FILM FOR INDIANS? BOLLYWOOD AND ALL THAT?”
The movie in question was the Hindi blockbuster My Name is Khan. It opened recently at number 10 at the Australian box office with the second highest per screen average of any film that week, a fact that film website Urban Cinefile remarked upon despite its having “been released under the radar” (which I take to mean that, like all Hindi films, it was not reviewed in any of the mainstream media, including Urban Cinefile). It seems that our film critics, taking their lead perhaps from the Victorian Police, are still in denial over the existence of Indians in our midst.
In the last issue of RealTime, Jack Sargeant made a case for what he labelled Australia’s invisible cinema—self-funded horror movies made by young wannabes [RT95,]. But here is a much more significant invisible cinema, one which equally puts large numbers of bums on seats.
By my reckoning, 19 Indian films were released in Australian cinemas last year, grossing around $3.5 million. The marginalisation of these films by the mainstream critical establishment is typical not only of Indian films but also of Chinese films such as Bodyguards and Assassins or Overheard, which are also consistently released these days in subtitled versions in Australian multiplexes.
The increased prominence of these films is in direct proportion to the growth of Asian communities in Australia. At the last census almost 1.7 million people identified themselves as having Asian ancestry. In central Melbourne alone, over 31% of the population was of Asian extraction.
Surely the cinema has a role to play in incorporating new communities within Australian society, rather than perpetuating the exclusionary racist bases of what has traditionally been defined as Australian.
A sub-titled French film like A Prophet can be released with fewer prints than My Name is Khan and take much less at the box office but David and Margaret will be all over it. European films fit comfortably into established arthouse distribution and exhibition channels and conventional modes of critical reception. There is still the assumption, however, that popular sub-titled Asian films, and by extension their audiences, exist within a diasporic ghetto whose walls cannot and probably should not be breached. On leaving the cinema after My Name is Khan, I overheard two ushers discussing the need for care with the audience because “many of them probably won’t speak English.”
On the contrary, the family of Sikhs who eagerly came over to discuss the film spoke better English than me. I am learning that such conversations are not uncommon when attending Indian films, where South Asian audiences are often eager to embrace anyone who shows curiosity about their cultural pleasures.
These issues have a particular saliency when thinking about My Name is Khan, a film which deals with the tribulations of Indians living in western societies. It tells the story of Rizwan Khan, an Indian Muslim living in the United States. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, giving Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan the opportunity to channel Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump. In the aftermath of September 11, Rizwan and his family suffer vicious attacks and exclusion from the white majority. He sets off to wander the US in search of the President so he can proclaim to him, “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.” This becomes an anthem embraced by the marginalised and the excluded who now stand up for their place in society.
The film is made by India’s leading commercial producer-director, Karan Johar. (Spell-check has just suggested to me that I substitute “jihad” for his surname. Note to Bill Gates: You might want to get that fixed.) Johar has become something of a specialist in making films set in the US. Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Not Be, 2003) is set entirely in New York and has Shah Rukh Khan performing an Indianised version of Pretty Woman in front of an American flag. Last year Johar’s Dharma Productions made Dostana, a sex comedy set among hedonistic Indian expatriates in Miami.
It should be no news that commercial Hindi films are often set in western cities. Australian governments are almost as eager to attract Indian film crews as they are to attract Indian students. Within Hindi cinema, these cities are then transformed into glamorous locales full of Indians living the cosmopolitan good life, synthesising the freedoms of modernity with their cultural traditions. America, in a film like My Name is Khan, functions as the arena in which Indians’ globalised aspirations are played out. A threat to it is therefore a threat to India. The nightmare which this film confronts is that the flaws of communal prejudice in India’s own past are suddenly reasserted in a fantasyland of its future.
Why am I thought to be aberrant for liking these films? Hindi cinema cranks up style and emotion beyond a point generally thought to be acceptable in the drier and more ironic reaches of western cinema. When was the last time you saw George Clooney cry? Well, barely a scene goes past in Hindi film without tears.
And we all know that Bollywood cinema commits the unpardonable sin of singing and dancing. It is a cinema which defies social realism in favour of a more utopian take on the world. At one point in My Name is Khan, someone gives Rizwan a video camera, telling him that when you are scared, it is easier to look at the world on a screen and then it’s easier to handle.
The film’s energy comes partially from its craziness as it hoovers up everything in its path—Guantanamo Bay, Hurricane Katrina, Barack Obama’s election—and puts it at the service of a highly charged set of emotions constantly on the verge of spiralling out of control. And finally, this is the major attraction of Bollywood: the assertion that humanity is, at its core, a mass of emotion, and one of the major functions of cinema is its unique ability to reach to that core through heightened manipulations of style.
Let me turn to another foreign film which, by way of contrast, everyone has seen and upon which every critic has delivered an opinion. At one point in James Cameron’s Avatar the baddie confronts our hero and asks him, “How does it feel to betray your own race?” Not a bad question in a film which tries to set up a safe fantasy space for American liberals in Obama’s America to try out what it feels like to become a more righteous colour. Though, of course, Avatar is also an assertion of the continued dominance of the strong and the rich. The blue people embrace the leadership of the white guy just like Australian audiences shelled out $110 million to its American distributor.
For Australians the cinema has always asked us to betray, if not our race, then at least our country by imagining other places that are more modern and filled with strange and fantastic aliens we call movie stars. Perhaps it is time to move beyond the conservative limitations of these fantasies and to truly betray our race if this means enlarging our sense of what the world and Australia might contain.
The presence of popular Indian and Chinese cinemas in our multiplexes offers the possibilities of including and embracing what has been seen, for too long, as external to Australia. To be Australian, after all, has always been to be open to the influences of the new and the unAustralian.
Originally published in the March 15, 2010 online edition.
IN A CHILLING CLIMACTIC MOMENT IN LAKE MUNGO, A FEATURE FILM BY JOEL ANDERSON, AN ADOLESCENT GIRL COMES FACE TO FACE AT NIGHT WITH HER ZOMBIE-ISH SELF ON THE BED OF DRIED-OUT LAKE MUNGO IN FAR SOUTH-WESTERN NEW SOUTH WALES. LIKE OTHER EVENTS IN THIS GRIM MOCK INVESTIGATIVE DOCUMENTARY, THE ‘EVIDENCE’ IS MEDIATED BY AV TECHNOLOGY. HERE WE WITNESS NOT THE ACTUAL EVENT BUT THE GIRL’S OWN MOBILE PHONE RECORDING OF HER FATE. ELSEWHERE IN THE FILM, AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS, FAKED AND NOT, LEND CREDENCE TO THE FACTICITY OF A POSSIBLE HAUNTING OF HER FAMILY BY THE GIRL. SHE HAD DROWNED IN A LAKE NEAR THE TOWN OF ARARAT NOT LONG AFTER HER LAKE MUNGO TRAUMA.
In Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski’s land(sound)scape, the same Lake Mungo is the subject of a media art installation that contemplatively conjures a largely forgotten 19th-century moment, when migrant Chinese labourers were contracted to build sheep station sheds from soon to be exhausted local cypress pine forests. The Chinese found the strange, weather-sculpted shapes of Lake Mungo’s surface oddly familiar, seeing in them the ‘Walls of China’, a naming that persists to this day.
lake mungo, land[sound]scapes, installation, josephine starrs and leon cmielewski, 2009
Land(sound)scape is not about ghosts but the way the work resurrects the past is curiously unsettling as you sit in a former Tea House in the Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour, Sydney. The room is largely made of timber, the names that echo through it are Chinese and we observe the land they inhabited and which evoked for them a distant home.
Sunlight is softly filtered through the room’s blue-tinted windows. On either side of the viewer are two large screens on which land(sound)scape’s gentle disorientations are generated by the contrasting movement of images. On one screen photographs of the uninhabited Lake Mungo landscape pulse slowly, and uncoventionally, right to left revealing strange figurations, buttes, small canyons, empty horizons. On the other, the orientation is aerial, a satellite point of view. We look down steeply onto the white beds of Lake Mungo, stark surrounding country and patches of green vegetation. Our internal movement feels like a slow dance in the air as we shift from the horizontal plane of the first screen to the verticality of the second.
Amid the factual if lyrical interplay of photographs, satellite images and the spoken, layered lists of immigrant and ship names and arrival dates (in Mandarin and Cantonese-inflected English) we notice something quite unexpected—the vegetation here and there spells out words and phrases that eventually form a poem. This quietly fanciful insertion generates another temporal and spatial layer—the evocation of a contemporary Chinese sensibilty nostalgic for a fading past. The artists explain: “[the immigrants] may have been homesick and wished to give the landscape a Chinese name as the formations do resemble some of the eroded outer walls in China. The text incorporated in the satellite image video, ‘I only wish to face the sea,’ is from a poem by the Chinese poet Hai Zi, 1964-1989. His poetry is about the disappearing Chinese landscape, and expresses nostalgia for the traditional countryside brought about by the large scale migration from the country to the cities.”
satellite view, land[sound]scapes installation, josephine starrs and leon cmielewski, 2009
In another unsettling moment, the crackling of fire breaks through the Lake Mungo ambience, “refer[ring] to what is known as the Lake Mungo Magnetic excursion; evidence of a change in the earth’s magnetic field 30,000 years ago which has been discovered in the ancient Aboriginal fireplaces found at Lake Mungo.” The subtle perceptual shifts that land(sound)scape subject us to now vibrate with a long ago tilting of the earth’s axis while we contemplate much more recent cultural history.
Lake Mungo is a significant archaeological site of ancient Aboriginal life, dating back at least 40,000 years. In land(sound)scape that history is not central to the work but it is acknowledged, while in the film Lake Mungo it’s absent—the landscape is simply eerie, haunted by a palpable image of death to come. Either the filmmaker was ignorant of Lake Mungo’s cultural significance or chose to sidestep it. A pity, as its deep history would seem an asset for a horror film—a landscape already populated with spirits. Perhaps the issues and negotiations entailed might have been too much to handle in a whitefella ghost story.
Martin Sharpe, David Pledger, Rosie Traynor, Lake Mungo
Mungo Productions, 2009
Martin Sharpe, David Pledger, Rosie Traynor, Lake Mungo
For an Australian horror film Lake Mungo is atypically restrained. Although over-extended and with just too many loose ends, its quiet, consistent pressure on the viewer to read images and attend to words closely makes us more than mere observers. We look repeatedly and forensically into photographs and videos. At the same time the film’s cinematography oscillates between its ‘documentary’ content (interviews, news and home movie footage) and sustained, immersive images of the night sky, of the time lapse turn of the stars and beautiful light patterns on the cusp between day and night. While adding to a pervasive sense of eeriness, of vast spaces and forces beyond the haunted confines of the home, these moments lend the film a measured, reflective quality supported by the consistency of the documentary tone and the realistic un-melodramatic performances (including Not Yet It’s Difficult (NYID)’s David Pledger as the father)—most apparently improvised.
But what Lake Mungo imparts is not revelatory: means are more interesting than ends. The dead girl’s remorse over her secret sex life with a couple-next-door is the underlying motive for her suicide. Sexual abuse is a harsh reality, but its pervasiveness as a too-convenient trope in theatre and film plots mostly exhausts it of any meaning beyond itself. This relieves artists from addressing complexity of character, which remains simply mysterious. Of course, that’s the appeal of much of the horror genre, a therapeutic revelling in and acceptance of the inexplicable, here embodied in Lake Mungo as a place where, simply, very strange things can happen. The 40,000 year-old remains of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady are not invoked, nor the land’s inheritors, the Barkindji, Nyiampaa and Mutthi Mutthi peoples who today manage the Mungo National Park with the NSW Government.
Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo is located firmly in a European tradition of ghost tales—specifically ones tied to visual technologies. The opening credits comprise Edwardian-styled, sepia-tinted photographs of ghostly figures and ectoplasmic outpourings, locating the narrative immediately in the contested arena of documentation and fakery. But true to the genre in general, the otherworld is a place of fear, a limbo of guilt: the girl haunts her family into discovering the shame that killed her. The otherworld of Aboriginal Dreaming, however, is home to good spirits and bad, a place actually made explicable through inherited knowledge rooted in the land.
Doubtless, this landscape will inspire more art projects. A notable earlier one was Sydney performer Tess de Quincey’s Lake Mungo Project, Square of Infinity (1991-94) which premiered in the lake bed and was made into a film, the live solo performance entitled is (1994) and the touring production is.2 (1995). De Quincey seemed to evoke through the almost still movement of one body the expanded sense of time and space associated with this place.
While Anderson’s fascinating film uses Lake Mungo for its title and as the location for a key narrative turning-point, a meaningful connection between plot and site, culturally, thematically and cinematographically, is not made. It might be a lot to ask of a popular suspense horror film, but its intelligence, not least about ways of seeing, is so evident that it’s surprising a deeper connection with the site wasn’t made.
Of course, Starrs and Cmielewski’s land(sound)scapes has none of the constraints attached to feature filmmaking and these are works of very different scale and intent. Land(sound)scapes embraces Lake Mungo directly, allows us to take it in and reorients that perspective, visually and historically. It tells a story—of 19th-century migration, with hints of ancient time—in the broadest terms, but the narrative is found in standing between the two screens, in the turn of head and body, and landscape, and in the roll call of the long dead—not ghosts, but newly remembered and ever present.
Land(sound)scape was originally developed for the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial. In 2010 it was a Chinese New Year event presented by Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski are Sydney-based artists: http://lx.sysx.org.
land(sound)scape, Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, voices Wendy Ju, Jenny Ng, Lionel Bawden, HD video editing Greg Ferris; Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour, Sydney, Feb 12-28
Lake Mungo was shown at the 2009 Sydney and Brisbane Film Festivals and is to be remade in the US for Paramount Vantage.
Lake Mungo, writer, director Joel Anderson, actors Talia Zucker, Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe, Steve Jodrell, cinematography John Brawley, editor Bill Murphy, music David Paterson, Fernando Corona, production designer Penny Southgate, visual effects supervisor Mathew Mackereth, sound Anne Aucote, sound designer Craig Carter; producers George Nevile, David Rapsey, executive producers Bill Coleman, Gilbert George, Robert George, 87 minutes; www.lakemungo.com
Originally published in the March 15, 2010 online edition.
Curated by Dorkbot Sydney’s “Overlord” Pia van Gelder, the dorkbot-syd group show was a small, well-balanced exhibition presenting the recent experiments of Sydney’s creative tinkerers. I missed the crammed opening, instead opting for the artist talk several days later.
Reminiscent of a shrine, Samuel Bruce’s installation, Art is great to waste time before dying, was situated by the pillar in the centre of the room. The hand-constructed speaker box and cattle skull with embedded red LED flashed away, accompanied by a cloud of chaotic noise, an offering from the artist as a memento mori, a reminder that one day we all must die.
Warren Armstrong’s software application, Twitterphonicon, as the title suggests, drew on a range of Twitter tweets, identified by selected hashtags. Sonifications of phrases, created by mapping words to various general midi instruments, produced short monophonic melodies. The mapping—always a challenge when using streams of data—was far too simplistic, and I was left desiring more. However, the work became more promising during the artist’s talk when Armstrong read aloud a tweet, spoken in synchrony with the sonification. All the audience agreed: Twitterphonicon was destined for a performance poetry future.
Light Speed Sound #2, Melissa Hunt
photo Somaya Langley
Light Speed Sound #2, Melissa Hunt
Light Speed Sound #2, by Melissa Hunt was immediately accessible with little instruction. It utilised light dependent resistors hooked up directly to the motor of a toy turntable plus some circuit bending skills and assistance from Nick Wishart. Hunt has no-doubt created what numerous teenage bedroom DJs dream of at night—the ultimate air-turntable interface. Hours of fun for those who like to wave their hands in the air while manipulating sound.
Lukasz Karluk, with collaborator Gentleforce, created the most striking work of the exhibition. Partly due to its size and also to an inviting interface, tr-IO earned this accolade with its video projection of triangular patterns spanning one entire wall of the space. Constructed from three polypropylene pyramids, Reactivision symbols pasted on the bases, and complete with pulsing LED colours, no child or adult could resist picking up these objects. Reposition the pyramids on the plinth and the projected image (think Tetris crossbred with patterned doona cover design) altered colour spaces, pattern sizes and perceptions of direction and speed of movement. Hitting the nail on the head in terms of mapping, the work wasn’t so complex such that you’d wonder whether it was interactive at all. Neither was it too obvious: shifting an object just once wouldn’t entirely demystify the process.
Programmable Light Metronome is exactly what it purports to be. Composer Amanda Cole developed this system out of her need for a device that did not exist. Utilising fairy lights, an Ardiuno microcontroller and MaxMSP, the Programmable Light Metronome was essentially created to provide a visual cue for musicians who perform her compositions (which often consist of dual time signatures and resultant cross rhythms). As an artwork it appeared purely decorative; as part of a larger work it holds the potential to be more.
Niche, Tega Brain
photo Pia van Gelder
Niche, Tega Brain
Occupying the back corner, Tega Brain’s Niche effected the most engaging user interaction with a projection of imaginary plant life, allowing users to tread on it, watch it die and regenerate. The work teased out intrinsic behaviours in audience members: some stood back to watch the plants grow, others stamped their feet to kill them off as rapidly as possible. Listening to Brain speak about Niche was rewarding. Knowledgeable and technically adept, the artist expressed her wish to expand the work to incorporate rewarding various forms of audience behaviour. This work was unfortunately let down by the exhibition space. The marked floor masked the detail of the plants, while the projection shook as occupants of the venue moved about upstairs.
Having exhibited their works, I suspect the artists have lists of modifications and possible enhancements that they’d like to implement if they ever get the chance. As is frequently the case when discussing experimental electronic works suggestions for improvement are always proffered. The artist talk illustrated the fact that so often such works are proof of concept, and with access to better resources the quality and professionalism of the works would increase a thousand fold.
The risk in developing these kinds of experimental electronic works is that the creative focus becomes the making of the tool. As I walked away from the exhibition space, I was accompanied by the question, “When is the moment the instrument slips away and the art emerges”?
Dorkbot-Syd Group Show: People doing strange things with electricity, curator Pia van Gelder, artists Warren Armstrong, Tega Brain, Samuel Bruce, Amanda Cole, Melissa Hunt, Lukasz Karluk + Gentleforce and Gavin Smith. Serial Space, Sydney, Feb 10-13, http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net/
A RealTime-Performance Space Forum, In Place, Inner Place, will address the subject of place in an engrossing, informal discussion, drawing on but going beyond the works in Performance Space’s You Are Here: Place program. The forum will discuss shifting notions of place in urban development, digital media and imaginal psychology.
The forum will be an ‘in the round’ open conversation facilitated by Tony MacGregor [Head of Arts, Radio National]. Artists from You Are Here: Place [Alex Kershaw, Nigel Helyer, Martin del Amo, Gail Priest and Rosie Dennis] will be joined by Zanny Begg [co-curator, There Goes the Neighbourhood, an exhibition and book about Redfern; Performance Space, 2009] and Julie-Anne Long [a dancer-choreographer investigating the relationship between the city and its dance culture].
Our special guest is Peter Bishop who writes and teaches about media, transportation and new meanings of ‘place’; the western relationship to Tibet; western Buddhism; orientalism & postcolonialism; Depth Psychology and post-Jungian studies; reconciliation; and utopian imagining and hope. Peter is Associate Professor in Communication & Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. His excellent book, Bridge, about the functions and meanings of bridges around the world was published by Reaktion Books in 2009.
RealTime-Performance Space Open Forum, Performance Space Clubhouse, CarriageWorks, Sydney, TRACK 12, Wednesday 3 March, 6.30pm; FREE.
RealTime issue #95 Feb-March 2010 pg.
From the series Picnic, 2004, Masato Seto
courtesy the artist and the Japan Foundation
From the series Picnic, 2004, Masato Seto
Gazing at the Contemporary World, at the Japan Foundation Gallery, Sydney, is the sort of exhibition you would expect to see at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Praise must go to the Japan Foundation for bringing it to Australia. I cannot think of another survey exhibition of Japanese contemporary photography shown here in recent years. Unfortunately it’s on display for only two weeks, for there is much to learn from it.
The exhibition, curated by Rei Masuda, Curator National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is divided into two sections, one titled A Changing Society and the other Changing Landscapes. It contains 76 photographs from 23 photographers, some well known, many not. David Freeman, the Japan Foundation’s Coordinator for Arts & Culture, says the exhibition is attracting audiences because of the subject matter as opposed to the reputation of the artists.
On first impression the works appear quiet and understated. The photographers, whose approaches are quite diverse, seem to be whispering rather than shouting. They ask for a steadiness of gaze and an attentive mind.
To outsiders, Japan has always been tinged with exotic difference. But Gazing at the Contemporary World could not be further from exotic. Instead, it focuses on the mundane in everyday life. The infamous Japanese photographer of the erotic, Nobuyoshi Araki has asked, “Why photograph the totally ordinary everyday stuff when nothing is actually happening out there?” But in Gazing at the Contemporary World, what could be more mundane than to document the outside and inside of refrigerators? In his series Ice Box (1988), Tokuko Ushioda presents two pairs of photographs of refrigerators, which provoke contemplation about their very different owners’ lives.
Documentary forms predominate. To an Australian viewer, however, there is a poetic, perhaps spiritual, overlay that is not common in western photography. In his photograph Tokyo, from the series Nihon Mura (‘Japan Village’, 1979), Shuji Yamada portrays the city as a dark moonscape with a topsy-turvy skyline broken up by peremptory, jagged high-rise buildings. The only sign of light is that reflected by the roofs of buildings.
There is a distinct air of sadness and a sense of distance from the world pervading the images in Gazing at the Contemporary World. Perhaps it is the observational gaze Rei Masuda refers to in the exhibition title. Likewise, in some portraits by Hiroh Kikai, from the series Persona, the characters portrayed appear strangely unhappy in their presentation to the camera.
A performer of Butoh dance from the series Persona, Hiroh Kikai 2001
courtesy the artist and the Japan Foundation
A performer of Butoh dance from the series Persona, Hiroh Kikai 2001
The landscape is depicted as scarred and (mostly) devoid of human presence, sometimes due to industrial ‘advancement’: for instance, in Toshio Shibata’s two images from the series Quintessence of Japan (1989) and Norio Kobayashi’s poignant image of a large dead dog, revealed in the landscape after snow has melted, from Suburbs of Tokyo (1984). The ambitions of failed human endeavour are documented in the construction of high-rise buildings and bridges, particularly in Toshimi Kamiya’s unfinished bridge going nowhere, from the series Mirabilitas Tokyo (1987), and in Hitoshi Tsukiji’s impressions of looming concrete structures overwhelming any human scale in Urban Perspectives (1987–89).
Two series provide drama and emotional release. Masato Seto’s richly coloured Picnic (2004), portrays couples seated and lying in parks with an intimacy of contact not found in other images. Ryuji Miyamoto’s extraordinary photographs of Kobe after the Earthquake (1995) have vivid impact in their depiction of buildings and whole streets collapsed from the force of the disaster. These images speak metaphorically, in a way others do not, of the enormity of change Japan has been subjected to in recent times.
Sannomiya, Chuo-ku, from the series Kobe 1995 After the Earthquake, Ryuji Miyamoto
courtesy the artist and the Japan Foundation
Sannomiya, Chuo-ku, from the series Kobe 1995 After the Earthquake, Ryuji Miyamoto
In his essay, curator Rei Masuda details the important events in the history of photography in Japan at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s that brought about the rise of ‘konpora’ (which translates roughly as ‘contemporary’) photography. Gazing at the Contemporary World sheds light on the many trends in and influences on Australian photography over the same period. These comparable yet culturally very different histories could benefit from greater examination.
Gazing at the Contemporary World: Japanese Photography From the 1970s to the Present, Japan Foundation Gallery, Sydney Feb 22-March 5 2010
Jumper, leggings, hat and gloves no.19 a/w 2008-2009, Walter Van Beirendonck, The Endless Garment
HAVING SHAPED SUCH NOTABLE GRADUATES AS TONI MATICEVSKI, RMIT UNIVERSITY HAS CEMENTED A STELLAR REPUTATION IN DESIGN, PARTICULARLY IN FASHION AND TEXTILES. THE ENDLESS GARMENT EXHIBITION APPEARS UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF THE L’ORÉAL MELBOURNE FASHION FESTIVAL, WHERE THE SHOW CELEBRATES NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE ORIGINALITY OF DESIGNS. BY TAKING CUTTING-EDGE DESIGNER KNITWEAR OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RUNWAYS AND PLACING IT IN A GALLERY CONTEXT, READY-TO-WEAR APPROACHES SOMETHING AKIN TO HIGH ART.
Items have been sourced from 10 internationally renowned designers and contemporary artists who have employed revolutionary knitting machine technology to delve into new design options. The resulting exhibition is a wonderfully mottled mix tape with moods ranging from the pop-tastic styling of Walter Van Bierendonck, to the gothic and ethereal creations of Nikki Gabriel.
Knitting has come a long way since ‘granny chic’—the young urban movement that popularised handicrafts—usurped the yarn and needles from the Country Women’s Association. Mothball-scented crocheted blankets and doilies of old soon gave way to guerrilla knitters who began to graffiti public items and monuments with knitted street art some five years ago. In the last decade or so, advances in production technology have at once broadened the aesthetic scope for design and taken the artistry of knitting from rocking chair to factory. Curated by Robyn Healy and Ricarda Bigolin, both of RMIT’s Fashion School, the heroes among the high-end designer clothing of this exhibition are the machines that have reinvigorated knitwear design. In the words of the curators, “the exhibition studies the endless design possibilities offered by the new craft of machine knitting to progress design practices from efficiencies of production, fabrication details of surface and texture, to economy of materials.”
Casablanca, lily a/w 2005, Yoshiki Hishinuma, The Endless Garment
The machine process most defiantly steers knitting-craft away from outdated preconceptions. The WholeGarment® machine technology, pioneered by Japanese knitwear machine company Shima Seiki in 1995, has been utilised in the construction of many of the pieces in this exhibition. As its name suggests, the machine knits complete pieces, eliminating the time-consuming and laborious cut and sew process of garment construction. Designers use CAD (Computer Aided Design) to create a garment pattern, which is then saved and transferred to a knitting machine. Picture a sweater as three tubes: the torso, left and right sleeve—these are knitted simultaneously using three carrier yarns with back and front needle beds to create the tube shape. When knitting reaches the underarm seam the tubes are simply connected. Like some implausible machine from Willy Wonka’s factory, the garment emerges whole. A video projection by Antuong Nguyen demonstrates one of the machines at work. Watching the needles looping and bobbing elegantly is strangely enthralling—machinery in the perfect sync of a dance symphony. In a project for her PhD, co-curator Ricarda Brigolin provides an example of the technology with three jumpers knitted as a single connected piece, much like a magician’s handkerchief.
Displayed in a gallery, the pieces take on new life. On runway models at least, lavishly unwearable haute couture is tempered down and humanised. Of the 10 designers showcased, none have that catwalk caw more than Swedish knitwear designer Sandra Bucklund. An immense rippled black jacket is possibly as far from a Paton’s catalogue as you can get. Though like others in the exhibition, Bucklund is new to knitwear production having constructed her prior collections by hand on a made-to-measure basis. Her work distorts the natural silhouette of the body with origami folds and organic textures; her woollen garments here are stately, fit for Queen Armidala. It’s not surprising to see sci-fi get a nod. Recently the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) adopted WholeGarment® clothing as daywear for astronauts onboard its spacecraft.
Despite the technology, many of the designs look deceptively handmade. Nikki Gabriel, the other Australian representative in the exhibition and a studio textiles graduate of RMIT, has earned her chops designing for Akira Isogawa and Aurelio Costarello. Her work is intricately dark, almost as though it is spun by hand from a fine silk cobweb.
The Perfect Body, 2007, Freddie Robbins, machine knitted wool, 1920 x 1640 mm, produced through support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Royal College of Art Research Development Fund
photo Douglas Atfield
The Perfect Body, 2007, Freddie Robbins, machine knitted wool, 1920 x 1640 mm, produced through support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Royal College of Art Research Development Fund
Among big name fashion and knitwear designers is a British contemporary artist who uses knitting to explore ideas of domesticity, gender roles and the human condition. Freddie Robin’s life-sized simplified humans with nondescript faces peer from the sexless shadows of their knitted bodies. With titles like The Perfect Body, they explore ideas of standardisation and perfection made possible with what can be called the cold, computer aided technology of the knitting machine.
Across the room is Walter Van Beirendonck, an hirsute Belgian who has designed outfits for U2’s Popmart tour, t-shirts for Australian band The Avalanches, not to mention scores of costumes for theatre, ballet and film. His previous seasons of commercial street wear have a kooky graphic sensibility (his own distinctively bearded image often features while other t-shirts are emblazoned with statements like SEX CLOWN). His knitwear for men bears traces of the chunky brightness of his love for pop music which he has sampled with left of field ethnic and nomad references. Meanwhile, the trio behind rising London label Sibling give men’s knitwear a progressive tweak with gender challenging twists: twinsets are covered in bright leopard spot sequins, ‘Crosby’ cardies are adorned with pink glittering rats and their Breton sweater has a skull cleverly woven into the famous French horizontal lines.
Although the method of production is the unifying element between the ten very different artists, the machine process is often used in a way that hides evidence of itself. Displays detailing the technology unobtrusively inform the viewer of the process that allows for such extraordinary singularity and potential in the hands of designers and artists. Yoshiki Hishinuma’s garments often straddle distinctions between contemporary art, construction experiment and fashion. His Casablanca, lily a/w 2005, a peculiar green-tinged shawl most closely resembles a rare orchid from a Florida swamp or an art installation.
Issey Miyake’s A-POC project (t-shirts rolled out of a fabric baguette—that’s all I will say) must be seen to be believed, while fresh designs by Mark Fast, Cooperative Design and Italian designer, Saveiro Palatella complete the show.
The Endless Garment: The New Craft of Machine Knitting, curators Robyn Healy, Ricarda Bigolin, designers and artists Issey Miyake, Sandra Backlund, Walter Van Beirendonck, Cooperative Designs, Mark Fast, Nikki Gabriel, Yoshiki Hishinuma, Saverio Palatella, Freddie Robins, Sibling; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 12-March 21
Orginially published in the March 1, 2010 online edition
RRIGHT NOW THE EPICENTRE OF THE SLOW ART MOVEMENT MIGHT JUST BE HOVERING OVER THE MCA. ON LEVEL THREE OLAFUR ELIASSON ASKS US TO TAKE (YOUR) TIME AND UP ON THE FOURTH FLOOR, WHERE WE GATHER FOR A MEDIA BRIEFING, FRENCH VIDEO ARTIST SYLVIE BLOCHER PASSIONATELY EXTOLS THE VIRTUES OF PAYING ATTENTION TO THE SUBJECTS OF HER VIDEO PORTRAITS; THE ENCOUNTER WITH ANOTHER IS A PLACE TO GIVE PAUSE.
The value of investing time to listen and watch is something Blocher knows well. In this exhibition, we see the results of many years of work on her “living pictures”, a series of individual video portrait projects each designed around a different kind of encounter. As a rule, she does not choose her subjects but either advertises or asks the gallery commissioning her to make the choice. Some subjects require a lot of time—seven hours in the case of one of her recruits for Ecstasy in which she invited 15 Indian men to enter a range of ecstatic states. In this case she did choose her subjects (though randomly, often in the street) as she was told that if she advertised she’d be swamped. As for how she elucidated the transcendent states on display, Blocher remains cryptic: “I created a space of freedom, without moral constraints, where everything was possible and experimental. It was long and difficult…”
Taking in the eight rooms that comprise the exhibition, you’re acutely aware of the artist’s ‘presence.’ Not that you see her, or hear the questions she calls her “tools that touch people” or her responses to the subjects’ answers. Instead you deduce what might be happening between the two in this other time-frame from what unfolds before you on the screen and in the eyes of the subjects that intriguingly suggest another space beyond it.
The images are projected at large scale as single or two-channel installations, the latter with little, if any, separation between the screens. In each case the relationship between the bodies on screen is slightly different. In the series entitled What is Missing? (2010) the subject (mostly in head and shoulders) speaks to us directly. As each speaks, a second embodiment of the same person appears as if silently watching or simply listening to the speaking self. Time and place are absent. There are dissolves to close-up, slight changes of angle—nothing tricky to interrupt the train of thought. The people are of varying ages and types and appear before a unifying backdrop (the American flag or wallpaper patterns of filigree or camouflage). Notably, all appear comfortable, even emboldened, before the camera. At the conclusion of each statement, the subject gazes silently outwards.
Living Pictures / Je et Nous (I and We) “Imagine someone on the other side of the camera whom you will address in silence through your gaze,” Blocher told her subjects in I and We (2003, 55mins). One hundred residents from Beaudottes, one of the poorest towns in France were also asked to “write a sentence on solitude or beauty, topics we usually keep silent about and have the courage to be in front of the camera wearing a T-shirt with the sentence printed on it.” The result is a telling new take on the passing parade.
Among Blocher’s other collections are 10 self-made millionaires from Silicon Valley (Men in Gold, 2007, 36mins). These men, hand-picked by MOMA in San Francisco, are afforded more time and, again, Blocher’s technique allows us to see something else beyond their guarded revelations.
Living Pictures/What is Missing? (still) 2010, commissioned by Museum of Contempory Art, for C3West, Sylvie Blocher
Living Pictures/What is Missing? (still) 2010, commissioned by Museum of Contempory Art, for C3West, Sylvie Blocher
What Belongs to Them (2003, 36mins) features residents of New Orleans who signed up if they had something to say about slavery—economic and racial as well as psychological slavery. An African American man tells us about shooting a deer: waiting to identify its sex, aiming, how his bullet hit, how the animal fell. After he speaks, he is consumed by the pleasures of the hunt, of his prowess. As he tells us that the head of the buck now hangs on the wall of his garage, he is silent and looks out beyond the camera and we catch what might be regret or ambivalence or simply reflection on what he has just let slip to us and himself. The same uncertainty crosses the face of the millionaire as he wonders if his name engraved on a building or any trace of the possessions he has gathered will endure. “I hope so,” he says. “I hope the world is still here.”
In another room (Wo/Men in Uniform, 2007, 46mins), we meet members of the police force in Regina, the city with the highest crime rate in Canada. This time we see full bodies as well as close-ups.
“I work with the extreme complexity of bodies and my tools are not those used in journalism,” says Blocher. “My work consists of bringing to light an invisibility hidden behind social constructions and learnt conventions.” Here, as we might expect, the fixed faces leak fear: a rookie taking possession of her first revolver admits she practiced for a while in front of a mirror.
Perhaps most fascinating for the Australian audience is the material Blocher has gathered from a project in Penrith titled What Is Missing? (2010). “In the last four years, the MCA and Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest have worked closely with Blocher on C3 West: an innovative collaboration between artists, cultural institutions and businesses in Western Sydney” (MCA Media Release).
Here, Blocher says, “I began with the idea of what’s missing, which allowed me to use the popular form of a short video to highlight the internal conflicts between Penrith and the Panthers—the football club which since 1919 have shared their revenues with the community to help with health, education and culture but whose utopia is made shaky by the pressures to privatise their profits…I proposed to the Panthers that I bring their utopia up to date.”
The range of people who appear before the camera are as surprising as their revelations. Like the subjects of Andrew Urban’s gem of a TV series, Front Up (1995-2004), given time and patience, the taciturn Australian will express an eloquent depth of feeling.
An Aboriginal man tells the tragic story of his own and his brother’s forced removal and separation from their family. Contracting meningitis that led to his losing both sight and voice, the brother was permanently institutionalised. Now 50 years later the institution is to be sold for profit and the brother abandoned.
A teenager appearing in a t-shirt that reads “G F ck Y rs lf. Would you like to buy a vowel?” tentatively posits neo-Nazism as a way to deal with the growing populations of people who “should live like us,” while admitting, “Hatred is turning me into someone I don’t want to be.”
A middle-aged man makes a personal apology to Joern Utzon for the country’s lack of vision. A young girl has difficulty pronouncing “feminism” but gains strength as she declares, “What’s missing in Australia is a form of peace.” A Mexican immigrant would like to fight the absence of spirituality here by “learning how to speak to birds.”
Another fresh-faced boy is fearful of divisions in the community. Like many other interviewees in this series, to him the future appears bleak. He reports that fights will break out for no reason. “We are separating into groups that can’t communicate with each other, can’t even act with courtesy.” The only feelings he regrets are sadness and depression. “Tears are not necessary,” he says before quoting from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “… For you in my respect are all the world: / Then how can it be said I am alone, / When all the world is here to look on me?”
In Urban Stories (2005, 9mins and 46mins) in a small room, we come a little closer to what might be Sylvie Blocher’s process in selectively capturing her shifting reflections on the self. On a visit to the Nanling Guangzhou Triennale, the artist meets a village woman in the street who had never seen a foreigner. “She started to talk to me, to touch my clothes and my hair. I asked her if I could film her. The next day I placed a camera in front of the studio’s sofa and let the woman use my body as a kind of tool…The woman touched me like a child, like a sister, like a lover, like a mother. It was like a rite of alterity. I stopped her after nine minutes. I couldn’t take any more.”
Sylvie Blocher distils the intensity of such encounters into absorbing private made public visions that richly reward the time and attention the viewer invests in looking and listening to retrieve all that is missing.
Sylvie Blocher: What is Missing, MCA, Sydney, Feb 17-April 26.
The exhibition is presented concurrently at Penrith Regional Gallery & Lewers Bequest, where it features work for the City of Penrith by Campement Urbain, a Paris-based collective headed by Blocher and architect/urban planner Francois Daune. The exhibition at Penrith Regional Gallery runs February 13-April 4.
Originally published in the March 1, 2010 online edition.
90 TRILLION EMAILS…1.73 BILLION NET USERS…350 MILLION FACEBOOK PROFILES…234 MILLION WEBSITES…126 MILLION BLOGS …27.3 MILLION TWEETS…
Although the internet was designed to be a decentralized communications network with the ability to route around any blockage to ensure its information flows freely, ironically its success means governments are now planning to regulate it. Whether this filtering is presented as safeguarding children from violent or pornographic content, protecting adults from the excesses of online gambling, or attempting to stem copyright infringement, attempts at censorship are both ineffective and threaten civil liberties. As an artist, writer or producer working directly on the net, writing a blog, mashing text, graphics, audio, video or animation from pre-existing sources, creating derivative works, publishing an e-book, publicizing your creative practice, or even organizing collaborative events—you will be affected.
Practices such as remediating artworks, creating fake websites, challenging copyright, generating alternate Wiki entries, interventions or tactical media are becoming things of the past. South Australia just attempted to enact legislation that required anyone posting a political comment online during an election period to supply their real name and address or be fined up to AUS$1,250. Independent artists, bloggers or tweeters can no longer post anonymously or work under pseudonyms—so start saving up Yes Men and Boat People! Double standards are now, well, standard. Take the China vs Google example of censoring domestic search results and site blocking. While the world applauded Hilary Clinton slamming China, Iran and Saudi Arabia for lacking free speech and imposing “electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world's networks,” Western governments are intent on enforcing similar regulations. These fundamental threats to creative practice on the Internet are:
1: mandatory internet filtering
The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy will introduce legislation in March for a two-tiered system to filter all internet content in Australia at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) level. The first tier will be mandatory for all Australian internet users and will block “prohibited” material, with a second, optional tier directed at families. Implementation of this system is widely opposed as IT experts agree it will not block all banned sites; it will inadvertently block other sites; will slow down internet speeds; and the additional costs will be passed on to users!
There are no comparable ISP-level filtering (aka clean-feed) systems operating in any other western democracy. Germany has filtering requirements on search engines rather than ISPs; Italy requires all ISPs to block access to child pornography websites within six hours of being notified of them; some New Zealand ISPs voluntarily filter content to market themselves as family-friendly; and all US regulatory attempts have so far have been contested on the grounds of free speech.
The critical issue for our sector is that the list of “prohibited” content to be blocked will be secret—compiled “through a public complaints mechanism” and by the government itself. Given our Prime Minister's response on the Henson affair, I could conclude that content which opposed 'moral majority' attitudes to sexual practice and preference, or provided alternative or currently illegal views on social justice, immigration, or euthanasia—themes artists often investigate—could be added to the “list.”
2: anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA)
ACTA has been under negotiation for the past two years between the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia and others. It is a trade agreement specifically designed to enforce copyright and stop peer-to-peer sharing throughout signatory countries, with the next round of ACTA negotiations being held in Wellington, New Zealand in April this year. Future scenarios, if ACTA goes ahead, look bleak. Content sharing sites like YouTube, which currently streams over one billion videos per day, could not exist. On a more personal level any allegations of file sharing from a home user's account would allow an ISP to remove your net access and place you on a user black list. Visual and sound artists using or sharing copyrighted material, which is common in online practice, are ripe for prosecution.
3: net neutrality
This founding and governing principle of the internet safeguards the circulation of information, ensuring everyone has the same rights and freedom to access and produce information online regardless of their financial or social status. Without Net Neutrality, the internet will look more like packaged pay TV.
So who would want to change that? Large US telephone and cable companies including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying US Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the net neutrality principle. They would like to create a regulated internet with the fat pipelines for their own search engines, internet phone services and streaming video, and for clients who can pay premium rates—and slow down or block services offered by their competitors. And of course if this is adopted in the US it will soon follow in Australia.
Hypothetically this means that corporate web sites like Telstra, News Corp or the Moran Arts Foundation would have fat bandwidth and superfast downloads, while lone bloggers, not-for-profits, political groups or individual artists would be blocked or arrive at deathly slow dialup speeds to anyone searching keywords. Or alternately the government could use its power, as has just transpired in Iran where Gmail has been banned, to block access to social networking sites. Welcome to the 21st century information wars fought on access and speed, with the very real possibility of the net disappearing as a viable arena for arts practice and promotion. Global legislative processes are underway and anti-legislation actions are appearing on and offline—the next local manifestation being the nationwide Block the Filter protests on March 6. Now is a critical time for our sector to respond to this proposed regulation. To quote Barak Obama—“let's stay firmly committed to net neutrality—to keeping the internet open and free.”
WATCHING RACHEL PERKINS’ BRAN NUE DAE ON A WARM, DANK AFTERNOON IN SUBURBAN SYDNEY’S RANDWICK RITZ WITH A LARGE AUDIENCE OF OLDER COUPLES AND YOUNG FAMILIES WAS A FASCINATING EXPERIENCE. LAUGHTER RANGED FROM SPORADIC TO UNANIMOUS WHILE THE FILM’S CLIMAX WAS GREETED WITH MUCH APPLAUSE AND A SUBSEQUENT BUZZ OF SATISFACTION. ACTORS’ NAMES WERE MUTTERED APPROVINGLY AS THEY APPEARED ON SCREEN—GEOFFREY RUSH, ERNIE DINGO, DEBORAH MAILMAN, AUSTRALIAN IDOL FINALIST JESSICA MAUBOY—WHILE OTHERS—KELTON PELL, NINGALI LAWFORD WOLF—LOOKED FAMILIAR: “THAT’S…?”
When I was a kid in the 50s, comedies and musicals often featured opening credits with cartoon figures or animations. Perkins immediately establishes her film’s retro tone—in bright tropical skies an animated black angel knocks a white one out of place. Before we know it we’re immersed in a world of iconic figures—young lovers, an anxious parent, a cruel authority figure, an avuncular helper and some could-be-baddies—who all sing and dance at the drop of a hat. With its fusion of romantic comedy, coming of age and road movie genres, brisk changes of location, if lovingly fixated on Broome, and broad characterisations, the film sustains a sense of immediacy, escalating furiously towards the end when the lovers are reunited and tangles of paternity are unravelled.
Teenage Willie (Rocky McKenzie), who lives in genteel poverty with his Christian mum, Theresa (Ningali Lawford Wolf), is in love with Rosie (Mauboy) who sings in the church choir. She’s likewise attracted to him, but Willie, variously thwarted, naive and doomed to a long absence at a distant school, can’t realise the relationship. Worse, he’s punched out by the handsome singer from the pub, Lester (Dan Sultan), who becomes Rosie’s mentor and potential lover (Willie’s fear but not at all Rosie’s reality). Willie returns to school and, at a low emotional ebb, joins in stealing from the tuck shop for which he is racially denigrated by Father Benedictus (Geoffrey Rush) and is about to be struck with the priest’s mighty stick. He revolts, uniting the all black school in a round of “There’s nothing I would rather be, than to be an Aborigine” before hitting the road, meeting the avuncular Tadpole (Ernie Dingo) and journeying back to Broome, family and love.
The plot conventions of Bran Nue Dae are broadly western, but there are familiar aspects to be found in the otherwise alien world of Ten Canoes and, after all, Perkins’ film is principally set in Broome which, as portrayed in Marrugeku’s performance work Burning Daylight [RT94], is a culturally complex town—western, eastern, Aboriginal. The film’s dynamics are driven by cultural dichotomies. In the opening scenes, the country music-cum-rock’n’roll of the pub where Indigenous young people gather is juxtaposed with gospel-ish singing in church and, later, mass schoolboy defiance is realised as a mock tap dancing routine inspired by the films of the period.
What makes the film particularly interesting is that the world it creates, in 1969, is principally an Aboriginal one within which black and white cultural clashes are played out (other cultural aspects of Broome are kept low key). The main exceptions are Geoffrey Rush’s headmaster-priest, the German-accented Father Benedictus, and a young German tourist, Slippery (Tom Budge), but in the end even they find themselves related to an Aboriginal family. Slippery’s girlfriend, Annie (Missy Higgins), feels bad that she’s the only one missing out.
Bran Nue Dae
image courtesy Roadshow
Bran Nue Dae
The clash of faith is not between white and black or Rush and Willie (that’s about racism) but between the church congregation (with their Aboriginal priest) and the pub-goers, with alcohol consumption central to the tension. Even in the outdoor cinema, as in the pub, the focus is not on the racial divide, but on Willie’s failure to connect with Rosie. As rain thunders down he sits alone watching himself on the cinema screen being farewelled by his mother as he catches the bus south to school. This fantasy/reality tension is played out in Willie’s jealous imaginings of Rosie and Lester together, in a celebratory dormitory dance with Rosie amidst a sea of candles and boys singing into their pillows, and, more seriously, as an Aboriginal ritual in the film’s darkest moment.
The dichotomies of the alcohol theme are dealt with breezily but are not so easily accommodated. In the early scenes, we see drunks stagger out of the pub and vomit, while inside the dancing is joyous, the mood safe. After Willie has run away from school, he mixes with an amiable bunch of drinkers beneath a bridge. One of them, Tadpole, quickly takes advantage of the boy, using his money for drink, but, guilt getting the better of him, he fakes being hit by a van belonging to two would-be hippies (Budge and Higgins) and demands compensatory passage to Broome. On the way, Willie’s virginity is drunkenly surrendered beneath The Condom Tree to another benign, livewire alcoholic (Deborah Mailman) and the film’s climax evolves out of the aforementioned clash when the church congregation rallies in protest outside the pub.
Embodying these tensions and hovering between them is the avuncular Tadpole, devious but with a conscience, culturally ignorant (muddling kinship connections) and exploitative (playing at being an elder). But he’s a skilled bush mechanic (stripping the skin of a snake to replace a broken engine belt, invoking David Batty’s Bush Mechanics TV series, 2001, from a concept by Francis Jupurrula Kelly), a fighter (rescuing Willie from Mailman’s jealous partner) and a man with hints of cultural depth.
Traditional Indigenous ritual finds only one defined moment in the film and it’s not an easy one to assimilate given the film’s otherwise jovial mood. On being locked in a cell by police for the night, Willie is anxious, knowing cells are places where Aboriginal people die. There he dreams a dance of elders led by Tadpole in which the boy participates and flies up, hovering over the dancers as their chains fall away in silvery light. In the morning Willie is nonplussed by his memory of the experience, but Tadpole’s knowing look suggests that perhaps the boy has made contact with his culture at some deep level. Like the Trickster figure who appears in the tales of many cultures, Tadpole mercurially bridges opposing realities, if here on his own journey to responsibility and possible redemption. Most of this is kept strictly within the film’s comic framework: when he and Willie are deserted by Slippery and Annie, Tadpole grabs any old bone and points it at the disappearing Kombi, exploding its tyres. Horrified at this unwanted power, he throws the bone to Willie who frantically flings it away.
Ernie Dingo, ‘Missy’ Higgins, Bran Nue Dae
image courtesy Roadshow
Ernie Dingo, ‘Missy’ Higgins, Bran Nue Dae
As often the case with romantic comedy, the lovers Willie and Rosie are innocents, rarely agents of their fate, but the complexities of the world constellate around them. Willie has no ambition but to live in Broome, to fish, to be with his family and Rosie. But the overriding sense of the film, again true to comedy, is not of individual drama so much as community and regeneration—here a recognition not just of new love but of parenting forgotten or squandered and now recovered, within and across cultures. Slippery is Father Benedictus’ son by Theresa, Tadpole is Willie’s father, Slippery and Willie are brothers and, for a celebratory big musical finale, everyone is welcomed into the greater Aboriginal community.
This is a feel-good fantasy world where harmony can be achieved, but the drunks will still drink and the church will be both a comfort and a cross to bear and traditional culture remains a deep but fragile certainty. The film makes all of this clear, if with a light touch. Bran Nue Dae offers a brand new day of opportunity and hope. Whether or not you can accept the film’s cheery vision will depend on your willingness to embrace its idealised history and surrender to its humour and music. It’s very much a faithful realisation by Rachel Perkins of Jimmy Chi’s vision. Chi apparently had considerable creative control over the making of the film from his original stage play. If it feels at times dated or out of synch with what we now know of Aboriginal culture, that’s because it presents 1969 as a more naive time and delivers it in a vehicle often of calculated innocence, the movie musical.
As a contribution to this movie musical genre, the film has its strengths and weaknesses: the music is beautifully sung and played, if without the embracing rawness of the stage version, and the dancing is well crafted and enticing (Stephen Page) but edited videoclip- style so that a sense of choreographic totality goes missing. The dancing in the early pub scene is particularly vibrant and distinctive, but glimpsed in fragments. However, Rosie’s immersion in the movement becomes ours as Andrew Lesnie’s camera spins from her point of view. A brief appearance by the Elcho Island Chooky Dancers doing their Zorba the Greek dance on the back of a truck is also irritatingly fragmented.
Bran Nue Dae
image courtesy Roadshow
Bran Nue Dae
I pretty much surrended to Bran Nue Dae’s charms, if coming away from it with plenty of concerns. I was struck by the film’s affinity with Richard Frankland’s Stone Bros (RT92), with its similar mix of broad humour, idealisation and touches of seriousness woven into the comic action. What’s important in both films is the evocation of self-contained Aboriginal worlds where issues are worked through with satirical acuity and self-deprecating humour. They might seem politically tame films next to the harsher realities of, say, Radiance, Beyond Clouds and Samson and Delilah, but they have their own complexities. Each time I read a review of Bran Nue Dae that complains of a thin plot line I’m mindful of the many generations of picaresque novels and road movie films that propel us moment to unanticipated moment through revealing landscapes and encounters. Despite its uneven comedy, the occasional limits of its movie musical format and constrained political sensibility, Bran Nue Dae is neither simple nor simplistic. It’s a forceful reminder too, in grim times, of the power of Aboriginal humour, recalling not least the earlier careers of the likes of Ernie Dingo, Ningali Lawford Wolf and Leah Purcell. The film’s humour was certainly not lost on the audience I shared the film with in its brisk and concise 85 minutes of idiosyncratic cultural celebration.
Bran Nue Dae, from the stage musical by Jimmy Chi, director Rachel Perkins, screenwriters Reg Cribb, Rachel Perkins, Jimmy Chi, director of photography Andrew Lesnie, editor Rochelle Oshlack, production designer Felicity Abbott, costume design Margot Wilson, music Cezary Skubiszewski, choreography Stephen Page, Robyn Kershaw Productions, Mayfan Films, 85 mins. Distribution Roadshow Entertainment, DVD/Blu-ray release on May 20, 2010
Originally published in the March 1, 2010 online edition.
Ross Coulter, Simon Obarzanek, Antony Hamilton, Byron Perry, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo Belinda: artsphotography.net.au
Ross Coulter, Simon Obarzanek, Antony Hamilton, Byron Perry, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc
Lucy Guerin Inc has been established in Melbourne since 2002, gaining momentum through the steady production and touring of well received dance works. Guerin occupies a focal place in the Australian dance ecology, maintained by the excellence of her choreography, the diversity of her artistic collaborators and presenting partnerships and her support for emerging artists. Guerin has a generous and modest persona, which carries through into her quietly authoritative work.
Born in Adelaide, Lucy Guerin graduated from the Centre for Performing Arts in 1982 before dancing for Russell Dumas (Dance Exchange) and Nanette Hassall (Danceworks). She moved to New York in 1989 for seven years and danced with Tere O’Connor Dance, Bebe Miller and Sara Rudner. Guerin’s pedigree shows in work that is highly crafted, fascinated by choreography and eager to explore aspects of everyday behaviour inside abstract frameworks.
In the last five years, Guerin’s profile in Australia has developed significantly. Previously, she was prolific but her repertoire was varied to the point of experimentation. Works presented in New York or in Melbourne’s more peripheral theatres combined with a programme for ACMI’s gallery spaces to introduce an energetic new vision to the contemporary Australian dance scene.
It was not until 2005 that Guerin began to achieve the rhythm that now enables her to create and present work in major festival contexts and important spaces like Melbourne’s Malthouse and Sydney Opera House.
The programme of short works, Love Me, and the full evening production, Aether, both premiered in 2005, followed in 2006 by another major premiere, Structure and Sadness. These works remain in Guerin’s repertoire and have attracted national and international acclaim and prestigious prizes, including a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for choreography for her work Two Lies in 1997, a 2000 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for Achievement by an Individual, a Helpmann Award for Best New Dance Work (Structure and Sadness) in 2007, and the 2008 Australian Dance Award for Best Performance by a Company.
The coverage of Guerin’s progress elaborated in RealTime’s archives, depicts her movement from the margins to the mainstream in terms of presentation. It maps this trajectory with the altogether less predictable diversity of her interests. A preview of Corridor, which premiered at Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2008 also explores Guerin’s contemporaneous collaboration with Japanese choreographer Kota Yamazaki. A review of Guerin’s Love Me, is followed in the subsequent edition of RealTime with a review of her annual commissioning program for emerging choreographers, Pieces for Small Spaces. Guerin’s collaborations with visual artists such as Patricia Picinnini and David Rozetsky show her willingness to be challenged by peers with a signature aesthetic. This openness extends into sound, as Japanese composer, vocalist and producer Haco, created the score for Corridor and Guerin has worked with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Australian Opera. Guerin also collaborated with Chunky Move on Tense Dave and Two Faced Bastard, works that toured to the US.
The most recent RealTime reference to Guerin places her at the forefront of developments in Australian dance. Touring more widely than ever internationally, she is also extending into the Australian regions and will embark upon her longest ever tour in 2011 through the Australia Council supported Roadwork touring circuit. Untrained, the piece that offers Guerin this breakthrough, was exhaustively reviewed in RealTime’s Dance Massive residency and the range of responses to the work proves how many nerves Guerin is able to touch. Sophie Travers
RealTime 95 is the city extra. New multi-functional artspaces are springing up in cities around the world, often in former industrial regions, resulting in artist-led urban regeneration, the housing of new art practices and the development of new artist-audience relationships. We report on this phenomenon from a busy and informative conference at RadialSystem V in Berlin in which centres were represented from Glasgow to Warsaw, Jakarta and Sydney. We also spoke to Berlin artists and curators about the changing relationship between their city and the arts, the ambition, for example, for the city to become an arts and knowledge laboratory. Carlos Gomes reports on the role contemporary performance has in understanding the mega-metropolis of Sao Paolo and how it transforms city districts. Robyn Archer, reflecting on Gavin Findlay’s essays in RT93 and 94 on the demise of innovative performance in Canberra, projects a bright future for the arts in that city. Reports from Newcastle (UK and NSW), Perth and Kuopio in Finland reveal the diverse ways artists are engaging with the city. Mike Mullins recalls Sydney in the 70s and 80s and the evolution of The Performance Space and ‘new form’ practices.
A TWO-DAY FORUM, NEW SPACES AND SYSTEMS FOR THE ARTS, CREATING CONNECTIONS—CONNECTING CREATIVITY, HELD AT AND ORGANISED BY BERLIN CONTEMPORARY ARTSPACE RADIAL SYSTEM V IN LATE OCTOBER 2009, WAS A HOTHOUSE (IN FREEZING WEATHER) OF RESEARCH DATA, PRESENTATIONS AND DEBATE ABOUT A RAPIDLY EXPANDING PHENOMENON. IN CITIES AROUND THE WORLD, FORMER INDUSTRIAL SITES ARE BEING CONVERTED INTO ARTSPACES PRINCIPALLY DEDICATED TO HYBRID FORMS AND ACROSS-THE-ARTS PROGRAMMING, AND ACCOMMODATING AND GENERATING NEW AUDIENCES WHO ENJOY ART WITHOUT BOUNDARIES.
The elegant four-storey Radial System V, a former water pumping station is located on the River Spree in a relatively undeveloped area of Friedrichshain. Housing two ample performance spaces, rehearsal rooms (including a large space used by Sasha Waltz’s resident company), a bar and restaurant, and a big, sheltered second floor space open to the elements, Radial System V is at once intimate and capacious. Atypically for the centres participating in the forum, it is not funded by the city, although the artists who perform there might be. It’s an independent venture on commercially owned land. Co-director Jochen Sandig said at one point in the forum that it would be preferable for the organisation to own the land, perhaps raising funds to purchase it by selling ‘shares’ to supporters.
Despite its relative independence Radial System V faces many of the same problems as its city- and government-funded guests with whom it was eager to discuss shared challenges and strategies for improved conditions. Above all, it was agreed that the new artspaces were providing governments with artist-led urban renewal. Art-led gentrification has moved like a wave through Berlin since the 90s, especially in the former East Berlin (and Jochen Sandig is one of those who has made the wave and ridden it) with Radial System V as a recent exemplar.
Fourteen centres (12 European, one Australian, one Indonesian) were represented at the event, most established within the last five years (or revitalised, like Hamburg’s Kampnagel), some brand new and others to be completed within a year or two. These are quite different organisations, reflecting local conditions and cultures, but the forum very quickly revealed similarities in inspiration and, above all, challenges for which mutual awareness and networking might aid survival and growth.
beginnings
While the conversion of former factories, warehouses, mortuaries, collieries and wharves into arts venues has a long history, this most recent manifestation of the phenomenon is more complex. Many of the organisations had been offered sites by the state or local government (or found a site themselves and sought support) in an area without other cultural facilities, with limited public transport and with a local population often not attuned to the arts. The pressure therefore has been to attract established audiences from other parts of the city and at the same time convert locals into arts lovers through often labour-intensive community programs. Some centres have been lucky enough to be supported by governments that have built public transport access into the early stages of development; others have been hindered by its absence.
For governments the opportunities of culture-led urban renewal in problematic suburbs is attractive in increasingly service-based economies. In terms of arts ecology there is evidence here of mutualism between the arts and government: between arts organisations seeking out new homes in relatively inexpensive city regions, homes that are flexible, responsive to the demands of a range of artforms and especially multimedia and hybrid practices, and governments keen to capitalise on culture as the first tool for urban regeneration. Sometimes it’s the arts organisation that makes the move, sometimes government, but as with CarriageWorks (a former train carriage building workshop) in Sydney, well before the venue was identified there was a very real need for Performance Space and a range of arts groups to find a new home.
For many of these centres, governments invested heavily in developing the sites. Sometimes artists and organisations were closely consulted, sometimes not, the ‘hardware’ being installed without thought as to how the ‘software’ would fit, for example how to cope with the technical demands of vast spaces. The next stage, of making the venue work and building audiences while promoting an identity (or re-establishing it in a new environment) was a serious challenge, labour-intensive and demanding. As a rule, governments have been less keen to provide funds for these spaces to invest in programming, commissioning and producing work, the very means they need to establish creative identity and the capacity to contribute to regional or international collaborations and touring networks.
Government expectation has often been that the artspaces will generate self-sustaining income rapidly through venue hire for local and touring productions, conferences, weddings and commercial trade events. This at the same time as building their own programs often with limited means alongside servicing local communities (with workshops, markets, child care) and, for some, benchmarks set for local audience numbers.
double binds
The challenges to these new centres, to their survival and especially to their sense of artistic integrity, have manifested as potential double binds: public/entrepreneurial; local/other; old (heritage site)/new; arts centre/social centre. Given that most have been set up by governments, even if in direct response to art community needs, there is also likely to be continuing pressure for these artspaces to enact cultural policy.
Maintaining programs with innovative, sometimes challenging content while running child care services and community events, isn’t necessarily an easy match. Unravelling these potential binds into healthy dynamics is hard work, but the binarisms were seen by some forum participants as evidence of a paradigm shift in the arts, of partnership-based centres (inhabited by a number of cooperating arts groups) that are innovative in all respects, addressing sustainability in multiple ways, operating holistically, essentially working ‘bottom up’ (responsive to the new forms that artists are evolving), interdependent (immediately networking) and developing a ‘hybrid audience’ who are already engaging with a range of media platforms in their everday lives.
Above all these centres yearn not simply to present work, but to commission, develop and produce it and, critically, debate the new forms with their public. This tri-partite thrust was seen as a break from the relative inflexibility of older arts institutions.
The artspaces also see themselves as meeting points for the advancement of theatre, dance, the visual and media arts and of interdisciplinary work—many have substantial workspaces for residencies and workshops. And many have aptly retained their factory origins in their name and architecture—as workplaces.
Tabakalera, Centro Internacional de Cultur
photo Idoia Unzurrunzaga
Tabakalera, Centro Internacional de Cultur
the new artspaces
In short introductory presentations and in discussion groups, directors and coordinators spoke about their centres, revealing the distinctiveness of each artspace as well as shared strengths and challenges.
Clara Montero is Co-ordinator of Activities for Tabakalera (www.tabakalera.eu) in the Basque country of San Sebastian, Spain. The building is a 150-year old tobacco factory currently owned by the city. Funded by the city and the Basque government, the centre will open in 2013 but currently runs events, such as inviting sound artists to work in the spaces. There is a strong focus on visual culture including cinema, video and media hybrids with studios available to artists and communities. There is also a considerable emphasis on archiving, in the form of a digital library with public access.
Montero sees the role of the new centres as integrative. Therefore, because the San Sebastian Film Festival is so strong, “we have taken it as a model.” She described the centre as being like a bridge. At the same time, Montero says she faces the big challenge of engaging 15-23 year-old audiences, and has done many free shows to attract people.
A few centres are more self-contained, focusing on artistic rather than audience development. Karen Wood is Creative Director, Briggait Development, Glasgow, which is run by Dance House (www.dancehouse.org). Originally it was a Victorian fish market, built in 1873, empty for 20 years and then converted to visual arts studios. At the centre is “a huge unheated hall,” a space common to many centres offering opportunities for spectacle and communality but presenting challenges. Established initially with lottery, arts funding and commercial support, the centre is, says Wood, “now into Phase 2, needing money. There are seven studio spaces, four resident organisations including dancers with disability, circus, aerial and street theatre people and a dedicated live art studio. It’s a venue for creation, not public performance and incidentally, the only place in Scotland where people can rehearse double trapeze.”
In contrast, Axel Tangerding, an architect and theatre director from Munich, spoke about Teater Maskinen (www.meta-theater.com), whose new building he has designed and which is located just outside of Stockholm—to keep costs low. In a former mining district by a river, the land was purchased for one euro per square metre. Designed to be ecologically sensitive, the centre includes a guest-house for 20 people, studios for work and creating video, a kindergarten, an outside theatre and a sauna—”It’s time the arts had a bit of luxury,” quipped Tandering.
Another new building is Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw (www.muziekgebouw.nl), a spectacularly beautiful glass and metal construction located in “an old industrial district on the water, which used to be populated by drunks and hookers”, says Tino Haenen, General and Artistic Director. Unlike the other centres discussed here, the focus at Muziekgebouw is on one artform, music and more specifically again, contemporary classical concerts and jazz, and no pop concerts. Opened in 2005, the centre was conceived as part of a plan to develop the east of the city. Like the other centres “it’s very flexible,” says Haenan, “even the floor can be elevated, which means the space can be adjusted to change reverberation substantially.” The building has three decks and a unique microtonal organ, which is very rare. The centre’s annual budget is three million euros, one million going back to the city for rental (a not uncommon tale). Around 250 concerts each year are presented in a building “which is huge but has a nice human scale to it.” Haenan says he’s sticking very much to his agenda, not wanted to risk competing with local theatre.
Mohamed Goenawan is director and initiator of Salihara (named after the lantana flower; www.salihara.org) in Indonesia. When Tempo, the political magazine he edited was banned in 1994, Goenawan went underground, set up alternative journals and ISI, a space to produce plays and gallery shows as a front for political purposes. He continued to work after Soeharto had been deposed, and says he is now battling rising Islamic fundamentalism. Goenawan describes his organisation as “a medium to introduce difference.” With money made from the newspaper, he has developed the former garbage truck parking station into a 3,000 square metre arts centre. The only flexible performing arts venue in Indonesia, it can seat 225 people or 400 standing. There’s also a roof theatre for traditional puppets, a cafe and a gallery. Salihari also hosts noted performance and literary festivals attracting artists and audiences from the region.
Philippe Bischof, Artistic and Managing Director, Südpol Luzern (South Pole Lucerne; www.suedpol-luzern.ch) in Switzerland and staff member Eva Heller described the centre as being in an industrial area of the small city of Südpol, 10 minutes out of Lucerne—“but people still see this as ‘far out’.” Costing 26 million euros to set up, and with ongoing funding coming from city and private sources, Südpol opened in November 2008. There is, as was reported by most centres, no funding specifically for programming or commissioning.
The centre, which also includes a music school for 6-18 year olds and a state theatre company, is dedicated to presenting the performing arts including hybrid practices. The building is a former slaughterhouse, but 90% of it is new construction. The architect designed the centre to be very flexible, with four acoustically discrete performance spaces (discrete from the school and the theatre company) in the complex, a restaurant and a bar. The audience, says Bischof, often stays for two to three hours after a show and there’s a downstairs club that can handle 250 people. The performing spaces can handle 600 people standing. “There is no ‘scene’ in Lucerne. We have to create it.”
For Südpol internal management is important, with collectives participating in running the organisation: “If partners have equality (and both have money), it’s easier to negotiate than having all the money and power in one place.” Other centres have ‘top down’ management but there was much talk of keeping it open and cooperative.
Sergi Diaz the coordinator of Fàbrica de Creació de Fabra i Coats, north of Barcelona, describes their centre, still in the process of renovation, as a network of former textile factories—the biggest at 2,000 square metres. It also includes a community centre and a school. Opened in 2006, the focus is on dance, theatre and multidisciplinary practices and includes musicians working in the factory space thanks to project funding from Red Bull, popular music events and media arts shows. Diaz described the working conditions for artists as very good.
Lea Dolinsek, Public Relations Officer for the Spanski Borci (Spanish Fighters) Cultural Centre in Lubiana, Slovenia says the centre, a renovated cinema, which was soon to open on November 25, 2009, was named after Slovenians who fought in the Spanish Civil War. The space is home to and is managed by the award-winning dance company En-KnapGroup as a “meeting point for local, regional and international dance” (www.en-knap.com). It’s unusual for such a centre to be run by a discrete artform company, but see also the Nowy Teatr below. The building was purchased from the city, which invested 250,000 euros in the renovation, and another space was added for music “after pressure from the electorate.” The centre has a 350 seat studio space, a smaller former cellar space for 50 and a library.
Meetfactory, International Center of Contemporary Art, Prague
photo courtesy Meetfactory
Meetfactory, International Center of Contemporary Art, Prague
Jindra Zemanová is Director of MeetFactory, International Centre of Contemporary Art (www.meetfactory.cz) in Prague, a 5,000 square metre facility leased from the city and focused on a residential program with 15 studios (40 to150 square metres) for visual artists (local and foreign) and theatre workers. There was no gas or water when Zemanová arrived, but since then a main theatre space (seating 150) and a gallery have been developed. The main hall holds 600 people. Far from ‘perfect’, the venue is very flexible: Zemanová reports that a Mexican artist knocked large holes in a wall as part of his project. Although MeetFactory as yet has no formal funding, she says that “the City of Prague is very supportive.”
Joanna Nuckowska, the Production Manager for leading Polish theatre company, Nowy Teatr (New Theatre; www.nowyteatr.org/#/en), Warsaw, tells us their huge new centre will be opened in 2012 in the former headquarters of the Municipal Waste Company. It will be an interdisciplinary, multifunctional cultural space presenting European co-productions, video, performance, actions and concerts. In the meantime, one-day events are being staged (Day of the Dead, 2008; Sleeping, 2009). A bookstore, cafe and facilities for children are included in the plan, a large roof garden and amphitheatre, plus a surrounding garden with concert space and open-air cinema. Nuckowska said that there will be a big emphasis on exchanging ideas with audiences in this the largest arts development in Warsaw for a long time.
Sue Hunt, CEO of Sydney’s CarriageWorks (www.carriageworks.com.au), described meeting the initial challenge of attracting audiences to a new destination (“there were no rules”) by running festivals for children and others featuring hip-hop and underground artists, supporting “ephemeral and unfunded” work in the first two years and programming the venue with resident arts groups. The principal of these is Performance Space which has four seasons a year focused on hybrid practices, plus residencies and special events. Two large, attractive performance spaces are used for mounting independent productions and commercial events, while other spaces accommodate workshops, rehearsals and residencies. There’s also a cafe and a gallery space. As with other artspaces, funding is largely operational with little room for investment in producing (see RT91 for more about CarriageWorks and Performance Space.)
Director Amelie Deuflhard, a much admired figure in art-led urban regeneration, has recently revitalised Hamburg’s harbour-based Kampnagel with a progressive performance program and “a lot of energy involved bringing together disciplines, community projects, a lot of work with children, all with the aim of ‘bringing Kampnagel to the city.’ I took it over when it was tired and it took two years to achieve flexibility.” She described a successful project called Talking Opera, an orchestral karaoke show for young people which was subsequently performed with older people, as a way of bringing together artists and audiences. Deuflhard believes that community work builds more spectator numbers. Kampnagel receives 3.6 million euros per year, “but this has to cover six halls, 80 staff and structural costs of 4.2 million euros—this is before the cost of shows is added.” (www.kampnagel.de)
Dietmar Lupfer is the co-director of Muffatwerk (www.muffatwerk.de), Munich, a former power station, located by the river, downtown and opened in 1993. “Initially the concept was for an avant garde venue but this was broadened with political change and there’s now a youth emphasis.” From the beginning there was, said Lupfer, no desire to create a “bad city theatre.” Instead, staff asked themselves, “What kind of inter-mediality can we create?” Now, he said, their strategy was copied by the big city theatres. The big issue for Lupfer is “how to keep the work political.”
Muffatwerk’s turbine hall, a huge empty area (similar to Brisbane’s Powerhouse) with a moveable grid is used for performance: “Heiner Goebbels loves the space.” There’s been a focus on new media with shows by Stelarc, Chico MacMurtie and bio-artists, plus considerable emphasis on installation and its relationship with performance in striking large scale works. Muffatwerk also has a mobile studio for reaching out beyond the centre, reflecting a desire voiced by a number of directors elsewhere in forum discussions.
art houses/cultural centres
Discussions repeatedly returned to potential binds. While most of the artspaces acknowledged socio-political aims (often inherent in their establishment) to some degree, artistic aims were their priority. Professor Birgit Mandel, Faculty of Cultural Policy, University of Hildesheim, reported from her survey of 10 of the spaces that they were “rather art houses than cultural centres,” focused on innovation and committed to new forms of interdisciplinary artistic work. At the same time they saw themselves as developing a supportive environment and meeting place for artists, and focusing on international artistic exchange while helping “develop neglected areas of the city” and “new ways of interaction between artistic production and audience reception.”
Interior Tabakalera, Centro Internacional de Cultur
photo Ian Penman
Interior Tabakalera, Centro Internacional de Cultur
old building/new space
The old buildings adapted as new artspaces were sometimes proving problematic. On the one hand, their flexibility was lauded for enabling new means for arts production and reception. Their “aura” was seen as “an inspiring influence for artists and audience” and the sheer spatial volume as allowing for ample performance spaces, studios, galleries, bookshops, cafes and restaurants. But some artists found themselves occupying spaces that were variously too big for their intimate work or, in some cases “too perfect, too clean” or simply unaffordable. One centre director commented that the new spaces “fill a gap but open up a new one.”
public/private
All the spaces saw themselves as essentially non-profit but with varying degrees of dependency on commercial activity, often from renting out the building or hosting conferences (a speciality of Radial System V). Professor Mandel pointed out that in a country with very high public subsidies for the arts, like Germany, there was an increasing expectation of reliance on more private funding and commercialisation. In other countries public funding was increasing. She reported that, “None of the spaces is able to exist without public funding; the majority get at least 50% of the budget from public authorities.” The scale of operation of the artspaces varied enormously from management staff of two to 40 and overall staff, at Kampnagel, of 80. Most also worked with freelancers and some volunteers.
the ideals
Although artspace directors were frank about the contradictions they were living out, there was nonetheless a prevailing mood of idealism which saw the centres as laboratories for producing and presenting new interdisciplinary art and moving beyond traditional definitions of low and high art. With flexible and cooperative management, centres were aiming to avoid hierarchical and too institutional structures. Openness, ‘mobile thinking’ and risk-taking were lauded. However, a series of specific challenges were delineated, beyond the double binds already cited.
the challenges
Participants in the forum saw serious challenges to the sustainability of new artspaces in two areas. Ugo Bacchella, President of Fondazione Fitzcarraldo in Torino, Italy was concerned that “although these spaces were being established, national cultural policy doesn’t recognise them.” Secondly, most centres were receiving less public money than traditional arts institutions. Bacchella could “not see governments pushing more money towards these centres,” therefore they needed “to be innovative in all respects, including funding models and should look at environmentalist models, different kinds of sustainability, bottom-up approaches, engaging citizens in new paradigms for funding.” He pessimistically cautioned these innovative centres about becoming obliged to the state. On the other hand, he reported “a big new European focus on education, with a new mantra: society, education and the arts.”
Some saw the pressure to generate considerable income outside of funding as risking conservatism in programming. Dietmar Lupfer of Muffatwerk saw it as “a big challenge for hardcore experimentalism.” Radial System V directors reported their “turnover as 2.7 million euros per year, with income of 60% from renting out spaces and the bar; 40% from production income. Foundation money and subscriptions are very small.” New work does not always attract large audiences in the short term.
time/space; new/other
Lupfer argued that “it’s not about being new, but being other, for both artists and audiences. It’s about time and space: both have been lost in conventional spaces, resulting in bad working conditions. In the new centres there’s the opportunity to work a space where a community can develop with a focus and an audience—an open house for social views. A docking station. In the 1980s the other was music, in the 90s the other was dance, now it’s net activism.” An important element in this is an audience attuned to and living with new media.
Jochen Sandig argued for “mobile thinking” as opposed to the exclusivity of traditonal institutional structures and their “immobile thinking.” He declared that “in reality there’s a mobile audience.” However, central to the sustainability of new centres is the need for sufficient funds to create time for new work and space in which to create it. He described the current situation as political, “when too many euros are spent on institutions and not on development, on operas and orchestras rather than development of new work—which makes this forum political.”
Some speakers argued that the potential of the new artspaces was at an early stage, emphasising the capacity for more varied building use and off-site projects. Sandig pointed to the revival of performance art outside of art galleries. He argued for “developing ideas for ‘outer space’. It’s not enough to be just in your space.” Paul Gazzola, a Berlin-based Australian who works in many cities around the world argued for a nomadic principle, while Mohamed Goenawan declared, “Space is produced when you create work.” Ugo Bacchella iterated that “new spaces should be seen as resource based, not just offering an art product but process, product and discussion versus the old one-dimensional function of the public arts venues.”
Further to the discussion about these artspaces as new, or other or oppositional, the general inclination was to see their primary responsibility as artistic but accommodating, reflecting a belief that the public didn’t want to see the new space as just another intimidating, inflexible institution.
Professor Wolfgang Schneider of the Faculty of Cultural Policy, University of Hildesheim, reinvoked the political dimension. He’s deeply concerned that “currently only 10% of society has access to the arts and yet huge amounts of money go into them.” He sees the new spaces as offering society a meeting point for the arts, flexible infrastructure and potentially clear outcomes like “a larger audience, not just the happy few.” He’d like to see the growth of the new artspaces as an opportunity for the development of a “utopian attitude to the arts, a rediscovery of aesthetics.” He suggested that the European Union’s enthusiasm for science should also be applied to the arts.
At the end of the forum, the outcome was indeterminate in practical terms. But everyone was more informed and the challenges for the new artspaces had been carefully delineated. It was agreed that the spaces would keep in touch with each other; that an approach possibly be made to have an ongoing gathering under the wing of IETM (International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts; see p10); that the exchange of staff could be a means for sustained contact and dialogue; and that opportunities for program networking be explored.
the city & the new artspace
As yet in their early days, the new artspaces represent the creation of revitalised public urban space, at a time when acccessible spaces are fast being diminished or commercialised. They embody new artistic practices, new relationships with audiences, greater accessibility, unconventional managerial and financial models— ‘non-profit entrepreneurial’—and expanded notions of the arts centre as not just a place for presentation but for actual creation and debate—a resource for artists and audiences, a source of creativity for the city. RadialSystem V, its directors Jochen Sandig and Folkert Uhde, and forum coordinator Tina Gadow, with Lisa Stepf, are to be commended for providing a timely opportunity to confirm the ideals of the new artspaces and jointly face common challenges.
postscript: cent quatre, paris
After the forum we visited Cent Quatre (see our cover image) in Paris’ north-eastern suburbs, a huge development in a one time slaughterhouse then mortuary with numerous studio spaces for residencies, two performance venues, an impressive bookstore, restaurant and welcoming cafe, and lots of central open, covered space for installations and events. Apparently aiming to build a sub-culture through its artist in residence programs, the centre cost 100 million to set up and receives eight million euros in funding a year. The suburban location is a culturally complex one, offering challenges for audience development and community relations. Just before our arrival a huge exhibition of artworks by young practitioners had attracted a large audience. We’ll have more on Cent Quatre in RealTime in the near future.
New Spaces and Systems for the Arts, creating connections—connecting creativity, A Forum at RadialSystem V Berlin, Oct 16-17, 2009; as part of Hybrid Arts Fest—Australia, organised by Radialsystem V during the Asia-Pacific Weeks Berlin 2009. In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut and the University of Hildesheim, Institute for Cultural Sciences, Aesthetics and Applied Arts.
Keith Gallasch attended New Spaces and Systems for the Arts with the support of the Goethe-Institut Australia.
AFTER BEING IMMERSED IN RADIALSYSTEM V’S FASCINATING SYMPOSIUM ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEW PUBLIC ARTSPACES AND CITIES, NEW SPACES AND SYSTEMS FOR THE ARTS (P2-4), IT WAS THRILLING TO GET ONTO THE STREETS OF BERLIN TO EXPLORE SOME OF THE ISSUES RAISED FROM OTHER PERSPECTIVES. COURTESY OF A GOETHE-INSTITUT ITINERARY AND AN EXCELLENT GUIDE, OVER TWO DAYS WE MET PEOPLE ACTIVELY ENGAGED IN SHAPING AND CHALLENGING THE CITY’S NOTIONS OF ITSELF. APTLY, BE BERLIN, A GOVERNMENT CAMPAIGN TO ENCOURAGE BERLINERS TO PARTICIPATE IN DEVELOPING A SENSE OF THEIR CITY’S IDENTITY, WAS IN FULL SWING.
Much has been written about the attractions of Berlin, not least its plethora of opera, theatre and dance companies, numerous festivals, including Transmediale and the Berlinale Film Festival, superb museums, countless commercial and independent galleries and clusters of shops with innovative wares (promoted in printed English/German guides in each of the fashionable districts). Large student and artist populations, enjoying cheap rents, have fuelled the evolution of squats into idiosyncratic art, shopping and eating districts with varying degrees of gentrification, development and heritage preservation.
The squats either side of the Wall in the 80s, especially in the former East Berlin, became hubs for intensive creativity into the 90s and beyond, incubating a wave of successive cultural hot spots across the city. We looked out from RadialSystem V across the River Spree at the grafittied old warehouse and factory squats that our hosts said would soon be home to new development. This wave moves slowly, if with determination. Land ownership was, and remains, a hugely problematic issue in the reunification of Berlin—who actually owned what in the former East? An older problem, resolving ownership and compensation for land stolen from German Jews by the Nazi state, persists as well. Several people we spoke to said that ownership challenges had a positive aspect in inhibiting rapid commercial development and keeping rents down. Protests against development are also common—one was taking place as we looked across the river.
The artists we met, not a few of them Australian, live in Berlin because of its cultural density which offers them connections, networks, study, mentoring, collaborations, inspiration and cheap rent, but not necessarily work or grants. Some arrive with grants from their home countries, many work elsewhere in Europe and use Berlin as home.
Already we had a strong sense of Berlin as a creative totality—it’s a place where artists want to be, as do audiences from the city itself and beyond. However, we were constantly reminded that Berlin is seriously broke, that a huge percentage of arts funding goes to a handful of major institutions and performing arts companies and little to a huge population of individual artists and groups. Much of the population cannot afford to enjoy the arts.
Nevertheless the city appears to be in a state of continual renewal. We visited the Neues Museum the day after it opened, a superb work of renovation and preservation housing the creations of ancient and mediaeval cultures. The external walls are pockmarked with bullet holes: inside and out the city’s history remains visible.
Two of our acquaintances are proud Berliners, but believe that the Nazi and Communist destruction of the city’s middle class and Jewish life in the last century meant that Berlin lost the opportunity to establish a consistent, coherent cultural drive, one that could acknowledge the artistic realities and potentials of the city. They look elsewhere—to the emerging cultural life of Istanbul for example—for inspiration.
Xenia Rautenberger, 2009
all rights reserved by urban dialogues
Xenia Rautenberger, 2009
urban dialogues
Others worry at the fragmentation of Berlin life. Instead of a coherent city, they see islands—ghettos of isolated citizens divided socially and spatially although living almost side by side. Urban dialogues (www.urbandialogues.de) devises projects that take participants deeper into their own neighborhood and then outside of it—to other parts of the city or some other city elsewhere in the world.
Urban Dialogues began in 1998 with an emphasis on site-specific work involving young people, research based projects and conceptual art work. A team of 11 evolved—eight artists, two urban geographers, one pedagogue. Artistic director Stefan Horn and collaborators constantly reinvent their approach according to the character of the location and the participating group as well as the skills and passions of the artist who will run the project. Photography has become the principal tool for many of the projects, used in myriad ways.
We meet Horn at the Clärchens Ballhaus in Berlin-Mitte, a century old timber dance hall where you can eat and drink, dance at night (as does our guide), enjoy chamber music or a jazz recital. The atmosphere is warmly communal.The amiable Horn briskly engages us with alarming accounts of the borders rising within cities and optimistic arts-led means for breaking them down. He describes himself as “a theatre designer who wanted to get out of black boxes and into urban dialogues outside. So I did a project with choreographers and designers on how to deal with community.”
Urban dialogue projects, explains Horn, are about “difference and communication, youth art and networks. A project might take three years to complete. Urban Dialogues builds teams of freelancers. Young people join workshops, each run by a professional artist. Each project has academics evaluating it from beginning to end with reports at different stages. We’re always looking for different ways to work with young people. Again there’s no recipe.” Horn appoints a local artistic director and “keeps in touch by teleconferencing and lots of visits. In Berlin we have done lots of art and education projects, focused on school or youth groups, choosing artists with the right experience.”
The main function of the projects is to reduce a sense of isolation, to encourage something as apparently simple, but often quite threatening in a big city, as visiting a neighbouring suburb. Young people going from from Brixton to Barcelona were “shocked by small things—the ritual of sitting down to drink coffee instead of taking it away.” The project report emphasises how quickly the young photographers sought out what was distinctive about Barcelona, instead of the familar “we’ve got one of those.”
The 15-month Signs of the City program focused its young participants (variously students, vocational trainees, hearing-impaired, homeless) in Berlin, East London, Sofia (in Bulgaria) and Barcelona on documenting and creatively intepreting cultural signs—state, commercial and personal—points of recognition and recollection. Often it was their first encounter with cameras, from pinhole to digital.
In these projects the artist leaders are not cast as teachers, they provide the means, models and inspiration for participants “to become authors in their own right, directly involved in the production of knowledge.” Significantly this is achieved through collaboration and through visual language, circumventing literacy challenges and allowing communication between different language speakers. These young people “are cut off from the art world as a result of language and segregation.” Artists and assessors reported the invaluable addition of GPS-receivers to the project, allowing the participants to achieve a greater sense of active documentation and facticity beyond taking and selecting images—”conjoining place and time.”
Exhibitions of the photographs were staged in each city, but online collections played a more significant role in allowing participants and others to see the greater range of the projects and to play with the images, assembling them into patterns and narratives to help shape perspectives on where they live (www.citipix.com). Excellent documentation of the project can be found in Stefan Horn, Rudolf Netzelmann, Peter Winkels eds, Signs of the City—Metropolis Speaking, Jovis, Berlin 2009.
Horn elaborated on the range of projects Urban Dialogues had initated or been involved in, incuding Islands+Ghettoes, case studies of Dubai and Caracas. These are “extreme cases of ghettoisation”, he says, “but good exemplars of working in social crisis zones.” He mentions the gated communties of London and Barcelona: “Sometimes the borders within a city are actual but even if metaphorical they’re nonetheless real.” A very real example can be found, he says, in East London where he’s currently working and where the 2012 Olympics will be held. He’s concerned that appropriate urban regeneration will be hindered by the installation of an 11 mile, 10 foot high, blue security wall replete with CCTV that cordons off the Olympics site over many years. The assumption is that the Olympics will regenerate the East End, but Horn is concerned it will set up new borders given its long-term presence and the possibility of permanenly dividing communities.
Horn thinks that “urban regeneration can work but there’s no recipe for it. It should develop at the same speed as the lives that inhabit it. People need a chance to cope, to develop a life in their city.” As for Berlin, despite its steady cultural development of parts of the city, Horn sees it as an island with ghettoes—”an island needing culture and tourism” to keep it alive. He writes in Signs of the City, “Berlin: a city that could, and had to, re-invent itself after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Sometimes resembling a peaceful urban island…[it faces] the challenge of integrating two different social and value systems.”
In the book documenting Islands+Ghettos (Verlag fur moderne kunst Nurnburg, Heidfeberger Kunstverein, 2008), Horn writes “that the spatial fragmentation of urban space…will increase in the future.” Concerned about “territorial delimitations and their effects on young people”, he argues that “perception must be schooled and the gaze sharpened for the things that surround us everyday that, all too often, we no longer really recognise, because we are accustomed to them.” As several observers of Signs of the City point out, this is a quest to develop ‘urban literacy’ and a slowed down, considered response to city life. For a freelance writer, Andrew McIllroy, reflecting on the project, Signs of the City is possibly about “emergent citizenship” and “the city as a place with soul.”
ina Wollny, Lea Draeger, Trust, Schaubühne Am Lehniner Platz
photo Heiko Schäfer
ina Wollny, Lea Draeger, Trust, Schaubühne Am Lehniner Platz
schaubühne am lehniner platz
Tobias Veit (Director Artistic Production) and Friederike Heller (Dramaturg) spoke frankly with us about the Schaubühne’s place in the city as the only major theatre company in the former West Berlin. It has been a challenge, they said, to get audiences to cross town. As well, this once wealthy district of the city, Charlottenberg, has become progressively poorer. Against these odds the Schaubühne has sustained progressive direction and programming, establishing itself as European and an international player.
The Schaubühne makes itself “internationally visible” with productions with English surtitles, by translating plays, by including in the program dance theatre which, Veit and Heller say, can draw a very different audience and build the contemporary profile the company is looking for—”to give way to diversity, rather than be overwhelmed by it.” Some productions draw particularly large audiences, like artistic director Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed as a party in a garden, but there’s a need to reach out beyond Berlin’s constraints.
The Schaubühne is part of Prospero, a partnership networked across six European cities. Veit says that “the works from each of these companies are very local in origin. Each year four mutually agreed on productions are shared. There are 10-12 other productions from which each chooses two. The challenge is to take into account your own audience and decide what they’ll like.” The organisations also meet, this year in Tampere and in 2012 in Leige, for a colloquium—”talking, dealing with four languages, developing co-existence, growing together.”
Veit pointed out that the partners are six completely different organisations: “The Modena company in Italy (Fondation Emilia Romano Teatro) is an autumn festival with no theatre of its own but produces tourable works. The one in Lisboa, Portugal (Fundaco Centro Cultural de Belem) is a cultural centre that presents a variety of forms. The Finnish Department for Theatre Research and Practice co-operates with the Tampere Festival. None is doing the kind of work that Ostermeier does. But there is a shared interest between organisations in certain directors.”
Another international dimension to the Schaubühne is to be found in its International Playwrighting Festival on Identity and History and FIND, its International Festival of New Drama focusing on and promoting lesser-known writers from around the world. The festivals involve “very fast programming—one year ahead—invited productions, staged readings, fundraising, support gained from political leadership, the Goethe-Institut and educational organisations, and programs are printed in German and English.”
The Schaubühne ethos is built on Thomas Ostermeir’s notion that culture comes from the contemporary author. The company has been producing Falk Richter’s work for 10 years as well as the plays of Marius Von Mayenberg [whose plays have been directed by Australian Benedict Andrews, a regular at The Schaubühne] alongside works by British playwrights Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. Choreographer Anouk van Dijk has been working with the company since 2000.
When Berlin’s other theatres followed the Schaubühne’s focus on authors, “it became overfished territory,’ said Veit. “Too many young writers in Berlin were expected to come up with a string of world premieres.” It was decided at the Schaubühne, among other things, to include dance in the program and to make an innovative shift by working with Van Dijk and Richter on the production TRUST, broadening the companys’ ambit.
Despite the language barrier (we had brief access to a rough draft translation), TRUST proved to be an engrossing experience shared with a large responsive audience. We’re familiar with dance theatre, but TRUST is like an inversion—theatre dance—in which the text is centre-stage but is danced and inventively moved to varying degrees. As an elliptical drama about an ageing relationship, infidelities, cross-cultural encounters, the global financial collapse and the draining pressures of digital social networking the tone of TRUST ranges from hyperreal to fantastical. While being lifted high and swung, characters continue to communicate normally. Or they are rendered puppet-like. A man performs a neurotic little dance in an armchair, not knowing what to do with himself as a woman speaks on and on. Monologuish interrogations of self or other multiply: “Have you actually ever thought about your body, what it tells you, the story of your body…the story your body tells me every morning?” A funny therapy class that offers release through barking turns nasty. Bodies clump together or are tossed behind a couch or are disappeared by a box. Speakers lose limb mobility as they rattle on. And all the while there’s the growing sense that personal or couple collapse is just part of some greater, surreal if mundane disaster. The performers, a mix of actors and dancers, commit to Richter’s lateral text and van Dijk’s movement (the show is co-directed by writer and choreographer) with passion and precision on the multi-level set to a live sound score. We’re hoping TRUST will hit the festival circuit with surtitles so that we can share our excitement in this theatre-dance innovation.
Meanwhile, on the financial side, “75-80% of the Schaubühne’s budget comes from the city while the other four major theatres receive up to 85%.” The five theatres are competitive but, says Veit, “there’s no serious debate or will to cut funding.” Similarly, despite the financial odds, Berlin still has three opera companies as well as the most theatre companies of any German city. With 230-250 personnel involved in the Schaubühne at any one time, “we might do 500 performances a year, 60-100 will be outside Germany, few within. Touring is very important to us.”
The Schaubühne reflects the changing social dynamics and fortunes of Berlin, adapting by finding new forms and audiences within the city and outside the country. Theatre companies around the world are diversifying their programs, embracing contemporary dance and performance, in some ways keeping pace with new multi-functional artspaces like RadialSystem V.
adrienne goehler
Author, curator and sometime politician, the dynamic Adrienne Goehler describes Berlin as being full of “people searching for euros because we’re an experimental city reinventing ourselves after the fall of the Wall.” For 12 years Goehler headed the academy of fine arts (Hochschule für bildendeKünste) in Hamburg. In 2002-2006 she was curator for the Hauptstadt Kulturfonds (cultural capital funds) of Berlin and wrote a book, Liquefaction, Ways and byways of the welfare society, culture (Campus, Frankfurt, New York 2006). For seven months she was Cultural Minister for the City of Berlin
A passionate arts advocate with a radical social justice agenda, Goehler has ambitions for Berlin. She’d like there to be more free creative spaces; for her city to more conscious of the importance of the arts for its own future; and a basic income for all citizens, working or not, “given that there will be no longer a return to full employment in Germany.”
Goehler describes the recent Jugend Forum with Parliament: 1,000 young people discussing the city’s creative crisis. “It included a range of artists—film, dance, cyber—addressing everything: alcohol, political correctness, poor kids, dating protocols, modern Nazis who are dangerously subtle and wear suits…The city is still bankrupt but recognises that it needs to open itself to new practices. But it’s too busy commercialising art and not understanding the conditions of creativity and without a clue about the pioneering work that has been done. The result is more and more a shopping window culture with a mayor who adopts the cultural ministry to create a culture to mirror himself and ignores the grassroots.”
Goehler spoke about how hard life was in the city for most artists, while at the top end the arts were well funded. She’s convinced there’s “a need for capital to provide a laboratory to discover new kinds of labour and art. But the city’s departments of economy and arts are totally separate.” This, she says, was what hindered her in her seven months as cultural minister: “In blinkered divisions people limit their responsibilities, whereas one of the big potential energies in Berlin is in-between-ism, between the arts, between sectors—especially in education. You need arts and artists in schools. I want dance in school during the daytime, not after 5pm. One of the best things that Simon Rattle did when he took up the job as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic was to demand music education in schools as part of his appointment. It’s taken three and a half years before the Departments of Education and Culture began to share euros and responsibility.”
Goehler said that when she headed the cultural capital fund “the government didn’t like my approach because it looked ‘social’ whereas I said, ‘it’s urban, ideological, educational.’” She drolly described her experience as arts minister as “my little workshop.” She was fired. “I’d won too many battles. I’m opposed to functionalising art for politics.”
As for her work now, she describes it as “a wild, intense precarious, independent life curating and writing. I’m fighting for a basic guaranteed income for all, an idea feared by all political parties. In the 21st century we need different ideas and creativity to overcome ecological and other problems. Therefore we need artists and scientists and we mustn’t let them starve. This includes non-university scientists and artists. Art has been built on the self-exploitation of people in their early 20s and the current means of securing money is humiliating.”
Goehler is involved in organising an exhibition on aesthetics and sustainability, bringing together inventors, artists and scientists. Behind the show there’s an aim, to set up a fund to connect the arts and sciences, “not a foundation—foundations are also sector-bound, and artists too need to see beyond their sector.”
At a time when art is expected to be educational, therapeutic, an industry, a service, Goehler’s position is a significant one. She places art firmly in a socio-political context, as having a role in improving the city, but on its own terms and for which artists should be duly rewarded. “[Creativity] is flexible, liquid, not a reserve, not a commodity, but a current.” As she said in a speech delivered in Sydney several years ago, of a city with the highest density of independent artists in Germany. “Berlin…has all the pre-requisites to perceive itself as a laboratory for trying out arts and knowledge related jobs.”
be berlin
Berlin’s government is also having thoughts about the city’s identity, clearly hoping to consolidate among its citizenry a positive view of the metropolis. The Mayor has backed and visibly fronted a public relations campaign. Christophe Lang Head of Corporate Communications/PR Be Berlin, says “it is designed to make Berliners aware of their own city, to overcome a certain critical and sceptical frame of mind. The best Berliners would ever say about Berlin was ‘you can’t complain.’” After the Wall came down, Lang says there was “a lot of change and a sense of loss but an improved attitude after 2006 when Germany was the World Cup host.”
Be Berlin commenced in 2008 “with a five million euros budget, and an aim to enhance trade for Berlin-based companies and marketing of the city, but not for tourism. It involves 168 companies—advertisers, publishers and management agencies. The central idea is a new branding of Berlin as the place to be: ‘Become a part of a city of change, and be changed by Berlin.’”
The campaign’s emphasis has been “on finding the uniqueness of Berlin. It’s already seen as unique, especially by the young but it was not clear what this uniqueness stood for. A logo was developed and posted all over the place. We sent letters to 1.4 million households, invitations ‘to tell your story—about your successes.’ We got thousands of responses from which 500-600 stories were chosen covering 2,500 people. We didn’t use celebrities or professionals, just average Berliners. If your story was accepted it was projected onto the Brandenburg Gate and you’d become a Berlin Ambassador with a special award and your story included on the website for Be Berlin.”
Each story was headed by a slogan variation: “Be volleyball/Be winner/ Be Berlin”; “Be upright/ Be garden saver/ Be Berlin.” The stories, in the areas of art, business, science, city life, are about personal successes large and small (www.be.berlin.de/en/stories).
Lang says that there’s a strong focus on youth, on green energy and cultural events and that polling has revealed a high approval rate for the campaign which is now extending to international events and trade fairs overseas. The key ‘descriptors’ of Berlin that appear to have emerged from the campaign suggest that the city is energetic and cutting-edge, has unparalleled diversity, attracts people from all over the world and has friendly citizens “with big hearts and big mouths.” There’s also a Berlin Friendliness Initiative designed to show visitors Berliners are helpful and good humoured. The Be Berlin logo is attached to arts, fashion, design, science and business products and events wherever there’s a will to be involved. Not surprisingly, artists we spoke to are less than impressed, thinking that the money spent on Be Berlin might be better invested in creating a future for the city rather than an attitude.
monopol
We enjoy a brief meeting with Elke Buhr, the assistant editor of the millionaire-owned Monopol. With its staff of 10—five writers, two art directors, two picture editors, two production people—the magazine initially focused on lifestyle, art and fashion, but “discovered that lifestyle readers are not so interested in art.” So the focus became visual arts in a city with reputedly the largest number of galleries in Europe per head of population and heavily involved in the continuing boom in the commercial art market: “We need the visual arts public.”
Buhr describes the magazine as “Berlin-centred while being international.” Mrs Taschen, partner in the idioyncratic Taschen publishing company, “does a double-page column each edition focusing on a different city.” Atypically two recent issues cover performance art, with a lead story on Rose Lee Goldberg’s Performa live art festival in New York. Initially the coverage was to be in one edition but was spread over two “to avoid an impression of ‘harshness.’” Media arts only occasionally make it on to the pages of Monopol whose strength lies in responding to a Berlin and European niche readership committed to progressive visual arts.
Rigaer Street 71-73A
photo Anja Leu
Rigaer Street 71-73A
fabrik (im) quadrat
Our last meeting was in Friedrichshain with The Association for Urban Spaces and the Creative Industries involving young artists directly engaged in preserving and regenerating a part of the city. Behind a tired, old wall topped with ragged barbed wire there’s a courtyard in which stands a large timber shed (apparently long ago it housed cows) and to its right a low bunker-like stone building. Towering above is an elderly, neat apartment building, once a 19th-century factory, with a shared cafe space on the ground floor in which plans are on display to convert the site in part into a cultural centre.
The shed is adorned with photographs, charts, maps and information cards, suspended light globes and an occasional ‘peep’ box. As we walk around the shed a 140 year history of the building unfolds, its industrial uses, including as a furniture factory in the 30s, changing ownership, the ‘missing’ years (blank wall space) of Nazi domination, the stealing of the property and the murder of the Jewish owners, the merchants Mechel and Simon Beiser….and on to more recent times. The display has an archaeological aura—photographs of layers of brick, a peephole glimpse of wall surfaces—and an air of mystery—swinging globes and a query about what precisely Osram were up to here with their wartime armaments research. It’s an engrossing site-specific installation, even on a chilly day. We’ve arrived just after the exhibition closed and see only traces of the bright blue ‘carpet’ that filled the spaces between buildings, unifying Rigaer Street 71-73A into a single concept—a workplace of the past, a living space in the present and an active cultural hub for the future.
This project at Fabrik [im] Quadrat (literally, the factory in the square) is described as “an intervention with light boxes, future-plans and historical speculations; yard-exhibition,” and was shown throughout October. An initiative of the local community (residents, artists, associations) who came together in 2008 under the leadership of Stadtraumnutzung e.V. to contest the sale and demolition of the historical property, the project gained the support of other organisations including the Cottbus Technical University.
In the ‘bunker’ there is a club gallery named Antje Øklesund, which contains a range of other peephole works including a small self-contained 50s loungeroom in which, swathed in retro-glow, you can sit as others spy on you. The venue is also used for progressive music performances at night and has a cozy bar and a variety of small rooms, one of which features a huge mound of trolley wheels (another layer of the site’s history) on which are mounted flickering video monitors. Outside, in the ruins, there are remnants of a sound art installation—small speakers on walls and in cracked wash basins. At the edge of the property a mechanic happily restores old GDR Trabant cars.
The three young artists and organizers of Antje Øklesund, Hajo Toppius, Thomas Redekop and Sascha Schneider, who guide us around the site are committed to preserving and simultaneously transforming it, collaborating with the community of heirs spread all over the world. Although they admit it will be a challenge given unresolved ownership and city politics, their determination is evident. (For more information & pictures see www.stadtraumnutzung.de)
berlin: i.d.
Strangers to Berlin, and on a short visit, we quickly absorbed a range of opinions as to the character of this city. We certainly sensed and experienced its diversity and vitality and were left in no doubt that here was a city busily re-inventing itself, despite its financial debt. But while the city saw itself as friendly, creative and internationally attractive, and was shoring up that opinion with its Be Berlin campaign, it was also described as an island with more connections to the greater world than with Germany, but also with islands and ghettos within of citizens separated by geography and wealth and inequitable degrees of access to the arts. Activists, theorists and artists seek a balance between preservation, regeneration and the new, seeing the city as a laboratory for producing new forms of art and knowledge. In the opinion of Adrienne Goehler, Berlin already is that laboratory, but it has to acknowledge it and, to make the most of it, invest.
Our thanks to Klaus Krischok Director of the Goethe-Institut Australia for proposing the visit, to Timm Klöpper of the Goethe-Institut Berlin for organising our itinerary and special thanks to our excellent guide Monika Böttcher for her companionship and for generously sharing her considerable knowedge of the city.
VILNIUS: EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2009. VILNIUS: THE CAPITAL OF LITHUANIA. LITHUANIA: INDEPENDENT SINCE 1990. RIDING THROUGH THE STREETS CHECKING OUT THE SOVIET MODERNIST AND CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURES WITH MEDIA ARTIST AND RACONTEUR GEDIMINAS URBONAS WAS A GREAT INTRODUCTION TO THE LAYERS OF HISTORY IN THIS CITY.
Lost Vilnius Through the Window of a Trolleybus introduced us to brutalist concrete buildings, to timber summer houses from another era, to the KGB prison-now-museum and the soon to be demolished historic Lietuva cinema—one of many buildings lost to the growing property market. Exposing us to the redevelopment of many culturally significant buildings brought about by the privatisation of public spaces, the trip critically charted the remapping of the city since the Soviets left in 1990.
An ‘artistic trip’ developed for the participants of the IETM Autumn Plenary Meeting in October last year, this experience was a fitting introduction to the contradictions raised by two decades of integration of East and West Europe—the broad theme of the meeting.
We return to the cobblestone streets and baroque architecture of the old city, wet with the rain that’s apparently typical. Our colleagues explain that the etymology of Lithuania (or as the locals say, “Lietuva”) derives from “lietus”—rain. The inside-out yellow umbrella logo of the event we’re attending suddenly makes sense.
Six Australian delegates attend the IETM meeting in Vilnius. Formally known as the Informal European Theatre Meeting, in recent years this 30-year-old network is reaching out to include other parts of the world. Renamed IETM: International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts, it’s a membership-based organisation with more than 400 members in 45 countries. It holds two plenary meetings per year, hosted by different cities and attended by an eclectic network of artists, producers, presenters and academics.
The Australia Council is an Associate Member of the IETM, and has been sending delegations of Australian producers and artists to their meetings since 2008. A partnership between the two organisations has now been formalised with the appointment of David Pledger (director of Melbourne’s not yet its difficult) as Project Director, IETM-Australia Council for the Arts Collaboration Project. Based at the IETM office in Brussels, Pledger describes his work as, “developing more opportunities for Australian artists to work internationally…and taking an active role in larger discussions which support more international artists working and performing within the EU.” One of his first tasks was to attend the IETM Plenary in Vilnius along with John Baylis (Performing Lines), Michelle Kotevski (Urban Theatre Projects), Lockie McDonald (Fullsky), Kate Neylon (pvi collective) and myself.
The IETM plenaries are about professional connection and exchange. ‘Pitching’ is fiercely discouraged; IETM is vehemently not an arts market. The panels and discussions typically address artform development, models of making and presentation, and sharing knowledge and strategies across borders. The performance program introduces delegates to some local work. And the informal moments are about developing relationships, brokering international collaborations and partnerships, sharing anecdotes and, in Vilnius, quite a lot of vodka.
The plenary was hosted by Menu Spaustuve, a performing arts centre located in a recently refurbished printing house in the middle of the old city—so recently they were still finishing the wiring and painting the day before the plenary opened. I arrived early to encounter great excitement—“The heating has arrived!” With its range of multi-use spaces, black box theatre and outdoor marquee, Menu Spaustuve was a great location for the events and for hosting the various constellations of people emerging in intense discussion.
The plenary focused on the shift in relationships between Eastern and Western Europe over the last two decades—examining promises and expectations from both sides—and the emergence of new colonisations. The impact of more fluid contact since the wall/curtain came down was a major area of discussion, proving to be full of contradictions and questions. Have the geographic and ideological been replaced with economic differences? How can resources be shared more equally across borders? Have Western markets ‘lost interest’ in the East? Why?
Nele Hertling, the founding director of Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre observed that while there are a handful of Eastern directors who’ve become ‘shooting stars’ in the Western European theatre festival circuit, presenters, press and audiences have generally shown disdain for the ‘folkloric’, ‘old fashioned’ work emerging from the East. She maintains the West’s interest in the East was stronger during the Cold War: “… whenever artistic work from behind the Wall was presented, one could be sure of interested audiences and press attendance. Maybe the interest was not so much in the artistic, but in the ‘subversive’ quality…When this was gone, the dream of artists—having an easy and open dialogue with new Western audiences—was cruelly damaged. Without that subversive quality the audience lost interest.”
Maciej Nowalk, Director of the Polish Theater Institute, maintained that although “we became much more open about new ideas and possibilities…the iron curtain still exists…with all of the money and power coming from the West…The UK has most of Poland’s plumbers and our artists too because they can earn more there…and Polish artists who stay ‘give in’ to the West by creating work that caters to the ‘old world’ curiosity.” Explaining that this drain of artists and ideas to the West has not been replaced with an influx of collaborations with western artists, he finishes simply “The exchange is uneven.”
As an outsider to the East/West European experience, these (and many other) insights were useful to decode and contextualise some of the artform discussions and performance work on offer.
Staged concurrently was the International Theatre Festival Sirenos, which, along with the Lithuanian Dance Information Centre offered delegates the opportunity to see performances with local audiences. With little knowledge of the artists and companies in the program, many delegates took a series of blind punts on shows we booked before arriving. And like any festival some of the works were great and others were not. Collectively though, they represented a strong survey of Lithuania’s rich theatre tradition (including works by internationally renowned directors Oskaras Korsunovas and RimasTuminas), its relatively young contemporary dance practice (for the five Soviet decades only classical ballet and folk dance received state support) and a new generation of hybrid collaborations.
Aukse Petruliene, Mrs Strangled and Mr Shot, Psilicone Theatre
courtesy the artist
Aukse Petruliene, Mrs Strangled and Mr Shot, Psilicone Theatre
My highlight was the modest but distinctive DIY show Mrs Strangled and Mr Shot made by young performance company Psilikono Teatras, a collaboration between visual artist Aukse Petruliene and musician Tomas Dobrovolskis. Petruliene animates a series of hand-made miniature silicone puppets and props on a worktable in front of the audience. Projected onto a large screen, these constantly mutating images create a compelling world of grotesque desire and intrigue. Building atmosphere and narrative, Dobrovolskis’ one-man orchestra provides the live soundtrack. Together, the two depict a story loosely based on documentary material from a scandalous pre-war murder case reinterpreted into a mythological exploration of hunger and desire.
As both technicians and performers, the collaborators play with their hand-made materials/instruments and the live pacing of the storytelling with enormous pleasure, creating an engrossing experience for the audience. Watching these artists, I’m sure they’re part of a new generation doing what they love to do, without needing to second guess what the West might want.
Three days of lively discussion, performances and meeting new and old friends and colleagues made the IETM Autumn Plenary a fantastic, albeit whirlwind, experience. For an Australian it was a window on another world, where the idea of East/West has a different set of co-ordinates, cultural meanings and lived experiences. Being my first time in Lithuania and at an IETM, I was glad to have gone a couple of days early to see the extraordinary Urban Stories: The X Baltic Triennial of International Art at the Contemporary Arts Centre and to visit the new National Gallery and the KGB Museum. It helped me understand where I was and to physically and culturally acclimatise to (some of) the differences.
As many delegates reiterated in different ways throughout the meeting, cooperation and partnership need continuity to thrive. While this is true of the relationships between East and West in Europe, it’s also true of Australia’s involvement in this international arena. So here’s hoping future Australian delegates take up the opportunity to attend IETM Meetings and take the time to broker new networks and collaborations over the next decade—in both Europes.
IETM (International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts) Autumn Plenary, Vilnius, Lithuania, Oct 8-11, 2009, www.ietm.org
The Australia Council has negotiated a special flat rate of 295 Euros for Australian artists and arts organisations interested in joining the IETM. The council supports an Australian presence at the 2010 IETM Spring (April 15-18) and Autumn (October/November) plenary meetings. David Pledger, Project Director, IETM-Australia Council for the Arts Collaboration Project, is based at IETM’s head office in Brussels (david.pledger@ietm.org).
Elizabeth Haslam, James O’Connell, Hoods, Street Theatre/NORPA
photo Lorna Sim
Elizabeth Haslam, James O’Connell, Hoods, Street Theatre/NORPA
FESTIVALS, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THEIR INFANCY, AND MAJOR EVENTS LIKE ANNIVERSARIES CAN LEAVE PROFOUND LEGACIES: THIS IS THE OFTEN UNDER-VALUED POWER OF EPHEMERAL ART. ANTHONY STEEL’S NEW MEMOIR, PAINFUL IN DAILY DOSES (WAKEFIELD PRESS, ADELAIDE, 2009) CANDIDLY DESCRIBES HIS QUEENSLAND EXPO PROGRAM AS A BOX-OFFICE UNDER-ACHIEVER, YET POINTS OUT THAT IT WAS THE STIMULUS FOR A HUGE EXPANSION OF CULTURAL ACTIVITY THAT HAS SINCE DEVELOPED IN BRISBANE.
The other side of that major event coin is the sad tale told by a young theatre-maker from Porto: she claimed that her city’s year as European Capital of Culture had all but destroyed local arts and many young artists, herself included, had found it necessary to leave. Resources had all been corralled for that year’s boost and left little for ongoing activity in the years to follow.
As Gavin Findlay has suggested (RT 93, RT94), the National Festival of Australian Theatre and the Festival of Contemporary Arts both served as timely platforms for Canberra artists. Given their subsequent demise, we have to assume that neither event was given long enough to put down strong roots. The former had been Anthony’s brainchild and he gave it a point of difference by embracing one genre, liberally and laterally interpreted. Had the faith been maintained, the national capital would now be host not only to a much needed annual theatre conference, but also to one of the greatest gatherings of performing arts professionals in the world. The Australian Performing Arts Market began under my watch in Canberra and when the festival was canceled a couple of years later, the market followed me to Adelaide and has continued to flourish there. Such is the fate of short-term thinking.
Nevertheless, my take on Canberra at present is a positive one. While I was shocked to realise a couple of years ago that there had been a dramatic reduction in the number of professional companies resident there, all of whom I had invited in to the festival, what I now see is new energy and a burgeoning renaissance. The celebration of the Canberra Centenary in 2013 offers yet another timely opportunity to nurture and encourage that movement.
The Centenary program will be cultural in the broadest sense and will showcase Canberra as an incubator, rather than reinforce the misconception of it as a passive host to national government and collections. Science, sport, political and environmental concerns, the slow food movement etc, all deserve to be celebrated next to, and in collaboration with, the major cultural foci of design, architecture, city-planning, writing, film and sound, music, visual and performing arts, and all of this against the unique local, regional, national and international landscape of Canberra.
In 2011 we hope to announce a major hypothetical design exercise which will not only engage with fresh ideas nationwide about urban planning and city-scaping, but also ensure that the thinking that went into designing a new capital 100 years ago is brought into the present. It will highlight new concerns for building, environmental sustainability and their challenges to design as pure creativity.
In that unique mix of centenary programming sits a once-in-a-century opportunity to support local arts practice for the long term. Gavin is right to point out the dearth of arts training and a decline in resources for dance: they are things which need attention. But the first signs will come surprisingly soon. Flipart is a new addition to the Canberra Festival and will not only bring Stalker, Dislocate, Zimboyz and others for free street performances, but also ensure that visiting artists offer workshops. It will provide platforms for local artists such as Janine Ayres’ Aerial Dance and Warehouse Circus. With new initiatives this year, the period around Canberra Day (March 12th) is starting to gather the kind of critical mass which might soon be shaped into a festival of note in the ACT. One endearing aspect is a reminder that despite its national and international significance, Canberra is also a regional city: sheep-dog trials are still included in the program.
Other festivals with continuing grunt in the ACT include the Canberra International Music Festival, the National Folk Festival and the Canberra International Film Festival (a great 2009 program by Simon Weaving).
In the context of year-round activity, the Street Theatre can’t be underestimated. Caroline Stacey is providing exactly the kind of support emerging artists need and has created a process for local artists who are invited in, and mentored, to make their work. Aerial Dance’s The House that Jack Built was a standout, but new music theatre, poetry, music drama and a rap show produced by a couple of high school students were also part of Made in Canberra.This is an emerging artist program the Centenary will be keen to nurture. At the same time, Canberra Youth Theatre offers residencies to young artists, Min Mae is indeed leading the charge in live art, Jigsaw and QL2 still produce, CMAG and Craft ACT are devoted to local work, and barely a breath away the Q Theatre in Queanbeyan has a lively program.
If you add the outstanding exhibitions and public programs of our national collecting institutions housed there, and the speaker programs of ANU and Canberra University, their art, music and design schools, to say nothing of the programs of 100 diplomatic missions, there’s never a dull moment in the national capital. The brainfood is in staggering quantities and can feed myriad creativity.
Hotshop, Canberra Glassworks
The current Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope is also Arts Minister and a genuine supporter of the arts. His personal commitment to the excellent Glassworks, a new arts centre in Belconnen, and public artworks all over the city is testament to this. He is also a passionate supporter of the new International Arboretum, rising like a Phoenix from the burnt-out hillsides—100 forests of 100 trees and 100 gardens. All these initiatives offer platforms to a wide range of artists.
Stanhope’s endorsement of widespread reviews is an acknowledgment that this is a time for change. I don’t share Gavin’s view that this will mean just more bureaucracy. He may be right that some energies are, understandably, exhausted. But there are new ones a-foot and a-wing, especially for those keen to roll up their sleeves and work for the renaissance.
My mantra is seed now, flower in 2013, blossom for another 100 years. Canberra is not in-your-face like Sydney and Melbourne. Despite the myth of monumentalism, it’s a shy city, like its twin, the ancient Japanese capital of Nara, and that’s why I like it. Seek and ye shall find. I hope that those who cherish Canberra’s past, as Gavin Findlay clearly does, will have a happier song to sing of its future in a few years’ time.
The first two parts of our survey of the recent history of performance in Canberra were by Gavin Findlay (RT93; RT94)
Lee Serle (foreground), I Want to Dance Better at Parties, Chunky Move
photo Igor Sapina
Lee Serle (foreground), I Want to Dance Better at Parties, Chunky Move
IT IS EASIER FOR AN AUSTRALIAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANY TO TOUR INTERNATIONALLY THAN IT IS TO VISIT A REGIONAL VENUE. THIS APPEARED TO BE THE CONSENSUS WITHIN THE SMALL TO MEDIUM DANCE SECTOR WHICH PROMISED TO TAKE THIS ARTICLE INTO GLOOMY TERRITORY. I CAN REPORT HOWEVER THAT A NEW PERFORMING ARTS TOURING SCHEME IS OPENING UP THE REGIONS TO AUSTRALIAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANIES.
Before researching this article I shared the opinion, derived from reports of international success from companies such as Melbourne’s Chunky Move and Adelaide’s Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), that there was a hungry international market for Australian contemporary dance due to the high production values, markedly physical style of the work and strong stamp of the sophisticated choreographers running the major middle-scale companies. Looking at the touring schedules of four companies with significant international touring in the last two or three years, it was immediately evident how little national touring accompanied their overseas success.
Set to explore the issues underpinning this imbalance, I spoke to the producers of these companies and was surprised in a couple of cases to find that large and significant Australian tours are planned for 2010 and 2011. Kate Champion’s Force Majeure is the first company to embark upon a national tour through the new Australia Council funded Roadwork network. This network administered by Performing Lines in Sydney consists of a self-selecting group of 18 regional theatres and the regional touring network, Country Arts SA. Roadwork is an extension of the successful Mobile States network model (also administered by Performing Lines and subsidised by Australia Council) which supports smaller scale work.
Roadwork seeks to support adventurous middle scale dance and theatre which is suitable for regional touring. The presenters meet to select productions from dance and theatre which can benefit from marketing and audience development activity. Created in response to feedback articulated by both presenters and producers about the obstacles to presenting dance, the program has been tailored to meet immediate needs. Force Majeure will tour The Age I’m In, the production which premiered to great acclaim at Sydney Festival in 2008. For the company the opportunity to present the work across such a large range of venues is an exciting extension of its aim to create accessible work which has a strong relevance to Australian audiences. Champion plans to accompany the performances with workshops and talks to create opportunities for regional audiences to come into contact with the artists and the work.
Also, heading out on a Roadwork tour, this time in 2011, is Lucy Guerin Inc’s Untrained, the production which premiered at Melbourne’s Dance Massive festival in 2009 and which will tour to Adelaide Festival, Hong Kong Arts Festival and regional Victorian venues—Kingston Arts Centre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, Colac Otway Performing Arts Cultural Centre, Frankston Arts Centre and Dandenong’s Castle Theatre in 2010. For Guerin, the nature of this production, which pitches two trained performers alongside two untrained individuals in a series of tasks which are both humorous and touching, has been the breakthrough required to reach broad Australian audiences. In 2011, the show will tour to 16 venues over nine weeks, with workshops for two untrained locals creating the show with the two touring professionals and Lucy Guerin. The work will literally transform with each local iteration.
For both Guerin and Champion, these new opportunities to present their work outside of their home bases in Melbourne and Sydney respectively are unprecedented. Prior to this tour Guerin’s producer, Michaela Coventry, told me that there were ongoing relationships with Brisbane’s Powerhouse, Sydney Opera House and PICA in Perth, but that it remains difficult to build an audience and demand for the work outside of a festival context. Only in Melbourne has the company succeeded in securing a long-term presenting partnership with Malthouse which has consistently presented the company and will partner Lucy Guerin Inc in an Interconnections commission of a new work in 2010.
In 2009 Lucy Guerin Inc toured Corridor, Love Me and Structure and Sadness to three US venues and six European venues. Untrained was presented at Sydney Opera House for the successful Springdance program but there were no further Australian presentations. In 2008 the company presented at Sydney and Perth festivals and in 2007 there was a Mobile States tour of Love Me which reached all five venues in that network. International touring in 2007 reached Korea, China, the US and Singapore.
Force Majeure has mainly presented work in Australia in the festival context and has begun to explore international opportunities for presentation on the back of its successful inclusion in Lyon’s Biennale de la Danse in 2006. In 2009 The Age I’m In toured to prestigious festivals in Ireland, Korea and Canada. For real international profile however Chunky Move and ADT have been redefining the parameters of success.
In 2009 Chunky Move toured more or less non-stop from March till December, with Glow, Mortal Engine, Two Faced Bastard and I Want to Dance Better at Parties. Fourteen venues in the US, UK and Europe presented this Melbourne-based company. Glow, the technologically driven solo created by artistic director Gideon Obarzanek in 2006 has become the company’s international calling card, with huge demand for the work appearing unabated into 2010. Executive Producer Rachael Azzopardi explained how this international dynamic was not mirrored in Australia. While Chunky Move has presented work annually in Sydney, Geelong and Canberra and has seasons in Sydney and Canberra planned for 2010, the company’s wish to tour regionally is difficult to fulfil. In 2007 I Want to Dance Better at Parties undertook an extensive regional tour supported by Playing Australia but Azzopardi admits that this did not create any forward momentum for the company.
ADT too has undertaken national tours in the past, with Birdbrain in 2002 and again in 2005, but in the last 10 years there have been only four visits to Sydney and one apiece to Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. ADT toured Birdbrain internationally for seven months solid from late 2002 to early 2003 to UK, Europe and the US. Between 2004 and 2007 it toured extensively with Age of Unbeauty and Held. In 2008 G toured to 26 venues with 39 performances across Europe and in 2009 added a tour of five more international venues to the impressive tally. Between 2002 and 2009 there were over 200 international performances. Due no doubt to the strong relationship with Gent based agent, Frans Brood, ADT experiences consistent and strong international demand for work which is rarely seen in Australia.
So why is there such a roadblock for contemporary dance in Australia? A follow-up article to this will survey the presenters and seek their views but for now the producers have their opinions. First amongst these is cost. The producers recognise that they compete with smaller, less technically complex works regionally. ADT sends up to 19 people on the road to support a production with 10 dancers and Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine requires a three-day bump-in. None of the companies can afford to subsidise their touring from operational budgets dedicated to the creation and presentation of new work.
The nature of contemporary dance is another obstacle, in that the form is perceived to be relatively less accessible to audiences. Whilst the large Sydney Dance Company, Bangarra Dance Theatre and The Australian Ballet have a sizeable audience in the major performing arts centres they visit each year, the producers often hear that these companies meet the need for dance content and attract all the dance attenders out there. The producers indicate that there is a lack of enthusiasm for dance from the presenters and few advocates for dance within the touring infrastructure. The invisibility of contemporary dance at dedicated touring platforms such as the Australian Performing Arts Centre Association (APACA) conferences, discourages producers from more confidently tackling opportunities to interface with presenters. Not since Playing Australia’s Made to Move program (now defunct) have the producers experienced pull from the sector. The losses experienced by many of the presenters associated with Made to Move are not forgotten and there is a sense that risks will not be taken with dance programming. With targeted funding programs for international market development and a keen interest in contemporary Australian work in several dynamic markets such as the UK and parts of Europe, it is little wonder that these busy producers focus their efforts upon areas where they are more likely to make immediate impact.
Perhaps the success of Force Majeure and Lucy Guerin Inc on their Roadworks tours to come will open some doors for dance companies to tour outside of this initiative and begin to build the communication between companies and venues which has dwindled of late. There is no lack of interest in engaging with Australian audiences on the part of the companies and no quality issues with the work. There are obstacles to be removed and companies, presenters and funders need to continue to work together to clear the path. More Roadworks required.
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Lucy Guerin Inc’s Untrained will be presented at the Adelaide Centre for the Arts, Feb 24-28 as part of the Adelaide Festival.
Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine returns to Melbourne, March 3-13 at Malthouse, and Sydney May 5-15 at Sydney Theatre.
LINDY HUME’S 2009 SYDNEY FESTIVAL WAS FRAMED AT EITHER END OF ITS PROGRAM BY SUPREMELY INVENTIVE AND INSIGHTFUL INTERPRETATIONS OF CLASSIC WORKS: SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET AND STRAVINSKY’S OPERA OEDIPUS REX. EACH PRODUCTION DREW FROM THE ORIGINAL UNEXPECTED PASSION, HORROR AND PITY, AND, HAVING ESTABLISHED THE FRAME IT WAS TO WORK WITHIN (ITS MODES OF TELLING, PERFORMANCE STRATEGIES, VISUAL MOTIFS), SUSTAINED AND DEVELOPED IT WITH RIGOUR AND CONSISTENCY.
The Schaubühne from Berlin, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, delivered a Hamlet rich in excess and abjection yet able to switch from raucous comedy and spurious violence to moments of intense interiority and intimacy. This was not only because the actor Lars Eidinger is frighteningly adept at such shifts, but because his Hamlet is part of a world that is likewise angry, rattled, impatient and unpredictable and he more than most. Guns are fired at the dinner table, people yell (even Polonius at Ophelia while trashing his meal) and Hamlet intrudes everywhere with a video camera that casts images on a huge screen and reframes our understanding of what is happening to him.
Although other characters take turns at videoing for Hamlet, the tool is principally his but it does more than pry and document. Hamlet’s psyche sees what it wants to see—the huge screen recurrently turns a stale yellow with flying black flecks, like bats or ash. Within this enveloping nightmarish image Hamlet, ‘projecting’ furiously, can create a growling Gertrude out of The Exorcist (much later he spiels an exorcism over the Queen in evangelical American English) and then transform her into Ophelia (played by the same actress). When the camera is turned on Claudius we see him become Hamlet’s dead father (Claudius’ brother), the skull quivering beneath his flesh—another of Hamlet’s conflations and a chilling rendition of the ghost.
The set is a frame that is itself constantly being reframed. Filling almost the width and height of the stage and riding back and forth, downstage and up, it is pulled by the actors over a field of dark earth. The frame that houses the screen (long thin metal chains providing a dense curtain as well) can be separated from its base, so that the screen can stay upstage while the base with table and chairs rolls forward, or vice versa, creating sudden shifts in depth of field with a cinematic verve isolating, for example, a terrified Gertrude in a vast sweep of dirt while Hamlet maniacally romps about her.
A room in the court can open up into a muddy graveyard in which, in the play’s opening, a lone gravedigger struggles to lower a coffin, falling into the hole with it and bouncing up like Buster Keaton while a member of the court creates arcs of rain with a garden hose as if requested to add apt ambience to the funeral (recalling Claudius’ “mirth in funeral…dirge in marriage”). Later in the production there’s a wild hose fight reflecting the frustrations and anger felt in a rapidly collapsing court. It’s the ‘undue haste’ of the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude that seems to have provided the impulse for the production—things are spilt, get messy, people stagger (especially Claudius) and pratfall. Impatience and anger saturate the action. The swordfight between Laertes and Hamlet looks dangerously reckless. Hamlet goes at his “To be or not to be…” speech a number of times for different audiences, as if trying to get a handle on it, going further into it, swapping rational delivery for rant. The production is never short of restlessness and anxiety: Hamlet rattles everyone, and finally himself, uncertain where his actions have taken him.
This Hamlet is a clownish brat, spitting food, singing rock songs and giving way to physical abandon—falls, a flash of sexual intimacy with Ophelia, fights and punkish dancing. He chats with the audience, mocks someone for falling asleep, but enters his moments of interiority with remarkable conviction. His capacity for transformation—discarding his Hamlet ‘fat suit’ to play a sexy Gertrude in the play within the play—is astonishing. Other actors also excel: Urs Jucker’s Claudius sees himself in the master of ceremonies mould, constantly picking up a microphone, dropping chattily into the auditorium to deliver the first part of his confession before returning to the stage to sink deep into his fear and guilt. Again, the consistency of these sudden oscillations of states of being frames a dangerous world in which death threatens and beckons—marked by the constant presence of the downstage centre grave onto which characters fall or bury themselves or each other.
Shakespeare’s text has been cut and pasted and re-written a little into new shape by Marius von Mayenburg but with much fidelity to the original (the work is surtitled). With Ostermeier he has fasioned a Hamlet apt for our own angry, anxious times, drawing us into the consciousness of a man whose madness seems not to be in doubt but who is still complex and memorably affecting. The consistency in framing and motif makes for an engrossing production, not least in the attention to media: the camera, celebrity moments, microphones and songs, and Hamlet mocking Rosencrantz and Guidenstern by creating a mock turntable using a paper plate, fork and microphone, spraying out hip-hop and glitching while squirting juice over the pair from a cardboard container tucked between cheek and shoulder.
foreground Roderick Dixon, Elma Kris, Oedipus Rex & Symphony of Psalms
photo Jamie Williams
foreground Roderick Dixon, Elma Kris, Oedipus Rex & Symphony of Psalms
I’ve listened to Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex often but found it somewhat austere. Peter Sellars’ staging and Joana Carneiro’s conducting yield surprising warmth and passion. Sellars has the large orchestra filling much of the lower auditorium floor space, making for a considerably improved aural experience in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. On a forestage just above the orchestra an all male choir, casually attired, assembles, and above them there is a narrow plain timber stage backed by a wall and housing four exotic thrones by Ethiopian artist, Elias Simé. Here the tale of Oedipus is enacted in simple costumes suggestive of ancient times. By placing the orchestra and the choir between us and the actors you’d think the effect would be distancing. But the framing provides a heightened sense of ritual and occasion (when Queen Jocasta enters to a trumpet blast, the house lights flood the auditorium. We almost stand to attention).
The choir play a key role in the layering of affect. They are a physical chorus as well as singers; schooled in a gestural language (presumably Auslan), they sign continuously, sink to their knees, fall and roll as one or in groups. The strength of their feelings is made visually as well as aurally palpable and the sense of an engaged citizenry is powerful.
The narration is delivered in English by Paula Arundell, with Sellars effectively casting the narrator as Oedipus’ daughter Antigone. The singing is in Latin, but with limited movement, emphasising courtliness and emphatic states of being, contrasting sharply with the vigour of the chorus.
Although they’re relatively far away from us, the spare staging and almost tableau setting allows for a clear focus on the performers. Movements are simple: Oedipus, his back to us, holds Jocasta affectionately as she sings, but as her resistance to the truth grows she moves to a throne and uses sign language rhetorically and evasively. Not unlike a Sellars staging of a Handel oratorio there’s a suggestion of psychological realism built from minimal means. The singing is superb, especially from Rodrick Dixon as Oedipus, a lightly toned tenor capable of great strength when required.
After interval Sellars changes the frame for Stravinsky’s more positive Symphony of Psalms, adding female singers, the chorus now surrounding the orchestra and lining upper aisles and again gesturing. On the forestage the blind Oedipus led by daughters Antigone and Ismene (Elma Kris) slowly traverses the stage before his disappearance into the underworld.
There were two striking if demanding dance works: Mau: Tempest without a body, from New Zealand’s Lemi Ponifasio, and Dark Matters by Crystal Pites’ Kid Pivott Frankfurt RM from Vancouver. Mau is rooted in Maori dance and culture but also contemporary performance and butoh. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history wanders the stage screaming; a group of monks glide about in fast, small steps and with beautifully complex gesturing; a man very convincingly becomes a dog; a Maori elder addresses us, first revealing his tattoos, later dressed in a suit; and a lone man appears to bend and collapse beneath the weight of the world until a moment of release late in the work. For all of its mysteries, Mau is an engrossing work suggestive of post-colonial tensions, environmental exploitation and a Pacific Rim cultural sharing. Recurrent movement patterns and haunting visual motifs (including a large hanging metal-like sheet that changes texture with light and projections) lend Mau a provisional coherence and implant a desire to know more.
Dark Matters has a more pronounced coherence but appeared to many to slip away in its dance focussed second half. In the first, a man makes a puppet (superbly manipulated by the dancers in black outfits). It turns murderously on him and triggers the destruction of his world—in this case a theatre set. In the second half the dancers alternate between group dancing (chains of elaborate cause and effect) and sublime off-centre duets (Pite has worked with William Forsythe). Among the dancers a puppeteer figure appears and in the final scene is released from her black outfit, taught to walk (by the young man from the first act) and move until she drains him of life. As he lies in her arms, she looks down at him, draws an imaginary thread from his heart and kisses him, bringing him back to life. In this reversal the dark matter of our desires that turn our passions and creations against us is revealed to be human, not abstract, no mere anonymous puppeteer. It’s a pity then that the protracted, fine dancing of the second half seemed to iterate and reiterate duets of interdependence, departing too far from the theatrical framing of the first half and the ending.
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
photo Prudence Upton
Ghenoa Gela, Happy as Larry, Shaun Parker & Company
Shaun Parker’s Happy as Larry has a satisfying consistency built around a chalk board artist whose impressionistic documentation of his own state of mind and others’ movements begins to build into a major artistic creation. It’s made on a huge rotating black box out of which dancers and personalities of very different kinds manifest and then disappear, perhaps reflecting aspects of the artist’s psyche as he searches for a sense of self and achievement. Much of the work’s happiness theme seems provisional—a performer (Ghenoa Gela) impressively laughs without moving a facial muscle, dancers seem happiest when absorbed in their dancing, one performer’s risky virtuosity begins to worry the others—and the engagingly jaunty music has a melancholy string aspect that suggests a more complex mood. Warranting more review space than is available here, Parker’s subtly memorable work is full of invention, vivid detail, characterful solos and duets and, in the end a smiling ensemble, their happiness well earned.
Red Leap Theatre’s account of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival was done for the most part with great design fidelity to his drawings, although it had to reframe the story with a more obvious narrative and with an inclination to sentimentality (not a Tan vice) towards the end. The performers are solid actors, adroit puppeteers and fine movers. The Arrival should enjoy a long career on the festival circuit.
Festival disappointments included two Irish works. Oedipus Loves You is a punkish semi-musical account of the myth with limited thematic coherence and bad jokes. I’d have rather been at a Dylan Moran show. Giselle from Fabulous Beast began promisingly, a dance theatre work with spoken text and songs transposing the plot of the 19th century ballet to a deeply prejudiced rural village. The community takes to line dancing—innovatively choreographed—while the put upon Giselle’s life unravels. The final stages of the show lose impetus quickly with pretty standard wafty modern dance in the graveyard and a final fatuous image of Giselle trampolining from her grave. Why the line dancing motif wasn’t sustained is a mystery given its earlier integral role and the opportunity for it to be the trap offered by the ghosts of dead young women with which to snare young men. Save for Giselle (McCreedy) the other key female roles were played by men, often dextrously though without making a point as to why. Here was a production that slid out of frame.
Headlong’s Six Characters in Search of an Author was the greatest festival disappointment, not least because the praise lavished on it in London didn’t mesh with what we saw. The promise of a television industry framing of a classic work about identity and self image held much promise, especially after the experience of Hamlet. But the conceit was merely that and was never embodied, either technogically or performatively. Even odder was the presentation of Pirandello’s family, looking as if still living in the 20s, or somewhere thereabouts. Long sections of the original play had the contemporary characters propping up walls, while the decision to document the family drama was agonisingly negotiated. Amidst all the overacting, Ian McDiamard, as the father, made some cogent sense of the family’s plight. But the new, ironic post-theatre ending did nothing for the original conceit except to remind us that we were watching theatre about theatre, with nothing about the media, let alone the selves generated by it.
Muziktheater Transparent’s Ruhe [see David William’s review, p16] was an interesting case of limited framing. Sung beautifully by the members of Collegium Vocale Gent standing on chairs amidst us in Sydney University’s Great Hall, the promised interruptions to the singing were only two, and in the form of monologues delivered by actors moving among us. With numerous songs, this felt more like a concert than a music theatre work. Nonetheless it had a certain power in the juxtaposition of musical beauty, ugly prejudice and site, but after seeing Peter Sellars’ engagement with his choir, albeit in a substantially different kind of work and doubtless greater resources, I yearned for a little more adventuruous dramaturgy.
Hamlet and Oedipus Rex offered complete aesthetic and emotional experiences while Dark Matters and Mau: Tempest without a body suggested an integrity of vision if more challenging to interpret in what was an otherwise uneven and much debated 2009 Sydney Festival. Sometimes it only takes several successful works for a festival to leave its mark. Many people couldn’t get in to see Hamlet, but after all the word of mouth and media coverage felt like perhaps they had.
2009 Sydney Festival: Schaubühne Berlin, Hamlet, William Shakespeare, translation Marius von Mayenburg, director Thomas Ostermeier, design Jan Pappelbaum, Sydney Theatre, Jan 8-16; Shaun Parker & Company, Happy as Larry, director-choreographer Shaun Parker, designer Adam Gardnir, composers Nick Wales, Bree Van Reyk, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, Jan 22-24; MAU: Tempest without a body, concept, design, choreography, text Lemi Ponifasio; Seymour Centre, Jan 10; Fabulous Beast, Giselle, director Michael Keegan-Dolan; CarriageWorks, Jan 20-26; Headlong, Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, adaptors Rupert Goold, Ben Power, director Rupert Goold; Seymour Centre, Jan 19-31; Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex & Symphony of Psalms, director Peter Sellars, conductor Joana Carneiro, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30; Pan Pan Theatre, Oedipus Loves You, director Gavin Quin, Seymour Centre, Jan 21-25; Musiktheater Transparant, Ruhe, Collegium Vocale Gent, Great Hall, Sydney University, Jan 25-29; Red Leap Theatre, The Arrival, creators Julie Nolan, Kate Parker; CarriageWorks, Jan 10-17
IN ORDER TO GET TO THE FENCE, WE HAVE TO TRAVERSE A FEW OURSELVES. STARTING AT PARRAMATTA RIVERSIDE THEATRE, WE WALK UNDER THE BRIDGE, ACROSS THE LAWN AND THROUGH A TUNNEL BEFORE WAITING ALONGSIDE A WIRE FENCE TO ENTER THE WIDER ENCLOSURE WITHIN.
Once in, we apply insect repellent, purchase programs and then wait at another fence on the other side. From here we walk up a wooden ramp before taking our seats in the red raked bleachers. Below is Alison Page’s meticulous set: the back half of a suburban house without its fourth wall. Inside there is a couch with cushions, two tasteful lamps, a wall of framed pictures, a stereo, a television, and a kitchen where a woman is cooking. Outside there is a shed, a steel drum and a wooden table with three green plastic chairs.
Soon enough the cook—Joy (Skye Quill)—announces that dinner is ready. She and her indigenous partner Mel (Kelton Pell) settle down on the couch but they are interrupted when a teary Lou (Helen Dallas) emerges from the bedroom, phone in hand and fresh from another break-up. Mel’s friend Chris (Richard Green) cruises in looking for a feed and throughout all of this, someone travelling suspiciously light lurks outside. The phone rings, Mel picks up and a voice says, “You took long enough.” Standing in the backyard, the intruder turns out to be Mel’s sister Connie (Vicki Van Hout), whom he hasn’t seen for ten years.
Thus the scene is set for a night of reunion, remembrance and occasional disagreement. Characters drift in and out of the house and through a series of elliptical conversations. Sometimes there are two conversations going on at once, such as when director Alicia Talbot, master of the split stage, places Lou and Connie inside while Mel and Chris converse outside. Then Joy, who apparently has a history with Connie, re-emerges to reprimand Chris for not being at home and Mel for not being inside talking to his sister. Lou breezes by, asking airily if she’s interrupting anything and everyone dances languidly around the living room to Steve Miller’s “The Joker.” (Liberty Kerr’s sound design and song choice are excellent throughout.) Lou cheers up and announces that she’s going out: “I’m going to find a man.” “I’m going to watch her find that man”, says Connie. “Maybe I’ll go too”, muses Joy but the moment passes before they get out the door.
The men retreat to the shed and the women’s conversation turns to children, biology as destiny and the perils of population growth. Once again we seem to be talking around something rather than about it until the conversation seems to slide out of anyone’s control. Suddenly Joy is goading Connie: “I turned out okay; you’re pretty fucked up though;” Connie is replying, “Don’t speak for me, my mother loved me. Number 184 doesn’t need a mouthpiece”, and Joy is threatening to throw her out of the house. It sounds explosive, but it isn’t—it’s just a conversation gone unexpectedly awry. When Connie goes outside to confess to her brother that she and Joy have had a blue, she says simply. “Ten years come and gone in one fell swoop.”
The Fence chronicles a night, and through it a lifetime, of loss, survival and reconciliation. Like The Cement Garage (2000), The Longest Night (2002), Back Home (2006) and The Last Highway (2008) before it, this show has been devised in collaboration with community consultants around a large contemporary theme: in this case institutional care as experienced by both the Stolen Generations and the Forgotten Australians. Once again, Talbot has created a piece of neo-naturalistic theatre in a non-traditional theatre space. This time, however, the usual magic is missing and the historic site—on the lands of the Burramattagal and Wallumattagal people, near the former Parramatta Girls Home, and the former site of the King’s School—seems to work at cross purposes to the set. Whereas the site functions to blur the line between theatre and reality, the kitchen-sink set serves to reinforce it: this isn’t a real house, it’s a really good re-creation of a house and it would make almost as much sense in a theatre as it does here.
Nevertheless, there is a tangible sense of intimacy within it, thanks to the understated performance of the cast. Like his character, Pell provides an anchoring presence while Quill is both brittle and vulnerable as his partner and Green is suitably restrained as his taciturn friend. Similarly Van Hout is lean and slightly nervy as the evasive Connie and Helen Dallas is a voluptuous and vivacious Lou. Through this improvised family The Fence makes visible what many of us take for granted: the minor miracle of everyday life. The performance ends with Connie walking off into the night and Mel placing leaves in the burning drum, creating a smoking ceremony of sorts. Home is where the hurt is, the hearth is, and—when we are lucky—the heart is.
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2009 Sydney Festival, Urban Theatre Projects, The Fence, direction and original concept Alicia Talbot, performers and co-devisors Helen Dallas, Richard Green, Kelton Pell, Skye Quill, Vicki Van Hout, set design Alison Page, lighting design Neil Simpson, sound design Liberty Kerr, community liaison Lina Katsoumis; Parramatta, Sydney, Jan 14-30
ON ENTERING SYDNEY UNIVERSITY’S GREAT HALL, I AM FACED WITH A MULTITUDE OF TIGHTLY PACKED MISMATCHED CHAIRS FILLING THE SPACE. WATCHED BY PORTRAITS OF PAST CHANCELLORS, I NEGOTIATE MY WAY AMONGST OTHER AUDIENCE MEMBERS.
As the last stragglers are seated, an ordinary-looking man in front of me stands on his chair, joined by another eight men. They are the renowned choir Collegium Vocale Gent and sing, in glorious a cappella harmony, a selection of songs by Franz Schubert. The title of the performance comes from their third song, “Ruhe, schoenstes Gluck der Erde” (Rest/calm/silence, earth’s sweetest joy).
The setting is perfect for a recital, and the singers are divine. But nothing in Ruhe is as simple as it appears. From within the huddled mass of audience, a woman stands and begins speaking, cutting off the choir mid-song. She speaks of her experiences as a paid-up member of the National Socialist Party working as a nurse in an SS hospital in occupied Holland. In her reminiscences she’s enthusiastic and bubbly, awestruck by the brave injured men for whom she cared. Despite the grimness of the hospital’s speciality—amputations and rehabilitation for those with artificial limbs—hers is a great adventure. “I realised how useful I was… I was doing something that really, really mattered.” She remembers gushing upon seeing Himmler for the first time. He was, in her opinion, very nice. Much later, in a crowded train with the rest of the hospital fleeing the Allied advance, she remembers hearing of Hitler’s death on the radio, and weeping.
As her story concludes, the choir begins to sing again, as if their beauty might relieve the disquieting memories of this apparently nice young woman. Soon after however, a man stands in the audience interrupting their song. “The thing I liked about National Socialism,” he declares, “was the socialism.” He wasn’t so interested in the nationalism, which perhaps made sense, given that he was a Dutch member of a German party. “A minority should never have more than their rightful share,” he states in a reasonable and mild tone. He’s much easier to dislike than the woman, clearly an adherent to an ugly ideology, and yet his words have an uncomfortable plausibility. I’ve heard words like these before, from Australian mouths.
The texts are drawn from Armando and Hans Sleutelaar’s book De SS’ers, a series of interviews in the 1960s with Dutch members of the SS during Word War 2. In the program notes, Tom Jansen, who adapted the text with director Josse De Pauw, suggests that the performance is motivated not by a political agenda, but rather by the “gripping confusion raised by the material.” But in the face of this testimony, it’s difficult to avoid thinking about nationalist political movements, past and present. These are familiar exclusionary politics, complete with ugly moral equivalences, and active blindspots.
“You’ve got a nerve bringing this up,” the man declares when the reality of the gas chambers threatens his rational anti-Semitic ontology. He agrees that, “gassing people is not a decent thing to do.” But he’s equivocal. “It’s a better way to die than firebombing,” he states, expressing outrage about the Allied destruction of German cities, embracing the grisly algebra of ‘better’ deaths. Who is this audience to judge him? “You’re not such nice guys yourself.”
Neither of the speakers repudiates past actions. The man even describes himself as “an idealist”, adding helpfully that it might be best for all idealists to be lined up and shot. The woman suggests that she was simply doing her duty in a struggle against communism. “Why,” she asks, “is it okay to fight Communism now and it wasn’t back then?” It’s an awkward, if self-deceptive question. By placing this testimony alongside angelic singing, Ruhe masterfully interweaves beauty and what Hannah Arendt has described as “the banality of evil,” an evil uncomfortably close to home.
Finished with Schubert, the choir move to a raised platform at the far end of the hall, from which they begin another Ruhe, composed by Annelies Van Parys. Beside them is a projected monochrome image, a pastoral scene dominated by a huge tree with two farmers standing in front of a windmill. The tree’s leaves rustle gently in a breeze, but the human world within the image remains frozen. It’s a magnificently unresolvable image with which to end a gentle, beautiful, and deeply disturbing performance experience.
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Sydney Festival, Muziektheater Transparant, Ruhe, conceived and directed by Josse De Pauw, text Armando, Hans Sleutelaar, text adaptatio Tom Jansen, Josse De Pauw, music Franz Schubert, Annelies Van Parys; music selection Jens Van Durme, set, lighting design Herman Sorgeloos, performers: Han Kerckhoffs, Truus te Selle, singers: Collegium Vocale Gent; Great Hall, Sydney University. Jan 25-29
AFTER 77 GAMES OF TABLE TENNIS AND A HOME VICTORY FOR NEWCASTLE, 40 TO 37, SEARCH PARTY CONCLUDED, “ALL THAT IS LEFT NOW IS FOR THE PEOPLE OF NEWCASTLE TO TELL THE TALE—TO TELL THE TALE IN THE CAFES, DURING THE EYE TESTS AND THE SHOE FITTINGS AND THE MANICURES, AT THE TILLS OR THE CASH POINTS, IN THE QUEUE TO THE LADIES TOILETS…”
From the candid to the visceral, a table tennis marathon in a shopping centre, the slumber party disco dance-floor of Goh Ideta’s installation piece, Reflections, to Mammalian Diving Reflex’s internationally travelled project Haircuts by Children, Wunderbar captured the imagination. It sought out audiences, enticed people to try things, to go with it, to get involved. By engaging people in not quite the everyday, but with familiar moments of universal appeal, Wunderbar in turn created surprises. In doing so it has left tales to tell; of course it has been blogged, tweeted and facebooked and posted within the confines of friend groups and forums. But whereas the online lifespan of these lie in the moment, what Search Party prophesied and Wunderbar has achieved is an ongoing dialogue about experiences gleaned and events witnessed.
Of the projects I have enlisted to discuss, what was fundamental was their participatory ethos; the way in which they made people part of the work; the sense in which the work made the audience feel they were able to get involved, to take ownership. Whether playing a game of table tennis, stepping across the threshold of someone’s home, standing up and being counted in The People Speak’s Who Wants to Be…? or buying into the cult of Reactor’s Big Lizard people unknowingly became audiences, some became performers and in some instances, participants became artists.
Manipulating the role of the artist in the creation of an event, for Tours of People’s Homes, Joshua Sofaer took on the role of director, collaborating with 12 members of the public to devise 11 unique events in the private domicile of their own homes. Billed as an opportunity to impart a story, to show off one’s home, possessions or hospitality, audiences were offered the opportunity to enter a stranger’s home and share in a host of experiences from reliving the pop (fizzy and musical) indulgences of youth to hearing an intimate life-changing story, to helping throw a food fight.
Others took a more critical response to the brief. Nathalie Levi mused that “you really can’t just let complete strangers into this house in this day and age.” She punctuated the tour of her home with various security checks—demanding proof of identification, giving a thorough frisking and an intimate interrogation before just as quickly hustling you out the back door.
Kate Stobbart’s Invitation to Tea was at face value an opportunity to become acquainted with a group of strangers over a meal. Reflecting the social niceties and insincerity that often underlie invitations into one’s home, dinner was served on crockery decorated with truisms, observations and outright insults. Though these comments were not necessarily individually directed, their acerbic overtones made the culinary accompaniments, at points, indigestible. The guest to my left, who sat near silent throughout the meal dined from a series of plates telling him, “You just love the sound of your own voice” and “I wish you would just shut your face.”
Bath Time made for a suggestive proposition and an unusual offer; “have a bath with brother and sister Peter and Katy Merrington.” Ostensibly it was just that, a bath run for you to your particular specifications. A bath into which you were invited to relax and relinquish yourself to be doted upon by brother and sister as they perched aside the bath washing your hair and scrubbing your back. In terms of protecting one’s modesty, far from my imagined scenario of embarrassment, I was wholly unprepared for just how sympathetic, generous and just how normal my bubble-bath turned out to be; fortune favoured the brave. Reflecting that whilst at certain points in one’s life such assistance in bathing may be necessary, in this instance the unnecessary decadence of the action highlighted the siblings’ selfless kindness.
Courage of convictions was something put to the test in The People Speak’s quasi-television game show, Who Wants to Be …? In this bastardised format, the audience became contestants in an autonomous quest not to win, but to spend the money. Having each literally bought into the process though the entrance fee, the following three hours were then spent debating ways and means of putting the accumulated cash, a not insignificant sum of £1,070, to ‘good’ use. Literally any proposal was an option, as long as it was voted on: green for ‘yes’, red for ‘no way’ and orange for ‘I just don’t give a damn.’ Amidst the bickering, quibbling and voting, two definite camps of reason made themselves evident: those in favour of the more worthy outcomes and those drawn to the ridiculous and more daring suggestions. As majority ruled, the most worthy of the shortlist came up trumps and collectively we agreed to purchase an electricity generator for Zambia. Though at the end we left with a self-satisfied warmth resulting from the good deed, I also think many left with an air of disappointment that something more audacious hadn’t in fact snuck in the back door; the mildly unsatisfying feeling of democracy.
Within the tenet of Wunderbar to let yourself be absorbed by an idea, by an experience, Big Lizard and the ‘big idea’ embraced this concept in its most ambiguous sense. Taking to the streets of Newcastle aboard the Big Idea Fun Bus, Reactor took the conceit of Big Lizard on the campaign trail to canvas support, armed with stickers, balloons and special appearances by the big cuddly personality of Big Lizard him/herself. As a character Big Lizard is created in the likeness of the promotional gimmickry upon which commercial enterprises—from gas companies to breakfast cereals—and societal campaigns, like those about the health dangers of smoking, try to create an identifiable and memorable image for their brand or social enterprise. Big Lizard’s purpose is much less clear. The Big Idea is sold to you with equal, if not greater vehemence and conviction, but what you are being asked to buy into, advocate or support is not stipulated beyond the figurehead of Big Lizard. Framed around ice cream, champagne parties and a campaign vocabulary of positivity you are asked to engage in the beneficial and most likeable aspects of Big Lizard and how his or her existence might better one’s life: what’s so great about Big Lizard?; do a drawing of yourself with Big Lizard. Like the promotional campaign methodologies hijacked by the project, Reactor are coaxing you to knowingly or subversively buy into the idea by reiterating and validating Big Lizard and his somewhat sinister Big Idea. “Big Lizard’s fun, give him a hug!”
Like Big Lizard, Wunderbar has employed subversive tactics in the way it has promoted and publicised the idea of a festival. Selling experience and interaction, it has been able to dispense with promoting the festival with the branding of either live or performance art. Certainly there was a presence of such well-rehearsed performance artists as Alastair Maclennan in the festival, but even their synonymy with live art was refocused as performance as event. Instead of art for art’s sake maybe Wunderbar could be described as being a series of events: events for event’s sake.
Wunderbar Festival: Search Party vs Newcastle; The People Speak, Who Wants to Be…?; Joshua Sofaer, Tours of People’s Homes: Nathalie Levi, Massive Giveaway; Peter and Katy Merrington, Bath Time, Kate Stobbart, You’re so not worth it; Reactor, Big Lizard’s Big Idea; Newcastle upon Tyne, Nov 6-15, 2009, www.wunderbarfestival.co.uk
The Red Carpet Treatment, Vincent Chevalier; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
photo Pekka Mäkinen
The Red Carpet Treatment, Vincent Chevalier; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
I AM IN KUOPIO, FINLAND AT ANTI, THE INTERNATIONAL LIVE ART, SITE-SPECIFIC FESTIVAL THIS YEAR CONTEMPLATING WALKING AS PERFORMANCE, AS A WAY OF UNCOVERING THE STORIES OF THE CONTEMPORARY CITY AND RECONFIGURING PUBLIC SPACE.
I approach the city as an outsider, a curator who already recognises the potential of live art to uncover schisms through which new meaning can emerge. However, I have never before seriously thought of walking as an act of transformation. I have legs, a map and some artists to guide me and through my own act of mundane motion I hope to discover an alternative city, a place that sits just outside usual perspective, recognisable but shifted into something moving or profound.
I have no previous experience of Kuopio, no prior affinity or particular empathy. My first impressions are of autumnal change, days caught between seasons with people in big hats and stout boots. Teenagers hang in bus stops and in the early hours old ladies wheel bikes through impressively drunken throngs hugging the pavements. In All the Demos I’ve Ever Been On, my partner Alex Bradley (UK) stomps the street in a repeated oblong for five days, a solemn, solitary demonstration of his own history of political activism. Transposing Kuopio for London, Kauppakatu becomes Embankment and Kaupungintalo the Houses of Parliament.
Every demo I’ve ever been on (1985-2009), Alex Bradley; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
photo Pekka Mäkinen
Every demo I’ve ever been on (1985-2009), Alex Bradley; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
For the first few days Bradley is quietly insulted or largely ignored by Kuopio’s residents. With constantly changing placards that scream defiance in clipped English sentences, he relentlessly supports the working class, long-gone British industry, the marginalised, the victimised and the poor. He supports the Miners’ Strike of 1984, the Ambulance Workers and the NHS [National Health Service], protests against the Poll Tax, Apartheid and Clause 28 [which prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality; enacted 1988, repealed 2000-03]. On his fourth and fifth days his placards shout of the global anti-war movement and at this point the people of Kuopio gently start to wake up. A police car idles past repeatedly, a punk shows him a victory sign, an older man shouts “Bless You” while another gives the thumbs up. We are told there is no significant history of public protest in Kuopio or indeed more widely in conservative Finland, but in the confusing mess of reaction and interaction Bradley’s 48 mile demonstration seems like it is starting to be noticed, just at the point it’s about to be gone. As he puts down his last placard a series of questions hangs in the air above the route of his protest, who are the Finnish disenfranchised, what statements fill their placards, whose future voices will rise to be heard?
Live Windwalks, Tim Knowles; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
photo Pekka Mäkinen
Live Windwalks, Tim Knowles; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
What do the market squares, shopping centres, parks and harbours of Kuopio mean to the artists, these outsiders? Will they rewrite these streets as they tread themselves into the tarmac and earth? Tim Knowles’ Windwalk (UK) takes place in a violet market square as the sun sets and a collection of participants gather with comical helmets and sails on their heads. The instructions are liberating and simple. Follow the wind and go as far as it takes you. Let the sails lead you through the streets, around all obstacles. People scatter like pollen, grouping then dispersing, caught in eddies and dark corners until one or two are freed on the outskirts of the square to range around the city, ignoring normal routes or obstructions in a kind of free fall with feet firmly on the ground. The work is a delightful statement of otherness and freedom in a city that appears not to mind either. One woman apparently travels miles before stopping in darkness against a wall.
Experiencing Rotazza’s theatrical illustration of a supermarket, Wondermart (UK), there was one single moment—when I was asked to open a fridge, stare at the white plastic and feel the frozen air—I found utterly transporting. Mostly however, I found the work predictable. Seduced by the tinned reindeer meat and weird mushrooms on the shelves before me, I embarked on an adventurous walking project of my own through the market. On the street, Vincent Chevalier unfurls a simple red carpet before him throughout his five days in the city (The Red Carpet Treatment, Canada). To see the artist approaching from a distance in slow chaotic determination is like watching a relentlessly bobbing minor television personality who remains just a little bit apart from the rest of us. It is a funny work of public endurance and there really are not too many of those.
Even in Kuopio the streets can be brutal. Despite the differences in their work, all the festival artists mention the pain and fear of being alone, of being vulnerable and the pressure of forever being on show. They talk of keeping to the path, following the map and ensuring always to bed down in safe places. They know their bodies’ limits. Blisters, wet feet, insect bites or any other minor affliction could ultimately finish the work. None of them speak of extreme acts of endurance but more of deliberately paced endeavours designed to push them on. The road acts as a score and their eyes are fixed on the approaching horizon, or what’s around the next corner or on the small path trodden by adventurers before them and passing less obviously between the bins, parked cars or trees.
Roberto Sifuentes, The “Pocha Nostra” performance intervention brigade, Kuopio airport; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
I see La Pocha Nostra (US/Mexico) who have sought out a covered walkway between fast food joints and department store to one side of the main market square. Here the public move quickly and tell of dealers and streetfights as the young and disaffected congregate in the glare of shopping centre lights. Five La Pocha Nostra characters enter, like barbarians from a freezone with identities distilled and distorted. A young Finnish punk faces off the genuine article, Guillermo Gomez Pena, in wheelchair, tulle skirt and head-dress with wise, black khol-rimmed eyes. Roberto Sifuentes dressed in military fetish wear shivers as he inserts saline solution into his eyes, spurting the water onto the pavement until the tears really come. A sign announces he has served in Iraq and seeks resident status in Finland. His ritualised plea, or apology, is largely ignored by passers-by. The artists remain long after the festival audience has departed and I realise we are not the intended participants. As the sun sets behind us only Kuopio’s punks float in fascination, temporarily giving over their territory in half-understanding as the temperature plummets.
Place is not static, it is rewritten by the performances that happen each day. I wonder if the psyche of Kuopio has been changed by the eight years that ANTI has been playfully interfering with its solid structures and tidy grid-like paths. I notice the public, their performances of not-looking played out in sideways glances or speedy road-crossings in the face of ANTI’s strange artistic goings on. In Bodycartography (US), a woman is framed by the dirty ramp into a car park as she bends double. Another woman hugs a bin for 10 minutes while a man lies on the pavement with a lamppost between his legs. How much do the artists disrupt the domestic goings-on? A few cars crawl past and a lady in a fluorescent track suit walks quickly as though she is part of the weird passing circus, but she is not. A normal town, on a normal day.
On a beautiful bright day, I walk with Stephen Hodge (UK) in SLaaristokaupunki [http://2ndlive.org/projects/slaaristokaupunki.php]. We leave the sensory overload of the outside world to enter a bland office space and sit before a laptop, a doorway into Second Life. Here I enter an island and walk under water without oxygen, traipse a beach without feeling the sand between my toes. I teleport from my island back to the beginning but with no sense of movement, time or distance. I leave Hodge’s’s guidance, Second Life and the office building to walk by the lake in the white light and perfect blue of the morning. It seems almost like dream space, caught between real and virtual, its lines so perfect and colours so precise. As much as I’d like to, I cannot teleport but I take comfort from the concrete certainty of the road and my heart thumping as I walk uphill.
At ANTI I find an adventurous spirit and strike out into the unknown. I give myself permission to walk where, when and however I damn choose. I walk without trepidation and look to the horizon where I meet helpful strangers. I discover beauty because I have looked for it. I find adventure in ordinary, wild or dirty landscapes. I am now a walker and I will only whisper the stories of my own vulnerability, of the darkness and its dangers, the bears and wolves that might lurk therein.
ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland, Sept 23-27, 2009
Helen Cole will present Collecting Fireworks, a growing archive of Live Art, as a Members Event as part of Performance Space, ClubHouse program, Sydney, March 2-3 and at Artshouse, Melbourne, March 17-19
It’s not the Sydney media arts expert Stephen Jones, but someone even headier, a UK hat artist with a Brisbane-exclusive exhibition, Hats: an Anthology by Stephen Jones, visiting the Queensland Art Gallery from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The garden-like millinery exhibition includes 250 hats and head pieces ancient and modern including Jones’ own creations (Mick Jagger’s hat for the Rolling Stones A Bigger Bang World Tour) and a journey through the life of a hat. Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, Queensland Art Gallery, March 27– June 27; www.qag.qld.gov.au
blissful opera
Peter Carey’s Bliss, a grippingly strange novel, was unexpectedly and memorably adapted to the screen in Ray Lawrence’s film (1985), which upped the book’s 80s oz-surrealism. The bigger than life characters, situations and ideas lend themselves to opera just as well as film, though pulling off the more fantastical elements onstage will be an exciting challenge. We might though get a deeper feel for Harry Joy’s inner world, the kind offered by listening as much as looking. Brett Dean is an award-winning composer who manages to bridge accessibility and challenge, creating memorable themes and engaging textures. Peter Coleman-Wright will play Harry, Neil Armfield is directing and the libretto is by Amanda Holden. Opera Australia, Bliss, World Premiere, March 12-30, http://opera-australia.org.au
desperately hoping: stvdio arts channel
Ovation, better known these days as the Andre Rieu channel, has been taken over by SBS and re-named STVDIO. ABC TV’s revolution in arts & entertainment erred on the side of the latter with a plethora of comedian-led competition programs. There have been the occasional late Tuesday night art programs from Andrew Frost and Marcus Westbury and the quaint, numbing Sunday Arts show (now deceased), but little else. Cable subscribers are keeping their fingers crossed that STVDIO will provide recent documentaries and features alongside worthwhile classics with a broader and more challenging approach to the arts here and overseas than Ovation’s ever narrowing and repetitious ambit. STVDIO, from April 1.
genre-hopping: tiny stadiums festival
One of the more scintillating contemporary arts events of 2009 was the Tiny Stadiums Festival, revealing new talent and ideas about performance, installation and networking. Describing the event as “a contemporary arts festival of genre-hopping live art”, the Quarterbred team have “curated a program made up of accumulative and durational projects that design and redesign the village, your hankies and your hair.” And it’s mostly free.
There’ll be the unveiling of a miniature Erskineville—a fun critique of the village into which Tiny Stadiums is increasingly insinuating itself with performances, installations and screenings in shops, vacant lots and a pub. Tristram Meechams’ Back To Hair Technology promises that you’ll “walk a mile in a bald man’s head by receiving your very own bald cap.” On a different hair tack, hairdresser Jade Markham will style and curate buns in Bunhead. In Photo-Opp Melbourne-based artist Zoe Meagher will offer herself in Ken’s Cake Shop for endless photo opportunities with you as the photographer: “it’s the subject who is constant, eternally waiting for the fleeting photographer to appear and complete the image.” Parachutes for Ladies will test the conformity of mass dancing with you in The Dance of Death. If that makes you weep you’ll doubtless respond to Amy Spiers’ Sob Stories, on-hanky tales of public teariness. Melbourne based collective Tape Projects will present video art at the Rose Hotel. Tiny Stadiums is curated by Quarterbred, an artist run initiative, in residence at PACT. Erskineville Road shops, parks and PACT, Feb 22-March 7; www.pact.net.au
Eric Bridgeman Boi Boi The Labourer 2008 – 2009, part of Mind Games, ACP
Eric Bridgeman Boi Boi The Labourer 2008 – 2009, part of Mind Games, ACP
mind games: other selves in the picture
ACP’s new show, Mind Games, is a potent mix of works from Papua New Guinea/Australia, South Korea, Japan and the UK focusing “on the psychology of play and the construction of identity.” The most immediately striking images come from Eric Bridgeman who himself performs The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules, “a series of caricatures that parody and critique stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in both black and white Australian culture.” A recent graduate of the Queensland College of Art, Bridgeman has already exhibited widely, attracting attention for his 2007 series Blue-Colour Picture exploring his heritage in the Queensland mining town Cracow and blue-collar masculinity. The other artists in the show are Suk Kuhn Oh (South Korea), Toshie Takeuchi (Japan) and the Jackson Twins (UK) who “present a series of ironically melodramatic self-portraits that draw on the anxious fascination of pop culture with identical twins: cloning, doppelgangers, sibling rivalry, ESP and the notion of the evil other.” Australian Centre for Photography, Mind Games, Photography, Identity and Play, Sydney, Jan 29-March 6, http://tmp.acp.org.au
experimenta’s happy critique: utopia now
Experimenta’s big exhibitions, now cast as an international biennial of media art, have always had an optimistic aura, the result of a certain playfulness and hands-on opportunities for audiences that tally with their daily new media experiences. But this time the biennial is addressing the flaws in “the dream of a perfect world”, never an easy fantasy given the state of the world and the diminution of utopian thinking. However it looks like it’ll be a fun critique: “Pull up your leg warmers and bust a move with our interactive dance party in a box; become a sticky shadow magnet and lead a chorus of interactive singing plants; take sides as Australian and international artists unite and fall out over the future survival of the planet.”
Also on the program of 25 works from Australia, Japan, Austria, India, Germany, Canada, France, Taiwan and the UK are “the funkadelic International Dance Party, a complete party in a box which transforms from humble transport crate into a powerful party machine that increases its frantic output the harder and faster you dance; Akousmaflore, a hanging garden composed of living musical plants that react to human gesture and gentle contact; Shadow 3, an interactive installation where the by-products of our consumerist society fall from the sky like rain, inundating your shadow with a deluge of debris; and You Were in my Dream, an off-the-wall ‘choose your own adventure’ dreamscape where interacting with familiar fairytale characters draws you into an enchanted fractured forest. [R]enowned Japanese/American artist Momoyo Torimitsu performs with her life-size robotic businessman Miyata Jiro as he crawls his way commando-style through the CBD battlefield like so many before him.” Experimenta, Utopia Now, International Biennial of Media Art, Blackbox, The Arts Centre, Melbourne, Feb 12-March 14; www.experimenta.org
Kathkali Dance Ensemble, part of Womadelaide
photo courtesy the artists
Kathkali Dance Ensemble, part of Womadelaide
womadelaide: classical indian rarity
An extremely rare opportunity presents itself in March to see classical Indian dance drama. The visiting Kerala Kalamandalam Dance Company will perform The Killing of Dushasana, a central episode of the Mahabhrata telling the story of rival families, the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The work will be performed in traditional Kathakali style with 17 dancers, singers, actors, drummers and, not least, make-up artists. A centrepiece in the tense unfolding drama is Lord Krishna’s sermon on selfless action and the setting out of the concept of Dharma. If you can’t make it to Womadelaide there are one-off opportunities in Sydney and Melbourne. Womadelaide, Kathakali Dance Ensemble, Feb 6-7; www.womadelaide.com.au; Seymour Centre, Sydney, Thursday March 11; Melbourne Town Hall, Tuesday March 9
THE LATEST INSTALMENT IN THE ‘SAND TO CELLULOID’ (AS IT WAS ONCE TITLED) SHORT DRAMA SERIES FROM SCREEN AUSTRALIA’S INDIGENOUS DEPARTMENT IS THE NEW BLACK. ONCE AGAIN THE PROGRAM BRINGS TOGETHER EMERGING FILMMAKERS AND EXPERIENCED PRODUCERS (INCLUDING KATH SHELPER, DARREN DALE, PAULINE CLAGUE AND LISA DUFF WORKING ALONGSIDE NEW PRODUCERS) AS WELL AS SKILLED CINEMATOGRAPHERS, EDITORS AND OTHER CREW.
The resulting films are, as ever, engaging, rewarding and of high quality. What is immediately noticeable are better production design, ever more sophisticated camerawork, tighter narrative structuring and more uniformly good acting. All levels of craft are growing exponentially in Indigenous filmmaking. What is missing is a certain verite quality, a rawness that gave earlier series an almost documentary edge to the drama. It doubtless indicates a greater diversity of approaches to filmmaking from new talent and their skilled nurturers. And there is a lighter touch to some very serious themes in The New Black than in previous collections.
aunty maggie & the womba wakgun
Leah Purcell co-directed the documentary Black Chicks Talking in 2001 with Brendan Fletcher. Her first drama is Aunty Maggie & The Womba Wakgun, a gently comic, confidently accomplished account of a mother who invests in a rooster and hens with which to supply her three boys and husband with eggs for breakfast instead of porridge. The rooster fails to do his job, nearly dies, is given mouth-to-mouth by mum (family revulsion all round) and amazingly comes good. Eggs are laid. The fun is in the detail and the consistently conveyed sense of idealised historical reconstruction.
The film is based on an actual incident in writer Angelina Hurley’s family in the 1950s, but the world portrayed here could be anywhere from the 20s to the 50s—a pleasant sunny place in the somewhere long ago—but “not dream time”, insists the voice-over. The poor but genteel Aboriginal community is well-dressed and groomed (the men’s hair parted and slicked down, mum’s bouffed up), the house under-furnished but bright, and the neighbour haughty about the chook business. Rachel Maza Long makes the bouyant and determined mum just a little larger than life, Kelton Pell is a bemused, tolerant husband, and the boys play their part with ease. Hurley’s script is aptly spare and Purcell’s direction economical—the challenges of poverty are not overplayed but are felt, for example, in the shop scene when mum fails to purchase eggs. The use here of sharply angled medium and close-up shots is effective as elsewhere in Mark Wareham’s fine cinematography. There’s an aptly amusing exhange of p.o.v. shots between mum and rooster (in a cardboard box with holes punched in it) which anticipates their coming together. Aunty Maggie & The Womba Wakgun is a loving work of family legend-making considerably aided by Nicki Gardiner’s production design, Bruce Kinven’s costumes and Dany Cooper’s deft editing.
ralph
Deborah Mailman’s Ralph is a somewhat more naturalistic venture but, fable-like in formula, also inclining to an idyllic view of another time, Sydney’s Redern in 1984. But on the way 10-year-old Madelaine endures bullying at school, an indifferent teacher and the realisation that her new friend, Garth (initially a tease, chopsticking a cockroach but later caned for coming to Madelaine’s defence) lives a difficult life in Redfern’s Block. Prior to this she’s been totally preoccupied with her screen hero, Karate Kid Ralph Machio, but in Garth the real world beckons and her affections shift—a mini-rite of passage. The final scene is squarely framed like a dream come true, all troubles overcome. The bullies attempt to turn Madelaine (in a new frock from her benign mum) away from the school dance, but Garth appears, immaculatey dressed (blue-striped shirt and blue tie) to walk her in. Just how Garth managed to reappear and in such good nick is necessarily left unexplained in this simply but deftly constructed drama that younger audiences will doubtless relish. In the moments when Garth and Madelaine wait beside the sandstone school building, their isolation, but also their commonality, is nicely framed and marked by stillness. Ralph is sparely scripted by Mailman and Wayne Blair and economically shot by Bonnie Elliott.
bourke boy
In Bourke Boy, writer-director Adrian Wills, maker of the fanciful five-minute comedy Jackie Jackie (2007), turns his hand to darker material. A white father (Andrew Macfarlane) takes his adopted Aboriginal teenage son (Clarence John Ryan, a strong presence) to the town where the boy was born, Bourke. It’s a difficult occasion. The boy has been misbehaving and it’s believed the visit will somehow or other settle him. Man and boy are reticent, stare at the old hospital from the outside and later drive nervously into the Aboriginal community outside town, only to turn around and leave at the moment the boy sees a woman who might just be his birth mother. The end. It’s a blunt finish but consistent with the protagonists’ inability to address at any length the crisis they face and which will remain unresolved.
A racist motel owner is rather awkwardly inserted into the narrative, but the son’s challenge to his father for shaking hands with her rings true as a moment of awareness marking his difference. The father simply replies, “It’s what you do.” Two of the film’s most striking moments are almost silent. The father watches his sleeping son in the motel, listening to the soft breathing of his rising and falling chest. As we admire the boy’s beauty we sense the father’s mix of affection and incomprehension. Then in the morning light, and observed low in the frame, the son picks up a handful of Bourke dirt and slips it into his pocket. Suggestive of a bigger story, Bourke Boy is a quiet and intense film—a portrayal of inadequate communication and a sadly incomplete rite of passage. Hugh Miller’s camerawork is aptly intimate.
the farm
Ghosts are recurrent presences in Aboriginal films. In Romaine Moreton’s The Farm a young girl (Madelaine Madden) watches them drift by her in the river as she swims after working as a bean picker with her mother and brother. She’s alarmed, but floats, not panicking, even touching a pale hand. In a steaming bath, she notices the names of past generations etched into the timber of the pickers’ shack. When asked, her suddenly angry mother (Lisa Flanagan) refuses to tell her what happened to those people: “When you’re older.” Later a spirit addresses the girl during the picking, no-one else seeing or hearing the presence; the girl’s mother grows anxious. In an act of identification, the girl floats in the river in her best dress, like a ghost herself. She etches her own name into the timber
Most of the scenes are brief, small moments of eerie beauty. In a longer passage, the girl’s mother, as if realising that she needs to do something to acknowledge the girl’s connection with the past, presents her with a necklace with a large amber ‘stone’ passed on from her own mother. She describes the amber as “a tree’s way of remembering…We die if we’re forgotten.” Mother and daughter are united. On the way to the local show, it’s as if the mother knows that her daughter can see the spirits of the dead walking on the side of the road. We see them too, before they fade, but they are now remembered by a new generation—even if we never learn their particular fate. There’s a lush beauty to Warwick Thornton’s cinematography, amplifying the haunted quality of the narrative as well as providing, with the warm performances, a sense of security, a safe, supported rite of passage.
nia’s melancholy
Nia’s Melancholy is also about an adolescent girl encountering ghosts but in more emotionally demanding circumstances. Nia (Tasia Zalar) must come to grips with her sister Lania’s suicide, at the same time as she is leaving her small home town. The film opens in a ‘secret’ place in the bush with her late grandmother instructing the sisters as children about the use of seeds as food once the poison is drained from them. Nia’s voiceover also recalls that Nana “would always speak to the old ones and they would listen.” The idyllic opening with its briskly stated themes is then starkly supplanted as Nia walks away from her sister’s body hanging from a tree at the edge of the schoolyard. She carries one of her sister’s rubber thongs, later slipping it on in her bedroom, triggering memories of Lania’s warmth and humour.
Nia’s mother (Kyas Sherriff) is hostile to her daughter’s determination to go to Cairns to train as a nurse, thinking the girl will never return: “you’ll forget all about us.” A close-up of an abandoned cigarette and a subsequent scene in which Nia attacks an out of control garden hose as if killing a snake are tellingly grim, wordless interludes. Nia then ventures to the secret place of her childhood, accidentally falls and concusses herself and slips into another world where she finds Nana and her sister who explains, “I was tired, so tired, not strong like mama, not like you.” Nia returns home (we watch her walk beneath the noose still hanging from tree) and soon leaves for Cairns, the tensions between mother and daughter unresolved but the mood amiable. She promises her young sister that she will return to take her to “a secret place.” This bond with her home is confirmed in the final scene when she sees Nana’s spirit walking behind the bus, waving her farewell. Perhaps the resolution is a little too easy, bordering on the sentimental given the palpable tensions writer-director SF Tusa and cinematographer Jason Hargreaves admirably convey, but the tale has an internal, if again fable-like consistency.
Ningalee Lawford-Wolf, Allira Coutard, David Ngoombujarra, Connie Amos, Jacob
photo Sam Oster
Ningalee Lawford-Wolf, Allira Coutard, David Ngoombujarra, Connie Amos, Jacob
jacob
Night, lights in a window. The cry of a new baby. The screen fills with the stark vista of dry cattle land in Central Australia, 1940. The view quickly narrows, camera and rapid edits closing in on tired timber fence poles and then the workers repairing them. A rider comes in from the far distance bearing news of the birth of a son to a proud father, the younger of the two workers. We guess later the other is his father-in-law. The view is reversed in the next scene, four months later, as a woman watches anxiously through flapping washing as the men on the horizon return to the outstation.
The new baby is white. The would-be father withdraws from his young wife and despite his father-in-law’s plea for sympathy—”She’s not to blame, you know. The boy is who he is.” When his wife bathes the child, the man looks on, gently touches its head but then walks out. It’s a chillingly wordless scene. Then the action suddenly accelerates: the young mother runs into the bush, lays out a sheet, rubs the baby against an ant hill and leaves it to die, ants crawling across its face. The grandparents rescue the baby and comfort the mother. It’s another blunt conclusion, sharing the disturbing lack of resolution in Bourke Boy. But there is closure of a kind in this tale.
The camera looks consistently into the faces of all of the characters but, by the end, when he plucks the baby from the ants and cradles it, his face full of alarm and determination, it’s confirmed that David Ngoombujarra’s compassionate father figure is at the film’s emotional and moral core. The intense look that passes between him and his wife (Ningali Lawford Wolf) says everything about their understanding of what has transpired. Writer-director Dena Curtis’ Jacob is a superbly made, discomfiting film that appears to have no resolution until we see it as being about the strength of this man and his wife. Murray Lui’s cinematography is, as ever, excellent, oscillating between vast spaces and intimate tensions, while the narrative structure and Tania Nehme’s editing are beautifully integrated.
the party shoes
The pre-adolescent child (Maci-Grace Johnson) in The Party Shoes discovers a shiny little trinket in a back lane and stores it with her other finds in an old power box high on the front verandah of her home where she lives with her mother (Ngaire Pigram). She totters about in her mother’s red high heels. Her mother appears ill, withdrawn, hiding in her bed, the family photo beside it suggesting better times. The mother refuses to let the girl read the letter in a blue envelope that so disturbs her. With simple logic the girl takes action, watching out for blue envelopes but then taking all the post including that from nearby houses and hiding it in the verandah box.
This film’s great strength lies in the close observation of the girl’s quietly resolute and undramatic approach to life. When the mother smashes the family picture frame the girl cuts her foot on the glass and bandages herself as best she can. There are no tears when her hoarded letters are discovered, nor when her mother’s momentary conciliation ends in anger over a broken lipstick. The sense of a child’s life alone but not necessarily lonely—she’s got a job to do—is nicely caught by the young actress and the camera (looking up the street with her for the postman, watching a letter float down a gutter). This is another case where narrative resolution comes a little too easily—the mother now calm and finally aware of the cut foot, the laying out of the letters for return to their boxes—but it’s done with the same lack of fuss that epitomises this fascinating little girl. Writer-director Michelle Blanchard and cinematographer Nicola Daley have created a beautifully consistent account of an episode in a life with a subtle evocation of a child’s point of view.
The New Black was shown on ABC TV in 2009 and individual films are already collecting awards. It’s important that these short films reach a wide audience. Tales of family strength, tensions and malfunction, of ghosts and growing up and of staying in touch with the past are presented here with a rich cultural specificity at once strange and familiar. It’s striking that six of the seven films were directed by women. It’s not surprising then that they test mother-daughter relationships, expertly trace rites of passage, preserve a sense of the past and with humour (Auntie Maggie) and grief (Jacob and The Party Shoes) address the pressures of motherhood.
Aunty Maggie & The Womba Wakgun, director Leah Purcell, writer Angelina Hurley, producers Lisa Duff, Bain Stewart; Ralph, director Deborah Mailman, co-writers Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair, producer Jenny Mangum; Bourke Boy, writer-director Adrian Wills, producers Anusha Duray, Kath Shelper; The Farm, writer-director Romaine Moreton, producer John Harvey; Nia’s Melancholy, writer-director SF Tusa, producer Andrew Arbuthnot, supervising producer Pauline Clague; Jacob, writer-director Dena Curtis, co-producers Darren Dale, Rhea Stephenson; The Party Shoes, writer-director Michelle Blanchard, producers Darren Dale, Rhea Stephenson. The New Black premiered at the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, Sydney Opera House, May 8, 2009
WE NEEDED A BOOK ON ROLF DE HEER. BY COMMON CONSENSUS HE IS THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED, INDEPENDENT AND IDIOSYNCRATIC DOMESTICALLY BASED AUSTRALIAN FILMMAKER WORKING TODAY. HE’S MADE A DOZEN FEATURES. HE’S WON MAJOR PRIZES AT VENICE AND CANNES. HE RUNS WHAT IS PERHAPS AUSTRALIA’S MOST SUCCESSFUL INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING COMPANY, VERTIGO PRODUCTIONS. IN SHORT, WHERE THE CAREERS OF OTHER LOCALLY BASED ‘AUTEURS’ HAVE DRIED UP QUICKER THAN YOU CAN SAY “ABC”, DE HEER HAS FLOURISHED AS AN INDEPENDENT IN THIS COUNTRY FOR 20-PLUS YEARS.
So why haven’t we had a book on him until now? At a time when vast sections of film libraries are being filled with books on Bollywood and Chinese cinema, why is this most inspiring of local filmmakers neglected? Ignoring the most obvious reason (that most Australian film scholars aren’t interested in Australian cinema) young Brisbane-based author D. Bruno Starrs suggests a different answer in his new short book Dutch Tilt, Aussie Auteur: The Films of Rolf de Heer. For Starrs, the most pertinent barrier to the Australian film public’s appreciation of de Heer as an auteur is the radical variety of his oeuvre.
Historically understood, an auteur is supposed to make a certain kind of film (a “Bergman”, a “Tarantino”) that bares the unmistakable stamp of the creator’s vision. The problem with de Heer’s work, Starrs points out, is that the director presents us with a thinly linked array of “projects”, each with very different narrative, stylistic and thematic concerns. Though some of de Heer’s films beg comparison (The Tracker and Ten Canoes), most are completely dissimilar (take Bad Boy Bubby, Epsilon and The Quiet Room for example). Further complicating matters is the fact that de Heer denies authorship of at least one film, Dance Me to My Song, which he attributes to the film’s scriptwriter and lead actor Heather Rose.
Starrs also notes that de Heer often makes movies for “no other reason than to keep a roof over his family’s head.” Where the auteur proper keeps crews waiting months for the right light, de Heer unabashedly compromises his films to fit a given circumstance, often restructuring his narratives around a feasible shooting schedule, budget or casting process. It’s almost as if de Heer is entirely unconcerned with making ‘Rolf de Heer films.’
In light then of the looseness of de Heer’s work, how do we (and should we?) understand Rolf de Heer as an Aussie auteur? This is the question that guides Bruno Starrs’ brief sketch of de Heer’s oeuvre.
For Starrs, the links between de Heer’s films are to be found not so much in their technical characteristics as in their unconscious preoccupations. Though noteworthy for his distinctive use of sound (specifically, his unusual use of a character’s subjective auditory experience) de Heer’s authorial signature is, in Starrs’ view, to be located in the unconscious ways the director perceives his Australian environment. A Dutch born immigrant who came to Australia as an eight-year-old (after several years in Sumatra) de Heer carries, Starrs suggests, an implicitly marginalised perspective on his narratives. De Heer’s films reflect what Starrs calls a “Dutch tilt”, a strangely askew, semi-evident eccentricity, the view of a gentle stranger who talks funny, quietly observing an Anglo-Australian culture of male aggression and suburban conformity.
Pointing to the “unlikely protagonists” of films like Bad Boy Bubby, Dance Me to My Song and The Quiet Room, Starrs succeeds in demonstrating how de Heer engages his audience in an experience of marginalisation, of seeing and hearing what the white Australian world looks and sounds like from the outside. In a different way, Ten Canoes (certainly one of de Heer’s best films) offers Australian audiences an experience of difference and marginalisation by telling its story in the indigenous Ganalbingu tongue, in Ganalbingu narrative structure, with Ganalbingu characters. In this case it’s the non-aboriginal Australians who are marginalised from the real Australia.
Starrs notion of de Heer’s “Dutch tilt” provides an interesting concept with which we can understand the director’s films relative to their national context. Unfortunately, the “Dutch tilt” theory remains seriously undercooked. Though a talented writer, Starrs is also conspicuously flippant. Instead of dexterously elaborating his key idea by charting de Heer’s authorial signature, Starrs makes do with a series of discrete and often embarrassingly brief essays in which the discussions remain consistently unrelated to the central thesis. The brevity, disjointedness and pedestrian nature of Starrs’ discussions ultimately make this a negligible study at best, slap dash at worst. It’s a shame really. We needed a book on Rolf de Heer. We need another one.
D Bruno Starrs, Dutch Tilt, Aussie Auteur: The Films of Rolf de Heer, DM Verlag, 2009, 104 pages, ISBN: 978-3-639-16834-1
AS EVER, FILMMAKERS, CRITICS, COMMENTATORS AND COLUMNISTS ARE VOICING OPINIONS ON THE LACK OF LOCAL AUDIENCES FOR AUSTRALIAN FILMS. THESE ARE FAMILIAR ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE NEED FOR FILM CULTURE, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND, INVARIABLY, TAXPAYERS’ MONEY SPENT ON ‘UNPOPULAR’ FILMS. THESE DEBATES DEPEND UPON SPECIFIC NOTIONS OF IDENTITY, CINEMA AND AUDIENCES THAT NEED TO BE EXAMINED.
Inside Film counts 37 Australian features in its summary of 2009’s box office figures (BrendanSwift, Box Office: 2009 Wrap, Monday 11/01/2010), while in his article “Nowhere Near Hollywood” published in The Monthly (Dec 2009-Jan 2010), Louis Nowra counts “over thirty.” Both articles include the same titles (Samson and Delilah, Lucky Country, Mao’s Last Dancer, My Year Without Sex, Beautiful Kate and so on). These are the films that have informed the debate on the current state of Australian film.
But these are not the only Australian features of 2009 and to focus on them alone is part of the failure of a discourse that simply omits that which it does not like.
There is an entire hidden cinema which exists, and even flourishes at the margins of Australian film culture. Premieres in 2009 included Dominic Deacon’s Bad Habits, David De Vries’ Carmilla Hyde, Nathan Christoffel’s Eraser Children, Richard Wolstencroft’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Jon Hewitt’s Darklovestory, Ursula Dabrowsky’s Family Demons, Stacey Edmonds and Doug Turner’s I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer and Martyn Park’s 1 and 0 nly [sic], amongst others (the Wolstencroft and Hewitt films had screened previously but as works-in-progress). These and many other Australian feature films screened at the Fantastic Planet Film Festival, A Night of Horror Film Festival, the Melbourne and Sydney Underground Film Festivals and the Revelation Perth International Film Festival. In most cases they played to packed houses and receptive audiences. Few, if any, of these films will receive a domestic cinema release, but most will screen widely at international film festivals and hopefully all will get domestic DVD distribution.
These films, many of which are low-budget genre works, are absent from the debates about Australian cinema, yet they are also representative of current domestic cinema. What is different about them is that they are often independently produced and seem largely ignored by cultural gatekeepers. Not Quite Hollywood may have been a success, but it has allowed genre, cult and exploitation movies to be framed as simply belonging to the cinematic past, rather than being a living phenomenon.
The vagaries of government funding mechanisms are not the concern of this piece. True, filmmakers need to take risks and make bold films rather than aiming to appease bureaucrats or satisfy the pre-defined selection criteria of funding bodies. Film is an artform that accommodates the cinema classic and the low budget exploitation genre movie. Other than a framing dictated by critics and markets there is no more or less intrinsic value to any singular form of cinema. To draw a divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of cinema is to create a false distinction.
The ‘most popular’ films of the 2009 box office were event movies, mass market products such as Avatar, cross promoted not simply as films but as ‘entertainment phenomena.’ The top ten also included numerous sequels (Angels and Demons, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the ongoing franchise represented by Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince), with a built-in audience who predominantly identify a trip to the cinema with consumption of pleasurable eye candy.
Australian cinema is not, and should not try to emulate mainstream Hollywood, the success of which is linked to the marketing of spectacle and the existence of the star system as much as to the creation of cinema. The success of Hollywood films can also be attributed to their market dominance; mainstream films play at multiplexes in every suburb, while most domestic films (and non-American foreign films and indie works) screen at just a handful of mostly city-based cinemas. Even if audiences are aware of locally produced films—and the marketing can be woeful—rarely is there a cinema screening the work near them.
The problem is that many self-appointed commentators view the success of a film as purely financial and there has been an ongoing emphasis on box office receipts. When journalists write that there are “too many costly box office flops using taxpayer handouts” (Fiona Hudson, Herald Sun, December 2009), they are working on the assumption that a film is simply designed to generate income, but cinema’s value is cultural and aesthetic.
Films exist within a multiplicity of simultaneous discourses: aesthetic, historical, cultural and social. What may once have been deemed a failure may subsequently be re-evaluated and become part of a wider, collective notion of a cinematic canon. Two Australian examples include the ‘unsuccessful’ Wake In Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) and the once banned Pure Shit (Bert Deling, 1975). Both films have been recently reissued, screened at festivals and subsequently found a home on DVD, finally recognised as important moments of Australian cinema more than 30 years after they were ‘forgotten.’
There have been some calls to make films that audiences want to see, to move to a market-dominated model, but there is no single homogenous audience and popular tastes cannot be second-guessed. Moreover, satisfying an audience implies simply making them ‘happy’, but the experience of film viewing need not be simplistic. The supposed “monotonous bleakness” (Nowra) of films may be seen as indicative of the desire to tell stories that exists beyond feel-good cliché.
The belief that a work should have mass audience appeal is also misguided. If films were made simply on the basis of box ticking exercises and consultations with would-be audiences in order to satisfy the largest number of people, nothing of any worth would be made, just unsatisfying grey slop. Across all forms of cinema, mass audiences have on occasion stayed away from ‘sure fire’ hits (for example Catwoman) and have gravitated to small films that initially appeared to be made only for a specialist audience. If you asked an audience in 1992 if they wanted to see a thriller with a non-linear narrative and no female characters, that emphasised oblique conversation over action and had a soundtrack made up of early 70s rock music, few people would have been interested. And yet Reservoir Dogs was a hit.
What is needed is a re-evaluation of cinema, an acknowledgment of genre and an appreciation of individual signature-driven works. It is also essential to understand that films may not find an immediate audience, especially if the screens are dominated by a handful of Hollywood big budget titles, but this does not devalue a less than popular film. Discussing audiences and economics is one way of examining cinema, but satisfying the mass market and counting profits is not the only reason for making film.
ON A HOT, LATE SUMMER AFTERNOON IN MILDURA, ROBYN ARCHER JOINS THE LOCALS TO HEAR BEETHOVEN’S PIANO SONATA OPUS NO 110 PLAYED ON THE ARTS CENTRE’S NEW STEINWAY, FOLLOWED BY SHARING FINE REGIONAL FOOD AND WINE: “THIS IS THE AUSTRALIA I ENCOUNTER ON AUSTRALIA DAY JANUARY 2009. MANNING CLARK ASKED, ‘WOULD THE PRICE OF SURVIVAL AS A PEOPLE BE THE SHEDDING OF THAT ATTEMPT TO PRESERVE A EUROPEAN SOCIETY?’”
Nineteenth-century commentators had assumed the Australian climate would severely undercut cultural ambitions. But Archer finds herself enjoying the rich European heritage on offer, adapted to and drawing on an Australian landscape and culture: “This seems less a conscious attempt to preserve European society than just the way it is evolving in the more compassionate and world-welcoming Australia which has at last greeted the new century.”
She pinpoints the synthesis of the European (and, elsewhere, other cultures) and Australian when she writes, “Drinking honey wheat beer, watching the Australian Open in the brewery, I am the early savage Manning Clark wrote about. The difference is that I am at the same time, working on a Brechtian cabaret I have written called Tough Nut, which I will start to direct at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in less than two weeks’ time.”
In the 10th Mannning Clark Lecture, Archer is concerned that we Australians have yet to grasp the significance of our cultural mix, of Reconciliation, of just what is entailed in our survival—economic, environmental and cultural. February 1, she’s on a flight to Perth watching Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.
* * * *
This is simply perfect. I have been resisting seeing Baz Luhrmann’s epic. I saw trailers on Qantas flights for months. I didn’t like the look of it. Then [there were the] indifferent or bad reviews and friends who hated it and some pretty ugly Nicole-bashing by the Poms…Cinema super-stars may be wealthy enough to be able to endure those blows—both Baz and Nic are on to their next projects as the Academy Awards Ceremony showed—but somewhere it has to hurt, and I don’t hold with hitting below the belt. This was the right place and the right time to see this film. No investment—passive.
The retro intention of Australia is obvious from the opening titles—the motto in English and the kitsch coat of arms. You can’t really bash up a fillum for doing what it says it intended to. You can criticise the director’s intent, and you can perhaps debate the use of gigantic public funding (Tourism in this case) for a folly—but that’s something different.
Of all the things I want to say about this film, I want to go to the very end first; because the greatest surprise in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is the final moment, when the film wants to play on the heart strings and force our emotional response.
The beautiful Aboriginal boy is about to run slow-mo after ‘King’ George, his Aboriginal elder or spirit. Lady Ashley can’t bear to let him go, Hugh’s chest heaves in sympathy but knows it must be so… ok, ok it’s kitsch and clichéd—Baz stated this clearly at the start. But, lo, what do I hear? It can’t be true. But yes, thine ears do not deceive thee. It is so: the ultimate emotional crunch moment of this film boldly entitled Australia is scored with Elgar—the Enigma Variation we all know so well, Number 9, ‘Nimrod.’
I am gobsmacked by this more than anything else in the film, I suppose because I didn’t see it coming, no-one wrote about it, no-one warned me. I am infinitely more surprised by this than by the much discussed wobble board which is featured for all of 10 seconds. Elgar! Elgar who himself was so dismayed that his pomp and circumstance had been usurped through official channels to become the ultimate jingoistic jingle of the Empire—Land of Hope and Glory.
Here his Enigma was a million miles away from being enigmatic. In order to bring the film to an emotional ending, Baz needed the heart and soul of Empire. Despite more than a hundred years of splendid music from Australian composers, despite a legion of them working in Australia and throughout the world today, the makers of this film resorted to the heart and soul of Empire. If ever there were a reason to move towards an Australian Republic then this is it.
Nothing could be more culturally revealing of our own sense of nationhood than this choice. Even if I give those responsible for the soundtrack the benefit of the doubt, this one is hard to reason. It is for me one of the queerest and kitschest films of recent years…and the caricatures are as much in the music as they are in the vision. The 10 seconds of wobble board are no different from the echoes of “Big Country”, the Marlborough Man, “The Magnificent Seven”: we get a mouth organ, some dubbed lyricism meant to be the kid’s dreaming leitmotif, a bopping dance band at Gov house, Waltzing Matilda and, of course, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in multiple versions. This film is a queer creation. The bulging beefcake of Hugh Jackman’s chest, Nic’s androgynous form in contrast to those of the Aboriginal women, the beautiful and beautifully groomed young ‘creamy’ boy—and Judy. Actually, this film is as camp as a row of tents. The ‘China man’ (reference The Hawaiians) plays “Rainbow” on a ukelele (reference the more recent uke version which references the Tiny Tim version) and we hear this just creep in again at the end as we roll to end credits.
So, it is not the Tiny Tim recording which at least we can understand in Australian terms of The Yellow House and Martin Sharp and his encouragement of Tiny Tim’s memorable marathons years later. The version the film uses just happens to be the one which gave us one of the strangest moments of the 20:20 summit. No sooner had we arrived and sat down in the Great Hall in Parliament House, all of us primed and ready to think and give of our best ideas, than we were asked to sit and receive for a moment. The first feed was a video report on the Youth Summit which had preceded us. What was the soundtrack to that video? Louis Armstrong singing “What A Wonderful World” and that recent version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Where was any single person involved in that video, or signing off on it, who might have asked ‘why wouldn’t we use an Australian song here?’ The following day someone spontaneously sang Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s “From little things big things grow”—why not that?
There are literally hundreds of songs that could have been used—just as there are for the ending of the film Australia—but no. The choice was music which is not only stirring (we all know that—we can all just about say where we were, when and how we first heard the Enigma Variations) but goes much deeper. It is English—it sings England—and somewhere we all know that. Some have argued that most of the audience would not know, and that even the makers would not understand the significance. This is exactly the point; unconsciously sticking with old world security stops us from really being our own.
It is peculiar how often Australian composers and composition are ignored. Music, past and present, of every kind and at every level is one of our greatest artistic endeavours and accomplishments. Why is it so left out of the conversation?
The soundtrack of Australia is pastiche—saccharine strings, thumping timpani—just as the director ordered, and in line with his stated intent. Hugh’s sculpted chest is a dead ringer for that of Charlton Heston in one of my very favourite films, The Naked Jungle in which a mail-order bride (Eleanor Parker) fetches up in the Amazonian jungle to be a planter’s wife. In fact it is she who stares down his apparent coldness saying “an instrument is better when it is played.”
The opening sequences of Australia are pure Blue Lagoon. Indochine makes an appearance, as does Out of Africa (the adventurer who just has to be off and away regularly and leaves the little lady to struggle with nature at home), as well as Gone with the Wind and its copy Tap Roots, starring Susan Hayward and Van Hefflin in lieu of Vivien and Clark. All this is well done in terms of pastiche and, for a fan of the genre, which I am, enjoyable.
Now, if it had only been called Lust in the Bulldust or Top End Tales, Sunburnt Country or Wide Brown Land, even Darwin, fewer bright folk might have been less upset. Despite the odd ‘below the belt’ she also gives now and then, I’m usually happy when Germaine (Greer) dares to give something a walloping: she often says things that everyone else is too timid to dare. But I also understood Marcia’s (Langton) defence of the film: the attempt to include a Stolen Generation story in this matinee movie tribute may well be genuine, and if you accept the pure camp milieu, then Germaine’s objection to scrubbed clean Aboriginal people is beside the point—everything in this film is airbrushed.
And as offensive as many have found it, there are just as many people in Kazakhstan offended by Sacha Baron Cohen, and I expect a number of Vietnam Vets by Tropic Thunder. If Robert Downey Jr can be not only praised, but also nominated, for blacking up, then why shouldn’t Ursula Yovich for Baz? Well, I’m being flippant, and to tell you truth even I was a bit taken aback by that use of what was once known as Max Factor Egyptian Number Nine. But, if the retro thing is consistent, there are precedents from Joan Collins to Debra Paget, Ava Gardner to Sir Larry and even, in the very flesh, Frank Thring—the very last word in colonial camp.?But we know why it offended: because this film was not promoted or anticipated as kitsch campery and airbrushed fantasy. The title, Australia, and the endless promos on Qantas and elsewhere else had us believe this would be something we, as Australians, could be proud of—an emblematic clarion call to the landscape we adore. Instead, we suddenly started seeing the trailers and felt a bit like that poor sod on Lesbos: “I’ve got nothing against gay women,” he says, “and they’re very good for our tourism, but I can’t call myself a Lesbian, yet that’s what I am—give me back the title of my identity.”
What the film Australia does is demonstrate just how strong, how subterranean, our ties to our colonisers remain. They are terrifyingly deep, as this cinematic moment proves. Deciding at the last moment that what would define the film’s soundtrack would be Rolf Harris’s wobble board was, in the end, just another kitsch effect. The Enigma is England.
[Archer later recalls that in a scene in Ang Lee’s Lust Caution, Elgar’s Enigma, is heard to very different effect from an onscreen record player used in the wings of a student staged play]
The difference is that in Lust Caution there is no mistaking the intent. Firstly we never hear more than a few scratchy seconds—just enough to recognize it—then it skips and jumps, comes back in a few bars to the next bit of the scene. Secondly, the easy access of the students to this vinyl underscores the British presence in Hong Kong—it is a British Colony. Thirdly the students are working within one colonised part of China to ensure that the rest, having fought and won its battle with Britain, does not go under to Japan. But most importantly, we in the cinema see that this piece of music is deliberately used to stir the play’s audience, who remain as ignorant of the ironies of using Elgar, as is the Australian audience ignorant today of the ironic (even tragic) manipulation inherent in its use at the end of the film Australia.
The difference is that Ang Lee’s intent as a filmmaker is to reveal the musical manipulation and irony to us, while Baz keeps his audience in the culturally colonised dark in order to manipulate emotion which, even more ironically, is supposed to be reinforcing the anti-colonial spirit of the film’s ending the Aboriginal boy reluctantly freed by the English woman to follow his dream(ing). Well, that triumphant and moving moment of partition clearly hasn’t quite happened yet, and the film’s inability to escape the deep and long clutches of colonisation hasn’t helped.
* * * *
Archer says that whatever we do next, about a range of issues, including becoming a republic, “we should not doubt that it will be a matter of survival. Perhaps not whether we survive or not, but the way in which we survive, with how much strength and dignity, and to what degree an authentic sense of national identity is nurtured, as opposed to that which is myopic, naive and kitsch.”
As for art as a substitute for faith, “Alas, I can’t claim Baz’s Australia as a source of spiritual uplift or enlightenment. Once I got over the initial shock of so much camp (no critic, no commentator had warned me—and that is one of their jobs), I quite enjoyed it as a popular entertainment, an exercise in referencing earlier forms. But given the musical betrayal in its final moment, it’s hard to forgive, especially given the title. This is the price of a false path to survival—the one that does not want to, or cannot, change. While the compassion in this film for the Stolen Generation may be real, and indicates an authentic change which is thankfully at last in the wind, the music in the end is deeply tied to an unreconstructed dependency on our colonisers.”
Metazoa, Angela Main, Super Human Exhibition, RMIT Gallery
photo Mark Ashkanasy; courtesy RMIT Gallery
Metazoa, Angela Main, Super Human Exhibition, RMIT Gallery
A RANGE OF MEDIA ARTS EVENTS, THE LEONARDO EDUCATION FORUM, SUPER HUMAN: REVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES AND RE:LIVE MEDIAARTHISTORIES CO-HABITED IN MELBOURNE DURING LATE NOVEMBER, AIMING TO ACHIEVE A CRITICAL MASS OF ARTISTS, THEORISTS AND CURATORS. SUPER HUMAN WAS THE AUSTRALIAN NETWORK FOR ART AND TECHNOLOGY’S INTERVENTION INTO QUESTIONS OF BIOLOGY AND FUTURITY, COMPRISING AN EXHIBITION, MASTERCLASS AND GENERAL SYMPOSIUM. RE:LIVE WAS THE THIRD MEDIAARTHISTORIES CONFERENCE, CAPITALISING ON THE GROWING BODY OF RESEARCHERS AND SPEAKERS WHO ARE ATTRACTED TO MEDIA ARTS DISCOURSE.
A great sense of disconnection permeated the official discourses of Re:live and Super Human (I didn’t get to the Leonardo Education Forum). The gap between what guests and attendees were saying on stage and then saying over coffee, or lunch, or walking between events, was more than merely disquieting—it was just plain weird. Given the openness of the audience to meta-analysis of the arts generally, more in-depth criticism of particular programs or models would have been welcome. The timid public accounts—especially from Australian artists, curators and academics—were especially striking in the still-raw discussion of the dissolution of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board. It seemed that little hope is invested in the Council’s pivot to the new “arts content for the digital era” strategy, though some discussants in the question sessions were articulating the board’s removal as bearing significant creative fruit.
In both events, the lived practice of history re-emerged as a kind of demilitarised zone between codified (and historicised) media art and the ever-refusing cultures which fail to engage with and hence misunderstand it. While work and institutions which speak to archive practices are being rewarded, Oliver Grau’s presentation at Re:live indicated many archives were succumbing to financial and other pressures. He asked whether or not the MediaArtHistories body could be a catalyst for preservation strategies. The question is going to become more and more explicit, with the ephemerality of new media now embodying another generation gap—one of ubiquitous-yet-closed platforms clashing with open-but-unpopular methods and protocols.
Other important questions concerning the generation and curatorship of work through arts funding circulated at both events. Most commonly, how do artists attract funding to work that doesn’t fit into the categories with which funding bodies assert themselves? Just as importantly, how do artists conceive of new media artwork when the only field-specific bodies are in every sense more risk-averse and conservative than the funders of traditional arts?
In many ways, the Super Human symposium addressed its concerns well, and the focus of speakers presumed investment from the audience. Some speakers, such as Natasha Vita-More—firmly of the mind that all life extension techniques and procedures should be pursued and promoted in order to avoid death—generated palpable disquiet that was far more fruitful for discussions than rote recitations of academic squirreling. Barbara Maria Stafford’s keynote was a highlight, connecting ideas across vast distances and elucidating a call for seismic shifts in approaches to art history and especially the task of the critic.
ANAT had obviously put on a very high-cost event, and the range of international speakers began to explain the high costs of attending. More than a few attendees, myself included, are beginning to wonder whether the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (and by extension, Federation Square) is the most viable place for such public events—certainly when the costs associated with events there far outstrip the convenience.
Early on at the Super Human curatorial masterclass sessions, Mike Stubbs (director of FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, UK, which will host the next MediaArt History conference) provided the answers nobody wanted to hear to these two questions. Stubbs’ impassioned pre-emptive defence of FACT and other national scope mega-bodies openly celebrated a risk-averse model of new media in favour of “publicly visible work” that can “extend the reach of these images.” On its own, his presentation would have sat reasonably well if a little controversially, as Stubbs had a tenure at ACMI overseeing excellent public exhibitions such as White Noise.
However, the speaker immediately prior on the same panel, artist Jens Hauser, had delivered a very well-received talk on producing work which explicitly complicates the ability to generate images at all: work that is neither combinable into a flickr set or Facebook post; nor the poster child for the conservative and static neologisms of theorists. Hauser’s work on the sk-interfaces exhibition in Liverpool in 2008 and a string of prior events concentrated on curating highly (culturally, materially) sensitive works and in one case, encountering a gallery that baulked, literally at the last minute, at the display of a work that could invite litigation—Jun Takita’s bioluminescent brain sculpture, Light only Light. It was interesting that Mike Stubbs was the gallery curator who made the call to retract the work and use a non-biologically active substitute. It is clear that Hauser and Stubbs are friendly and the issue is not the source of tension, but the significance of the discourse was left entirely implicit, to be picked over in between sessions rather than built upon and expanded.
One of most engaging speakers in the masterclasses was Sarah Cook (speaking largely as CRUMB) who asked the audience to help address a curatorial problem with an ongoing program of works that had not found an audience. The openness of such a presentation was precisely what many attendees had paid to join the masterclass for—actual work on projects, rather than the usual panels. Erich Berger’s presentation was delightfully specific, rapidly dissecting the difficulties of putting on a series of shows in Laboral, Spain, culminating with the deliriously expansive Homo Ludens Ludens show in 2008.
Re:live’s focus on history was hinted at everywhere, but unfortunately organisers resisted the urge to frame issues of decay alongside continuance—decay of works, decay of institutions, and most importantly, the decay of audiences and imperatives. Sean Cubitt, bravely filling a hole left by one of several last-minute cancellations and Skype hysterics (will there ever be an exhibition comprising the mangled faces and victimised voices of this interminable program?), chose to frame the conference and open up to audience questions concerning the direction of the MediaArtHistories concept/group more generally. A common point of agreement between generations and professions is that there was a great deal of theory being produced (and sold) and far less careful description and preservation work.
The most glaring omission from both events was mentioned by an audience member right at the close of this informal debrief; people under 30 were barely represented in any of the events. However someone wishes to defend or historicise media arts in Australia, it will need to increasingly account for the shift away from large-scale institutional media arts events and equally, a shift upward in artist age. Events such as Electrofringe and the minor exhibitions of tactile animations from groups such as Tape Projects constantly filling city media galleries (of which there are now a fair few, with a new gallery, ScreenSpace, in Melbourne) seemed to have no role to play in the history taking shape, not even as disappointments or diversions.
The risk of an academic history is that rather than looking at the fine grain of particularities, credit is given only where it is easily coded—such as in essentially closed networks of new media artists and writers. At both events it was when openness was emphasised that activity seemed the most possible—an openness that includes a fundamental receptivity to the notion that some forms and practices are organically diminishing and others, yet to be named or understood, have no history.
Symposium proceedings will be published in Second Nature: the International Journal of Creative Media in March 2010; secondnature.rmit.edu.au
ANAT Super Human, Revolution of the Species, Symposium; www.superhuman.org.au, BMW Edge, Federation Square, Nov 23, 24; Re:live, Third International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, www.mediaarthistory.org; BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, Nov 26-29
SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE, CURATED BY AMELIA GROOM, PRESENTED THE WORK OF SEVEN YOUNG ARTISTS FROM JAPAN EXHIBITING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AUSTRALIA. COMMON TO THE WORKS IS A SENSE OF PLAY—GENUINE AND COMMITTED PLAY IN WHICH NAIVETY ALLOWS FOR TOTAL FREEDOM. APTLY TITLED THE WORKS OFFER VISIONS OF THE WORLD WARPED, EXPANDED AND MAGNIFIED, YET MOSTLY BENIGN—WE WITNESS FROM A COMFORTABLE DISTANCE.
Silver & Gold by Kiiiiiii is in fact nothing but play as the girlband duo presents video clips for their songs including a cutesy thrash version of ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” It’s reminiscent of a community TV kids show with a few frenzied gig shots thrown in—think Sailor Moon meets Peaches on Sesame Street.
The work of Crazy Hat & Long Ears also expresses a childlike abandon but their thematic of food and eating offers more conceptual depth. Our Full Courses presents a series of vignettes in which food is remodeled, animated and eventually splattered all over the protagonist—an Alice in Wonderland figure who has been wandering around eating vegetables from posters on walls, feasting on bacon and extracting green milk from puppet cows. The scenarios are vivid yet the tone of the work is quiet and underplayed and the sound track of soft humming and crunchy foley renders the work particularly intriguing.
Ine wo Ueru hito, One day, I meet… Part 1
courtesy the artists
Ine wo Ueru hito, One day, I meet… Part 1
While the work of the duo Ine wo Ueru hito is similar to Crazy Hat & Long Ears in its use of absurdist scenarios they offer a slicker and more mature vision. One Day, I Meet… parts 1 + 2 are linked by a woman in purple flowered dress, face obscured by hair, patiently vacuuming outdoor spaces. Part one is particularly engaging as scenes are intercut with sculptures of strange stuffed hybrid animals—a lamb with a unicorn’s head, a squirrel with hypodermics attached—rotating in an eerie Mathew Barney-esque white room. A particularly striking moment sees the woman vacuuming a large mound of dirt to reveal a giant sculpture of a bullock. While there are darker moments (a grotesque face made of chocolate grinding its teeth; the woman in silhouette repeatedly thrashing something with the vacuum nozzle), the atmosphere is curiously ambivalent giving the work of Ine Wo Uero Ito a sense of detachment more often felt in dreams.
installation by KATHY, Black & Blue Gallery, Surry Hills
courtesy the artists
installation by KATHY, Black & Blue Gallery, Surry Hills
In Daydream, KATHY also exploits an ambivalent darkness. Three performers in quaint evening dresses, blonde wigs and with black pantyhose over their faces (dangly legs still attached) conjure an amusing analogue recreation of the faceless ghosts of Japanese horror. While there is no blood splatter, KATHY use duration to generate tension, as we see the trio continuously stumbling and falling toward the camera from the end of a long street, or twirling compulsively on the furniture in a fancy apartment. These girls are definitely possessed, but by what remains a mystery.
In the works of Tetushi Higashino, Yukihiro Taguchi and Daito Manabe the sense of play turns what might be described as boy’s-own: the kind that involves kit sets from Dick Smith (or Tokyo’s Electric City). Tetushi Higashino’s KINE is a collection of kinetic constructions: a billowing plastic bag attached to an oscillating fan; a small square of Astroturf spinning slowly in a field of grass; a moustache (a Dali reference perhaps?) sliding backwards and forwards across a motorised track. The works are simple, verging on the banal, yet this simplicity suggests a contemporary animism, drawing attention to the essential ‘thingness’ of things.
Yukihiro Taguchi’s activation of objects is particularly impressive. Using stop motion animation, he literally vivifies his Berlin apartment in Nest: the furniture moves around, rooms are totally covered in paper and the bathtub fills to overflowing with foam. Even more amazing for the interplay of object and environment are Moment 1 & 2 in which the floorboards of a gallery are pulled up and ingeniously reconfigured both inside the gallery (creating a nightclub, a banquet hall) and outside where they wander the streets of Berlin, creating temporary public art structures. Taguchi’s work is exceptional in its attention to detail and scale not to mention the sheer labour of its execution.
Daito Manabe (with Shizou) performing live at Big In Japan, CarriageWorks, Dec 2
photo Daniel Boud
Daito Manabe (with Shizou) performing live at Big In Japan, CarriageWorks, Dec 2
Daito Manabe’s video documentation of recent experiments looks potentially malevolent, as he faces the camera with electrodes stuck to his face, but in reality it’s more play. Creating music compositions (of the white noise glitchy beat variety) the electrodes stimulate the muscles in the face, essentially making it dance. This reaches its zenith when the screen shows 16 willing human guinea pigs, whose wired-up faces spasm in unison—a truly hysterical sight. In another experiment Manabe reverses the flow making his facial ticks trigger the sound. In these works (which he also performs live) interactivity reached a new extreme.
The artist collective Chim↑Pom also tends towards the extreme. The 45 minute DVD, Super Rat and Other Adventures, is a collection of the group’s antics around Tokyo. Their strongest action, documented in several locations, is one where they ride the streets on a scooter broadcasting crow calls and waving a stuffed bird, which bizarrely tricks the multitude of real crows found around Tokyo to flock and follow the team—instant Hitchcock over Shibuya. In another segment they catch rats late at night and dress them up like stuffed Picachus (from Pokemon). In another scene, in Bali, one of the group works in the rubbish dump while a glamorous female flies in a chartered helicopter, littering from above. Many of the other activities, including a guy blowing into his foreskin with a straw to make his penis dance, look like naughty drunken party tricks, but even here there is something about the childlike abandon with which they are undertaken (given the context of such an extremely polite society in which it is considered rude to eat on the streets) that seems genuinely transgressive.
Spooky Action at a Distance, the first time curatorial project for Amelia Groom, offered a fascinating selection of works introducing the practices of some very interesting young Japanese artists. (It’s worth a google to check out the other aspects of their installation and performance practices). The strong curatorial logic of the collection and the resonances that emerged between the works—childlike freedom, playful transgression and animation of the banal—presented a very particular kind of surrealism, a dreaming that feels…well…essentially Japanese.
Spooky Action at a Distance. presented as part of Kirin’s Big in Japan, curator Amelia Groom; Black & Blue Gallery, Sydney, Dec 4-19, 2009; www.biginjapan.com.au
JUST OVER 10 YEARS AGO SYDNEY MEDIA ACTIVISTS RUSHED TO FINISH A VERSION OF ACTIVE SOFTWARE WHICH WOULD ENABLE THE FIRST INDYMEDIA SITE TO GO LIVE IN TIME TO COVER THE PROTESTS AGAINST THE WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION MEETING IN NOVEMBER 1999. AS RIOTS ERUPTED IN DOWNTOWN SEATTLE, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE LOGGED INTO THE NEW SITE LAUNCHING A MEDIA NETWORK WHICH REPORTEDLY RECEIVED MORE HITS IN ITS FIRST WEEK THAN MEDIA HEAVYWEIGHTS SUCH AS CNN.
“It was the heyday of globalisation, the high point of the internet boom and the last gasp of the New Economy: the WTO ministerial in Seattle was meant to celebrate the advent of a corporate millennium extending ‘free trade’ to the furthest corners of the earth. Nobody on that fall morning of Tuesday, 30 November 1999, could have predicted that by nightfall the summit would be disrupted, downtown Seattle would be paralysed by demonstrations and a full-scale police riot would have broken out…Nobody, that is, except the thousands of protesters who prepared for months to put their bodies on the line and shut down the World Trade Organization.”
Brian Holmes, nettime posting November 2009.
Ten years later the Indymedia network, while relatively small and fragmented in Australia, has grown to over 150 outlets around the world and has become a global phenomenon based around the simple slogan: “don’t hate the media, become the media.” A decade on it is now possible to see that Indymedia not only helped establish a global media service it also helped forge a connection between digital innovation and activism which has had a lasting impact on culture and the net.
activism goes digital
ABC social media producer John Jacobs, a member of the Jellyheads anarchist media collective whose warehouse was an infamous performance venue in the 90s, explains that the impetus for Indymedia grew out of attempts by people involved in Jellyheads, Critical Mass and the Reclaim the Streets activist communities to produce a hardcopy calendar to share news and events. Jacobs says that he knew he “never wanted to look at a photocopying machine again” when he met up with a physics student at Sydney University, Matthew Arnison. Arnison and Andrew Nicholson collaborated in writing the code for Active Sydney, a website which enabled people to share events, news, photos and other digital material online for the first time.
Active showed its international networking potential when used to cover news of the J18 global street parties in June 1999. As Nicholson, who is now a freelance coder and a member of the Sydney based art collective You Are Here, explained, its breakthrough was that activists could share information in “near real time.” In the build up to the Seattle protests in November of that year the founders of Active made contact with media activists in America and helped create the first Indymedia site which was based on the existing Active software.
Media analyst Marc Garcelon explains how Jeff Perlstein, a local member of the Seattle Independent Media Coalition, and another Seattle media activist, Sheri Herndon, became interested in using the internet to create an independent media network focused on the upcoming WTO protests. These activists wanted to utilise the archetype of “open-posting” developed in Australia: “after hooking up online with the Active network, the Seattle group around Perlstein and Herndon secured low-rent use of a downstairs floor in Seattle through the directors of the Low Income Housing Institute…For the next six weeks, the network transformed this space into the first Indymedia center, which became operational the day before protests began against the WTO Conference” (Marc Garcelon, “The ‘Indymedia’ Experiment: The Internet as Movement Facilitator Against Institutional Control”, Convergence 2006; 12).
open structure
According to Nicholson, the creation of Indymedia marked “the first time that a decentralised activist network used the domain name system to at once differentiate themselves locally but stay linked to a global network.” Nicholson explains that the original Indymedia site very quickly decentralised into seattle.indymedia.org, washington.indymedia.org and sydney.indymedia.org and so on: “this was the same process for Active which had always been active.org.au/sydney, active.org.au/melbourne etc…but using the same domain name system enabled the community media centers to hold together as a network.” Nicholson goes on to explain, “in 1999 it wasn’t very common for mainstream media organisations to have any of the Web 2.0 features which people now talk about such as group voting, commenting, rating, tag clouds, inter-related social networks and so on. Things which we did on our websites put pressure on non-activist website for similar features, so 10 years later everyone wants interactive elements.”
For Nicholson the first Indymedia site uniquely brought together the hacker systems of communication which had developed in the early days of the BBS and the ARPAnet with an expanding counter-globalisation movement and its non-expert adherents and enthusiasts. The interactive elements which were so novel in the Indymedia site had a long history in “the smaller base of the open source community of programmers who were writing websites for other programmers and were used to using the most advanced technologies of the time to rate and improve their programs. Slashdot.org for example had a system of commenting and ratings 10 years ago. It was a very nerdy algorithmic way of moderating because you could rate people’s articles and people could rate your ratings, you could rate people’s comments and other people could rate the way you rate people’s comments in an endlessly recursive system of moderation.” Because Nicholson and Arnison had a foot in both camps—open source programming and activism—Nicholson explains “we were a bridge to bring those forms of interactivity to a broader range of activists who also had an interest in democratic forms of communication.”
Indymedia’s rapid expansion was helped along by its open structure—anyone in the world could put their hand up and say that they wanted to create a local branch and they were given the domain name and someone would create a handle for them in the Active software. Nicholson describes this as a “network effect” much like the old web rings of the early days of the net where people would band together to share common interests within an autonomous and expanding web environment.
Indymedia flyer
courtesy Zanny Begg
Indymedia flyer
open publishing
Also crucial to the success of Indymedia was the notion of open publishing, something Arnison describes as ensuring “the process of creating news is transparent to the readers….” (http://purplebark.net/maffew/cat/openpub.html). John Jacobs likens Indymedia to a “big communal blog before blogs were even invented. The backbone of Indymedia was peer-to-peer moderation, user generated content and open publishing, something which would ripple out through the web as a whole.” The concept of open publishing has expanded throughout the web with popular sites like Wikipedia which rely on “swarm intelligence” to refine, edit and verify content.
An obvious corollary opens up between the open architecture of the web and the open publishing tactics of the web activists of Indymedia. The desire to decentralise information production and distribution connects directly to the de-centralised packet-switching structure of how information flows through the web. The many-to-many information broadcasting nodes of the web form the base which supports an ideology of open content creation, editing and sharing which has become normative within activist and web culture more broadly.
The cultural implications of this have been enormous, both for the raft of art projects which have used the web as their medium, experimenting with net conceptualist actions such as the electronic sit-ins of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, but beyond the core of internet artists there has been a general trend towards interactivity and networked culture within art making even in non-technologically dependent projects, such as the artists loosely grouped under the banner of Relational Aesthetics.
tactical media
Tactical Media is a term developed by David Garcia and Geert Lovink in the late 90s to describe the possibilities for artistic and activist interventions into digital and web-based media. In creating this term they borrowed from Michel de Certeau’s celebrated book The Practice of Everyday Life which outlined the potential for ordinary people to tactically interact with consumer society. De Certeau drew a distinction between strategic interventions, which were the prerogative of those invested with power, and the wily, tactical interventions of the weak. In contrast to the grim absolutism of the Situationists (“consumer society has colonized social life”), de Certeau saw the possibilities for consumers, or rebellious users, as he preferred to call them, to recreate the value of consumer products by investing them with their own idiosyncratic uses and meanings.
Garcia and Lovink explain, in a nettime posting, how this allowed de Certeau to produce a “vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to amount to a distinctive and recognizable aesthetic…[an] aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring…” Since the mid to late 90s multiple groups, networks, lists and projects have evolved under the tactical media umbrella such as Institute for Applied Autonomy (1998), RTMark (1996), The Yes Men (1999), Next Five Minutes (1993), Carbon Defense League (CDL) (1998), Bernadette Corporation (1994), Beyond The Brain parties (1995), HAcktitude (2001) and so on. The tech savvy trickster has become a key figure within art as cultural activists use the avenues of communication opened up by digital media to play in the gaps and cracks in the armory of the powerful.
digital cultural resistance
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) has contributed greatly to the discussions surrounding the possibilities of digital resistance in a networked world. For CAE the “tradition of digital cultural resistance” is indebted to a rich heritage of avant-garde art practices such as detournment, bricolage, readymades, plagiarism, appropriation and the Theater of Everyday Life. These practices stretch back to 20th-century art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and the Situationists, and just as much reach forward to a tech utopia of the information age. This point is also made by the founder of the online discussion list HAcktitude, Tatiana Bazzichelli, who sees the lineages of digital art/activism stemming from “situationist, multiple singularity and plagiarist projects” (www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg05812.html). As she explains “the contemporary Internet-based networking platforms have their deep roots in a series of experimental activities in the field of art and technology started in the last half of the 20th-century which have transformed the conception of art as object into art as an expanded network of relationships.”
avant garde continuities
What the internet allows is the rapid expansion and diversification of the impulse towards networking, collaboration and collectivism contained within earlier avant-garde art movements: thus Mail Art becomes the email list, detournment becomes sampling, the readymade becomes plagiarism, plagiarism becomes copyleft, the derive becomes Google-earth, the collage becomes the mash-up, appropriation becomes the fan-zine and so on. Rather than emaciating the avant-garde impulses of earlier art movements, as those who claim we live in a postmodern world might hypothesise, the internet age has put them on steroids, rapidly expanding the capacity of artists and art movements to experiment with networked practices which regard social relationships as a form of art.
Experiments in the 80s and early 90s with neoism, culture jamming, cyber-punk, tactical media, net.art and hacktervism created a culture of digital resistance and critique which has transformed both art and networking, or, as Bazzichelli cogently argues, conflated the two. In Italy, where Bazzichelli is located, the digital underground is highly active and innovative spawning a multitude of networked cultural practices and initiatives such as 0100101110101101.org the Luter Blissart Project, the Telestreet network, FreakNet and so on. In Italy there has been a powerful combination of autonomist theory, digital resistance and political activism which has reverberated outwards to the rest of the world through the writing of Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi and Paolo Virno and the actions of counter-globalisation protesters in Genoa.
the internet come to life
In May 2000 Naomi Klein was invited to give a paper at the Re-Imagining Politics and Society conference in New York. A central theme of this conference was providing vision and unity to the counter-globalisation movement which had emerged so spectacularly on the streets of Seattle the year before. When deliberating on her speech Klein came to the antagonistic conclusion, however, that a lack of vision or unity should be considered a strength rather than a weakness. Choosing her metaphor carefully Klein argued that while the movement had not coalesced into a single definable identity its various elements were “tightly linked to one another, much as ‘hotlinks’ connect their websites on the Internet.” She went on to explain, “This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding the changing nature of political organising. Although many have observed that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without the internet, what has been overlooked is how the communication technology that facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image…What emerged on the streets of Seattle…was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralised, interlinked pathways of the internet—the internet come to life” (www.thenation.com/doc/20000710/klein/single).
The Sydney hackers who helped launch Indymedia years ago played an important part in linking our experiences of communication and politics with the technical capacities for decentralisation embedded within the structure of the web itself. As we confront copyright, piracy, plagiarism and other issues of the digital age, the innovation of a decade ago stands as a reminder that the future of culture lies in democratising the productive capacities of the era in which we find ourselves.
ADAM LINDER EXUDES A DANCER’S RESTLESS ENERGY, MOMENTARILY SUSPENDS SENTENCES AS HE SHAPES THOUGHTS, FILLS THE GAPS WITH EMPHATIC TURNS OF THE HEAD AND EXTENDED GESTURING (AS IF LITERALLY REACHING FOR THE RIGHT WORD), AND THEN RACES ELOQUENTLY ON. LINDER’S PASSION AND DETERMINATION BELONG TO A DANCE-MAKER IN HIS MID-20S IN THE PROCESS OF CREATING A NEW WORK, ABOUT ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, FOR THE SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY’S FIRST 2010 SEASON, IN A DOUBLE BILL WITH ANOTHER NEW WORK, FROM ARTISTIC DIRECTOR RAFAEL BONACHELA, FOR WHOM LINDER HAS DANCED IN LONDON.
A graduate of the Newtown Performing Arts High School, Linder trained in ballet with Christine Keith and left Sydney at 16 for London where he was admitted with full scholarship to the Royal Ballet School. He subsequently joined the company, performing in classic works as well as modern creations by Kenneth MacMillan, Christopher Wheeldon, Mats Ek, Wayne McGregor and Cathy Marston. But he told The Guardian (Sept 29, 2008) that he had chosen to leave the world of ballet because “it’s not an evolving form of dance.” He explained: “I realised that traditional ballet, and the themes and stories it deals with did not really connect with me as a young dancer and artist. I wanted to delve into contemporary things and be involved in new work and the exploration of new approaches to dance, not be involved in rehashing historical pieces.”
After dancing with Netherlands Dance Theatre II in 2004 and making Over My Dead Body for company dancers in 2005 Linder then worked as an independent in productions by Michael Clark, Rafael Bonachela, Arthur Pita, Meg Stuart and, in Berlin, Jeremy Wade.
Linder says that the spaces between these jobs allowed him the freedom and time to invest in his own dance-making and branch out into photographic and film work. “I’ve managed to divide my time between dancing under other people’s authorship and my own. For the last few years it’s been six months on each if not always consecutively.”
Since 2006 Linder has worked with photographer Will Davidson on the dance-film collaboration Collectnudes.com, including the making of Fuck Forever (2007), which has been broadcast on British, Australian and Spanish television. There have been art films with Pablo Bronstein, since 2007, and in 2008 Lindner presented I Put My Trust In You with British band These New Puritans at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. “I was getting into film and video before I plunged into making my own performances. It was at a time when I was dancing mostly for other people and it was somewhere I could form an identity. It was self-produced art-making with Will. We just did it, seeing the web as a great outlet. We were both living in London. I’d just moved back from Holland and I was creative assisting him on stills-based projects. I was also dancing and we were making these small films with no money and a lot of ideas and using every resource at hand in covert locations.”
Linder is now engaging with interactive media in a work-in-progress with a fellow Sydney-sider and Berlin resident, media artist Jordana Maisie as part of the 2009 Critical Path-UNSW Dance Research Residency Program. “I’m a dance-maker and she’s a media artist working in interactive installation—we meet in the middle to create a one-on-one participatory installation for the audience, one person at a time. I’m working on how to guide that person, orienting the whole physical experience and guiding them through it. It’s almost like translating all my body practice history onto someone who doesn’t have a practice.
“My work has either been on film or performed in black box and Jordana’s is gallery-based, on a loop, without a beginning or end. But here we were, working in an an undefined pitch black space, creating a linear journey. The audience member becomes the performer and it brought up the question of how you exchange movement history. We’re also working with a lot of text, which neither of us had gotten into before: more new media possibilities.”
Linder’s solo work, Perfect Score, performed to Ravel’s Bolero and described as “the psychodrama of an adolescent search for masculine identity” was commissioned by London’s The Place and performed in Italy and France. Later in 2008 he won the 25,000 pound Place Prize for Dance with Foie Gras a duet (with Lorena Randi) offering a satirical, surreal account of the excesses of consumerist society. His new solo performance, Early ripen early rot, has had preliminary showings in Sydney, London and Berlin and “is about the faith of self-obliteration.”
In 2009 Linder was one of the collaborating performers in Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods’ Do Animals Cry? which was developed in Berlin and is still in repertoire. He’ll work on a new Stuart show later this year. He says that over the last year he’s struck up a close relationship with her: “Meg’s processes are second to none…so wholly inclusive, so thorough, from the six performers to lighting and costume designers and production manager. We worked on Do Animals Cry? for four to five months almost every day, talking, meeting, engaging in experiential experiments. It was such a definitive process for me. Meg works completely with improvisation, with constant dialogue that is theme driven. Twice a week we’d watch a related film. We’d find different physical scores to realise that came up in discussion.”
Linder is inspired by this model of collaboration, of mutual discovery and sharing, where “choreography is not simply a group of performers on stage solely embodying someone else’s vision.” He sees the dance-maker as “setting up a thematic score or situation and improvisations that entail feeling, looking, thinking, possible references. But it’s up to the performers to access their own responses.” He says that many dancers happily work with improvisation and, increasingly, “will be disappointed if they’re not asked to.”
Linder’s new 30-40 minute work for the Sydney Dance Company is titled Are We That We Are. Asked what drives his dance-making, Linder replies, “I will make a work because I’m curious about something and the work needs to be made. By starting the journey I go further into the enquiry, primarily driven by its theme and then engaging in movement research to best explore it. This work will be about altered states.”
Linder explains that he’s been “doing a lot of state [of being] work rather than body practice improvisations with narratives or somatic directions or aesthetic ones, like ‘Only work with a plane lower than a metre high.’ I’m working with rapture, disillusionment, neuroses, inhibition…”
Working with Meg Stuart and Jeremy Wade in Berlin provided some of the impetus for Linder’s new work: “Jeremy’s very interested in the grotesque, the distorted and the transgressive. I was involved in a festival he curated in Berlin called The Politics of Ecstasy titled after Timothy Leary’s book. Meg and Jeremy and a musician, Brendan Dougherty, co-curated a series of improvisations. We were working in a pool of performers, researching ways of dealing with the topic of altered states, and I thought I want to get further into this, to find out my own take on it. I’m personally very interested in altered states, in what is fundamental to the right side of our brain—the sensory, the visionary, the experiential.
“Last night I was having fish and chips at Bondi Beach with my mother. A woman, clearly under the influence of some substance or other, was very slowly moving up the hill from the beach. I could almost sense what she was seeing with her mind’s eye, so disengaged was she from the function of her body in that moment, making swirling, sweeping, spirally walking patterns up the hill.”
Linder admits that he’s taken on a huge subject. He says that creative associate and dramaturg Sally Schonfeldt tells him, “Adam, this topic is too big.” His research embraces “clinical material, scientific research, transpersonal psychology, anthropological forays into shamanism, as well as meditation and Buddhism.” But Linder is emphatic: “I’m not out to make a definitive statement. Contemporary performance is not about putting a cap on things. The work will be an utterance of sorts, proposing an avenue in, one way of looking at things, hopefully inciting the audience to make their own estimations.”
For the new work, Linder’s primary communicative tool is, “of course, my body, for the most in-depth, extreme, experimental, for want of a better word, movement research. But lighting, which will be by Nick Schlieper, is especially important for the work given its role in altering states of being, and sound will also offer an accumulation of entry points into the topic.” In the 1960s psychedelic music was integral to the altered state experience. Linder will draw on the contemporary version (known variously as psychedelic pop or neo-psychedelia) found in the music of Animal Collective, Panda, MGMT, White Rainbow and, reaching back into the 90s, Sunburned Hand of the Man. Linder is curious: “This huge experimental psychedelia movement happening, these new modes, make me wonder what is it about the current political and social climate that is bringing this line of enquiry back from the 60s and 70s but exploding the old notion of it. It’s transcendental, ecstatic and timely for my investigations.”
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Sydney Dance Company, New Creations, Rafael Bonachela, 6 Breaths; Adam Linder, Are We That We Are; Sydney Theatre, March 23-April 10; www.sydneydancecompany.com
Elena Gianotti in Episodes of Flight, 2008 by Rosemary Butcher and Cathy Lane
courtesy the artists
Elena Gianotti in Episodes of Flight, 2008 by Rosemary Butcher and Cathy Lane
LATE LAST YEAR, CRITICAL PATH HOSTED TWO WORKSHOPS BY CHOREOGRAPHERS WHO MAKE VERY DIFFERENT WORK, BUT WHO ARE LINKED THROUGH A COMMON EXPERIENCE OF EPIPHANY WHEN MEETING THE WORK OF JUDSON CHURCH CHOREOGRAPHER, YVONNE RAINER.
French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, in his piece, Product of Circumstance, cites performing in a company which recreated Rainer’s works as a major shift in his understanding as a dance maker (and was introduced to audiences in Sydney by Amanda Card with a lecture that began with Rainer’s famous No Manifesto). UK choreographer Rosemary Butcher, who uncannily describes her meeting with Rainer as not so much luck but circumstance, is upfront about how her time in New York in the late 60s and early 70s profoundly changed the work she made on her return to the UK.
Butcher was in Sydney with her collaborative partner, composer Cathy Lane, to lead a month-long research project through Critical Path and Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) called the Composers and Choreographers Lab, in which I participated and the results of which were screened as part of CAC’s What I Think About When I Think About Dancing exhibition. Despite having made work over the last 30 years and being one of the leading proponents of new dance in the UK, Butcher’s choreography is not well known in Australia. This is possibly because she has constantly challenged conventional forms of dance, which makes her work appear somewhat difficult (a recent review in London admits that her audience is small but dedicated), and because she has only been touring outside of the UK since 2000, after making her first piece in collaboration with Cathy Lane, Scan.
The effect of working with Rainer in New York for Butcher was the total shift in understanding as to what sort of movement could constitute dance, and the performance of this dance outside of the conventions of the theatre. Butcher says, “I do not know, in my background, why I should have been so suddenly so disconnected with the formal and the theatrical, but I responded to another way of thinking, and I think, felt as if I could create with that in mind in a much freer way than if I’d stayed within a wider construct.” The first work Butcher made in the UK after this period was performed at The Serpentine Gallery at a time when, she says, “everybody seemed to be working for free and there was sort of an idea that things just happened at that time and then they disappeared. They weren’t recorded very well. There was no sense of continuity but there were a lot of people putting things on.”
This initiated her long interest in researching “how to transfer the ideology and methods of making visual art into the dance world and into the choreographic world”, which has led her work to a focus not only on the visual but also on notions of space and duration.
“[F]or a long time the formal time-based way you come to a show and you’re presented with something and you clap and you go away [has] always slightly worried me, though I’m a performer at heart and a director and love the theatre…[But] I’m less interested in it and would like the work to be far more along the traditions of how visual art is viewed, where you spend as long or as little time as you want within your experience, but it’s entirely up to you as to how, when, where etc that you experience it. You’re not brought in and curtailed and asked to see something at a particular time.”
Butcher’s movement palette consists of a dancerly version of pedestrian or everyday movement, but requires a precise and detailed virtuosity from her performers through her choreographic treatment of this material, which is expanded and amplified through repetitions and changes of speed. “There is a consideration of duration. There’s a consideration of how a particular framework will allow something to be seen very particularly or, if you increase the number of times that you see it, the volume of the experience is bigger. Instead of changing and developing an idea, to me it’s very interesting if it recurs. The scale is bigger though in fact the movement is still the same.”
Rosemary Butcher and Cathy Lane, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing Artist Talks
photo Heidrun Löhr, courtesy Campbelltown Arts Centre
Rosemary Butcher and Cathy Lane, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing Artist Talks
However, for Butcher the choreographic material is only one part of her work, and she contends that it is set up to be watched with other layers and frameworks. She has consistently collaborated with artists from other fields, including contemporary art, architecture and music, and has worked with composer Cathy Lane for the last 10 years. Their collaboration is particular in that they begin discussing concepts and ideas together, swap books and research material throughout the creative process but make their work in parallel, only bringing it together in the last weeks. This allows an autonomy of form, and the audience is able to watch the dance in relation to the music and visual elements, rather than seeing them as a whole. Butcher says she wants her audience “to view the work as a non time-based medium, that they’re experiencing sensation and feeling, and that all the ideas within the making are shown through the way the performance is executed. Of course I want people to understand it, but I also don’t expect it not to be difficult. And people do get lost within it. There’s a lot going on but it doesn’t register with everyone; but then I wouldn’t want to lead people directly to it, so I have to take the consequences.”
Rosemary Butcher and Cathy Lane Residency: Composers and Choreographers Lab, Critical Path, Campbelltown Arts Centre, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing, Campbelltown, Sydney, Nov 16-27
Rosie Dennis, Loving You In Public, Artist Talks, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing
photo Heidrun Löhr
Rosie Dennis, Loving You In Public, Artist Talks, What I Think About When I Think About Dancing
WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN I THINK ABOUT DANCING IS A CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE PROJECT THAT SEEKS TO INVESTIGATE THE “INTERSECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE AND VISUAL ART.” ON A STEAMY FRIDAY NIGHT, IN THIS ART GALLERY FAR AWAY FROM THE CITY, THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH IS FULL OF ACTIVITY: STATIC ART, VIDEO ART, DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE, MASHING SOUNDTRACKS AND A CHIRPING CROWD. BY THE TIME THE PERFORMANCES BEGIN SENSORY OVERLOAD IS ALREADY APPROACHING.
In this fulsome atmosphere, dance is cast as a visual art aesthetic event. White walls replace the theatrical black box, and this bright and partitioned shininess throws the dancing body into sharp relief. Colour radiates and frames the performer as artefact.
Rosie Dennis creates a poignant pastiche of poetry, music, movement and instantaneous art. She speaks quietly, making me lean into her words, words I cannot quite grasp. The pull of these almost inaudible whisperings lies in a poetics of repetition and rhythm. She begins to dance a Rosie Dennis dance: odd, detailed and slightly tortured. Her body twitches and stretches, it stops and starts, swaying through syncopated and mellifluous states. As always with Dennis it is a dance not danced before, a dance with potent individuality. But it is all too short and will be rendered almost lost amidst message and aesthetic.
Thus begins what Dennis call the “soapbox section.” It is a political monologue; tightly written and delivered with an understated intensity that actually deepens its heartfelt subjectivity. Almost apologetic, Dennis’ quiet voice escapes and wanders in an almost-anti-projection that steers her Equal Rights monologue away from rant.
She silences herself by dancing a solo waltz: pitifully lonely with its empty outstretched arms. It is the dance of lack, of the human left bereft. But all is well. Her arms are soon filled with the lover who makes her smile. Other couples join them. These couples, dancing out real life love, perform publicly what is usually private. Audience becomes voyeur at a romantic dinner, an intruder in foreplay. It is both uncomfortable and touching.
This is a poignant piece which lingers but never drowns in saccharin, saved from a too, too sweetness by the poetry of repetition and rhythm, by Dennis’ unique movement style, by performative simplicity and by the sparse but stark palette of colours. In the bright white light of the art gallery, the ‘turf’ beneath the performer’s feet is green green, a music stand is blue blue and the various anonymous performers stencil their love names in bright spray paint, leaving traces of their real life romance like hearts carved in a tree.
Almost immediately we all turn around to watch a performance by Brown Council. The familiar strains of “Black Betty” create an ‘oh yeah, here we go’ ripple and after all that lovin’ and sweetness ‘let’s see some sex’ and nothing says sex like the rock strains of Ram Jam’s 70s hit. With the performer sharply lit and luridly dressed in pink tasselled cowboy gear and insanely high heels, the opening sequence is restrained and tottering, foregoing both the wild unabashed revelation of flesh and the titillating promise of tease. This is more Ralph magazine than transgressive burlesque. After the shoes are discarded the dance becomes softer, slower, deeper and definitely sexier. The performer brings out the oil and drenches her arched and prone body, over and over again. But where is the tease, the delicacy, the subtlety?
Brown Council presents Kelley K; What I Think About When I Think About Dancing
photo Heidrun Löhr
Brown Council presents Kelley K; What I Think About When I Think About Dancing
Is this irony? A statement on the nature of dance, gender, politics? Is it the arty setting, with the arty crowd watching a puff pastry debauch that constitutes the titillation? Does the dislocation of context create a new set of meanings?
Brown Council is a Sydney-based performance group who play with the rearranged and reclaimed image, especially the fetishised female form of popular culture. Here, the four members—Kate Blackmore, Fran Barrett, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith—are strangely absent, even though the performance bears their name. The dancer is in fact Kelley Kae, a professional stripper hired by Brown Council for the project. While it is clear they want to say something about dance, the body, gender, politics and the artistic economy, Kae’s performance does not make these statements clear. Her name is missing from the printed program and this anonymity objectifies and ‘castrates’ her, casting her as stripper rather than artist. Sadly, there is no full monty or happy ending, just the lingering question: why?
The spray painted epitaphs from Rosie Dennis’ romance dance leave traces, letting love linger in this sharply coloured setting. Her bodies entered and changed the space, then left, transforming performance into artefact. Here was an ‘intersection’ between dance and visual art, a comment on fleeting yet resilient temporality.
What I Think About When I Think About Dancing, Campbelltown Arts, Centre, Campbelltown, Sydney, project launch Nov 27, Nov 16, 2009-Jan 2, 2010
2009 WAS A PRODUCTIVE YEAR FOR FREELANCE DANCE, THEATRE, CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE AND NEW MEDIA PRACTITIONER LISA O’NEILL. TWO WORKS THAT HAVE BEEN, WELL, A LONG TIME IN THE PIPELINE, ACHIEVED A FINAL APOTHEOSIS.
Apotheosis seems the appropriate word in this context. Rave reviews for her performance in The Pineapple Queen which premiered at La Boite Theatre earlier in the year were an indication of O’Neill discovering new depths of dramatic prowess [RT93]. An apotheosis of a metaphorical kind served as the expression of artistic freedom in O’Neill’s off-beat take on the creative process itself, The Pipe Manager, where she is back on familiar territory as a leading exponent of dance theatre.
This solo show is sold as “a dark and quirkily comic journey through bureaucratic insanity.” O’Neill’s character superficially resembles the hardboiled investigator in conflict with greedy corporations. With a nod to Dorothy, she puts on her green shoes, ready to go for it. The storyline is radically out there. She is hired by the menacing Peers Pipe company as a pipe innovator. With her own reputation as a peerless innovator, O’Neill’s pursuit of this hopeless task is lovely self-satire. She also has endearingly long obsessions. The menacing Board of Directors are caricatured as an alien species, as Yetis—self-referential to an early signature dance work, Sweet Yeti.
Two projection screens with a gap in between for exits and entrances. A cube and a pipe. The story is uniquely told by switches between O’Neill performing live on stage and the story book adventures of her onscreen double. This oppressive fantasy world is rendered adult comic book style by master illustrator XTN and given cohesion by Guy Webster’s understated but menacing and dramatically effective sound design. The live O’Neill is playful, seductive and forceful in turns. All her movements, whether tentative, minimal, balletic or frenzied mechanical repetitions, are riveting. Even in taking on an absurd commission, there is warmth here as well as precision, a real curiosity that is at the heart of play: a desire for interaction wherever it may lead that is in contrast to product-obssessed, profit-orientated Yetis. O’Neill’s escape from Yetiland was a coup for lighting designer David Walters whose laser lighting produced the breathtaking effect of O’Neill walking through a drawing of herself, caught in a world where dimensions slipped and slid. She disappears into a fierce light backstage.
In his program note, writer Peter Berkahn says that his story “homed in on the human need for endless rejuvenation, which was suggestive of a quest for humans wanting to be a ‘God Head’.” The journey thus undertaken may have provided no ultimate answers nor, indeed, lead to any real life outcomes. O’Neill wrily remarks that “the irony behind making the work is that in one way The Pipe Manager became about making The Pipe Manager…” O’Neill’s triumph over Yetiland, however, lay in the apprehension that she so effortlessly and sensuously realised in performance but which seemed left up for discussion in this otherwise pertinent gem of a piece. She embodied the notion that—beyond God Head, beyond creation ex nihilo—the artistic imagination may require both the ecstasy of abandonment to what is other, and the self-possession of mastery. O’Neill didn’t disappear into an absorbing God. She remains, to our joy, a dancer on the edge of infinity.
The Pipe Manager, creator, performer Lisa O’Neill, writer Peter Berkahn, illustrator XTN, sound composer & designer Guy Webster, dramaturg Kathryn Kelly, lighting designer David Walters, graphic design Jaxzyn, costume design, Glen Brown, artistic consultant Keith Armstrong; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov 18-21, 2009
‘wildcard’ performers Trevor Patrick, Joanna Lloyd, Helen Herbertson, Full Colour
photo Rohan Young
‘wildcard’ performers Trevor Patrick, Joanna Lloyd, Helen Herbertson, Full Colour
HELEN HERBERTSON EXCHANGES SMILES WITH OTHER DANCERS, THEN WALKS TO THE CENTRE OF THE ROOM. THE ORANGE AURA OF THE SPACE (STAINED WOOD) IS INTENSIFIED BY THE PRESENCE OF A CURVED STREET LAMP. THE LAMP RECALLS FILM NOIR SCENES—A SINGLE LIGHT SOURCE SOFTLY ILLUMINATES A DARK WORLD. OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THAT WORLD IS CIRCUMSCRIBED. THERE IS NO PANORAMIC, GOD’S EYE VIEW.
Lasica often makes use of the spectator’s limited perspective, drawing upon a hidden score or creating a panorama which cannot be fully taken in. Sometimes a narrative lurks beneath the action, inaccessible or unconscious. Other times, multiple activities are superimposed so that the viewer must make choices about who and what to watch.
This time, inaccessibility is built into the structure of the piece and it is Shelley Lasica who must stay in the dark (choreographically speaking). Full Colour is performed by three dancers and one ‘wildcard’ performer each night. The latter has a certain leeway which the others do not. My wildcard was Helen Herbertson. Her beginning was particular to her body and her persona. The exchange of smiles was an indication of her own pleasure. Her taking the centre of the room was a momentary choice, a spur of the moment decision—unrepeatable.
Herbertson starts by flexing her hands, beginning at the periphery of the body, a distal origin. I suspected this was not Lasica’s movement material. Lasica’s arm movements are very distinctive, even when taken up by another body. She also has a preference for cross lateral connections made in the torso, which then spread out into the limbs. She composes staccato moments, perhaps a fall taken into a step; reassemble, reorganise, stop. Start again. None of this was apparent in Herbertson’s assay into motion.
Once begun, other bodies enter the fray, more recognisably mimeses of Lasica’s own body. I always enjoy watching others perform Lasica’s style, taking up her movements in the context of their own bodies. Deanne Butterworth has been doing this for some time. There is a plushness to her movement, a sort of peachy thickness which gives life to the material. Kyle Kremerskothen is newer to the task, but it is still clear that this is what is happening. This intense difference, between the wildcard’s improvisational work and the fixed material apparently performed by the others, sets the scene for Full Colour. It is as if the three performers (Lasica, Butterworth and Kremerskothen) are incarnations of the one persona in contrast to the wildcard.
Relationships emerge through physical proximity. Although interested in narrative and human relations, Lasica keeps the dramatic canvas spare. The responsibility for any interpretation of events and relationships lies squarely with the spectator, so much so that I cannot fully determine what Full Colour is about. I could say the work is about people in relation to each other. To that extent, Full Colour is not just about movement, it is about the movement of our lives. The wildcard does the trick in this respect, especially in Herbertson’s hands, for her personable interactions with the dancers suggests a human dimension over and above the human fact of dancers dancing. When she dances with Butterworth, it seems that a worldly project is underway. Although unclear what precisely that endeavour is, the feeling is that life has been abstracted.
What is it that allows for such abstraction? The bodies themselves are fully concrete. I think it is that the narrative dimension is underplayed. Theatrical forms of dance often show what they are about through creating recognisable stories or settings. We are at a train station, in someone’s home or in the bedroom; this is about a couple who are fighting or a group of energetic youths. Although there is a dramatic element to some of Lasica’s works, and to Full Colour in particular, its content is not laid out for the spectator. There are no surfaces, only depths. We have to work at interpreting any human drama. Furthermore, these interpretations are provisional, fleeting projections.
In this sense, my perceptions are only temporary illuminations. Lasica has left a lot unsaid and, in doing so, given space to the observer to meet the action. The music also refuses to determine the tone of the dancing. It gently supports the flow of movement. If this is in full colour, then it is watercolour, calligraphy, a picture created from momentary flows and constellations, the thickness of preconceived phrase material against the human tendency to perform oneself.
Full Colour, A dance performance, choreographer, director Shelley Lasica, dancers Shelley Lasica, Deanne Butterworth, Kyle Kremerskothen, with Wildcards: Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick, Jo Lloyd, Phillip Adams, sound Milo Kossowski, Morgan McWaters, lighting: Bluebottle, Ben Cobham, diffusion Rachel Young, Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne Dec 10-13, 2009
CLARE DYSON’S WORK HAS ALWAYS STRUCK A BRIGHT NOTE ON BRISBANE’S INDEPENDENT DANCE SCENE, BUT SHE HAS BEEN ELUSIVE AND DIFFICULT TO PIN DOWN BECAUSE HER RESTLESS UNDERTAKINGS HAVE TAKEN WIDELY DIFFERENT FORMS. IF ANYTHING, DYSON’S HIGHLY IDIOSYNCRATIC APPROACH MIGHT BE LIKENED TO A CUBIST PAINTER ANALYSING THE SURFACE APPEARANCE OF THINGS.
Nevertheless, there is a definite ‘Dyson-effect’, a sympathetic vibration that travels with us back into daily life but isn’t attributable to any consistent aesthetic element. Instead, there’s always been what I’ll call a ‘community’ of effects distilled into Dyson’s distinctive emotional tone.
Dyson’s latest offering, The Voyeur, is part of a larger doctoral research project looking at how audiences engage with contemporary dance. As such, it lightly carries scholarly references to 1970s performance art, or the even earlier experimental theatre of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. Like Grotowski’s ‘holy’ theatre, Dyson’s audience is limited in size and configured as a vital part of the performance. Bruce McKinven’s design consists of a room constructed from heavy ply on the bare stage at QUT Gardens Theatre. The audience is given the choice of watching through multiple peepholes that provide access to a more or less partial view of the performance. They can listen through headphones to either one of the nakedly confessional texts produced by the two performers, but not both.
The room reflects a student bohemia from the past, indicated by a record collection and an old style gramaphone. The action is nostalgic, reminiscent of evenings we all remember when we resorted to playing our favourite records in an attempt to be understood by ‘the Other’, significant or otherwise. Records chosen ranged from Harry Belafonte to Iggy Pop, and Phillip Glass’s retrospective collection Glassworks. Two ‘lovers’ face one another, intimately looking into each other’s eyes. They are smiling tenderly, but knowingly, for there is danger here as well as promise.
Whole worlds might be exchanged in such encounters, but there is always the possibility of violation in one’s depths. The two play a game of slapping and sparring, testing the waters until, apparently unable to sustain the nakedness and vulnerability inherent in each other’s gaze, they break away, each to their own self-contained world. This was the leitmotif for the performance, and duplicated our own atomised responses as an audience of voyeurs individually consigned to play out a perversely ritualised, collective role. Shuffling, bending, peering through monoculars, we paid no heed to each other, even avoided each other’s eyes. Particularly we ducked the gaze of watchers concealed behind opposite walls lest we find ourselves in the position of the voyeur in Barbusse’s L’Enfer who peers through a keyhole only to be shocked to meet another eye staring back.
The more urgently, the more desirously we sought to become intimate with the performers, to enter their private worlds or perhaps simply to make the disparate elements of the performance cohere, the more we were forced to acknowledge our own gaze mirrored in their presence, to find that it was the recalled intimacies in our own lives that we must confess, the raw nature of our own desires that really counted. Dyson tells us through the headphones that research shows it takes the average audience member 15 minutes to fantasise about what it would be like to have an intimate relationship with the performer. She lethally evokes and simultaneously mocks desire as she slowly slices through a passion fruit on her bared thigh. As the juices run and her eyes seek us out, she obligingly personifies the object of desire. That the moment is bracketed, however, points to the performer as emptied of all real characteristics and substance. She is fulfilling a symbolic function, reflecting back the projection of our own narcissism. If you had been on her ‘track’, you were both aroused and at the same time felt completely exposed. Exposed in the sense of Lear and the Fool on the heath in the middle of a storm: that is to say, without shelter.
Dyson cites philosopher Emmamual Levinas to the effect that an encounter with ‘the Other’ is the only way of revealing the truth about ourselves. The interacting subjectivities of the performers—through what I would describe as the naked effrontery (in the sense of a scandal) of their texts, and in movement that comfortably existed in the here and now, in this time spot (however past)—showed us that unsheltering in Levinas’s sense can become a homecoming and a healing. This was ambiguously spoken for in Dyson’s Magdalene-like action of washing Sinatra’s hair, and in Sinatra’s self-absorbed jouissance in a dance to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life while she sweeps the floor, but could only truly, finally be mediated, in Dyson’s wonderful dispensation, her gift to us, by the despicable voyeur, her audience.
The Voyeur, creator Clare Dyson, choreography, performance, text Clare Dyson, Jonathan Sinatra, dramaturg Kathry Kelly, lighting design Mark Dyson, design Bruce McInven, QUT Gardens Theatre, Brisbane, Nov 22-25, 2009
Willem Dafoe, Alenka Kraigher and the company, Idiot Savant
photo courtesy Public Theater
Willem Dafoe, Alenka Kraigher and the company, Idiot Savant
OF ALL THE PRODUCTIONS TO VISIT AUSTRALIA LAST YEAR, TWO OF THE BEST WERE NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA’S NO DICE AND ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE’S GATZ, THE FORMER A SPRAWLING EXAMPLE OF VERBATIM THEATRE AT ITS MOST EXTREME AND POETICALLY INANE AND THE LATTER AN INVENTIVELY STAGED READING OF F SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY. ASIDE FROM LENGTH—BOTH WERE IN THEIR OWN WAY EPICS, ONE PLAYING AT FOUR HOURS, THE OTHER SEVEN—THE PRIMARY POINT OF SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE SHOWS WAS IN FACT THEIR POINT OF ORIGIN. BOTH NATURE THEATRE OF OKLAHOMA AND ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE HAIL FROM NEW YORK CITY AND TOGETHER REPRESENT A MERE FRACTION OF THAT CITY’S FORMALLY INNOVATIVE AND SELF-POSSESSED INDEPENDENT THEATRE COMPANIES.
For this writer, at least, both shows were revelatory and sparked an interest in New York’s Off- and Off-Off Broadway theatre scenes. It was not long before seeing Gatz that I booked my ticket to the United States and began furiously purchasing theatre tickets, too, to shows playing while I was there. While certain to temper my intake of independent and fringe work with a bit of White Elephant art (Patrice Chéreau’s production of Janacek’s From the House of the Dead at the Metropolitan Opera) and the occasional guilty pleasure (Ricky Gervais at Carnegie Hall), for the most part I was there to see what I could in the way of cutting-edge formalism, new writing and contemporary avant-gardism.
morgon thorson, heaven
Morgon Thorson’s Heaven fell somewhere between the first and third of these categories, a brilliant figuration at the level of the body, not only of religious ecstasy and grace, but also of the masochistic submission and abject self-loathing so often involved in the search for transcendence. Indeed, the performance often seemed suspended between the extremes of the sublime and the cilice, the performers running, jumping and whirling in circles, embraced for the moment by air and light, before debasing themselves at the feet of their unseen celestial dictator almost immediately afterwards. Throwing themselves into walls and each other, tangling and tying themselves in elastics and endless rolls of tape, there was a subtle but suggestive hint of corporal mortification in the work. Many reviewers insisted that the search for spiritual transcendence was a metaphor for the choreographer’s own search for physical perfection in dance; few followed this metaphor to its logical conclusion, however, which is that the price of this transcendence or performative perfection is in fact physical self-destruction. This idea is an unsettling one—that grace and self-harm contain and enable one another—but it reaped fine aesthetic rewards here.
temporary distortion, american kamikaze
Temporary Distortion’s American Kamikaze, too, contrived to collapse apparent opposites, the most notable of these being east and west, as well as theatre and cinema. A J-Horror [Japanese horror. Eds] story with an American neo-noir sensibility, the production perfectly married content and form. If Joseph Cornell, the master of the assemblage, had designed theatrical sets, he may have come up with something rather like this one: two coffin-sized boxes in which the performers stood motionless, speaking their lines in chilling monotone, flanked a tall, thin screen on which the pre-recorded inner lives of their characters played out, theatre and cinema leaning on and playing off one another. The production’s narrative of collapsing marriages, abusive lovers and leather-clad murderesses similarly amounted to little more than a pretence for narrative and generic deconstruction. As in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or one of Paul Auster’s intentionally airless fictions, everything in the production eventually turned around on itself, and had one questioning whose doppelganger was whose, and whether it was the stage or the screen component of the story that was meant to be its supposed reality. While some of the horror elements of the production were indeed quite frightening, it was as much this Möbius strip-like quality, the sense of having the formal and generic rugs pulled out from under you, that made the production most unsettling.
meg stuart, auf den tisch
!
Perhaps most striking about Meg Stuart’s Auf den tisch! was its overwhelming sense of nostalgia, at times only latent, at others self-conscious, and ultimately—if only retrospectively—restrictive and suffocating. The show’s conceit was a simple, even promising one: a group of actors, dancers, performance artists and random creative types were invited to create an ostensibly improvised work around a large, stage-like table, taking as their starting point whatever creative, political or personal concerns they wished to express or discuss at the time. Sitting around the table with the audience, and free to get up on it whenever the urge took them, the performers were given their heads. Using microphones placed around the table, they would start a conversation, which would turn sooner or later into a dance solo, which would turn into something else again. It very quickly became apparent that the production was meant to be a kind of happening, deliberately harking back to events the performers had once been party to or perhaps even performed in.
But this self-conscious happeningness was ultimately lacking in irony: earnest, strained attempts were made to get the audience to voluntarily tear up dollar bills (a not particularly original or effective political statement, and one that was apparently repeated the following evening, suggesting that things were not quite as improvised as had originally been made out), and race and class were discussed in prolix academic terms that seemed entirely out-of-date. At one point Slovenian artist Janez Janša, scaling a scaffold to one side of the table-stage, chided his fellow performers for not taking the performance to the extreme and pushing it to its limits. He cited a New York performance artist who decided, three decades ago, to question why one couldn’t get one’s kit off during a performance by getting his kit off during a performance. That’s all very good and well for you to say, another performer accused from the table, but you’re hardly testing such boundaries yourself. You’re just hanging off the scaffold there. At which point Janša got his kit off, hanging off the walls and flapping, so to speak, in the wind. But surely if people had been stripping off in the 70s, as Janša had claimed, then his own nudity now remained within accepted boundaries, little more than a nostalgic homage. Indeed, far from exploring new possibilities for performance, or asking new and probing questions about it, the performers remained unhelpfully stuck on old ones, unable or unwilling to move forward.
müller-wilson, quartett
There is something about Robert Wilson’s work that does little for this writer: the ultimate emptiness of its grandiosity, perhaps, or the decorative arbitrariness of most of its motifs of forms. Someone whose work this cannot be said of at all is the German playwright Heiner Müller, which is why the idea of a Wilson-directed Quartett seemed to me such a curious one, even if he’d already directed it numerous times in the past, and even if this incarnation starred the incomparable Isabelle Huppert. I rather entered the theatre hoping that Wilson would stay the hell out of Müller’s way.
And so it was surprising to find that while Wilson’s production neither obfuscated or misinterpreted Müller’s vicious, carnal adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, nor did it appear any less Wilsonesque in its aesthetic or execution. Unlike Americana Kamikaze, however, this happy accident had nothing to do with a perfect marriage of content and marriage didn’t even appear to be on the cards: it was as though form and content had never met. Indeed, for much of the production, stagecraft and text appeared to be running parallel to one another, bemused by, when not simply indifferent towards, what the other one was doing.
Only when Ariel Garcia Valdès, playing Valmont, and Huppert as the Marquise de Merteuil, were left alone on stage to thrash it out to the end, did these parallel lines converge to create a sense of a unified whole: the rest of the time you were basically able to regard one or the other entirely in and of itself. Regarding them thus, the text clearly came off the superior of the two. A dense, poetic, sweaty thing, obsessed with flesh and propensity to rot, its effect was a sense of mortality unlike any I think I have experienced in the theatre. Müller uses language to often intensely physical effect: not only did your skin crawl at his words—”I want to emancipate your blood from the prison of the veins, your entrails from the constraint of the body, your bones from the choke-hold of the flesh”—you actually felt it rotting on the bone, fetid, like a pound of flesh left out in the sun. The same could not be said of the production, which exhibited precisely the arbitrariness of form I had earlier suspected it might. With the exception of Wilson’s colour-coded lighting, which cast Valmont in demonic red and the Marquise in an icy blue, and which was at once both visually striking and more than a little obvious, Quartett’s visual and aural forms—large geometric shapes rotating slowly on the floor, electronically distorted voices—seemed at best dramatically unmotivated and at worst like out-of-date self-parody.
Huppert was at once a part of this aesthetic schema and apart from it. More than any other element of the show, including the other performances, the actress seemed able to embody Müller’s corpsical poetry while simultaneously accommodating Wilson’s more abstract vision. Delivering a taut, highly mannered performance, which nonetheless throbbed with real corporeal energy, Huppert fashioned herself as a site where writer and director might meet on common ground, while she took charge of the situation and—Merteuil-like to the last—sublimated both to the other and ultimately, therefore, to herself.
richard foreman, idiot savant
My first experience of Richard Foreman’s theatrical work had been plugged in the press as also being his last. Starring Willem Dafoe in the title role, Idiot Savant was to be the writer-director’s swan song—or, given the unexplained prevalence of another breed of web-footed fowl in the piece, his duck song—with avant-garde film to take up most of his time from now on. The piece was essentially an Ionesco-ish romp through some of Foreman’s trademark concerns, addressing such issues as language and its shortcomings and that old self-reflexive chestnut that is theatre that knows it’s theatre. But I found myself willing to excuse them in the face of such awesome performances.
Much like Huppert in Quartett, Dafoe was at once both a part of the play and external to it, lifted outside of it less due to his fame than by virtue of his valiant attempts to be more than Foreman’s paper doll. His co-stars, Elina Löwensohn and Alenka Kraigher, rose to the occasion, too: if the Pirandello-esque self-consciousness of their characters worked for the production instead of grating against it, it is likely because they seemed to be in conscious opposition to the director who had written them such flimsy and cipher-like roles. (Three Characters at War with an Author might have been an accurate subtitle.) The result worked a treat: even if one does not buy Foreman as a philosopher, you can’t deny he’s a creator of striking imagery and intensely theatrical business, and the struggles of the actors to find something human within his hermetically—and hermeneutically—sealed world rendered this production surprisingly engaging.
Kianne Muschett, Sterling K. Brown and the company, In the Red and Brown Water, part of The Brother/Sister Plays
photo Joan Marcus
Kianne Muschett, Sterling K. Brown and the company, In the Red and Brown Water, part of The Brother/Sister Plays
tarell alvin mccraney, the brother/sister plays
By far the best thing I saw in New York City was Tarell Alvin McCraney’s tri-generational epic, The Brother/Sister Plays, which any festival director worth their salt should secure for their next program. Directed by Tina Landau and Robert O’Hara and starring a versatile, highly committed cast, the three plays that make up McCraney’s trilogy—In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet—were at once both modest and expansive in scope, quotidian in their concerns and monumental in their realisation. Living on the Louisiana bayou, the characters have simple, even ordinary hopes and dreams—to have a baby, to help a brother, to learn about one’s past, to come of age—but in McCraney’s rendering take on the force and power of myth and the tone and timbre of memory or dream. Characters are named after Yoruban nature gods; they have prophetic dreams and visions.
The third play, Marcus, takes place as a hurricane bears down on the bayou, the narrative function of which is neglible, the symbolic function, like the storm at the end of the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, considerable. The characters also have a strange way of speaking: in addition to their dialogue (a rich, musical vernacular) they also speak their action lines: “Ogun Size sighs,” reminding the viewer of the pre-emptive voiceover in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. This potentially alienating, even anti-dramatic, device took far less getting used to than one might have suspected and was used to bring the act of storytelling, which plays a central role in these plays, to the fore. The Brother/Sister Plays gave form to the manner in which we turn our lives into narratives, mythologising and making sense of them even as we are living them. It was a dramatisation, in other words, of the manifold ways we use concepts such as God’s will and fate, destiny and myth, the butterfly effect and teleology, to structure our lives as meaningful narratives. As Joan Didion once put it, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. McCraney, who I suspect we will be hearing more from in future, goes a little further: for him, we not only tell ourselves stories in order to live, we turn ourselves into stories as well.
Heaven, choreography Morgan Thorson, Performance Space 122, Oct 25–30; Temporary Distortion, Americana Kamikaze, writer, director Kenneth Collins, Performance Space 122, Oct 24-Nov14; Damaged Goods, Auf den tisch! (At the table!), curator Meg Stuart, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Nov 6-7; Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Quartett, writer Heiner Müller, conception, direction Robert Wilson, BAM Harvey Theater, Nov 4-14; Public Theater in association with Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Idiot Savant, writer, director Richard Foreman, Public Theater, Nov 4-Dec 20; Public Theater in association with McCarter Theatre, The Brother/Sister Plays, writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, Part 1: In the Red and Brown Water, director Tina Landau, Part 2: The Brothers Size, and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet, director Robert O’Hara, Public Theater, New York, Nov 17-Dec 20, 2009
Sonya Parton, Keith McDougall, Mike Mullins, Gerard Hindle
photo Richard Bruch
Sonya Parton, Keith McDougall, Mike Mullins, Gerard Hindle
MIKE MULLINS AND I ARE STARING INTO THE PAST, AT OLD PHOTOGRAPHS ON A COMPUTER SCREEN. POINTING KEENLY, MULLINS SAYS, “THAT WAS TAKEN ON MAY DAY WITH GROTOWSKI IN POLAND. MAY 1, 1975. ONE OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE I’VE BEEN WORKING WITH HAS BEEN RESTORING ALL THIS. THERE’S EIGHT HOURS WORK GONE INTO THAT IMAGE. IT WAS SCRATCHED, IT HAD MOULD ON IT THAT HAD GONE HARD.”
I’m appreciative, “It looks so fresh. You could be just down the street.” We’re looking at Mike Mullins’ life in art in the 1970s and 80s: working in the outer limits of theatre, enacting solo performance art, establishing The Performance Space in Sydney and zealously promoting “new form” (which we now know as contemporary or hybrid performance or live art) to the Australia Council.
Mullins will launch this history at Performance Space as a performative lecture on February 16. He takes me through a chapter, a series of images which will be accompanied by recorded voice-overs quoting from letters and articles interpolated with his own live, onstage commentary. “‘Early Experiments’ is about the first original work I did in 1976, in Fitzroy in Melbourne when I came back from Poland. In the lecture I’ll recount how Grotowski referred me to Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line and said, ‘That’s you Mike.’ So I took that as a context for the work and developed a piece partly based on Woyzeck but also referencing Conrad’s book, which is about rites of passage. The work was very physically oriented but I started playing with symbols and metaphors. [He points to the image.] This was the performance area—imagine the OH&S on that these days! Here’s the young Margaret Cameron—she must have been 23—and those are slides on two screens.
“I’ll be talking about how the slides gave another dimension to the performance and indeed, one theatre critic wrote quite a good review and Reg Scott in Nation Review actually talks about how this use of photographic images in performance is something unknown at that time. We came to Sydney and performed at The Village Church where the Paddington Markets are now. But then I decided I was doing exactly what Grotowski advised me not to do. The last words he said to me were, ‘Find out what it is that you do. Don’t do Grotowski-style theatre.’ That’s what I was doing. It was a poor theatre, focused on the actor, very physical, quite violent in a way. It made me want to find out what it was that I did. People were doing theatre—with a capital T—based on scripts and there weren’t many of us actually out there exploring new forms of performance.”
out of the box
I ask Mullins what motivated him to write and perform his history. He explains that he recently embarked on a Master of Arts degree and “decided to open about 30 boxes that I’d been carrying around for about 30 years. I’m an obsessive sort of person and an obsessive documenter of my work and of the times. So I’d fill a box, seal it and those boxes weren’t opened until last year. What I discovered when I opened them was that I actually had an historically significant collection of letters, documents, people’s papers, newspaper articles and Australia Council publications, from 1973 to 1986. So I had this little window of time that told the story of the battles that were fought for new form practice. There’s one chapter, ‘The New Form Dialogue’, which is just letters between the Australia Council and me fighting, me accusing them of maintaining a colonial culture, of buying a culture rather than investing in a culture, and attacking the mainstream companies for what I considered to be colonial theatre, carbon-copy theatre. There’s a whole chapter on the production of Nicholas Nickleby as evidence of this with letters between Richard Wherrett and myself and Jim Waites because we’d attacked it for reproducing the achievements of English artists.
“Now, we’ve come a long way—and I’ve been practising this line for some time—when you look at Cate Blanchett sitting passively onstage taking a golden Shakespearean shower, you’d have to say we’ve come a long way since Nicholas Nickleby! And I passionately disagree with [the new artistic director of Opera Australia] Lyndon Teraccini when he says we haven’t come very far since The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Well, I’m sorry, but that kind of denies everything that’s ever happened at Performance Space for a start.”
Mullins’ history also includes a chapter on the “ceiling funding strategy” debate of 1985, which he thought extraordinary, not least because it was a serious national debate, but because it lacked the language with which to discuss the issues. The attempt by the Australia Council for the Arts to cap the funding of state theatre companies was met with voluble protest from those organisations as they demanded “certainty”—something the major performing arts organisations have had ever since (if under review next year). Mullins argues that the ‘ceiling funding’ debate really started much earlier, if implcitly, with the collapse of The Old Tote in Sydney and the establishment of the performing arts complexes. “Suddenly the game changed. The state governments created these cultural palaces—Adelaide Festival Centre, 1973, Sydney Opera House, 1973, The Arts Centre in Melbourne, 1984, QPAC, 1985. So not only did a whole lot of arts money go into these complexes but suddenly the budgets of the state companies had to expand. So all this money was being absorbed. And to be fair on the Australia Council and the Theatre Board, the decision they took with the concept of a ceiling funding was the only way they could respond to all the work emerging outside of the mainstream that warranted support. All hell broke loose. I’ve got a wonderful letter from CAPPA [Confederation of Australian Professional Performing Arts] sent to me at The Performance Space saying, ‘Of course we support you but not at the cost of funding to the major companies.’ And my response was, ‘Well what am I supposed to do—wait two decades?’”
thesis as performance
Initially Mullins opened his archive boxes when searching for historical references for the thesis he was writing for a Master of Fine Arts at CoFA. Eventually the research project evolved into a performative lecture, a work of art in itself rather than a conventional thesis or the exhibition that had been considered at one stage. Some of the material had aged badly: “One of my team, Sonya Parton, has just been doing the archive restoration—documents on fading fax paper—and putting it on slides. In one of the boxes I found the fifth carbon copy of the contract between Grotowski and the Arts Council of NSW signed by Grotowski. Gerard Hindle is doing the engineering for the multimedia presentation and the art direction and Keith McDougall is doing the sound design. Plus I’m working with a couple of graduates from the VCA who are doing the voice-overs. So the whole thing is like Media Watch meets Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. It’s an investigation, an exposé of a period about fighting for new form, about fighting for the right to pursue new ideas. What really underlies all of this is the question: why is it so fucking hard to pursue new ideas in this country? And it’s not just in the arts. It’s science, industry…What I will show, along with the clinical evidence, is how hard it was for me 1973-86 to pursue new ideas in this country. I ask the question, has much changed?”
Mullins’ archaeological dig into his archive was at moments intensely personal: “There were dead people in those boxes.” But also some revelations. When in 1986 he was asked to do some research for Andrea Hull at the Australia Council about the plight of the individual artist he agreed: “as long as I could in the first instance talk about my own struggles. So I had access to all my files and I discovered that when I was arrested for performing The Lone Anzac on Australia Day 1981, unbeknownst to me all hell broke loose. I found an incredible file of letters from the RSL, from the British-Australia Friendship Society, letters to Malcolm Fraser…It was much bigger than I knew and the Australia Council was under severe attack. It was even raised in the Senate. It was like the Bill Henson case. There’s a wonderful letter from Richard Perram [then a Project Officer at the Australia Council] to Mrs X from Kew in Victoria who thought the whole thing disgusting. He’s writing back to her quoting Gertrude Stein. I ask what’s happened with arts bureaucrats these days? All you get is a pro forma letter.”
For his historical performative lecture, Mullins has drawn on only 20% of the boxed material: “There’s 80% that’s got to be restored. There was a reel of 16mm film that I’d never seen but was shot on the day that The Lone Anzac was arrested. I’ve had that digitised. It was shot on Eastman Colour and colour’s faded, but it’s in there.”
The Performance Space program, 1984
courtesy the Mike Mullins Archive
The Performance Space program, 1984
the performance space years
After establishing The Performance Space in 1980, Mullins says that “the sad story is that my own work largely died because I took on the politics. In 1986 I walked away from the whole thing, exhausted. It took five years of my life and a dole cheque to start up The Performance Space. And many people contributed to that process. I came to an arrangement with the Greek family who owned the building that I’d live there rent free and that I would set it up as a corporate funded body. I have all the letters of rejection from funding bodies. There’s a wonderful one: I have endorsement from one of the seminal figures of 20th-century theatre and I go to the Theatre Board and say I’ve got this introduction from Jerzy Grotowski and I’d like to go to New York and Europe because it will open doors for me. ‘This has no relevance to our agenda,’ says the Australia Council letter.”
I wonder how Mullins kept The Performance Space going until it got funding. “Oh, it was hard. As I explain in the lecture, The Performance Space came about, like most major decisions in your life, from not just one thing. I was working in the Pilgrim Church’s Pilgrim Theatre [over the road from the RealTime office in Pitt Street, Sydney] and because in Shadow Line 2 I had a huge cross that during Act 2 slowly fell, the church kicked me out. Fair enough, I suppose. So I was looking for space but every time you opened a new space it was time and money and energy. Then, after the Luna Park fire in 1979 the Public Halls Act became quite draconian. You couldn’t have a public performance in any church hall anywhere unless it had fire equipment. So the next place had to be the place.
A former trades union hall in Cleveland Street, Redfern, was licenced for public entertainment and “had all the exit signs and fire hoses and all that sort of stuff.” The third reason for establishing a home, Mullins says emphatically, “was that we artists were all working in isolation. I worked out that to do the work, you had to change the thinking of the funding bodies, by having innovative work all happening in one place. But that was the beginning of the end for me as a practitioner because all the energy was going into fighting the battles for change. Hence the title of my presentation, ‘The politics of change.’”
I asked Mullins who were the artists he was supporting and nurturing at The Performance Space. In his boxes he kept all the fliers, listing Dance Exchange, Grotesqui’s Monkey Choir, Even Orchestra, Nanette Hassell’s dance company, Carol Woodward’s Fools Gallery, Entr’Acte, One Extra and many others. “There were the ACT 1 and ACT 2 festivals which is where I did my Agent Orange piece. But The Performance Space also represented a pooling of resources in terms of audiences. It gave them a focus on this work. It gave the funding bodies a focus on this work. My God, it was in a fucking building. They could understand it now! An address. Oh, so that’s new form? 199 Cleveland Street, Redfern. Right! Got it! [LAUGHS].”
Mullins created a range of performances from 1980 to 1986: “Nuke Love (1980); Long Long Time Ago (1983); The Invasion of No-one (Orange Festival, 1985); Illusion (1986); and The Human Exhibit (1984), when I spent three weeks in a cage at Taronga Park Zoo.” His last performance work was Illusion, created with Peter Carey and others (with songs by Carey and Martin Arminger) at the 1986 Adelaide Festival, “for which,” he says, “I got a flogging. That’s a whole other story but an important part of the history. The concept for Illusion was conceived at the Pilgrim Theatre. It was the third part of a trilogy of works I wanted to do: the first two were Shadow Line 2, which was realised, and New Blood which unofficially opened The Performance Space in 1980 when I moved in there. The next work was going to be Illusion but it took me six years to get adequate funding to do it. It was a compromised work in many ways by the end. However, the ABC filmed it and I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve included a section from it in my presentation. It was about Australians pretending to be Americans and getting burned in the process. That’s not a bad statement and how relevant was that during the Howard era?”
investment & a national cultural policy
Reflecting on the rationale for arts funding, Mullins believes a long-term notion of investment in the arts is a good one, “because there’s no quick return. We’re a very young country, a post-colonial settlement, still forming who we are. So investment is very important. I’m a great believer in having a cultural policy because of that. I think we’re very vulnerable to outside influences and we need to protect our identity. That’s got to be the basis of why we have a cultural policy. Who are we? We’re actually quite strange: we’re a massive piece of land with relatively few people on it; we’re isolated by great oceans; we’re in the middle of Asia; we have some of the oldest cultures on the planet, and this idea of multiculturalism—what does that all mean?”
Mullins then looks back longingly to a period of substantial investment: “My chapter on 1973 is full of fantastic things. Whitlam doubles the funding for the arts that year; the first Biennale happens; Blue Poles is purchased; Sydney Opera House opens; Patrick White wins the Nobel Prize; a merchant bank is formed in Sydney called Nugan Hand; Rupert Murdoch registers News Limited in America; the Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) is established and Al Grasby announces ‘a multicultural society for the future.’ You know, in 1973 women were permitted to sit for the Public Service entrance examination in Victoria for the first time. It’s inconceivable isn’t it? Gilbert and George perform at the Art Gallery of NSW for the first time. And what was I doing that year? I was a trainee director at The Old Tote working on the three opening shows at the Sydney Opera House, pretty well learning everything I didn’t want to do in theatre.”
performing with a purpose
What will Mullins do with his performative lecture after its Performance Space launch? “I’d like to tour it around the country this year. I want it to start a dialogue. All this contemporary practice nowadays has a history. Australia is very good at denying its past. Spaces like Performance Space and Arts House in Melbourne didn’t come out of nowhere. My intention was always to promote the need for a cultural policy. We got real close to it with Creative Nation and I know Andrea Hull was looking at it back in the mid-80s at the Australia Council. I talk about 2110 when there’s been a cultural policy in Australia for 100 years and some kid from a rock near Wagga Wagga comes up with this grant application and it’s for a lot of money because he wants to do the work from the outstation on Mars. It’s a work referencing the red soil of Mars with the red soil of Australia. All doors open, he gets the grant.”
But Mullins isn’t only thinking of emerging artists: “I used to jokingly say about The Performance Space, we’re creating a home for the middle-aged avant-garde. And I was quite serious. Experimental or avant-garde theatre was something you did when you were young. It was never conceived to be a life’s work. And of course it is a life’s work. It’s not something you get over when you grow up. And I see great evidence of that in the work of an artist like Margaret Cameron.”
Mullins would love to trigger change, change that builds acceptance of change, of new ideas, into our culture. He’d love it to be a certainty: “My son has recently graduated as a mathematician and we’re trying to work out a formula, a mathematical equation that explains why art is a critical part of culture. We haven’t cracked it yet.”
The Politics of Change, Mike Mullins and collaborators Gerard Hindle, Keith McDougall, Mike Mullins, Sonya Parton, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, February 16, 6.30pm
Steffen Hesping, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, Tantrum Theatre
photo Lauren O’Brien
Steffen Hesping, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, Tantrum Theatre
THE SCRIPT FOR PETER HANDKE’S WORDLESS PLAY THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER INDICATES: “THE STAGE IS AN OPEN SQUARE IN BRIGHT LIGHT.” IN HER REVIEW OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE 2008 PRODUCTION IN LONDON, GUARDIAN BLOGGER LYN GARDNER COMMENTED THAT “RATHER THAN BEING PUT ON AT THE NATIONAL, MAYBE [IT] SHOULD BE STAGED OUTDOORS.” IT SEEMS OBVIOUS ENOUGH, ESPECIALLY IN THE AGE OF THE FLASHMOB, BUT APPARENTLY NO ONE HAS DONE SO. THAT IS, UNTIL NOW, ON THIS NOVEMBER NIGHT IN NEWCASTLE, WHERE TANTRUM THEATRE IS PERFORMING AT WHEELER PLACE IN THE CITY’S CIVIC PRECINCT.
Within Wheeler Place, which is too large and windswept for a performance, designer Kat Chan has fenced off a smaller rectangle. On one side there is a concrete barricade and a building shaped like a beehive. Perpendicular to this, a set of wide and shallow concrete steps leads up to the cavernous entrance of a brick warehouse. The third and fourth sides are seating banks for the audience. Surrounding us are the sights and sounds of Saturday night in Newcastle: we can catch glimpses of King Street and Civic Park and we can hear cars throbbing up and down Hunter Street. High above are the palm trees and the Newcastle City Hall clock tower, which strikes eight and signals the beginning of this absorbing performance.
Suddenly a man sprints diagonally across the space. Two girls run in the other direction. Then another man comes down the steps, gulping up the night air. Children skip across the stage and an old lady drags her shopping cart on another adventure. Two firemen hurtle through and some latecomers arrive, though they could easily be part of the performance, a worker almost knocks over a woman with his ladder and a skater breezes by. There is a man lugging rugs, a stockman cracking his whip and an office worker on a coffee run. Groups of schoolchildren wander by, always with a straggler at the back. Every once in a while the action is interrupted by the town fool who likes to mimic, follow and harass, or the street cleaner, who is constantly sweeping.
In amongst all of this activity, there are some lovely lulls when even the wind contrives to participate, swirling dust and debris across the stage. There is also a brief interlude when the performance is suspended for rain. Nevertheless the play soon regains its momentum as a glamorous woman (a minor celebrity perhaps) walks with a false self-consciousness across the square, acutely aware of every stare. The clock strikes nine, Moses comes down from the mount (or at least the warehouse) and a body bag is picked up and stretchered off. Sometimes it is as if European theatre history is playing itself out over two hours instead of several thousand years: there are gods, clowns, detectives, characters from the opera and the Bible, a lost circus and at one point the whole company might well be a Greek chorus. Other times, it is as if humanity itself is washing across the stage: characters’ paths cross, miss and run parallel to each other and there are arguments, reunions, pregnancies and deaths.
This is a well-paced and detailed production of Handke’s evocative scripted stage directions. (Gitta Honneger’s translation includes lines such as “The empty square in bright light, like a tiny island surrounded by an episodic torrent of oceanic sounds. The whistle of a marmot, the scream of an eagle. For an eerily brief moment, the shrilling of a cicada” [New Haven: Yale UP, 1996]). Director Brendan O’Connell has harnessed the energy of 54 performers, aged between five and 26, who play 450 characters between them. It is exhilarating to see so many bodies on stage and for the most part they are disciplined and generous, rarely loitering too long and almost always ready to share the space. Sound designer Roxzan Bowes allows Christopher Harley’s original compositions to coexist sympathetically with the city’s own soundscape and at various points we hear strains of a song from the pub next door (“Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey!”). Similarly, John Zeder’s lighting design does not try to compete with the existing street lighting but rather to amplify it. The overall effect is of theatre deconstructed while simultaneously a sort of meta-theatre is reconstructed. Like the spectators of Handke’s most famous play, Offending the Audience, we are constantly reminded that this is a performance. Yet, like the angels in Wings of Desire—Handke’s film collaboration with Wim Wenders—we are granted an overview of life not normally available to us and certainly not available to those we are watching. We sit, taking it all in and stitching together our own version of the town square. In the final moments of the play, everyone runs across the stage before coming to a standstill and looking out at the audience. We’ve not known each other for nearly two hours now.
On the night I attend there are also a couple of speeches, marking the end of the year for the Tantrum Theatre team. While it has been operating since 1976 as 2 Til 5 Youth Theatre, the company was reborn and rebranded in 2003, gaining additional momentum in April 2008 when it appointed O’Connell—a former recipient of an Australia Council Flying Start grant—as Artistic Director. Like Powerhouse Youth Theatre or PACT in Sydney, or Platform Youth Theatre in Melbourne, the company aims not only to develop young artists’ skills but also to enable local emerging artists to create their own work in collaboration with professionals. Though Tantrum Theatre is not yet as famous as other Novocastrian organisations such as Octapod or events such as This Is Not Art, or even strategies such as LiveSites and Renew Newcastle, the company is becoming an increasingly important part of the city’s evolving arts ecology. In the process they are building a reputation for ambitious, innovative and inclusive performance. If you have the chance, I recommend getting to know them better.
Tantrum Theatre, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, writer Peter Handke, translator Gitta Honegger, director Brendan O’Connell, performers Tantrum Theatre junior and senior ensembles, designer Kat Chan, lighting designer John Zeder, composer Christopher Harley, sound designer Roxzan Bowes, Wheeler Place, Civic Precinct Newcastle, Nov 26-28, 2009. www.tantrumtheatre.org
IT’S TEMPTING TO STATE THAT 2009’S CLOSE WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR THE PROVOCATIVE, NATION-SPANNING DEBATES SURROUNDING GENDER DISPARITY IN THEATRE WHICH CROSSED MAINSTREAM PRESS, THE BLOGOSPHERE, SMALL PRESS AND FOYER CONVERSATION. THIS MIGHT BE WRONG FOR TWO REASONS: FIRSTLY, THESE DEBATES ARE FAR FROM OVER, AND TO CONSIGN THEM TO HISTORY WOULD BE GROSSLY NEGLIGENT. BUT SECONDLY, SADLY, THERE’S AN EQUAL CHANCE THAT THESE DEBATES WILL SOON BE HARDLY REMEMBERED AT ALL.
That said, I’m not going to try to address the entirety of this complex debate here. I do want to tackle one tiny corner of the canvas, however: the notion of the (male) wunderkind. It was a topic raised by a number of voices last year—the sense that those who push our theatre in the most exciting new ways are almost invariably youthful white males. Of course this is a fallacy. But the wunderkind phenomenon is no less real for being a myth, and an enduring one at that. The Koskys, Kantors and Andrews were never the only artists working at the vanguard, but they have reached a national status that affirms this mythmaking exercise and a younger crop are being hailed as their successors.
Four very different productions which appeared in late 2009 provide ways of thinking through this dynamic. Simon Stone is one of the touted heirs to the wunderkind title, but his B.C. saw the crown resting uneasily; Daniel Schlusser’s Life is a Dream made one wonder why he has never been positioned in the same category; James Saunders’ Harry Harlow emphasised collaboration rather than individual artistry; and Bagryana Popov’s Progress and Melancholy was a reminder that innovation has nothing to do with gender.
Schlusser and Popov have both been developing distinct aesthetics for some time now, but haven’t received the same kind of attention afforded someone like Stone. Life is a Dream was a rich, difficult production, infuriating to some and unforgettable to most. The complexity of its aesthetic sensibility made it, for me, one of the most rewarding experiences of the year. Schlusser stripped back Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 15th-century play to a raw core of power relationships and plot mechanics, then had a cast of bedraggled wastrels act out this excoriated drama as an infernal punishment. The conditions within which these performers found themselves have been compared to Big Brother (both Orwell’s nightmare and the reality TV show) but the situation seemed to me more thickly existential rather than simply allusive. The actors forced one another into cruel games of torture, humiliation and betrayal; that the play they eventually began to perform was just another monstrous game is vital. De la Barca’s drama is very much concerned with freedom and predestination; Schlusser’s direction gives this greater resonance by creating a performance space that highlights the absurd limitations ‘theatre’ imposes on its participants.
Todd MacDonald, Christophe Le Tellier, Progress & Melancholy
photo Paul Dunn
Todd MacDonald, Christophe Le Tellier, Progress & Melancholy
Popov’s Progress and Melancholy was a more playful attack on similar ideas—inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, it took a freewheeling, libertarian approach to adaptation. Standup comedy, dance and live music appeared unexpectedly; various narrative threads were given heightened prominence while others were almost done away with entirely. Popov herself gave audible direction from one side of the audience bank, and this sense of liveness underscored much of the production, where individual performances frequently took on aspects of improvisation and emotional immediacy.
The effect was quite other to that produced by Life is a Dream. Schlusser’s production created violent chaos within a tightly defined space of rules; Popov’s seemed more interested in challenging rules and the result was a strangely orderly experience. Its unruliness seemed merely sporting, making for an undeniably enjoyable work that never quite went beyond its own ephemerality.
James Saunders, The Harry Harlow Project
photo John Sones
James Saunders, The Harry Harlow Project
James Saunders’ The Harry Harlow Project was another fascinating experiment which quite literally focused on the laboratory as a metaphor for freedom and control. Taking as its subject the notorious behavioural scientist whose pioneering experiments on primates deeply influenced 20th-century psychology on infant-rearing, attachment and mental illness, it shied away from biography in favour of a more impressionistic portrait of a troubling figure. Trapped within a cold, clinical room and beset by physical tics and psychological compulsions, the confines of the stage here came to represent the solipsistic inwardness of the character unable to escape the limits of his own existence.
But while Harlow’s lot is to be eternally caged with his own demons, Saunders has ensured that the production itself is not the result of a single vision—rather, much of the work’s shape is defined by his collaborators. Martyn Coutts and Kelly Ryall provided live video and aural components to Saunders’ solo performance, where projected monkey footage and fascinating sequences wherein Harlow engages with ghostly doubles of himself or his shadow offered some of the most striking moments. Brian Lipson’s direction, on the other hand, felt less disciplined and at times introduced a less integrated, more self-conscious tone to the work.
Dylan Young, Nicole Da Silva, Ashley
Zukkerman, B.C., The Hayloft Project
photo Jeff Busby
Dylan Young, Nicole Da Silva, Ashley
Zukkerman, B.C., The Hayloft Project
Simon Stone has been taking The Hayloft Project in encouraging new directions in the past 12 months. Initially a company indelibly stamped with his own creative mark, 3xSisters saw the director teaming up with two others to take on another Chekhov classic, while the wonderful Yuri Wells was essentially developed Stone-free (RT94, p8). This expansion of Hayloft’s boundaries has substantially enhanced the range of work we can expect from the company.
B.C. saw Stone back at the directorial helm, but here he took on an original script rather than setting his sights on reinventing an established work. Rita Kalnejais’ writing is perhaps the least confident ingredient in the mix, though an outstanding cast mostly made up for some structural failings in the narrative.
The work performs a contemporary retelling of the Christian story of Mary and Joseph: the pair are disaffected teens in a suburban Australia, the archangel Gabriel is Mary’s intellectually disabled brother. These religious notes are only one of B.C.s layers, however, and far more compelling are the less forced details of quotidian wonder that permeate the mythic overtones. Joseph’s gradual shift from clichéd tracksuit-wearing thug to self-questioning lover is deftly handled, while Mary’s parents are provided thick and engaging narrative arcs of their own.
What can these varied productions tell us about that old wunderkind thing, then? For one, they suggest that the kinds of dense, textured theatre that shifts away from textual primacy maintains a meta-theatrical self-awareness and incorporates extra-theatrical modes of performance are being created by all sorts of people all over the place. Trying to find applicable terms for this kind of theatre (the post-dramatic, the spectacular, the postmodern, the cross-platform) seems a bit unnecessary, since these diverse works aren’t simply a trend or movement. They’re an indication of where performance is at right now in this country.
Secondly, they hint at the way the great authorial director is always less responsible for a production’s successes (and failings) than the myth would lead us to believe. The finest directors in Australia are the ones with the best collaborators. However dictatorial and demanding a director’s public face may be, they’re still at the mercy of designers, writers, performers and countless others who will shape the thing that wears their name.
So why are particular men elevated to a particular status as directors? This isn’t to fault people such as Stone, or Benedict Andrews or Simon Strong or Matthew Lutton, who are all very talented and knowledgeable theatremakers. But they’re not alone, and they’re not Olympian in their abilities. Perhaps it’s just that among the many, many first-rate artists in the country, we need a few names to stick out as ones to watch; a combination of media laziness and audience acceptance. Is that really good enough?
Life is a Dream, director Daniel Schlusser, performers George Banders, Brendan Barnett, Johnny Carr, Andrew Dunn, Julia Grace, Sophie Mathisen, Vanessa Moltzen, Sarah Ogden, Josh Price, design Marg Horwell, lighting Kimberly Kwa, composer Darrin Verhagen, The Store Room, Nov 20-29; Progress and Melancholy, director Bagryana Popov, performers Todd Macdonald, Natasha Herbert, Majid Shokor, Christophe Le Tellier, Paea Leach, Sara Black, design Adrienne Chisolm, lighting Richard Vabre, composer Elissa Goodrich, Fortyfivedownstairs, Nov 19-29; The Harry Harlow Project, writer, performer James Saunders, director Brian Lipson, composer Kelly Ryall, video artist Martyn Coutts, dramaturg Kate Sulan; Full Tilt, Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre, Nov 26-Dec 5; The Hayloft Project, B.C., writer Rita Kalnejais, director Simon Stone, performers Tyler Coppin, Nicole Da Silva, Margaret Mills, Yesse Spence, Dylan Young, Ashley Zukerman, design Claude Marcos, lighting Kimberly Kwa, sound design Stefan Gregory; Full Tilt, Black Box, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Nov 30 – Dec 9, 2009
A TYPICAL DAY IN SAO PAULO, BRAZIL’S LARGEST CITY. THE CITY IS IN CONSTANT MOTION; CARS CRAWLING THROUGH GRID-LOCKED CITY STREETS, TRAINS WHIRRING THOUGH UNDERGROUND TUNNELS AND HELICOPTERS BUZZING OVERHEAD. THE RAIN IS POURING DOWN.
It is the Copenhagen week of negotiations on global warming and I am stuck for three hours in traffic because the Tiete River is flooding the motorways that enter the city. My mission in Sao Paulo is to find out about the new generation of contemporary theatre and performance-makers to see what kind of work is emerging from this mega-metropolis.
It’s a long time since I left this town. The contemporary theatre scene is growing and evolving. Sao Paulo has a long history of theatre/performance, strongly rooted in European theatre traditions. The Jesuit priestsa, from the colonial period, created performances for indigenous Brazilian Indians with the aim of converting them to Christianity. These days the contemporary art of Sao Paulo is also influenced by indigenous and African heritage (as a result of many years of slavery), popular US trends and the more recent waves of Japanese, Middle Eastern and European migration to the city. The city’s art scene is a jungle overgrown with dense layers of eclectic, proliferating cultures.
I have arranged a meeting with Silvana Garcia, a researcher, author and expert on the contemporary theatre scene in Sao Paulo. We have planned to meet at a cafe on the Avenida Paulista, one of the most important financial strips in Latin America. International banking edifices tower above the wide pavements of the avenue. Due to certain tax arrangements in Brazil, many of the banks have established their own cultural centres that house theatres and galleries. Itau Cultural, for example, is a gallery space established by a bank (Itau) that also hosts an online archive that documents significant contemporary performance, and curates events such as the series Videobrasil and Ocupacoes. I wander through Itau Cultural’s large installation that explores the life and work of Ze Celso, an important theatre director/writer who continues to exert a strong influence on the new generations of artists in Brazil.
Av Paulista, Sao Paulo
photo Carlos Gomes
Av Paulista, Sao Paulo
ze celso
Silvana Garcia is a lecturer and writer from EAD (Escola de Arte Dramatica), a drama school linked with the University of Sao Paulo (USP). She talked firstly about the importance of Ze Celso, the iconic, militant, anarchic director who has worked continuously in theatre since the 1960s. His Teatro Oficina is a building with a 30-metre-long, narrow-corridor performance space, above which are suspended three levels of scaffolding. From these vantage points audiences witness his anthropophagic, durational performances. Ze Celso’s work dives into social taboos, challenging the puritanical aspects of Brazilian society. For example, what appears to be a religious procession (common throughout predominantly Catholic Brazil) is subverted, and transformed into an assemblage of Dionysian profanities. Sex acts and nudity are emblematic of his shows. His performances launch from the theatre into the streets, stopping the traffic. Prostitutes, homosexuals and black Brazilians (still fringe-dwellers of Brazilian society) are Ze’s heroes. Ze Celso invites his audience not only to observe, but also to participate in his celebrations of the social taboos that can oppress and shame.
Anthropophagy is a fundamental concept in Ze Celso’s work. He borrows this term from the Brazilian modernist writer Oswald de Andrade. It refers to the act of humans devouring their own flesh, as witnessed by the Portuguese colonisers amongst Brazilian Indian tribes. In cultural terms anthropophagy refers to the digestion of the Other in the phenomenology of cultural encounters. If de Andrade sees anthropophagy as the ultimate taboo, the work of Ze Celso employs this “taboo of taboos” as a departure point for his work, transforming taboo into totem. Itau Cultural’s exhibition explores some of the artistic voyages and manifestos of Ze Celso’s extensive career. The online exhibition captures aspects of Ze Celso’s vision and philosophy. Its English version will allow you a glimpse into the life and times of the artist (www.itaucultural.org.br/ocupacao/).
sesc
Silvana then spoke about how this city hosts the most diverse range of artists. From the mid-1990s, changes in the Brazilian government’s cultural policies allowed for greater financial incentives to support cultural activities. Existing organisations such as SESC (Serviço Social do Comercio) also support cultural activities and development. SESC, for example, is a non-government cultural network established in 1946 by the industrial sector of the state of Sao Paulo and other states in Brazil that is supported through tax incentives and employee contributions. SESC is committed to providing services in the areas of health, leisure, culture and social support to populations throughout Brazil. SESC has established a number of cultural sites in Sao Paulo (housing theatres, music venues, libraries, artist studios, galleries etc) that run an extensive program of events every day of the week. These are open to the public and provide discounted tickets for employees of the industrial sector (www.sescsp.org.br).
Danilo Miranda has been the head of the performance department for SESC for the past decade and strongly supports young, emerging groups researching and creating works that interface with the wider Brazilian cultural landscape. SESC also has sufficient resources to invite and host international companies and works. It will buy new work from concept stage and support its development, or will invite an existing work to be presented for an extended seasons, touring through its network of cultural centres in Sao Paulo and throughout Brazil. For many companies SESC provides critical support in both creating and touring work, opening new possibilities for artistic development that would not otherwise be available to them.
Silvana gave me a few names and contacts for companies and venues that would assist my investigations, including Teatro da Vertigem, Grupo XIX, Grupo dos Fofos, writer Mario Bortolotto, Galeria Vermelho, Satyros, Newton Moreno and numerous others. As my time was limited in Sao Paulo, I’ve selected just a few of these companies to introduce to you.
Marilia De Santis, Sergio Pardal, BR3, Vertigen
photo Nelson Kao
Marilia De Santis, Sergio Pardal, BR3, Vertigen
teatro da vertigem: making the city their stage
Teatro da Vertigem is a collective of performer-creators established in 1991 and led by Antonio de Araujo, who also lectures at ECA (Escola de Comunicacoes e Arts) at the University of Sao Paulo. Initially self-funded, the company now receives some financial support from Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company.
I met with members of company in the eighth floor of SESC Paulista, where they were bumping in a new work, Kastelo. From what I can see of the new show, the audience will sit on office chairs around the inner space of the building and the performance will take place on a platform rigged outside the glass walls of the building. What a logistical nightmare! I met with performer Roberto Audio and director Eliana Monteiro to talk about the group. Their work involves an extensive process of research and is mostly presented in non-conventional theatre sites around Sao Paulo. Vertigem’s work exists on the frontier between performance and contemporary theatre.
The group’s most important work, known as the Biblical Trilogy, is a criticism of the social and political degradation of the country. Paraiso Perdido (1992) was performed in a Catholic church, O Livro de Jo (1995) in a hospital and Apocalipse 1.11 (1999) in gaols (referencing Carandiru prison where 111 prisoners were killed by police in a prison rebellion). This trilogy has been presented at national and international festivals.
Talking about logistical nightmares, Vertigem’s latest work BR-3 was performed along five kilometres of the Tiete River that runs through the middle of Sao Paulo. The audience was taken by bus from the Monument to Latin America Complex (a concrete modernist design) to a dark bend in the Tiete River. From this we are invited to board a boat, a kind of floating evangelical church with a neon sign proclaiming, “Jesus is whiter than snow.” On board, the audience is promised salvation by the recorded voice of a dead evangelical minister, the proceedings being conducted by a devoted disciple. The sounds of recorded gunshots mix with the buzz of traffic on the highway beside the river. The dark river and the glittering cityscape beyond its banks are the backdrop for the show. The Tiete is one the most polluted rivers in Brazil—the smell is overwhelming, the pollution a sad reality, the result of rapid, unplanned urbanisation. But there is no way out, and the church boat is our only salvation!
The performance is located in three cities of Brazil, in three different periods: Brasileia, a lost city in Acre near the Amazon River; Brasilandia, a poor suburban area of Sao Paulo where drug trafficking is rife; and Brasilia, the planned, ordered and monumental Brazilian capital. Along the margins of the river, for example, we witness a woman searching for her lost husband, whose cheap labour has been used to build monumental cities like Brasilia.
Vertigem’s BR-3 is created using performers on the principal boat, projections onto passing bridges, small fast boats that circle the main craft and performers with microphones working on the margins of the river. It is a quite confronting, apocalyptic experience witnessing such human desperation. One of the great things about Vertigem is their ability to merge the world of fiction with the real world, leaving us wondering which is which.
After nearly 20 years, Teatro da Vertigem now have their own rehearsal space where they continue to research new works and conduct workshops for each new production. Vertigem also work with local communities, inviting members to participate in their performances. (www.teatrodavertigem.com.br)
artist occupation: transforming the city
Praça Roosevelt (Roosevelt Square), in the centre of Sao Paulo, was in former times a glamorous part of the city, but is now a dark and sometimes dangerous part of town. It was also once the home and workplace of socially neglected individuals, prostitutes, transvestites and rent boys but is now undergoing a process of reformation.
Through necessity (cheap real estate), independent theatre companies have recently moved into Praca Roosevelt, establishing small, versatile theatre spaces that allow artists great freedom in terms of experimentation and artistic risk-taking. The larger established theatres are too expensive for smaller and emerging theatre companies.
Satyros is one such company, and was among the first to establish a theatre space in Praca Roosevelt approximately 10 years ago. Led by dramaturg Rodolfo Garcia and actor Ivam Cabral, the group has become one of the most controversial in Brazil. In many instances their work, like that of Ze Celso, reflects the universe of sexual and social minorities, and the marginal world of the site in which they are based. Their works have included Sappho de Lesbos (by Ivam Cabral and Patricia Aguille), Filosofia de Ancova (devised from the works of the Marquis de Sade) and Transex, performed by Phedra D Cordoba (a transsexual who formerly lived at Praca Roosevelt and who has become an important artistic collaborator with the company).
In 2005 the company presented German writer Dea Loher’s A Vida na Praca Roosevelt (based on the inhabitants of the square). It was awarded the prestigious Beckett prize in Germany. The company has shown its work in major festivals in Brazil, and throughout Latin America and Europe.
Now the Square has eight new venues (theatre spaces complete with bars and cafes) that present many diverse styles of performances, becoming a vibrant part of the cultural landscape of Sao Paulo.
There is currently a redevelopment project underway, supported by the government of Sao Paulo, to renovate the square and to build a school of performing arts on the site for about 1000 students a year.
Historically Praca Roosevelt has received very little support from the politicians, other artists and the media (some journalists refused to attend the performances). A decade later, the artists who ‘occupied’ Praca Roosevelt and who believed in their artistic utopia feel that they have conquered both the Praca itself, and won the respect of their peers, politicians, the media and society at large. The persistence, creativity and hard work of these artists have inspired other small companies to initiate their own ‘occupations’ in other parts of the city.
Cracolandia (so called for the prevalence of the drug crack) in the old historical part of Sao Paulo is also undergoing an arts-led transformation. Work will shortly commence on the construction of a centre that will become the home of the contemporary dance scene in Sao Paulo. Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, known for their bird nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing and the Tate Modern in London, will design the building.
Christiana Moraes, Andre Nunes, Globo da Morte, VERBO
courtesy Galeria Vermelho
Christiana Moraes, Andre Nunes, Globo da Morte, VERBO
verbo international performance festival
At the end of Avenida Paulista is Galeria Vermelho, a commercial gallery that represents a number of important Brazilian contemporary artists. The building itself has grown into a series of rooms, corridors and courtyards that, for a week in June, hosts a number of live performance works from local and international artists in a festival called VERBO, is one of the most important performance events in Brazil’s arts calendar.
VERBO is now in its sixth year. One of its curators, Marcos Gallon, explained that it sprang from the need of young and emerging artists to have a space where their work and concepts could meet the public. The director of the gallery, Eduardo Brandao, together with a number of curators selects the works. Marcos described how, during the early days of VERBO, they tried to accommodate the demands of all the performing artists wanting to be part of the festival so that hundreds of “action” performances would take place during the festival. Now the director and curators select just 50 events for gallery space and in public spaces in the city.
VERBO takes place in June and is open to any artist who submits an artistic proposition. There are also a number of seminars, workshops and publication launches presented with the support of FUNARTE (Fundaçao Nacional das Artes) and Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, two major arts organisations in Brazil. Applications to the festival are made via www.galeriavermelho.com.br. An English version of the application process can also be found on the website as Galeria Vermelho is very interested in Australian performance. The versatility of the space can host a diverse range of work.
Performance in Brazil originates largely from the 1970s and has been influenced to a large extent by European ideas and concepts. The body is the main performance subject as are ideas around it such as informatics, bioethics, the body as a weapon etc. A new generation of performance artists in Sao Paulo is creating work that explores the quotidian body, the socio-political realm and urban street culture in response to their city. PUC (Pontifical Catholic University) and Faculdade de Belas Artes have specific courses on Performance and the Art of the Body. The major universities and the visual arts department are creating generations of artists who are expanding the ideas of performance art by fusing new media, dance and voice.
Nezaket Ekici, VERBO 2009
courtesy Galeria Vermelho
Nezaket Ekici, VERBO 2009
Marcos described some of the performances that have been part of VERBO, to give an idea of how Galeria Vermelho comes to life in a week of contemporary performance. Turkish artist Nezaket Ekici dressed in a burka is rigged upside-down from the ceiling, reading, then dropping to the floor, newspaper articles about the injustices and violence suffered by Islamic women. Outside in the courtyard a truck arrives, full of concrete bricks. Artists Caroline Mendonca and Bruno Freire construct, deconstruct and re-construct a 20 metre wall, transforming and redefining and reconfiguring the public space of the gallery. Los Torreznos, a collective from Spain, have a more direct interaction with the public, creating political and social discussions, improvising vocally on the themes of El Cultura and El Dinero, making a humorous critique of this territorium.
In a white gallery Marco Paulo Rolla (an important Brazilian performer) creates Suando e Resistindo (Sweating and Resisting), a compelling and risky performance where three performers create a choir of voices interspersed with the sound of breaking house objects. Nancy Mauro-Flude (Australia/Holland) performs Paraphernalia, a karaoke cabaret performance with break beats, noisy guitars, pop, punk rock influences with a trash aesthetic.
Les Gens D’Uterpan (France) is a dance collective that constructs its choreographies in different parts of the space, contrasting harsh and violent acts where their bodies are in intense collisions with serene dances where the dancers dribble saliva over each other as they move smoothly through the space. A big metal sphere is built to the sounds of two revving motorbikes in Globo da Morte (Death Globe), creating great expectation. The sphere is completed,but the act remains unconsummated. The sphere is dismounted, frustrating an audience that asks, ‘Where is the spectacle?’
* * * *
Sydney and Sao Paulo share similarities but there are also vast differences in their respective cultural practices. What can they learn from each other? I am excited by the idea that maybe one day they will establish a dialogue that explores their respective artistic natures. For example, Verbo’s presentation of hybrid arts practices and its focus the performative body make it a relevant point of contact for Sydney artists who share similar preoccupations. What cultural specificity can be discerned in Verbo’s representation of the body? Perhaps a Sydney institution will one day host a Verbo festival. Links between venues in Australia and SESC could create a network of cultural exchange allowing for the introduction of Australian artists to Brazil, and vice versa. I see great possibilities in small independent performance companies in Sydney and Sao Paulo leading the exchange.
Wayne Blair, Essie Davis, Tot Mom, Sydney Theatre Company
photo copyright Lisa Tomasetti
Wayne Blair, Essie Davis, Tot Mom, Sydney Theatre Company
THE RIGID, PREENED FACE OF US CRIME TV HOST AND EX-PROSECUTOR, NANCY GRACE (ESSIE DAVIS), OGLES US ELECTRONICALLY FROM FIVE SUSPENDED SCREENS. HER EYES PROJECT RIGHTEOUSNESS, HER LIPS AND CHIN CARVE OUT A THICK ‘UPPER INCOME’ GEORGIAN DRAWL WHICH MISTAKES ‘S’ FOR ‘SH’ AND WHICH SWALLOWS VOWELS ECHOICALLY DOWN INTO THE BACK OF HER THROAT AND OUT AGAIN. NANCY GRACE IS A MEDIA MONSTER WHO SEEMS TO WANT “AYVERYONE”—WHETHER GUILTY OR NOT—”TO HAYVE THAYRE DAY IN COURRT.”
Oscar-winning film director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Che) had to travel all the way to Australia, and all the way to verbatim theatre, to air his version of the murder of Orange County’s toddler Caylee Anthony and ensuing media trial of her mother in the Sydney Theatre Company production, Tot Mom. The child’s disappearance was reported by her mother Casey Anthony (now indicted for first-degree murder and facing the death penalty if convicted) one month after Caylee had gone missing. Six months later, the child’s bagged and duct-taped body was found in a wooded area “only a stone’s throw”, as Grace repeatedly reminds us, from the Anthony residence.
Grace is best known in the US for Nancy Grace, the ratings-topping HLN program featuring breaking crimes news with lashings of innuendo from a variety of favourite experts. Night after night, Grace remounts the sordid debris of Florida’s rapes, murders and disappearances—skulls falling from plastic bags, the forensics of hair and skin, tears or dry eyes in a suspect—in her tightly conservative, scandal-bound media script. Her tactics are savage, banal and flush with the rhetoric of victim advocacy at the expense of due diligence and civil liberty. It seems she’d get on well with Sarah Palin, although it’s a marvel there’s space for two of their ilk in the world.
We are told that all words in the piece derive from transcripts—not the preciously undisclosed transcripts of witness testimony, but of nightly US TV verbiage, mixed with documents from the public record. What insight can live verbatim theatre bring to such a highly mediated event? Why theatre? Why verbatim? Why here?
Documentary theatre has been traditionally used to advantage minority voices and rights (Urban Theatre Projects’ Fast Cars and Tractor Engines [RT70), Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls). We’ve also seen the reversal of this convention in works like version 1.0’s CMI: A Certain Maritime Incident (RT61) and David Hare’s Stuff Happens, which take words out of the mouths of those in power to re-quote the quotation and let the rhetoric be heard. In Aalst, Duncan McClean shifted tactics again, deploying the chilling testimonies of two parents charged with infanticide to tempt our moral incredulity over the social psychology of good and evil (RT83).
Soderbergh’s strategy departs from these by remediating the already mediated: he re-screens words that have already, so to speak, gone to air. He saves these words from disappearance and brings them to account. They are made distinctly temporal, and although we never see Grace in the flesh, they are also made distinctly corporeal—they flash between the TV program’s interviewees (who are physically present, seated in a row beneath the screens and never seen on them) and Grace’s indomitable screen presence.
The text runs at hammer pace. Grace calls a bounty hunter, a psychoanalyst, a police detective and a defence attorney, amongst others, to her program—all excruciatingly facile in their observations. The structure of the work follows Grace’s shifts between these experts, eye witness news reportage and call-in viewers, to mount a crescendo of conjecture around the crime itself. At times the rhythm in Grace’s speech overtakes her meaning—she is given a parodic edge that makes her both larger than life and extraordinarily real. The staging is simple—a bog upfront reminds us of the missing child—and lighting is expertly timed to puncture Grace’s false solemnity with a perfunctory cut, black-out and edit to the next scene.
The performances are powerfully economical. Essie Davis creates Grace solely through manipulations of voice and face, her chin muscles often taut with purpose, her lips and eyes ready to pounce. The other performances are also compelling, with multiple character portrayals drawn through minimal costume changes. Wayne Blair stands out as the redneck bounty hunter Leonard Padilla and Darren Gilshenan for his depiction of hapless criminal defence attorney Mark Nejame.
The Anthony case became a witch hunt in the US, owing to media overexposure. In Australia, Tot Mum has been interestingly met with a degree of hostility (see http://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/2009/tot-mom/talkback/), with claims that Soderbergh is capitalising on someone else’s grief. (By playing only in Sydney he allegedly avoids compensation fees for the American figures in the play). That Grace is co-author of a bestseller on how “24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System” is no little irony. With the trial to begin in June 2010, Soderbergh’s account is an oddly timed intervention that contemplates this very topic. His is a ‘trial’ of the media ‘pre-trial’, but we are still a long way from knowing the legal outcome of Casey Anthony’s fate, and likewise, from hearing her story should it be told.
Tot Mum, director, creator Steven Soderbergh, performers Wayne Blair, Zoe Carides, Essie Davis, Darren Gilshenan, Glenn Hazeldine, Genevieve Hegney, Damon Herriman, Peter Kowitz, Rhys Muldoon, Emma Palmer, set design Peter England, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Damien Cooper, sound Paul Charlier, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf Theatre, Dec 23, 2009-Feb 7, 2010
Jo Stone, Astrid Pill, The Pyjama Girl, Ladykillers
photo Shane Reid
Jo Stone, Astrid Pill, The Pyjama Girl, Ladykillers
IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE DEAD—THIS IS ONE OF THE MORE ENDURING FUNCTIONS OF PERFORMANCE: TO CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE PAST, TO LURE GHOSTS FROM THEIR GRAVES, TO EXHUME THE LIVES OF THOSE WHO HAVE DISAPPEARED.
Written histories and documentaries do much the same thing, but the rigours of authentication and realism often extinguish the warmth, intimacy and affection that performance can evoke.
The Ladykillers’ new work is an evocation. It calls forth the mystery of a murdered woman—the Pyjama Girl—whose body, dressed in yellow silk pyjamas, was found in a roadside culvert in Albury, New South Wales, in 1934. The woman was not identified until 1944, and then perhaps incorrectly, when a man confessed to the murder of his wife. The body was buried and the man convicted. But the case has been revisited several times since.
Historian Richard Evans’ 2004 book, for instance, casts considerable doubt on the identification and conviction, and raises questions about the conduct of the then New South Wales Commissioner of Police. The Ladykillers’ production does not seek to set the record straight. What it does, initially, is evoke an historical aesthetic that distances the trauma of the case, setting its eroticism and violence in the past.
The Australian 1930s are conjured with design (Gaelle Mellis), music and sound (Zoë Barry, Jed Palmer): a bakelite radio and an old-style microphone, a man’s hat and the women’s shoes, the instrumentation of popular song and the clipped accent of a newsreel announcer. At the outset, performer Stephen Sheehan, seated in a cane armchair, reading the evening news, projects a relaxed image of masculine order. Chaos may be consumed as evening entertainment for, in his work today, he has ensured that public order prevails in the world.
Not so within the fevered inner world of the women in the work. Performers Astrid Pill and Jo Stone, a blonde and a brunette, dressed in yellow frocks and high-heeled yellow shoes, play around a doll’s house and whisper to each other. Later, furtively, at home alone, Pill stuffs biscuits in her mouth and washes down the crumbs with swigs from a hip flask. The women perform the emotions of disquiet. They are often anxious and ill-at-ease. They take turns in dancing with the man—or, rather, listlessly being danced by him.
Vocally, the women are erotically assertive, anachronistically articulate. “Come on, punch me. Hit me. Give me a black eye”: one attempts to arouse the man with erotic fantasies of domestic violence—but fails. Instead, they play dress-ups to jazz percussion, swapping gender roles with shoes and hats. The man croons a song of love forgotten: “My old flame, I can’t even think of her name.” A woman censors her sexuality, infantilising herself by intoning quietly: “I am a bad girl. I am a bad girl.” The man tells a string of misogynistic jokes.
These gendered memories from the past are played skittishly like vignettes. But they also become painful and unpleasant. The violence, at times, feels real. Director Ingrid Voorendt choreographs the action with repetition to estrange the impact of bad affects. In the program notes, she asks, “How do we deal with our fear of bad men?” and “How do good men deal with this?” Voorendt’s direction takes particular care not to disconnect its audience from these gendered questions.
Characters are dislodged as they form. For Pill and Stone, the doubling keeps the identity of the Pyjama Girl unsettled and dispersed throughout the work. With Sheehan, the tendency for suspicion and accusation to alight on him is explicitly rejected. As the work’s tensions are threatening to snap, Sheehan takes a break. Taking off his tie, he turns to the audience and addresses us directly: “I’m not him,” he reassures us. “The whole thing makes me sick.”
The work’s dramaturgy hinges on a transition from fantasy to reality. First up, fantasies about gender, violence, sex and death range freely across the story of the Pyjama Girl, activating a sensual historicity and some playful, role-reversing erotics. What follows then is, literally, reality as revelation. Surface elevation gives way to depth and fantasies hit the dirt. A knife is drawn, a voice floats free, and the body lies inert—but not alone.
If I were a woman with a male partner, I would take him to The Pyjama Girl and I think he would enjoy it. Like a funeral, it is both confronting and consoling. We would come home, make love and talk about it after.
Ladykillers, The Pyjama Girl, director Ingrid Voorendt, devisor, performer Astrid Pill, performers Jo Stone, Stephen Sheehan, devisors, composers, musicians Zoë Barry, Jed Palmer, designer Gaelle Mellis, lighting David Gadsden; presented by Vitalstatistix with Adelaide Festival Centre’s inSpace program, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, Dec 9-19
THE EARLY BOOKS OF GENESIS IN THE BIBLE ARE ALL ABOUT GESTATION: WITH HIS WORD AND HIS BREATH GOD TRUMPS WOMEN BY ASEXUALLY CREATING A PERFECT WORLD, INCLUDING ADAM AND THE ANIMALS, AND THEN EVE FROM ADAM’S RIB. BUT HIS CREATION IS FAR FROM PERFECT.
Adam and Eve in turn breed curiosity and defiance for which they are banished from Eden as sinners, doomed to parenting and a profound sense of the loss of direct contact with their maker. The Mysteries: Genesis, is written by Lally Latz and Hilary Bell, directed by Matthew Lutton, Andrew Upton and Tom Wright, and performed by the STC’s new young ensemble, The Residents.
The trio of short plays, based successively around the lives of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and then Noah adds up to a lateral re-working of the originals, a blend of The Bible, apocrypha and fancy. The staging resonates with associations with the mediaeval English Mystery Cycles. These were seasonal English pageants of Bible stories performed by craft guild members, mostly on carts, and often executed with fearsome spectacle and not a little humour in the vernacular up until their banning in the 16th century by a newly Protestant monarchy. In the black box Wharf 2 we can choose, in the first and the last plays, to watch seated on the floor or the balcony above, while in the second we can stand on the floor, moving about with the performers. The result is an apt sense of both ritual occasion and informality, of being in a public space to witness a re-telling of tales embedded, for many of us, in our psyches but here made new.
The first play, Adam, Eve, commences in total darkness until dim light reveals a mound of flesh which we then see is a body: God seated, bent over, as if in the act of self-creation. But his creation is already imperfect and rules have to be imposed, first on an ambitious Lucifer: “Hell is your gift if you should break my heart.” Ash pours down on Lucifer, rendering him black, erased: “Hell has no windows.” God admits, “I was dazzled by my own creation” but persists, and goes on to “fill the world with [his] ideas” as the stage floods with polystyrene snow in which the childlike Adam and Eve play. Their co-existence with a big penguin (a performer in a daggy costume) with whom they can communicate confirms their innocence, and that they live at one with nature. But we can also understand the couple’s growing curiosity, especially Eve who has not enjoyed Adam’s direct contact with God: “What was it like to look him in the face?” She wonders,”Is this tree the knowledge of our God?”
As Eve, like the child of an absent parent, yearns for God, the rationale for temptation is offered not by Lucifer but by a Lilith figure: “To reach him you must know him.” Eve’s curiosity extends to asking, “What is behind the stars?” But drinking the juice from a plucked glass apple yields a different truth: Eve declares, “I now know what a man is.” Soon she and Adam are feeling the chill, sense their nakedness and are ashamed. God is punishing, condemning Eve and her heirs to the agonies of childbirth and driving Adam to kill the penguin. From the costume Adam forces a woman and tears off her underwear in a palpable ‘rape of nature.’
Writer Lally Katz and director Matthew Lutton don’t subvert the through-line of the Bible story, the outcomes are given, but test its contradictions by siding with Adam and especially with Eve, portraying them as victims of a God who is himself clearly imperfect, a creator who inadvertantly generates a world of escalating contradictions—innocence/sin, black/white, man/woman, love/hate, man/nature—and who cruelly withdraws his affection. Design and performances are realised with like tension between absolutes, sometimes strikingly, too often awkwardly (as in the de-wigging of Adam and Eve in their transformation into sinning humans), and the text is delivered with a drab, actorly archness contrary to the pop staging.
The second play, Cain, Abel, tells the Bible tale but with some intriguing and some alarming variations alongside thematic continuities with the first play. Of the three it has the most affinity with a Mystery Cycle performance. It’s played out amongst the audience. The actors form a band (replete with penguin) that vividly opens the play and later, as a choral group, sombrely closes it with the same song. The script, with its vivid imagery, contemporary references (Cain finds after the murder that “the locks have been changed”) and couplets that evoke the mediaeval cycle texts. While In the first play, Adam and Eve as characters are inevitably difficult to invest with much human complexity, the tale of Cain’s killing of his brother Abel offers more room to move, especially by taking licence with the Bible story and texturing it with God admitting Cain as a mistake, Eve ackowledging her power (“I like God become creator”), and a tired cigarette puffing, dying Adam still longing for one last sight of his maker. The homecoming Cain is murdered by his daughter and wife (who had become prostitutes during his exile) and God is a hovering, bad tempered commentator in a business suit.
Binary dynamics are again central. Abel is played by a woman and his/her murder is perpetrated with precisely the same kind of sexual brutality as the assault on the penguin in Adam, Eve. The realms of Cain (the too demanding care of the earth) and Abel (the rewarding world of blood, plenty, animal husbandry and Eve’s admiration) are quickly mapped out on the floor with tape, dividing and re-dividing characters and audience. Brett Stiller’s performance is the best in The Mysteries: Genesis: his Cain is sulky, envious, dangerous, but, after the murder and exile, he is darkly and intensely remorseful, recalling his misery and abjection, “scouring through the garbage bins like a possum” and wondering, like Job to come, “Why me?” Tahki Saul, as Seth, brother to Cain and Abel, introduces a new dimension, an amiable, potentially restorative figure in a world God sees as almost iredeemably locked in a cycle of corruption. Tautly scripted and rich with curious apocrypha and invention, strong performances and an engaging use of space, the writer Hilary Bell and director Andrew Upton have engendered a disturbingly lateral account of the arrival of Death in the Bible narrative (though made oddly explicit as a female figure in underwear, her hair pulled down over her face).
Bell and Katz co-wrote the final play, Noah’s Ark, with a much more subversive intent than in the first two. Their Noah is a drugged fantastist, a refugee from the world, hiding on top of a pile of eight mattresses on which God addresses him from a radio and joins him for chats. Out of the mattress ooze his three imagined daughters who share Noah’s desire to punish family and neighbours for their sins against God and to sail away in the coming flood. When not sedating him, Noah’s wife berates the man (not in the comic manner of the mediaeval cycles) to nil effect. He is truly delusional, “All history begins and ends with me.” Even God wonders why Noah has no curiosity about his fate, but appears to long for contact with his last believer, almost reaching out to touch him.
Surround sound torrential rain floods the theatre, and the stack of mattresses spins. As the waters subsides God returns to give Noah mastery over all of nature, declares a long list of taboos (including not eating penguins and kangaroos), and makes a covenant that he will never again destroy mankind. It’s time to multiply, as God and Noah enter into a closed circuit of love, mutually delusional. Noah asks, “So what will we do?” God replies, “If you love me, you’ll be with me forever.” We, however, feel less certain. The prospect of salvation from a global environmental disaster through the grace of God worked through a madman seems distant. If dramatically one dimensional given the totality of the protagonist’s condition, the Noah play was nonetheless fascinatingly subversive and visually potent.
For their first mainstage outing, The Residents performed with conviction and ample ensemble spirit if not always investing sufficient detail in their characterisations, admittedly a challenge with this kind of archetypal material. While adding fuel to the ongoing debate between atheists and believers, The Mysteries: Genesis at the same time perpetuates our fascination with a significant component of western cultural history, not least as a theatrical legacy out of which 16th and 17th century English drama partly sprang. There’s also a notable focus from Bell and Katz on women in these Bible stories—Eve’s justifiable curiosity, nature raped by Adam, Abel as representative of the ‘female’ spirit, and Mrs Noah’s hard-earned recognition of her husband’s delusion.
For a very different visual experience, try the recently published R Crumb comic strip of all the Books of Genesis with text from Robert Alter’s lucid new Bible translations. Although not as outrageous as you’d expect from Crumb, there’s much telling detail that undercuts the aetherial abstractions of standard Bible story illustration with strong historical research and vivid characters who palpably sweat, age and have sex. You can’t keep a ‘good’ myth down, it seems.
Sydney Theatre Company, The Residents, The Mysteries: Genesis, writers Hilary Bell, Lally Katz, directors Matthew Lutton, Andrew Upton, Tom Wright, performers Alice Ansara, Cameron Goodall, Ursula Mills, Julia Ohannessian, Zindzi Okenyo,?Richard Pyros, Sophie Ross, Tahki Saul, Brett Stiller, designer Alice Babidge, lighting Paul Jackson, sound design Kingsley Reeve; from Nov 25, 2009; The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R Crumb, 2009
THE SOUND AND SIGHT OF AN AUSSIE FLAG BEING SLOWLY TORN APART DOMINATES HUGE VIDEO SCREENS AT EITHER END OF AN ELONGATED BLACK-BOX SPACE AS THE AUDIENCE FILES IN FOR RESIST: THE RIGHT TO REVOLUTION, PART OF PERTH’S AWESOME ARTS FESTIVAL.
The atmosphere is energetic: a chaotic, kilted MC introducing a haphazard band while two tracksuited contenders, in red and in blue, repeat an individual tug-of-war over a tightly gripped flag.
Audience members, on their way in, have each been given a red satin cape emblazoned with the name of a ‘champion’, anyone from Che Guevara to Anne Frank. As music thrashes and the tug-of-war continues, we’re informed that Australia is unlike many countries worldwide in having no bill of rights. A sterile female voiceover interrupts at intervals: “The battle will commence in [x] minutes.”
The right to revolution, we’re told, is a little known clause in many existing bills of rights: in other words, if the government lets the people down, the people have the right to overthrow it. Today, the audience will decide, by tug-of-war, whether this clause should be part of an Australian bill of rights. If the decision is YES, the bill will be delivered to one of WA’s civic leaders—live—and videocast back to the theatre.
To the sound of rousing march music, our MC heads out to the streets to gauge the will of the people. We’re asked to choose sides, guided by our two performer/leaders and, as a practice run, the FOR team throws imaginary stones and sets up the chant, “WAKE! UP! WAKE! UP!” Those AGAINST deflect the stones with mimed ‘sticks’ and stomp closer and closer. At its climax, the energy approaches that of a protest—the agression, the power, and, crucially, the will to win.
Next, two teams of seven are chosen, and a heavy rope is measured out across the centre of the space. I’ve chosen FOR. On my team are Sun Yat Sen, Golda Meir, Germaine Greer, Morpheus, the Dalai Lama, Spartacus and Malcolm X. While we prepare for battle, the screens show our MC canvassing shoppers on the bill of rights. He meets, predictably, with almost complete public apathy.
We’ve been promised that if the result is FOR, the bill of rights will be delivered to one of WA’s key civic leaders–today’s ‘target’ is Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan.
Kelli McCluskey and Steve Bull, the pvi collective co-founders and show co-directors, were interested in the tug-of-war both for its participatory possibilities—audience engagement is crucial to pvi’s work—and because they found it has a very real history as a non-violent confict resolution device. “There is a hardcore physicality to the action of tug-of-war,” says McCluskey. “The physical effort alongside the mental conviction for what you are fighting for seemed to us a really potent combination.”
The investment in an outcome has palpable effect as those holding the rope feel the resin on their palms and tighten their grip, and the audience on the sidelines gets ready to barrack. Bull says that with a full house the performance space becomes more like a sports arena: “It feels like the ownership of the work transfers completely to the audience, with us simply facilitating.”
On the day I attend, the audience is of modest size, but the sense of ownership is strong, intensifying as the tug-of-war begins. The live cross is now crucial—we in the room know we’re determining something that will happen in the ‘real world’ outside. After a bitter struggle, the AGAINST team wins.
In a short review it’s hard to convey the personal investment that resist: the right to revolution sets up. It’s a poignant moment, watching our MC, still at large, intone to the camera, “The will of the people has decided. The right to revolution will not be on the bill of rights.” He takes the scrolled document, sets it aflame and lets it drop to the footpath, watching with exaggerated reverence. It’s a surprising moment, and a poetic one.
There is no audience applause, no curtain call, the two tug-of-war leaders have left the stage, feel-good music is playing but we’re left in our black box until someone decides to get up and leave. Some kids are playing with the rope. We take off our capes and leave them at the door, no longer heroes for the cause. And afterwards, outside in the museum café, I overhear a family talking about whether Australia should or shouldn’t have a bill of rights.
pvi collective, resist: the right to revolution, directors Kelli McCluskey, Steve Bull, performers Ben Sutton, James McCluskey, Ofa Fotu, Sarah Wilkinson, production Mike Nanning; Western Australian Museum, Perth, Nov 23-28, 2009
AFTER 15 YEARS, WHAT IS MUSIC? HAS BECOME AN INSTITUTION IN THE AUSTRALIAN MUSICAL LANDSCAPE, AT THE SAME TIME CONTINUING TO CHALLENGE AUDIENCES, REFUSING TO COMPROMISE IN ITS PROGRAMMING AND REMAINING STEADFASTLY DEDICATED TO THOSE INTERESTED IN THE EDGES OF MUSIC IN THIS COUNTRY.
Although there were concerts in Sydney and Perth, this year the focus of the festival was on Melbourne and here the festival started with the John Wiese Ensemble from Los Angeles at the East Brunswick Club. A 15-piece ensemble of local musicians performed two half-hour versions of a piece that Wiese devised specifically for the occasion. Each musician played from a visual score based on a graphic deconstruction of their own name underlined with a measure divided into durations of one minute.
After a brief introduction from festival MC Sean Baxter, the musicians launched into the performance and it became clear that the music was not recognisable as John Wiese’s but belonging to the individual performers themselves. It was as if I was listening to solo performances from all of the artists at once with someone playfully hitting ‘mute’ and ‘solo’ from time to time. Yet that process produced a genuinely gripping and dynamic music that seemed to constantly mutate, pushing out in different directions before springing back with contorted vocals, slices of guitars and strings, the feedback of overblown horns, scattered percussion and noise punctures. Gradually the structure became obvious and I realised that, along with the meeting of the individual voices on stage, the piece was principally about duration, with the sound of minutes ticking clearly discernable.
The second night at the East Brunswick Club started in punishing style with a tag team set from noisemakers Lloyd Honeybrook, Marco Fusinato and Lucas Abela that in 15 short minutes contorted our collective cochlear until the close with ‘Justice Yeldham’ smashing a pane of glass over his head to cheers from the crowd. It was followed immediately with the cry ‘Bruuutal’ from Sean Baxter, which would bookend every set of the festival from here on in, and provided the perfect summation.
Next up Oren Ambarchi and Matt Skitz launched into a relentless set of thickly abstracted guitar heroics and fast paced, powerful and precise drumming underpinned with a driving double kick that was like hearing a tape of the history of rock music on rewind. Although too macho for my taste, the tension between the virtuosic drumming of Skitz, who drove the set, and the abstracted tones of Ambarchi’s setup was compelling.
Robert Piotrowicz followed on laptop and Doepfer modular synth. He gave an impressive performance that, after the previous set, seemed to simultaneously synthesise and deconstruct a digital take on doom laden rock aesthetics, allowing shards of heavy chords to occasionally escape before breaking them into fragments interspersed with bursts of noise and the rhythms of manipulation.
John Wiese closed the night, sitting before a modest looking setup of laptop, mixer and cassette player, and immediately let forth a sharp but detailed mélange of noise. Everything remained just beyond comprehension as a frenetic but focused mix with hints of voices, electronics and other incidental noises flew past with gradually more discernable tape interruptions. It was certainly difficult listening, but Weise’s creativity and attention to detail was exceptional.
Last event for the festival, but certainly not least, came the 50/50 performance at the ABC Iwaki Auditorium in Southbank. The night featured 50 acts, each performing for a minute back to back. There was a buzz in the air and the sheer size of the undertaking was evident upon entering the venue and seeing almost the entire floor covered with instruments and performers, leaving only the fringes and gallery for the audience. After a brief explanation of how it would all work, the night started with a count down from 50 to one on the giant screen behind the performers that would serve as timekeeper for the event.
Quickly it became clear that explosions of noise, thrash and yells were the order of the day but the consensus afterwards seemed to be that it was the exceptions to this rule that were most interesting. The performers focused on what they do and avoiding getting caught up in the excitement were most memorable: personal highlights included Clare Cooper, Breathing Shrine, Frances Plagne, Pig & Machine, Golden Fur, Kim Myhr and a trio from Clayton Thomas, Dale Gorfinkel and Darren Moore. Absoluten Calfeutrail submitted perhaps the only example of a gripping and intense noise performance while Bum Creek succeeded where others failed with an hilarious set in which they ‘electrocuted’ each other, emitting stabs of ground hum punctuated with their own screams. Ivens led the most engaging of the ensemble sets, in which different groupings of artists from the various acts performed together, fronting an intimidating assault of drums and vocals.
I was surprised at the extent to which the event seemed to form into a single cohesive piece despite the at times disparate nature of the individual performances. Perhaps because so many sets were presented in the time it would usually take to hear just one, I found myself listening to the event as a whole. This was certainly due to the dominance of noise, grind and shit rock throughout the program; however, the inclusion of numerous ensemble sets broke down the notion that we were listening to completely separate acts and the finale, in which all the performers exploded in a minute of celebration, made it clear that there was an involvement from each of them in the organiser’s larger vision for 50/50.
Despite a clear imbalance between the resources the festival poured into solo performances from featured and touring artists and those involved in 50/50, What is Music? took a great number of artists from the local community and presented them and us with a wonderful opportunity to celebrate that community as a whole as well as the individuals who comprise it.
What is Music? in Melbourne featured two other nights, staged at the Old Bar and Horse Bazaar and curated with the help of organisers from Sabbatical and Stutter. This is a move that I commend and think further demonstrates a focus on Australian artists across the festival. Special mention must be made of sound engineer Byron Scullin, whose work was impeccable.
Before the festival I wondered about the issues inherent in the huge numbers of local artists being given only a role in John Wiese’s Ensemble or one minute in 50/50, while a small number of international artists was each afforded a solo performance. However, it became clear while listening to the performances that rather than limiting the locals each benefited from being placed among the others. The performance from the John Wiese Ensemble was much more interesting than the solo performances, which it must be said seem to feature a rotating but similar roster of artists each year, and 50/50, while not flawless, gave audiences a unique snapshot of contemporary music in Melbourne at the moment.
What is Music? East Brunswick Club, Old Bar, Horse Bazaar and Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne, Dec 13-19, www.whatismusic.com
Peter Blamey, Monica Brooks, Laura Altman and Daniel Whiting, Difficult Music Festival
photo Nick Dan
Peter Blamey, Monica Brooks, Laura Altman and Daniel Whiting, Difficult Music Festival
THE SUMMER SWELTER OF SYDNEY HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH A REASONABLY LIVELY EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SCENE FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS MAINLY THANKS TO THE NOW NOW FESTIVAL (SEE REVIEW, RT96). HOWEVER THIS YEAR IT REACHED A VERITABLE FRENZY OF ACTIVITY WITH THE ADDITION OF THE DIFFICULT MUSIC FESTIVAL.
Run by the core team of Nick Dan and Nadine Pita with Damian Sawyers and other guest curators, the Difficult Music Festival heroically presented a gig every night in January. The majority of events took place at Sedition, the legendary barbershop in Darlinghurst run by Michael Joyce (who came up with the idea), which has been hosting the weekly Apostasy series amongst other events since 2007. Waking up slowly to the year, I finally made it to some gigs in the festival’s final week.
Monday January 25 saw the small shopfront packed (by about 30 people) to hear Ivan Lisyak, Ben Byrne and Dale Gorfinkel. Lisyak pointed his guitar to a small amp perched on a sink and sculpted the feedback. Well controlled, it was loud but never crossing over to pain, neat and punchy in its timbral and tonal investigations. Ben Byrne, visiting from Melbourne, played an old tape machine and laptop carnivorously patched together, his fingers spasmodically swiping back and forth across a mini Kaoss Pad pad to manipulate random snatches of sound, creating serrated edges to his densely textured wedge of noise. Both sets were satisfyingly succinct, appropriate considering the steamy climate.
Given the tight squish it was fortunate that Dale Gorfinkel didn’t bring his vibraphone but rather played trumpet, employing some of his now customary devices: backyard-invented small motors which introduce chance elements and make styrofoam cups spin and little balls bounce around in jars. Gorfinkel has been developing his ideas around extended technique, instrument building and improvisation over the last few years and he is fascinating to hear and watch. Using circular breathing he guided us through a playful soundscape of squeaks, burbles, blobs and whirs. Gorfinkel has created a unique performance style that is unassuming, yet commandingly showman-like. His makeshift toys sat well amidst the outsider art that adorns the walls of the shop.
Unfortunately after the following evening’s performance the nightly crowds of people swarming around the shop drew the ire of the neighbours and the final gigs for the festival became nomadic. I caught Wednesday January 27 at The Cross-Art + Books in Kings Cross. In the less charged and, let’s admit it, more comfortable atmosphere—a neat, white airy reading room lined with books—the three sets were more extended. Laura Altman (also curator for the evening) played clarinet with Monica Brooks on accordion. Exploring the threshold between sound and no sound, Brooks plays tiny sustained notes with bellow sighs, while Altman breathes through her instrument, eking out minute squeals. It’s the second time I’ve seen the pair play super quietly together, and while the exploration is rigorous and intriguing, I do occasionally long for a contrast to what sometimes can seem either like gentility or timidity.
Peter Blamey and Daniel Whiting are loud and dense in comparison, yet in reality this duo also exercises considered restraint. Blamey tames and shapes the blurp and stutters of his mixing board, which, when plugged in wrongly takes on a life of its own. Whiting deftly walks a fine line between pretty melodic snatches and hard electronic detritus, and together they create a place of broken rhythms and textures in which you can lose yourself.
The final set brought all four artists together: small sustained tones from the women, playing with shifting harmonic spectra, grounded by electronic grit from the men. Extra dynamic was added by some of Whiting’s offerings which occasionally verged on melody and acted as kind of a glue between the players.
The official final night of the Difficult Music Festival (there was yet another gig on Feb 2) was curated by Sumugan Sivanesan and found a home at Locksmith Gallery in Alexandria—probably better placed since the deserted thoroughfare of Regent Street was a far less conspicuous place for the mayhem on offer. Stepping onto the bill at the last moment was WT Norbert, recently relocated to Australia from Berlin, who played a short and humble set on an instrument constructed of 1/4inch jacks and effects pedals. While he admitted that this was his first gig for many years, his curious brand of minimal glitch was appealing.
X-No MSG-X was up next, a totally trashed display of non-sensical screaming and out of control exhibitionism which doesn’t warrant serious comment, though the miniature rave that emerged after much spazzing about did excite the kids. This was followed by the songs of Dominic Talarico which are not so much difficult music as just lo-fi electro-pop. With witty lyrics about meatheads and being a bong slave, he had a certain charm and once again had the kids dancing.
The final set was a face-off between Defektro, with his elaborate noise instruments, and Justice Yeldham (Lucas Abela), returning to his fan-mounted record attacked with a miked up skewer. The eviscerating sound of Abela’s instrument rendered it not the most sensitive tool for collaboration, but once the set evened out some interesting tones and structures emerged, particularly from Defektro. Being fearful of decapitation by vinyl, and even more afraid of Defektro’s gas bottle powered percussive flame thrower, I experienced this performance from the street looking in. All up a fittingly extreme end to an extreme festival.
While this vast array of artists and interpretations of ‘difficult music’ was going on nightly, the Sydney Festival/Modular Circa 1979: Signal to Noise forums were presented at the Seymour Centre, in which the heyday of post-punk was raised to holy status, and there were moans about how different times are now, with kids frittering away their time on Facebook. Well, it is certainly harder to live without the shackles of a real job these days, but the Difficult Music Festival, which was free or entry-by-donation and completely DIY (along with other independent events across the year), puts the kibosh on the assumption that this generation is just waiting around for things to happen. If you add in several extra gigs by the whirlwind duo of Clayton Thomas and Clare Cooper now based in Berlin, as well as Cooper’s inaugural two day audiovisual festival Smack Bang! at the Red Rattler, Sydney this January truly felt alive with the sounds of experimental music.
IT SURPRISES DAVID YOUNG THAT TWO TO THREE YEARS AGO HE COULD NOT HAVE IMAGINED HIS EXISTENCE OUTSIDE OF APHIDS, BUT NOW, MOVING ON TO THE ARTISTIC DIRECTORSHIP OF CHAMBER MADE OPERA, HE LEAVES KNOWING THAT APHIDS IS SUCCESSFUL AND SELF-SUSTAINING AND HAS A STRONG TEAM, INCLUDING YOUNG’S LONG TIME ARTISTIC ASSOCIATE, ROSEMARY JOY. AND IT’S THE RIGHT TIME FOR HIM TO LEAVE. ABOVE ALL HE’S DEEPLY SATISFIED, AFTER 15 YEARS, THAT THE COMPANY, ACCLAIMED IN AUSTRALIA AND OVERSEAS FOR ITS INVENTIVE HYBRID ART CREATIONS, FUNCTIONS AS “AN ARTWORK, NOT JUST A SET OF PROJECTS BUT ORGANIC, AN ECOLOGY.”
The position of artistic director has been advertised. It’s timely for Aphids, Young thinks, “to have a new injection of ideas. Projects and tours are in place for 2010, so the incoming artistic director can enjoy focusing on 2011 and beyond.”
Asked why he was attracted to the Chamber Made Opera job, Young says that outside Aphids there had only ever been two organisations in Melbourne in which he thought he might play a role. The first was Next Wave, which he directed in 2002, the second Chamber Made Opera. Both have offered opportunities to support and develop contemporary Australian work and been open to embracing a wide range of art forms and practices: “So it seemed a logical step for me to go from Aphids to Chamber Made Opera.”
While Young “enjoyed the ambiguity of Aphids” he’s amused that he sometimes found it complex to explain just what the organisation is, given the sheer newness of what it does. “I feel I’m moving into more defined territory with Chamber Made Opera: people at least have some concept of what opera is. But I’m hoping also to challenge that expectation.” Aphids has effectively rewritten our expectations of the music concert and the installation by merging them, explored the relationship between experimental film and contemporary classical music and, not least, reworked the audience-performer space in works of intimate scale whether of music or puppetry, as well as asking what actually constitutes a musical instrument—in Rosemary Joy’s exquisite creations.
For 20 years, led by founding artistic director Douglas Horton, Chamber Made Opera has been the only company in Australia consistently dedicated to the creation of often innovative and memorable new operas. Young is determined to continue the company’s tradition of producing chamber operas of medium size, but will introduce “works of different scale, different models, for example adding miniatures that offer opportunities for touring—and sooner rather than later. Touring is the only way for the company to survive and broaden its audience base. We already have plans for interstate and overseas activity.” Young can add to the touring potential by drawing on Aphids’ success in the creation of cross-artform, intercultural partnerships across state borders and between countries—developing works, for example in Belgium, Japan and Mexico.
Young thinks that his new venture will benefit from “fond memories of the company’s 20 years, the strong feeling and goodwill for Chamber Made Opera in Melbourne.” As with Aphids, Young believes that Melbourne will provide Chamber Made Opera with a strong base. “New work will be made in Melbourne and travel, or be made overseas and then be shown here.” He quips, “I see my job as an international appointment.” But he means it.
Young sees opera, a hybrid form right from its 16th-century inception, as “a springboard for creating new kinds of work, including a reimagining of chamber opera itself—with musicians, architects or visual artists.” He’ll commission works and is keen, as a widely played composer, to occasionally create something himself for the program (“it’s not going to be all about my work!”).
There’s a certain timeliness to Young’s appointment. It corresponds with the great promise inherent in singer and festival director Lyndon Terracini taking up the artistic directorship of Opera Australia—“It sets the right tone,” says Young. As well, Chamber Made Opera and Opera Victoria are nurturing new opera music theatre works in their NOVA (New Operatic Ventures Australia) project. A call was put out for proposals in 2009: “Many more were received than we expected. There’s clearly a great need. Six works have been selected for workshopping in August and subsequent showings. It’s important that very different organisations like Chamber Made Opera and Opera Victoria work together. Some of the selected works will suit one company rather than the other, but all have potential.”
After 15 wonderfully creative years with Aphids, David Young is clearly already enjoying his new role with Chamber Made Opera, bringing to it a mix of continuity, new vision and ambition. The synchronicities of Terracini’s appointment and the Victoria Opera project partnership could bode well for opera and music theatre in Australia. It’s about time.
It intrigues me that the first work I saw by Aphids was Ricefields, in 1998 at Sydney’s The Performance Space (the work also played in various settings in Melbourne, Brisbane, Tokyo and Belfort in France). At the time I was closely following what appeared to be the improving fortunes of Australian music theatre (pretty well over by the early 2000s), and although Ricefields was a subtle synthesis of concert and installation it also exuded a magical theatricality. When RealTime edited the first of the Australia Council’s In Repertoire Series in 1999, it promoted to the world operas and music theatre works ready to tour—and we just had to include Aphids alongside Chamber Made Opera and others. Now, in 2010, I look forward eagerly to a new Chamber Made Opera, taking on the world.
WE USE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE WHILE TORRENTING THE LATEST HBO SERIES; REDUCE OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT BY FLYING LESS WHILE IGNORING THE CONGO GENOCIDE FUELLED BY MOBILE PHONE CONSUMPTION; EAT LOCAL PRODUCE WHILE DRINKING IMPORTED BEER AND WINE; FORTIFY GLOBAL CORPORATIONS BY RECYCLING AT EBAY AND PURCHASING INDIVIDUALLY CRAFTED OBJECTS AT ETSY. ARE THESE IDEOLOGICAL INCONSISTENCIES, OR THE REALITIES OF C21 ANTI-GLOBALIST CULTURE WHICH EASILY MIXES GREEN IDEALS WITH INDUSTRIAL ENTITLEMENT?
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in our enthusiasm towards today’s iteration of the Gothic revivalist Arts and Crafts Movement. Although the original 19th century movement was largely a reaction to industrialisation—advocating traditional craftsmanship and economic reform—it also recognised the necessity for machines to carry out tedious, repetitive tasks. Inspired by John Ruskin’s writings it espoused the pleasure and intimacy of making, along with the moral imperative of art to better society. A century later one of its mutant off-spring is Craftivism, a term coined at a knitting circle in 2002 to describe the Political Activism meets Craft Practices movement.
Materially agnostic, the Craftivism event at Arnolfini in Bristol, perfectly captures the hand-made Zeitgeist. Artworks emerge from almost anything: textiles, cellophane, wood, bread dough, recycled clothing, string, YouTube videos and computer code. Skills and knowledge are shared in the gallery via knitting and knotting, mapping free urban food locations, and pure:dyne real time video and audio processing workshops. Information is replicated through a spectrum of technologies—from ye olde brass rubbings, post-it notes and photocopiers to a carefully crafted user-generated wiki containing extensive video documentation.
There is a direct relationship between the rise of DIY craft and the World Wide Web. Both date themselves from 1994, with the early days of art on the internet characterised by artists taking up the tools of technology to craft code: challenging museum hierarchies, reinventing distribution systems and building collaborative communities across the globe. It’s fitting then that one of the highlights of Craftivism is the inclusion of those pioneers of net art, JODI.
Over the 15 years they have been creating code art, the changing web has elicited an array of humorous and critical responses from JODI. In YouTube Records they again succeed splendidly in making us reconsider the familiar with an absurd conceptually and materially looped work. JODI take the audio tracks of YouTube videos of people singing about the Internet, usually in their bedrooms, and etch them onto vinyl records. The vinyl then becomes an artefact of performance, being videoed while playing on a turntable in the gallery.
In a parody of net celebrity, persona and identity, the video of the vinyl playing is then posted back to YouTube as a response to the original video. And so on…However JODI’s vinyl of someone covering someone else, covering something else is for sale. Work that copyright out!
Delving into another type of celebrity, Handmade Hero explores the culture of pro-wresting—a form of theatrical athleticism which originated in 19th-century carnival sideshows and music halls. As matches are choreographed with scripted outcomes, the wrestlers’ larger than life personas are vital for audience engagement.
Artist Rhiannon Chaloner has been working with Bristol-based wrestlers to design and construct their masked and costumed alter-egos. Strikingly similar to the way users approach their online identity and avatar personality construction, these wrestling personas are constructed from a mix of the purely fanciful with a reappropriation of the wrestler’s everyday identity. Handmade costumes, such as a magnificent cape of stitched together silk business ties, will adorn local wrestlers when they face off in Craftivism’s satellite wrestling matches in January.
Mandy McIntosh and the West Country Knotters sounds suspiciously like a good-time folk meets neo-punk band, however this former Kenzo knitwear designer and the West Country branch of the International Guild of Knot Tyers are seriously into macramé. No, don’t think of hideous 1970s hangings, but rather contemplate the sophistication of textile-making using ornamental knotting, as popularised by sailors decorating anything from knife handles to parts of ships.
McIntosh and the West Country Knotters’ joint project, Extended Family, is a social and play space within the gallery, with hanging macramé book cases stuffed full of McIntosh’s personal craft reference library which dates back to the 1970s; a macramé hammock and swing in which to relax or browse books; and a photocopier to enable gallery visitors to take patterns home. Again a subtle circularity emerges—the crafting circle uses the book patterns to build the objects that now hold them, at the same time creating a skill-sharing and resource platform, which in turn proliferates their production and distribution.
Craftivism could have felt a little preachy if it were not for its uncurated satellite event, UnCraftivism. Over the opening weekend, anyone could book a space in the Arnolfini building via a post-it note whiteboard schedule in the foyer. Surprisingly, or not, this thoroughly unpredictable, self-organising method produced some of the most engaging outcomes of the show, which are well video documented on the Wiki.
The local Dorkbot chapter (people doing strange things with electricity in the West of England) had a fun array of inventions to play with, including a lovingly crafted wood and copper mechanical eye prototype with natural looking eye movements that followed people as they moved around. I submitted myself to 20 minutes of green noise in a Ganzfeld Experiment that supposedly hacks the brain and cleanses the mind. As it didn’t induce the promised hallucinations, and I felt silly with ping pong balls taped to my eyes, I went searching for other sorts of stimulation.
Next stop was the Bristol Knowledge Unconference room, where talk of Knowledge from scientific and new-media perspectives accompanied by geeky nods was interspersed with poetry readings. Up the hall, in the Members Room, several artists spent the weekend hacking the building itself—constructing a scary giant cellophane string, paper and wool insect hive between bookshelves and furniture. I came back the following day to find the artists installed inside Touch me touch you, with just their fingertips emerging to entice the touch of passers-by.
Downstairs in the Auditorium I played my first game of Tambourelli, a musical variation of shuttlecock for two to four people played with a tambourine as a racquet. Flickering from across the room was Milk Pixel built by the Bristol Robotics Lab, an inspired re-use project incorporating LEDs into two-litre plastic milk bottles. The 64 bottle/pixel array continuously responded to sound performances and moving image in unexpected collaborations and improvisations.
Amidst this sometimes chaotic self-organising and generative environment the glorious ninth artwork Cultural_Capital provided conceptual stability as well as being delicious. Paralleling the use of bacteria and culture in that staple of life—traditional bread-making—Cultural_Capital is a touring artwork that acquires both bacteria and Bourdieuian value from its installations over a period of time.
For Craftivism the sour-dough starter was cared for by curators in the gallery, transforming over about a week into a mature sour-dough. It was then baked into bread and made into bruschettas which were appreciatively consumed at the openings. What could be better than art you can eat! Portions of the finished dough were distributed amongst guests who could use it all to make a single loaf, grow it for a continuous supply of bread dough or let it die. The curators retain a certain amount and the remaining starter is passed on to the curators at the next venue.
The strength of this work lies in its simplicity: designating a colony of living yeast and bacteria in a stable symbiotic relationship as a collectable work of art, and situating the curator as the carer of that lifeform which will die unless regularly fed. Cultural_Capital is still alive and has been installed and eaten continuously around Europe since it was launched in Cornwall in March 2009. Unfortunately you won’t taste Cultural_Capital here as the sour-dough starter cannot legally enter Australia due to our strict border protection regulations.
Crafitivism could have been mistaken for a warm and fuzzy Information Age Village Fair, espousing principles of commons, community and care with artists, curators and visitors actually talking to and working with each other. However beneath the artful surfaces, crafty textures and edible objects, subversive structures and essential networks were being cultivated around distribution, modification, customisation, skill-sharing, playfulness, risk, and intimacy. Here the individual is never the hero—rather in these places the pleasure is in the process.
{$slideshow} HELD OVER EIGHT WEEKS AT THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION (AEAF), GONE IN NO TIME (GONE IN NO TIME) DESCRIBES NOT SO MUCH A COLLECTION OF WORKS BUT THE UNFOLDING OF MULTIPLE PROCESSES THROUGH THE SUCCESSION OF FOUR SETS OF ARTISTS OR ‘ACTS.’
As a way of circumventing the static display of objects in a gallery space, each ‘act’ in the program was staged over the course of a fortnight by a pair of artists who actively produced work and also engaged with gallery visitors during opening hours. The work of each ‘act’ was left in the gallery for the succeeding ‘act’ as material to work with.
The teamed artists in gone in no time were, in successive ‘acts’, Annette Lawrence and Jacobus Capone; Yhonnie Scarce and Nicholas Selenitsch; Margit Brünner and Danielle Freakley; and Ardi Gunawan, Katherine Huang and Jason Sweeney with guest Fiona Sprott. A musical performance by AEAF director Domenico de Clario and Sweeney concluded gone in no time.
Given that one of the accepted assumptions of a gallery is that it divides, separates and binds discrete works of art within its neutral surfaces, gone in no time directly called this assumption into question, as objects were accumulated, erased, eliminated and transformed throughout its duration. At the same time, the ‘acts’ transformed the approach to making and exhibiting objects, as artists had to consider working within a dynamic and evolving field of relationships effectively collapsing art’s historical boundaries, such as object/ field, support/supported, close/distant, process/product. While within contemporary art circles this might not seem so unusual, gone in no time went further by dissolving the distinctions between the process of creation, creation itself and the life of the artist, making them one. It is therefore extremely difficult to write about individual works; rather, in discussing gone in no time it is more productive to describe the unfolding of a single project that multiplies space thereby extending the idea of the gallery in both spatial and temporal terms.
Three aspects of gone in no time are of particular interest. First, as indicated, the framework is noteworthy through its activation of time while enabling artists to engineer or intensify (or take up the option of) the accidental and the surprising and, in effect, to bring about a transformation of the space. This was made possible through the exhibition’s sequential revelation, which enabled gone in no time potentially to make, unmake and remake itself. Ardi Gunawan’s reconfiguring of movement through the gallery space, by repositioning and tilting the gallery’s moveable internal walls each day, altered the perceptual field of observers and their connection to the work, while Danielle Freakley (of Quote Generator fame) literally disassembled the space by destroying the work of previous artists, transforming the gallery into an infrastructure of various shifting micro–spaces. Similarly, Katherine Huang’s sensitive placement of an assortment of small mirrors, vents and air-conditioning tubing throughout the space both revealed and explored these spaces through strategies of framing and mirroring at micro scale. In an enjoyable pairing of artists, Huang’s exploration was on such a divergent scale from Gunawan’s that together they produced a cinematic effect, the observer continually negotiating the differences.
The second significant aspect of gone in no time was in its being primarily experiential. Objects matter less than the relations between them: everyone and everything moved either by increment or at incredible speed through the activation of the temporary, the ephemeral and the changeable. For the observer this meant that no single or coherent image or artefact independently embodied the totality of the exhibit. Rather, what one recalls is the multiple fleeting impressions, moods, atmospheres or the ambiences of the gallery space rather than individual objects. The atmospheric drawings of Margit Brünner, for example, both generate and are generative of part of gone in no time’s multiple moods. Collapsing the distinctions between object and subject, the sense and the sensed, the drawings consist of dense layers of delicately produced coloured lines applied directly to the wall by a range of drawing instruments, some up to three metres long. The instruments altered the artist’s relationship to the surface by extending the body, at the same time enabling her to extend what a wall can be. The drawings produced a new depth (as opposed to flatness) by absorbing the observer within a perceptual field that alters the one-to-one, front-to-parallel relationship the observer customarily has with a vertical surface. This field enables the observer to test various distances and positions from which to view the work, at the same time cunningly propelling the observer into motion. Similarly, a particular atmosphere is evoked through Annette Lawrence’s abstract calculations. But unlike the sensuous experiences evoked by Brünner’s drawings, her work depicts an abstract landscape of information made visible through number, pattern and iteration. Informed by the cycles of the female body, Lawrence’s work is both self-reflecting and self-neglecting, tracing the body’s movements through time and space and therefore through another possible dimension—the unreal or the virtual.
The third aspect of interest was that objects in gone in no time were ‘monstrous.’ Substituting promiscuous objects for autonomous ones, creates a deviation from what one expects to find in a gallery space. The stability and circumscribed nature of objects is cast aside for the materially and programmatically malleable, deformable, transformable, bendable and able to be destroyed—gone in no time is, after all, about ruin. Consequently these objects began to take on properties of other works, making it difficult to determine where one artist’s work began and another ended. Jacobus Capone’s work, derived from rituals of “futility, pointlessness, moments gone,” exhibited this monstrous capacity through patterns that slowly threatened to engulf the entire gallery space in continuous expansion. The patterns turned out to be an interesting trajectory to monitor through the several acts of gone in no time. The work took on a second life after Nick Selenitsch sought to discipline the work in Act Two simply by ‘cleaning it up’ only for the work to then undergo a third mutation after Danielle Freakley decided to do a brutal aerosol number on what was initially a delicate surface pattern in Act Three. All of this left Capone’s initial work in a state entirely ‘other’ than how it started out.
These three aspects of gone in no time—its micro-spaces, the monstrous nature of its objects and its varying atmospheres and moods—are provocative and can be extended by analogy with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of “minor language,” whether or not a conscious influence. If a succession of art movements, styles and artistic figures describes a “major language”—of both the art historian and the institution—then a “minor language,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, is marked by the unruly and heterogeneous, where titles, names and objects fall between stable categories while opening them up to networks of proliferation and connection. In this respect, gone in no time invites consideration in terms of the Fluxus ‘movement.’
While some might dismiss gone in no time as an experiment that overshoots its mark or as underdeveloped or misguided, such assessments overlook the questioning of ideal forms and stable categories that marks gone in no time’s complex relationship to both power and history. Now that all is gone the question remains: how to account for it?
A selection of images and movies which in part document gone in no time can be seen at www.eaf.asn.au/2009/goneinnotime.html
Australian Experimental Art Foundation, gone in no time (gone in no time), Adelaide, Sept 15-Nov 7, 2009
One-way colour tunnel 2007, Olafur Eliasson; Collection of the Art Supporting Foundation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
photo Ian Reeves Photography
One-way colour tunnel 2007, Olafur Eliasson; Collection of the Art Supporting Foundation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
WHEN MASSES OF LONDON GALLERY-GOERS BEGAN TO SPONTANEOUSLY SUNBATHE ON THE FLOOR OF THE TATE MODERN UNDER THE HAZY GLOW OF OLAFUR ELIASSON’S ARTIFICIAL SUN FOR THE WEATHER PROJECT IN 2003, THE ARTIST’S INSTALLATION CAPTURED HEADLINES WORLDWIDE. SEVERAL YEARS LATER ELIASSON CONTINUES TO PROVOKE WITH EXPERIMENTS INTO SPACE, LIGHT, NATURAL PHENOMENA AND VISUAL PERCEPTION THAT HAVE ESTABLISHED HIM AT THE VERY FOREFRONT OF CONTEMPORARY ARTMAKING.
This year’s Sydney Festival sees the inclusion of both a large survey of the Danish-born Eliasson’s work, Take Your Time, along with a trilogy of immersive video installations by one of Australia’s most prominent new media artists, Lynette Wallworth, as major components of its visual arts program. Take Your Time, showing at the MCA in Sydney until April 11, first opened at the San Francisco MOMA in 2007 then toured a number of museums in the US where its range of spectacular experiential installations generated a buzz among gallery visitors. Wallworth’s videos carry similarly impressive credentials, exhibited previously to much acclaim both within Australia and at a number of prestigious international festivals, and appearing at the Sydney Festival as a trilogy for the first time.
Sunset kaleidoscope 2005, Olafur Eliasson
photo Fredrik Nilsen
Sunset kaleidoscope 2005, Olafur Eliasson
That two artists so greatly concerned with rewiring the relations between viewer, artwork and the world around us should share top billing is a sign of the times, as a growing number of artists shift their emphasis from the art object to experience and process. Where Eliasson has arguably most effectively differentiated himself is in his refusal to shy away from either visual seduction or spectacle in the exploration of his more abstruse concerns. Whether it’s the creation of shared viewing experiences that overturn the traditional notion of contemplation as inherently solitary, or visual thought experiments that return the viewer to an awareness of his or her own perceptual faculties (“seeing yourself seeing” as the artist puts it), these works reveal beauty and awe as tools to be exploited rather than enemies to be resisted.
360° room for all colours, 2002, Olafur Eliasson
photo courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
360° room for all colours, 2002, Olafur Eliasson
Speaking with Adam Jasper for Sydney Ideas Quarterly in the lead up to the exhibition’s launch, Eliasson pointed out that “art-historically speaking, we stand on the shoulders of generations for whom looking at art was considered such an intimate act that having somebody else in the space would compromise the experience.” In Take Your Time, enclosed spaces refute this tradition by bringing viewers physically closer to one another while, as the mechanics of the works are often made visible, visitors are stimulated to interrogate how the magic is realised. From a fluorescent lit spherical room that places visitors within the colour spectrum (360° room for all colours, 2002) to a darkened, cave-like space in which visitors are drawn toward a mesmerising artificial waterfall (Beauty, 1993), these spaces generate discussion more aligned with the logic of scientific analysis than aesthetic appreciation.
Wandering through this labyrinth of special effects, however, a niggling concern arises that, beyond the initial shift in perception these installations facilitate, there may be limited scope for deeper interpretation. Following this line of thought, suddenly Eliasson’s approach becomes slightly unnerving. Completely a-historical, mainly non-representational, and largely without objects, this is artmaking with all the points on the compass wiped clean. Ultimately, though, this may be an idealistic strategy on Eliasson’s part, one in which art takes place in the present moment liberating the viewer from the encumbering expectations of transcendence, and its accompanying anguishes, handed down from history. And while the artist has insisted “it’s not about utopia or anything final,” it is from this perspective that the works seem most affecting. A quiet plea emerges to use one’s senses, however conditional their production of reality might be, to appreciate nature simply as it is, rather than treating it as a canvas for the projection of our feelings, anxieties and the desire to transform it into something of our own making.
Invisible by Night, 2004, Lynette Wallworth
photo Colin Davison
Invisible by Night, 2004, Lynette Wallworth
Over at CarriageWorks in Redfern, the exhibition of Lynette Wallworth’s trilogy of immersive video installations follows the first major survey of the artist’s work staged at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum in early 2009, which also coincided with the debut of Duality of Light, a groundbreaking moving image artwork commissioned by the Adelaide Film Festival. Like Eliasson’s installations, this trilogy of intimate videos reveal Wallworth’s concern to place the viewer at the centre of the work but, in marked contrast, her approach is very much anchored in the specifics of history, place, identity and personal stories.
In the earliest work presented, Invisible by Night (2004), a life-sized woman appears trapped behind a misty screen and is beckoned to greet the viewer when the video is activated by a touch sensor. This uncanny encounter with a grief-stricken figure represents the artist’s melancholic and empathic response to the site of Melbourne’s first morgue. In a later work, Evolution of Fearlessness (2006), the same touch activation technique is used but here the idea is extended with the portrayal of 11 women, again in life-sized portraits. Some are refugees who have relocated to Australia from various corners of the globe and each has suffered violent persecution. The women’s harrowing true stories of survival are documented in an accompanying text.
In Wallworth’s videos the haptic dimension of the touch screen is not simply about engaging the senses as a challenge to the essentially non-tactile character of the cinematic medium. Rather, it belongs to a larger concern to use gesture, here the simple act of two hands meeting, to engender compassion and expose the viewer to meeting a stranger’s gaze at close proximity—a subversive act in a culture which conditions us to look away. Touch is not harnessed in the final installation, Duality of Light (2009), but again the notion of encounter is significant. In this instance it takes on a more mystical dimension. Immersing the visitor in the sounds of dripping water the installation brings to mind the emotive video works of Bill Viola where water signifies near religious journeys of birth and rebirth. Although here the subterranean sound of water hitting limestone, captured in a cave in Auckland by noted sound artist Chris Watson, leads into deeper recesses of memory becoming, as Wallworth describes it, like “an echo of time.”
Duality of Light, 2009, Lynette Wallworth
photo Grant Hancock
Duality of Light, 2009, Lynette Wallworth
So Wallworth, too, brings the experience back to the viewer with interactive video installations that issue a challenge to feel, to empathise and to relate, that runs counter to an entertainment culture that often demands little more than to sit back and enjoy. Eliasson offers similar challenges in differing ways, yet neither artist denies the audience pleasurable viewing experiences. In fact, the very opposite is true. Heed their advice to look more closely about you and on the faces of fellow visitors at both exhibitions you will find expressions of wonder, surprise and delight.
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Olafur Eliasson, Take Your Time, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Dec 10 2009-April 11 2010; Lynette Wallworth, Invisible by Night, Evolution of Fearlessness & Duality of Light, Carriageworks Sydney, Jan 7-24 2010
IN HARUTYUN KHACHATRYAN’S RETURN OF THE POET (2006), WE FOLLOW THE TRANSIT OF A MASSIVE SCULPTURE OF LATE 19TH-CENTURY ARMENIAN POET AND PHILOSOPHER JIVANY FROM YEREVAN, THE CAPITAL OF ARMENIA, TO JAVAKHK, JINVANY’S BIRTHPLACE. IN MANY WAYS, THE FILM’S TRACING OF THIS SLIGHTLY SURREAL JOURNEY, WITH NUMEROUS UNEXPECTED OBSTACLES AND DELIGHTS ALONG THE WAY, SYMBOLISES THE EXPERIENCE OF THE APT6 CINEMA PROGRAM.
The Australian Cinematheque established the expectation that major art shows should be accompanied by film screenings with its maiden outing at the fifth Asia Pacific Triennial in 2006. Now, with nine programs comprising over 100 films, documentaries and animations, the Cinematheque for the sixth incarnation of the APT cements its reputation for insightful, far-ranging programming.
Z32, 2008, Avi Mograbi
image courtesy Doc&Film International
Z32, 2008, Avi Mograbi
The sixth broadened this juggernaut’s ambit to include not just Central Asia, but the Middle East as well. This move is reflected strongly in the film program, which essentially eschews the more familiar cinemas of Japan, China, Korea and Hong Kong for those further west with two major programs, Promised Lands and The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation. South-East Asian arthouse cinema isn’t entirely absent; three auteurs are profiled with retrospective seasons during the exhibition of APT6. Of these, Takeshi Kitano (Japan) and Ang Lee (Taiwan/USA) are unusually well-exposed choices for such an adventurous program but the third, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, offers a challenging counterbalance. Panh, whose work includes documentary and dramatic filmmaking, as well as cultural conservation endeavours in Phnom Penh, deserves this sustained attention and the Cinematheque congratulations for bringing him to light.
Un barrage contre le pacifique (the sea wall), 2008, Rithy Panh
Threaded throughout the APT6 season, The Cypress and the Crow program highlights the richly textured history of animation practice in Iran. The vast cultural achievements of Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known as Kanoon) include well-known alumni such as Abbas Kiarostami, but its animation work has until now escaped wider attention. The Cypress and the Crow flings open the door prised ajar by 2007’s Persepolis (included in this program), leading audiences on an exhaustive journey through the Iranian animated tradition. Revered veteran director Noureddin Zarrinkelk is well represented, with a choice selection of gorgeous 1970s and 80s animations, as well as a more recent work, 1998’s Persian Carpet.
Iran’s history of textile design recurs in various forms across the program. It is however most evident in the four-screens installation in the gallery on Level 1, in the main APT artists’ section with the works by Farkhondeh Torabi and Morteza Ahadi. A striking still image from one of these, Ahadi’s exquisite, self-reflexive 35mm animation, The Sparrow and the Boll (2007), emblazons the print program, though it’s a shame it was only screened once in its proper black-box glory, amidst all the colourful chaos of the opening weekend celebrations. On the other hand, the installation of these gorgeous hand-made works amongst all the other artworks confers numerous benefits, not least the multiplication of eyeballs in the form of the thousands of visitors who visit over the APT’s four months.
Promised Lands is divided thematically and geographically into five autonomous curatorial categories, including Cinema of Partition, which examines Bangladesh, India, Kashmir and Pakistan, and The Tree of Life, looking at Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Kurdistan, both of which run concurrently throughout the APT6 season.
Yadon Ilaheyya (Divine Intervention), 2002, Ella Suleiman
Though the slimmest, the Sri Lankan set, The Road to Jaffna (Feb 4-14), is among the most vital of the programs, offering a rare glimpse of the conditions of civil war on the island. Two other shorter programs, Return of the Poet, focused on the cinema of Armenia and Turkey, and Eating my Heart, looking at Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, contain some of the most lyrical and moving work of the entire program. Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman cuts a Keaton-esque figure with his deadpan appearances in front of the lens, repetition of bizarre sight gags and a pervasively wistful sensibility. Suleiman’s “occupied imagination” comes powerfully to the fore in 2009’s The Time That Remains, and especially 2002’s Divine Intervention, where the comic and the tragic, the humiliating and the absurd, and the fantastic and the banal uncomfortably co-exist.
In Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s How I Love You (2001), gay men talk about their feelings to do with their own and other men’s bodies. However, speaking from a place where homosexuality is punishable with a jail sentence, Zaaatari’s subjects’ faces are over-exposed, or blurred by a filmy white veil. As they discuss, among other things, gender roles in relationships, the viewer gains access to a host of complex sexual and personal realities normally totally hidden from view. Many of Parvez Sharma’s interviewees in A Jihad For Love (2007) are also veiled, for obvious reasons: through a series of sophisticated interviews, the film explores whether or not the idea of spiritual struggle can be reclaimed to reflect the internal struggle of those who find themselves gay in a near universally hostile world. The documentary urge also runs through the memorable Armenian program. As well as Harutyun Khachatryan, the series also offered a rare chance to experience the work of the incredible filmmaker and theorist Artavazd Pelechian, whose idea of “spiritual” or “intuitive” montage has contributed to his international cult-director status, and whose shorts program mobilised a small army of art/film lovers at APT6.
Meng (We), 1969, Artavazd Pelechian
Coming on the heels of the program immediately prior to the APT6, the View From Elsewhere (2009), which also examined Western and Central Asia and the Middle East, Promised Lands and the Cypress and the Crow develop our cinematic understanding of these regions of the globe in thoughtful selections reflecting the Cinematheque’s sensitive and intuitive approach to programming. Mapping, as it does, cinematic expression across some of the world’s most fractious, troubled zones, it is perhaps not surprising that some of this fragmentation and volatility has crept into the print program advising audiences of what they will encounter at the Cinematheque: the absence of a single day-by-day calendar was felt. This notwithstanding, the APT6 cinema program provided an enormous wealth of ideas, as well as viewing pleasure, for an increasingly grateful Brisbane audience. It is through exposure to these ideas, sounds, images and experiences that we reach greater understandings of our place in the region, and the world, and of those we share it with; in Pelechian’s words, that we are “a ‘we’ that is just a piece of the larger ‘We’.”
APT6 Cinema Program, curators Kathryn Weir, Jose da Silva, Australian Cinematheque, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Dec 5, 2009-April 5, 2010
In 2011, Urban Theatre Projects will be 30 years old. It is a feat of incredible resilience, which itself is an enduring theme of their work. In 1981, Kim Spinks, Paul Brown and Christine Sammers founded Death Defying Theatre. Ten years later, artistic director Fiona Winning (1991-95) relocated the company from Bondi to Auburn and then to Casula. In 1997 John Baylis (1997-2001) took over the reins. The company changed its name and moved to Bankstown in 2001, where it is still based. This archive focuses on UTP’s more recent history, documenting the era associated with artistic director Alicia Talbot (2001 onwards), rather than her predecessors (whom we will cover when our archive is completed back to 1994. Eds).
There are three discernable strands to Urban Theatre Projects’ work over the past decade. First, there is Talbot’s body of work as a director—Cement Garage (2000), The Longest Night (2002), Back Home (2006), The Last Highway (2008) and most recently The Fence (2010). Sitting alongside this corpus is the more spectacular work UTP has developed with collaborators, for instance Mechanix (2003) with designer Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, Karaoke Dreams (2004) with Katia Molino, and Plaza Real (2004) with Branch Nebula, as well as india@oz.sangam (2002) with the Western Sydney Indian community. Finally, there are the performances produced by solo and/or emerging artists whom UTP has mentored, auspiced, or generally supported in some way. These include the intimate performances of Brian Fuata in Fa’afafine (2002), Valerie Berry in The Folding Wife (2007) and Ahilan Ratnamohan in The Football Diaries (2009), as well as the performed oral histories Fast Cars and Tractor Engines (2005) and Stories of Love and Hate (2008), directed and devised by Roslyn Oades.
Of course the distinctions are not as clear-cut as this and these threads overlap, braid together, and sometimes tangle. Though Talbot cautions against seeing “aesthetic cohesion” where there is none, together the artists involved in these projects have examined the politics and poetics of resilience. Time and time again, Urban Theatre Projects has explored who becomes marginalised, how and why; but rather than talking about marginalised subjects, UTP prefer to talk with them through community consultations, running workshops and mentoring emerging artists. More importantly, UTP enables people to speak not only about their lives, but also about life more generally—as one collaborator remarked, “my social and political opinions and ideas about the world.” Through their many productions we have come to know many modes of resilience: modest, contingent, defiant, temporary, permanent and sometimes triumphant, but rarely in the way we expect.
The irony of pioneering an aesthetics of resilience through theatre is that it’s the least ‘resilient’ art of all, which is where this RealTime archive comes in. It’s a focused collection of our best profiles, images, interviews and reviews. They might prompt your memory if you were there or jealousy if you weren’t, but above all else they will make you think—as Urban Theatre Projects does—about how the world works within theatre and theatre works in the world. Caroline Wake
What is Music was founded by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim in 1994 and can rightly lay claim to significantly raising the profile of and expanding the audience for experimental music in Australia. Early festivals had a reputation for exploring the wild and anarchic, often involving rock, punk and noise cross-overs, outsider artists and performance art all thrown in with the more serious end of improvisation. Ambarchi says in an interview in 2004 that they wanted to present:
“really high-brow and low-brow stuff.…We didn’t really differentiate…we just threw them together. In the beginning there was more of a [pressing] reason because there were so few gigs in Sydney for experimental artists…We were interested in digging people out of the woodwork…presenting work that was really important but that no one knew about.”
RealTime’s reviews of the festival start in 2002, alas missing some of the crazier 90s manifestations. The festival has grown to serious contender status, playing in venues such as The Studio at the Sydney Opera House and CarriageWorks in Sydney, Brisbane Powerhouse and the ABC Iwaki Studio in Melbourne. The festivals of 2002-2005 increased to mammoth proportions with a plethora of international acts who otherwise may not have come to Australia—Merzbow, Keiji Heino (their performances detailed in the 2004 review by Danni Zuvela), Otomo Yoshihide (see Gail Priest’s 2002 article), Sun O))) and Pan Sonic, and offering festival platforms in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane, increasing interstate touring potential.
What is Music? has always been a festival that invites passionate reactions. The name itself is a provocation, and so writing about the festival has often involved critical discussion on the nature of experimental music as a whole. Greg Hooper’s review of the Brisbane leg of What is Music? 2004 reflects this most colourfully:
“Noise/experimental/microsound improvisation has a long enough history to have developed its own clichés…the formal structures to organise the sound stream are still in short supply. Sometimes it’s a bit like the one-man-band thing…Except nowdays it’s shaving a whale in a cardboard box and every time you hit the footpedal it vomits.”
In 2005 Caleb K (a co-director of the event in 2004) offered an opinion piece on how What is Music? was faring, not only due to irregular funding and financial pressures, but also the changing landscape of experimental music which by then included the NOW now festival. A strong criticism was of the diminishing of local representation in favour of higher-profile international acts. This imbalance has been addressed somewhat in recent years, but unlike the early days the tendency is towards programming established artists rather than emerging (in Sydney at least).
Fifteen years on and the festival continues, now under the sole guiding hand of Robbie Avenaim: a remarkable feat of staying power. The scale of the event has reduced to a more sustainable level with the majority of the activities now happening in Melbourne, but with some events in Sydney and Perth. While it still elicits passionate criticism and discussion (see Gail Priest’s review of the 2009 Sydney What is Music?), there is no denying that the Australian experimental music landscape would be very different if What is Music? had not begun and not had the audacity to just keep on rolling! The challenge for What is Music? now is to maintain its unique flavour in a more established experimental music landscape and increase its engagement with a new generation of music makers. Gail Priest
Ben Byrne will be reviewing aspects of What is Music Melbourne in RT95.
soundcapsule #1 features sound works from Germ Studies (Clare Cooper and Chris Abrahams), Joel Stern, Adam Simmons, Ernie Althoff, Mark Cauvin, Topology, Rice屎Corpse, James Rushford, Cat Hope, Clocked Out, Jason Sweeney, and a video composition by Brigid Burke.
You may choose to download single tracks or the entire collection as a zip file. (Note for Dec 18 – if you have difficulties with the downloading the 320bps files – they may still be coming online – please come back tomorrow to find them complete.)
Germ Studies is a unique duo comprising Clare Cooper on guzheng and Chris Abrahams on DX7. Both accomplished improvisers, their collaboration is about an investigation into the essence of their contrasting instruments. Chris Reid describes Germ Studies, their double CD, consisting of 198 tracks with accompanying illustrations:
“It is…a deep exploration of musical language. Rather than producing longer, more self-contained compositions, Cooper (guzheng) and Abrahams (DX7) have created a series of sonic moments that flit through conscious awareness, sharply distinguished from each other by the nature of the sound, the sum of which creates a substantial and engrossing oeuvre.” www.realtimearts.net/feature/Earbash/9619
As Germ Studies tracks are quite short the artists have offered 3 pieces.
Stern has appeared in the pages of RealTime for many years, as a writer, co-director of the OtherFilm Festival and as composer/sound artist. In 2009 his CD Objects, Masks, Props was featured in earbash, reviewed by Gail Priest:
“Objects, Masks, Props is perhaps most interesting because rather than the field recordings grounding us in the ‘real world’, serving as markers of concrete space, Stern’s manipulations and combinations create a kind of lucid-dreaming…” www.realtimearts.net/feature/Earbash/9437
Brisbane resident Leighton Craig has been experimenting and composing with keyboard, synthesizer and all manner of instruments since the mid-90s, both solo and in groups including The Deadnotes, and The Lost Domain. He runs the label Kindling Records.
This collaborative piece is part of a larger unreleased suite of improvisations recorded one scorching hot morning in 2006 at Toohey Forest, just south of Brisbane, surrounded by lorikeets, tawny frogmouths and possums.
Adam Simmons is a multi-instrumentalist who first made an appearance in RealTime’s earbash with his 2002 CD Adam Simmons’ Toy Band, Happy Jacket. In RT94 RealTime-Aphids writer in residence Simon Charles offered a profile of Simmons current work:
“Simmons’ creativity and talent for collaboration make him one of the most in demand musicians on the Melbourne scene. His involvement with groups such as Embers, The Australian Art Orchestra, Bennett’s Lane Big Band, New Blood and Bucketrider (to name a few), testifies to his versatility as a performer. This is no more apparent than in his live shows which incorporate an arsenal of wind instruments and creative approaches to composition and improvisation.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9669
Ernie Althoff’s approach to kinetic art, sound installation and music making has been an inspiration to many younger artists practicing today. Chris Reid wrote on Althoff’s major installation The Middle Eight, as part of the exhibition The Freedom of Angels, Sculpture in a Century of Upheaval, Geelong Gallery, 2009:
“Althoff’s work sets sound free from its metal and timber constructions. Through the twin catalysing forces of electrical power and the composer’s design, sound is now encouraged to flow from musical and unmusical objects. The listener can experience and understand familiar ambient sounds anew, and better understand what it is to engage in the act of making sound or music”. www.realtimearts.net/article/issue91/9497
Mark Cauvin made his first appearance in RealTime with Chris Reid’s earbash review of the debut CD Transfigurations:
“[T]he more you listen, the more you appreciate the immense stamina and concentration required to realise these works at the necessary level of perfection. Cauvin’s Transfiguration leads us to a new appreciation of the musical possibilities of the double bass…” www.realtimearts.net/feature/search/9286
He also impressed Gail Priest with his performance as part of the New Music Network Solo Perspective 2 concert:
“Musician and instrument seem to be in an intense symbiotic relationship as Cauvin summons extraordinary sounds, the correlation of gesture and sound absolutely pure, non-theatrical, yet utterly engaging.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9606
As one of Australia’s long standing and leading new music ensembles, Topology have appeared many times in the pages of RealTime. Keith Gallasch writes of their versatility in recent performance at Sydney’s Sound Lounge:
“Brisbane-based Topology’s east coast tour gave us a live, working band with a casually theatrical and jazzy spontaneity…Hoey’s viola improvisation on Davidson’s Exteriors (a response to Southern Indian temple architecture) ranged through meditative warblings to passionate flourishes supported by tabla-ish taps on Davidson’s double bass. Babbage’s witty arrangement of Cold Chisel’s Cheap Wine starts out 50s cool jazz and then proves Topology can rock.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9609
Tyalgum – concise version (1999, 10:11) download 192bps – 14Mb; download 320bps – 32.3Mb
Composed by Robert Davidson, performed by John Babbage (baritone
saxophone), Christa Powell (violin), Bernard Hoey (viola), Robert Davidson
(double bass), Kylie Davidson (piano)
“The small village of Tyalgum is nestled in a spectacular landscape dominated by Wollumbin (Mt Warning)—the first place on the Australian mainland lit by the sun each day, and the core of an ancient, enormous volcano. Commissioned by the village’s wonderful music festival, I spent a week there composing and found my resistance to landscape-inspired music stood little chance against the inspiring forms around me. The piece is a kind of personal mythology in response to the land, ending with a reflection of the intense quiet I often experienced there.” Robert Davidson
Copyright Status: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial http://www.topologymusic.com/
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Rice屎Corpse
Along with a review of Mrs Rice, the debut CD by Rice屎Corpse, Lucas Abela’s latest ensemble, RealTime also featured an article where Dan Edwards spoke with the Chinese musicians Yang Yang (drums) and Li Zenghui (piano) in Beijing and Gail Priest talked to Abela (glass) in Sydney. A longer version of the interview with Abela was also published.
“Abela: Always when I play, I have this imaginary rhythm section in my head. I think I aurally hallucinate because I’m hearing all sorts of things. In this instance I got this band, and they’re outwardly influencing me as well and I’m hearing them and I’m following a rhythm or following a change of theirs. It added new elements to my playing. And I think it really shows on the album because it’s completely different to anything I’ve done before.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9510
Earbash review – <a href="http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9504www.realtimearts.net/feature/search/9504
Full interview – www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9556
Chris Reid was thoroughly impressed with James Rushford’s Vellus. He writes
“This is a cracker of a CD, one of the best sound art releases I have heard…Rushford’s are well crafted compositions, where ‘resolution’ can be found structurally and timbrally. What works particularly well is his juxtaposition of electronic and acoustic instruments.” http://www.realtimearts.net/feature/Earbash/9438
Rushford also appeared with his trio Golden Fur as part of the New Music Network series. Gail Priest writes of his performance of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Oscillators (1992):
“As piano resonances cut through the pure sine tone to produce swirling and beating effects, the sound becomes thick and tangible. Rushford’s touch is gentle and evocative allowing the beauty and meditative nature of the piece to come to the fore. www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9606
Cat Hope—composer, musician, academic and tireless advocate for exploratory music in Western Australia—recently launched Decibel, an ensemble of musicians defined by Hope as exploring the “nexus of acoustic and electronic instruments.” Jonathan Marshall reflected on ideas about sound and music suggested by the the Tape It! concert, the ensemble’s first appearance, as part of the Totally Huge Music Festival:
“Hope and her peers…continue to argue that noise art, concrete approaches to sound and to the sample, together with instrumental composition, graphic scores and rules-based ideas, are not incompatible…Just as Cat Hope’s own approach favours the unresolved, so the combination of ideas and processes here might favour an endless, irresolvable dialogue, rather than a new condition of musical interpretation.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9674
Clocked Out, directed by Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson, have been extremely busy in 2009. Keith Gallasch describes their Wide Alley concert at the Sydney Opera House Studio this year:
“Clocked Out’s approach displays a meeting of forms across cultures and musical languages but also allows the musics of Sichuan enough time-space to stand on their own: in the presentation of traditional works, in re-framings of native classics and in wilder experimental fusions where traditional instrumentalists reveal how they can transplant their virtuosity to new terrains.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue90/9442
Clocked Out also presented a concert at Brisbane Powerhouse of Stockhausen: A Message from Sirius. See Greg Hooper’s response: www.realtimearts.net/article/issue91/9489
Most recently, Erik Griswold also co-created The States (with Sarah Pirrie, Craig Foltz). See Greg Hooper’s review www.realtimearts.net/article/94/9672
Jason Sweeny is a composer with multiple pseudonyms. Most recently he has been releasing and performing as Panoptique Electrical, a project which brings together elements of compositions he has made to accompany performance works by artists and companies such as Version 1.0, Victoria Spence and the PVI Collective. Sweeney is also one of the driving forces behind the hybrid performance group Unreasonable Adults. In an interview with Sweeney, Keith Gallasch described the music as:
“…contemplative and dreamy, never soporific… [T]he album [is] neither predictably ‘spacey’ nor mindlessly ambient, although late night listening can yield the relief of high quality distraction and the curious comfort of a free-floating melancholy that Let The Darkness At You generates. www.realtimearts.net/article/issue88/9255
(video excerpt)
While there are many artist who combine video with laptop music, there are very few who also add an instrument into the mix making composer, clarinetist, visual artist Brigid Burke unique. On her performance in Solo Perspectives 2 presented by the New Music Network Gail Priest wrote:
“The final two pieces, Roses will Scream (2007) and Scratching (2009), incorporate live video in a more essential way, overlaying live feeds to affect textures and transparencies on pre-recorded material, both photographic and hand drawn—an impressive feat of multi-tasking. Both pieces for bass clarinet explore the rich range of the instrument, finding an elasticity to its tone and timbre but with an agile, melodic touch.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9606
The wild child of alternative music culture, What is Music? has been running on an almost annual basis for 15 years. So now that it’s in its teens, is WIM? wilder, or are festival years like dog years making it more than middle aged? In 2009, I think the answer may depend on where you experienced it and how far you and the festival go back.
When WIM? began in 1994 festival founders Robbie Avenaim and Oren Ambarchi both lived in Sydney so the festival had a strong focus here, expanding to Melbourne in 1997 and subsequently touring to Perth and Brisbane some years. As a whole, the festival has become smaller (the large scale manifestations of 2002-5 being unsustainable). Also over the last few years Avenaim, the now sole director, has spent more time in Melbourne so this leg of What is Music? has become the centrepiece, in 2009 offering five events across a range of venues.
For the last two years the main gig for Sydney has consisted of one very long concert at CarriageWorks. (In 2008 there was also a sideshow featuring Avenaim’s band Wog at a smaller venue.) The 2009 Sydney event offered 11 acts over six hours, including a performance and installation in the foyer. Particular highlights for this year were from the improv duos of Jim Denley (saxophone) and Clayton Thomas (double bass), and, in their Germ Studies pairing, Clare Cooper (guzheng) and Chris Abrahams (DX7). Both Cooper and Thomas live in Berlin, so it was exciting to hear them play again and witness their growth as artists as well as the development of the other ongoing collaborative relationships. It was also good to hear Jon Rose perform without the fences, kites or bicycles that he’s recently been manipulating. Instead it was just Rose with violin, laptop and magic interactive bow filling the space with cascading notes and energetic gesture, reminding me of the first time I saw him perform—at the REV festival in 2002.
Brendan Walls perhaps came closest to the older WIM? anarchic spirit with his upturned table of chipped cymbals and broken electronics which created a thunderous apocalypse to accompany a relentless video of riot clashes—at turns shocking and naïve in the representation of good, evil and chaos. David Shea also utilised video featuring a cut-up of the cut-up work of Canadian filmmaker Authur Lipsett. Showing Lipsett’s original film, Very Nice, Very Nice, was a bold move as it allowed us to decide for ourselves whether the collage really needed re-collaging. Although an interesting structural or anti-structural exercise, Lipsett’s version is already concise and thought provoking. I’m not sure Shea added much, besides length, in his re-interpretation.
Miles van Dorssen’s sound sculptures have been features of several What is Music? festivals, and his magnificent Feuerwasser (reviewed in RT85) is hard to top. This year his work was less of a visual spectacle but offered a much stronger sonic focus using spinning horns and speakers to fill the foyer with a rich dopplering drone that even mesmerised some of the punters waiting for the amateur dance concert at the other end of CarriageWorks. Another foyer attraction was Richard Allen’s Egg, a cocoon hanging from a pyramid of piping and intended for inhabitation by an audience member. When swung it triggered an ambient soundscape (with some help from a guitarist). Unfortunately the interval was quite short, and as the evening started bizarrely punctually for a sound gig, there was never much hanging around in the foyer for audience members to engage with it.
Suicidal Variation, WIM? festival, Sydney 2009
The international acts, Anna Zaradny, Robert Piotrowicz (both from Poland) and John Wiese (US) appreared in the final half of the evening. Unfortunately, there is not much detail I can impart as by now each act was so excruciatingly loud that ears had to be blocked in order to stay in the room (and I have to admit I could no longer stay by part-way into John Wiese’s performance). It’s not that I have a problem with loud noise—used structurally, viscerally and/or politically it can be incredibly affecting in a way that makes sense of the music. But here the master level was just so goddamned loud that all intricacies of the works were lost. While Wiese is a self-confessed ‘sonic-extremist’ both Polish artists were actually described in the program notes as “not-so harsh”, even “hypnotising” and “massaging”, however the volume and brutal mixing totally blocked the audience from entering and engaging with the sound. Basically, with fingers in your ears, all artists sound pretty much the same Admittedly the video from Korean duo Suicidal Variation was engaging, offering an intriguing clash of narrative and noise—the kind that is meant to be loud to have a visceral effect—but by then I was already shredded by the sound system so there was no sense of contrast. Avenaim is hoping to bring the duo out for the next festival.
The end of year time slot might bear some blame, but it also seems that the programming consisted of what is now standard festival fare, with no real surprises. Along with the significant lack of engagement with younger artists in the Sydney scene this took its toll on attendance and the overall vibe of What is Music? Sydney. It is also really worth reconsidering the epic one night gig format that the Sydney leg has become. While inclusion in the CarriageWorks program provides profile for the event, the fact that it must then be compressed into one night not only makes it hard to create the momentum of a festival, but it’s a really difficult ask of a listener to concentrate in formal concert mode to four acts in a row, over two unrelenting hours and that’s just the first half. And what is it like for the artists? I’d much prefer a series of smaller, varied events, as programmed in Melbourne, to get my What is Music? festival fix. But then again Arts Victoria actually invests in the Melbourne event.
Nonetheless, keeping the festival going is no mean feat and, of course, the nature of the event is going to change as the culture does. Perhaps Sydney with its troubled funding climate and venue challenges means the What is Music? is growing old respectably here, while the Melbourne manifestation continues to age disgracefully, maintaining the vividness, boldness and wild spirit that Avenaim (and Ambarchi) have fought hard to bring to the fore of experimental music over the last 15 years.
Ben Byrne will review What is Music? Melbourne in RealTime 95 Feb-March
To enter a gallery and be greeted with something other than silence is a nice change. In the case of Brown Council’s Big Show exhibition at Locksmith Project Space, you leave with laughter ringing in your ears. Dressed as dunces, in brightly coloured cone-shaped paper hats and matching bibs, the four performer-artists laugh hysterically on a monitor, seemingly at nothing in particular, at each other’s fake laughter and at their own slapstick comedy acts in Big Show (2009), the second video piece which is projected onto the conjoining wall.
Canned laughter normally comprises brief bursts following punch-lines in sit-coms, but in the case of The One Hour Laugh (2009) it's a non-stop 60-minute endurance performance that, at least for Brown Council, sucks the fun right out of laughing. It's also a fitting accompaniment to Big Show in which there are no punch lines and the performances are laughable, in the worst sense. The acts include two dunces continuously slapping each other’s faces, a gag-inducing banana eating marathon (the bananas are pulled from inside the dunce’s pants) and a wrist- and ankle-untying escape act of undramatic writhing around on the floor.
Last time I saw Brown Council was a rather different experience—they flashed their boobs at me. I was in the audience of NightTime, an evening of short works at Performance Space where, in keeping with the Petty Theft theme, they had 'stolen' the stereotyped feminist act of bra-burning and Beyoncé Knowles’ apparently female empowering yet oddly traditionalist pop anthem “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (2008) and merged the two in a stoic performance re-asserting the need for radical feminist protest in contemporary times. I found their pop-protest moving (boob flashing may have been done before, but it is still gutsy), however there was an inescapable cringe factor that I put down to the earnestness of the act. It was missing Brown Council’s signature humour.
The One Hour Laugh, 2009, Brown Council
Humour pervades Brown Council’s live performance and performance video practice, allowing them to effectively rip apart conventions of screen, theatre and art history and critique contemporary culture, while avoiding the limitations of didacticism and the defensive reaction of audiences to overt agenda. Like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night jester, Fester, it seems one has to be “wise enough to play the fool”, since it takes skill and sophistication to combine acute cultural insight and comedy, essentially to say something complex through something stupid. In Big Show Brown Council do just that.
The cartoon-like violence and crude acts of entertainment in the Big Show video belie a sophisticated interrogation into conventions of humour in performance, and expose the hilarity of performance, or more accurately, the absurdity of what performers endure in the name of art. The endurance factor behind Big Show’s apparently light-hearted comedy dawns as your own gag reflex sets in from watching a dunce genuinely retch (after an hour of banana ingestion), as you feel sympathy pains from seriously stinging cheeks and note the frustration, and close behind it boredom, of witnessing the escape artist's continual, flailing failing. The artists' self-inflicted discomfort recalls the performance art tradition that has embraced self-mutilation, debasement and mental anguish with performances that, were they not canonised in art history, might seem to be acts of plain stupidity. Brown Council’s humour suggests that the performance artist is the fool, the butt of their own cruel jokes. While a fair observation, this isn’t Big Show's punch line. As if accentuating the point, The One Hour Laugh aptly provides those over-the-top guffaws you hear when someone clearly doesn’t get the joke.
Rather, by embodying the ‘dunce’, a figure incapable of learning, and enacting soft-core self-harm and generally failing to perform, Brown Council doesn't satirise the performance artist so much as themselves in relation to the performance artist ‘greats.' The inane repetition of slapping and guzzling in Big Show mirrors the postmodern device which Brown Council employ, reiterating and referencing historical artworks and actions, indicating that the collective are worrying at its own capability to learn (and not just loot) from its predecessors.
Brown Council describe the notion “of the Australian artist as a shadower to European and American art histories” as the focus of their earlier 2009 work What Do I Do? (1970-2009). Here they re-enact two Vito Acconci performance pieces, in one repeatedly asking, “What do I do? What do I say?”, and in the other standing blindfolded and being hit with tomatoes. Performing their own “performance anxiety”, as they put it, continues in Big Show with the artists relegated to a corner stool (where I found one of them gallery-minding the show) and donning the dunce’s cap—like the once common form of humiliating punishment for schoolchildren not performing properly.
It is pretty funny that one of the most exciting, emerging performance and video art outfits suffers such performance anxiety and failure complex that it's had to resort to public self-flagellation. Of course, had Brown Council nothing to really contribute to art history the joke of Big Show would just fall flat.
Brown Council, Big Show, Locksmith Project Space, Alexandria, Dec 3-19
![lake mungo, land[sound]scapes, installation, josephine starrs and leon cmielewski, 2009](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/34/3460_gallasch_lakemungo_install2.jpg)
![satellite view, land[sound]scapes installation, josephine starrs and leon cmielewski, 2009](https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/34/3459_gallasch_lakemungo_install1.jpg)
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soundcapsule #1 features sound works from Germ Studies (Clare Cooper and Chris Abrahams), Joel Stern, Adam Simmons, Ernie Althoff, Mark Cauvin, Topology, Rice屎Corpse, James Rushford, Cat Hope, Clocked Out, Jason Sweeney, and a video composition by Brigid Burke.
