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Scott Shepherd, GATZ, Elevator Repair Service

photo Chris Beirens

Scott Shepherd, GATZ, Elevator Repair Service

FROM NOW UNTIL JUNE THERE’S A WEALTH OF ADVENTUROUS ART TO EXPERIENCE ACROSS THE COUNTRY. HERE’S ADVANCE NOTICE OF SOME OF THE SHOWS THAT HAVE GRABBED THE INTEREST OF REALTIME’S EDITORS.

elevator repair service, gatz

You enjoyed the plethora of theatrical epics in this year’s Sydney Festival and you’re a fan of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Or you’ve never read it but would love to have it read aloud to you, word for word. Then GATZ is for you: a seven-hour show that’s travelled the world since 2006 from New York’s Elevator Repair Service innovatively tackling the very nature of reading and performance. Adventures, Sydney Opera House, May 15-31; www.sydneyoperahouse.com

My Darling Patricia, Night Garden

photo Jeff Busby

My Darling Patricia, Night Garden

peformance space: my darling patricia’s night garden

Following the success of the award-winning Politely Savage, the long awaited Night Garden from My Darling Patricia looms (see photo page 2). This work furthers the company’s exploration of gothic Australia, distinctively fusing performance, puppetry, video and installation—here the skeleton of a burned-out house. The Australia-Japan photomedia collaboration, Trace Elements, is also on show until March 21. And in May, There Goes the Neighborhood, curated by Zanny Begg and Keg de Souza, explores the politics of urban space. Meanwhile performer Rosie Dennis’ highly anticipated new show Fraudulent Behavior premieres in June. Performance Space, Night Garden, CarriageWorks, March 6-14; www.performancespace.com.au

Yayoi Kusama, Walking on the Sea of Death, 1981

courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo

Yayoi Kusama, Walking on the Sea of Death, 1981

mca: yayoi kusama: mirrored years

You won’t see stars, but spots will certainly appear before your eyes when you enter the immersive worlds of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (see page 3). Single works have been exhibited previously in Australia but here is an exhibition on the grand scale: film, performance documentation, sculpture, installation work and painting, including 50 recent print works. A unique vision, a transformative experience. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Feb 24-June 7; www.mca.com.au

malthouse/arena: goodbye vaudeville charlie mudd

Some of the most innovative theatre of recent years (The Black Swan of Trespass, The Eisteddfod) has come from Melbourne’s Stuck Pigs Squealing underpinned by the collaboration of director Chris Kohn and writer Lally Katz. Kohn is now artistic director of Arena Theatre, but the creative relationship with Katz persists in a Malthouse-Arena co-production, Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd. With Kohn’s keen eye for the languages of theatre this show resurrects the vaudeville world of 1913 Melbourne but through the prism of Katz’s surreal imaginings. Malthouse, March 6-28, www.malthousetheatre.com.au; www.goodbyevaudeville.blogspot.com

clocked out: the wide alley

The dynamic Brisbane-based duo of composer-pianist Erik Griswold and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson have an extensive 2009 program taking them to Sydney, Auckland, remote Queensland and Canberra. In March at Sydney Opera House’s The Studio and then at the Auckland Festival they will fuse traditional music from the street and opera of China’s Sichuan Province with their own avant-garde creations. Aural excitement is guaranteed in a Clocked Out gig. The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 1, 5pm, www.sydneyoperahouse.com

stc: martin crimp’s country

Looking well ahead to late June, here’s one for the diary: Benedict Andrews’ production of The City by leading English playwright Martin Crimp (Attempts On Her Life, The Country). Those who saw Andrews’ engrossing production of Marius von Mayenburg’s Eldorado for Malthouse in 2006, will recognise what has doubtless attracted the director: everyday suburban life goes doggedly if bizarrely on while a ‘secret war’ rages. In the meantime STC’s offering a welcome revival of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in March and two visiting Kafka shows in April: Kafka’s Monkey (from his Report to the Academy) performed by the UK’s Kathryn Hunter, and an Icelandic physical theatre rendition of Metamorphosis (p3, p16). STC, The City, June 29-Aug 9, www.sydneytheatre.com.au

casula powerhouse: nam bang!

Thirty four years after the Vietnam War, Casula Powerhouse is mounting a major show of works by 25 artists from Australia, Vietnam and beyond that reflect imaginatively on the experiences of those involved and their descendants. Artistic director Nicholas Tsoutas aptly asks, “When does war become art?” An international conference, with prominent arts writer and activist Lucy Lippard as keynote speaker, will take place April 17-18. Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, April 4 –June 21; www.casulapowerhouse.com

sound travellers 2009 and free cd

Now in its second year, Sound Travellers has a substantial touring program of sound art, improvised jazz and contemporary classical music.You can see the program on the organisation’s website and while there request a free CD of a collection of works by the touring artists—including Topology, Ross Bolleter (a featured artist in Ten Days on the Island), Pivot, Joel Stern, Ensemble Offspring, Mark Isaacs, Camilla Hannan, Klumpes Ahmad and more. www.soundtravellers.com.au

double take: ann landa award 2009

You may well do a double take when you see the list of artists competing for the 2009 Ann Landa Award for Video & New Media Arts: Cao Fei (People’s Republic of China), Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano (Australia), Phil Collins (UK), TV Moore (Australia), Lisa Reihana (New Zealand) and Mari Velonaki (Australia). Yes, the award’s gone international. The mix of video, interactive robotics and digital photography will inherently tackle the big question, “How can we be both the self, and an other at the same time; both a self, and an out-of-body split self?” Art Gallery of New South Wales, May 7-July 19, www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

the chauvel cinema does expanded cinema

As part of its Cinematheque program, Sydney’s Chauvel is showing an expanded cinema program “devoted to (mostly) Australian experimental art films that use multiple projectors.” The program includes Paul Sharit’s twin screen, looping Razor Blades (US,1968), John Dunkley’s pattern-play Rotunda, Dirk de Bruyn Experiments (1982), a veritable catalogue of techniques and “a scream from suburbia”; Arthur and Corinne Cantrill’s The City (1970), “a composite view of the city is created by three films screened simultaneously”; and from the same filmmakers, Meteor Crater—Gosse Bluff (1978). Also coming up at the Chauvel on March 6 is a rare opportunity to see two recent films by popular, award-winning Czech filmmaker David Ondricek. Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, Sydney, Feb 23, 6.30pm; www.chauvelcinema.net.au

blacktown arts centre: blind as you see it

We haven’t seen their work yet, but the emerging Shh Company are tackling a challenging subject with their director and composer Michal Imielski. Blind As You See It fuses puppetry, theatre, music and dance in an exploration of the experience of losing one’s sight. Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, Feb 27-28; www.artscentre.blacktown.nsw.gov.au

syncretism: lawrence english + no anchor

Brisbane’s No Anchor experimental duo “creates an utterly engulfing wall of sound” while Lawrence English generates immersive sound fields with material from his album, Colour for Autumn. With a guest appearance from Heinz Riegler. Judith Wright Centre, March 21; www.judithwrightcentre.com

Fleur Elise Noble’s filmic-theatre production 2-Dimensional Life of Her

come out: 2-dimensional life of her

One of the many intriguing hybrid performances in the 2009 Come Out Festival is young Adelaide artist Fleur Elise Noble’s 2-Dimensional Life of Her (see photograph on page 2). An earlier version won the Best in Show award in the 2008 Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar program. The work involves three projectors, animation, drawing and an audience immersed in paper, and will have an accompanying drawing installation at the Experimental Art Foundation. Come Out 2009, Adelaide, May 18-30; www.comeout.on.net

griffin theatre company: ross mueller’s concussion

In a co-production with STC, Griffin is staging Ross Mueller’s Concussion, an edgy comedy about a man who wakes up without a memory. Melbourne’s Mueller, like Tasmania’s Tom Holloway, is a distinctive and relatively new voice in Australian theatre. In the meantime, don’t miss Ranters’ Holiday at The Stables (it closes Feb 28)—a potent example of the strange paths opening up in contemporary theatre. Griffin Theatre Company, Concussion, Wharf 2, Sydney, March 17-April 4; www.griffintheatre.com.au

song company: tenebrae iii

An annual highlight has been the Song Company’s Good Friday event, a powerful fusion of song and dance, directed in the past by Kate Champion at Sydney Town Hall (2005, 2006), this time by Shaun Parker in the vast industrial spaces of CarriageWorks. Tenebrae III is based on Gesualdo’s Responsories for Holy Week, sublime music evoking the spiritual extremes of belief. And you don’t have to be Christian to appreciate the emotional power of Tenebrae III. CarriageWorks, Sydney, April 8, 10; www.carriageworks.com.au

Metamorphosis, Vesturport Theatre

photo Eddi

Metamorphosis, Vesturport Theatre

10 days on the island

This unique across-the-island biennial event draws on its own and other island cultures to entertain and challenge us. It’s a wonderfully intimate live-in festival. In 2009 the festival includes a significant Indigenous dance program in Launceston and innovative performances all over, including two hot shows from Iceland. See page 16 for Carl Nilsson-Polias’ interview with Ten Days director Elizabeth Walsh. Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania, March 27-April 5; www.tendaysontheisland.org

RealTime issue #89 Feb-March 2009 pg. 10

Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Lee Serle, Stephanie Lake, I Like This, Chunky Move

photo Genevieve Bailey

Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Lee Serle, Stephanie Lake, I Like This, Chunky Move

THE VARIOUS LABELS WE USE TO CATEGORISE THE CAREER DEVELOPMENT OF ARTISTS—EMERGING, PRO-AM, MID-CAREER, FRINGE, PROFESSIONAL—ALWAYS HANG UNEASILY UPON THEIR SHOULDERS, LIKE A RENTAL TUX THAT’S BEEN THROUGH THE WASH ONE TOO MANY TIMES. THEY’RE USUALLY EMPLOYED TO POSITION SOMEONE WITHIN A LARGER ‘INDUSTRY’, BUT THE AMORPHOUS NATURE OF THE ARTS, ALONG WITH FICKLE FUNDING, THE DIFFICULTY IN DEFINING A ‘MAINSTREAM’ AND THE WONDERFUL CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ACTIVITIES WHICH MAKE UP SO MUCH OF OUR CREATIVE LANDSCAPE CONTRADICT SUCH PIGEONHOLING. THREE PRODUCTIONS WHICH APPEARED AT THE TAIL-END OF 2008 ARE CASES IN POINT.

Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton are amongst the most recognisable contemporary dancers in Melbourne, having featured heavily in the calendars of Chunky Move and Lucy Guerin Inc for several years as well as popping up in the works of younger dancemakers. Their first original collaboration, I Like This, can’t really be classed as the debut of two emerging choreographers. There are two immediately apparent reasons: firstly, both dancers have distinct styles and interests which have been evident in their previous performances for others. Secondly, the influences of these earlier mentors have left particular traces in the witty, astute form of I Like This.

Billed as a choreographic conversation between Hamilton and Perry, the work is partly an exploration of the process of dance-making, in which their ideas of what the work is to become are played out around them by a cadre of talented performers. But while this kind of meta-theatre is hardly ground-breaking—and reached a superb apex in Guerin’s and Chunky Move’s respective contributions to the last Melbourne International Arts Festival (see RT88, p4), both starring Hamilton and Perry—I Like This takes its concepts in pleasing new directions. It’s not a navel-gazing piece of the sort presented in Wendy Houstoun’s Desert Island Dances, another MIAF event. Here, action supercedes analysis.

The duo clearly recorded their rehearsal process and used the result to produce a kind of remixed dance. The performers begin to move, then rewind, skip or become stuck in loops. All the while, Perry and Hamilton sit surrounded by lighting panels, power boards and snaking cables, orchestrating the handheld lamps carried by the dancers. In fact, Perry and Hamilton’s visual design for the work deserves particular mention, becoming a character almost in itself, with hundreds of perfectly executed changes whose sometimes stroboscopic effect makes lighting operation appear a form of choreography in its own right.

It’s self-reflexive dance, certainly, but by incorporating technology in such a sophisticated way it becomes something much more. And when the work ends with the two choreographers covered by a giant quilted doona, lights sparking underneath like flashes on a distant mountain range, the result approaches the sublime. Emerging artists? Far from it.

Avast, Black Lung

photo Jeff Busby

Avast, Black Lung

The Black Lung are another ensemble well entrenched in Melbourne’s independent arts scene while occupying an utterly, defiantly outsider space. But, testament to the inadequacy of such categories, they were picked up by the Malthouse for a residency in its Tower program.

The Tower season consisted of a remounting of Avast, first produced three years ago, and a new work entitled Avast II: The Welshman Cometh. The theatre itself was radically transformed during the three month residency, outfitted with dingy couches, graffiti-covered walls and a massive wooden set filled with animal skulls, worn leather, animated dummies and dusty ephemera. Both productions were equally ramshackle, eclectic and brilliantly detailed.

The Black Lung create the kind of anarchy that can only result from incredible precision, an effect most notably associated with Forced Entertainment. During Avast, a confrontation between two brothers haunted by a legacy of familial murder and betrayal is interrupted by a falling spotlight which crashes to the ground inches from the actors’ feet. They are visibly shaken as they attempt to continue the scene, and convincing the audience that this wasn’t a pre-planned moment only proves the astounding capabilities of these performers. Similarly, the constant sense of competition, potential violence and despair of the actors themselves creates a brilliant blurring of understanding—are we watching something taking place, or something failing to take place?

Underneath the deliberate chaos is a thick questioning of theatre, narrative convention and masculinity. The two works are almost entirely composed of pastiche, quotations from film, literature and generic devices overlapping constantly. It’s all brutally blokeish too, with the only female character killed in the opening moments of Avast (unless you count another male character’s inexplicable change in gender halfway through the second work). And while Avast II is evidently a new work, the three years of development accorded Avast have made it one of the tightest, funniest, scariest pieces of theatre I’ve seen in years.

Collapse, Red Cabbage Collective

photo Matthew Scott–Cheeky Monkey Enterprises

Collapse, Red Cabbage Collective

Melbourne collective Red Cabbage might be the artistic equivalent of the Slow Food movement—like incidental fellow travellers such as Eleventh Hour Theatre, Red Cabbage eschew quantity for quality, creating one work per year. The time commitment was certainly evident in Collapse, an epic, large scale installation and performance located across a remote former maritime precinct in Williamstown. Audiences were transported by a 20-minute boat ride to a post-apocalyptic world both staggering and serene. Disembarking from the vessel, we were met by linen-clad survivors of some disaster dredging canned food from the ocean, hauling rotten row-boats across concrete as the twilight descended; we gathered in a vast, weed-strewn warehouse where women lyrically spoke around the mysterious disaster which had befallen the community; we roamed a maze of sheds, alleyways and ruined sites housing countless traumatised inhabitants coping with the new reality into which they’d been reborn. An alchemist conducted strange experiments in a bubbling lab while a babbling wreck spewed poetry in a nearby shanty. The enigmatic, voyeuristic voyage ended in a gargantuan warehouse-cum-cinema, a ragged corps of drive-in speakers standing to attention before the flickering celluloid images retrieved from a lost world. Gaps in the canvas screen revealed blue skies and drifting clouds, as much a memory as the filmic footage being projected. The survivors gathered before this iconic scene in reverential silence. Minutes later, it was all over.

Collapse’s narrative was piecemeal and its meaning kept obscure, allowing each visitor their own interpretation. The audience was allowed to wander individually; unlike the masterfully subtle control of attention exercised by another interesting company, Peepshow Inc’s similar The Mysteries of the Convent (2008), there were plenty of opportunities to miss a dramatic moment or provocative scene here. Collapse’s effect was a cumulative one, however—even the relatively uneventful prefacing boat ride worked to establish a mood of quiet distance and reflection, producing a sense of reverie.

It’s difficult to stamp any of these three works as “emerging”, though all fit a technical definition. But all are equally the products of artists who have been honing their crafts for years and all exceed journeyman status. The next evolutionary step for each will most likely prove just as hard to classify.

I Like This, choreography, direction, lighting, sound Antony Hamilton, Byron Perry, performers Hamilton, Perry, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Lee Serle, costumes Paula Levis, Chunky Move Studios, Nov 20-29; Avast and Avast II: The Black Lung Theatre Company, The Welshman Cometh, performers Sacha Bryning, Gareth Davies, Thomas Henning, Mark Winter, Thomas Wright, Dylan Young, sound design, music Liam Barton, lighting design Govin Ruben,Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Nov 12 – Dec 6; Red Cabbage, Collapse, creators Louise Morris, Tania Smith, Kirsten Prins, Anna Hamilton, performers Jason Lehane, Claire Reynolds, Maria Sirpis, Jason Cavanagh, Kate Boston Smith, Alice Claringbold, Ross Farrell, Krista Green, Portia Chiminello, Carlo Marasea; Seaworks, Williamstown, Melbourne, Nov 19-30, 2008

RealTime issue #89 Feb-March 2009 pg. 12

Grayson Millwood, Roadkill, Splintergroup

photo Tim Bates

Grayson Millwood, Roadkill, Splintergroup

REALTIME’S COVERAGE OF LAST YEAR’S MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL FEATURED AN EXCITING RANGE OF NEW DANCE WORK FROM LOCAL ARTISTS. FOR THE DEPLETED SECTOR IN SYDNEY, MASS MIGRATION WAS SERIOUSLY CONTEMPLATED. IN MARCH, IN A WELCOME JOINT INITIATIVE, THE THREE HOUSES OF MELBOURNE’S CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE CULTURE—ARTS HOUSE, DANCEHOUSE AND MALTHOUSE ARE THROWING OPEN THEIR DOORS TO CO-HOST TWO WEEKS OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE PROGRAMMING IN THE FORM OF DANCE MASSIVE. THE GENEROSITY IMPLIED IN THE EVENT’S TITLE IS REFLECTED IN A PROGRAM OF 15 WORKS FROM WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE HOME STATE.

Part of the function of such events is for audiences to survey the form, to muse on its preoccupations. What strikes me in promotional literature for the programmed works is the language constellating around oppositions, the difference between states of being and, biting at those binary ankles, ideas of liminality and hybridity. These spaces of uncertainty and possibility occur both in the form and subject matter of the works. Live performance meets film and installation in Russell Dumas’ Huit à Huit. In Lucy Guerin’s Untrained, four men—two dance trained, two not—“show what each of those bodies can do with the same set of instructions, what they have in common and where their physical histories set them apart.” In 180 seconds in (Disco) Heaven or Hell, “speed dating meets pomo disco” and comes with The Fondue Set’s customary warning of “possible bad dance moves.”

Oppositional themes abound: circadian rhythms underscored by driving beats; population growth and the auditory phenomenon of feedback” (Rogue’s A Volume Problem and The Counting); Australians homesick in Berlin (Splintergroup’s Lawn); a couple stranded in the middle of nowhere (Splintergroup’s Roadkill); the monster within (Jo Lloyd’s Melbourne Spawned a Monster); two performers/two viewers (Inert); the substitution of real life for imitation (Luke George’s Lifesize). Shelley Lasica’s Vianne tests the fissures; in Limina, Michaela Pegum dances at the point where one thing becomes another and is for a time both; Helen Herbertson’s Morphia Series takes us directly to dreamstate (do not pass go); The Fondue’s No Success Like Failure playfully lays bare the schizophrenic state of the dancing life and Chunky’s Mortal Engine dares to come between the performer and her light source.

Steven Richardson, Artistic Director at Arts House, sees Dance Massive as “creating some essential critical dialogue around contemporary dance, setting a national context to present work in a concentrated cluster of programming” and also as offering the chance to host some international guests, “either presenters or potential co-producers, to really enter into that dialogue (and possible co-production) with Australian artists, many of whom are at the leading edge of contemporary dance internationally.” Currently in Australia, according to the Dance Massive program, there are around 50 dance companies and more than 200 choreographers investigating a range of techniques, culturally diverse forms, contexts and media. “Australian contemporary dance is in demand internationally. It has a strong track record for touring work,” says Richardson.
Byron Perry, Anthony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc

Byron Perry, Anthony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc

photo Untrained Artists

Byron Perry, Anthony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc

Dance Massive also represents for the partners “a broad audience development strategy, the possibility to create a strong concentration of work over a specific time period…We don’t have the resources to mount a festival but a concentrated program has some added benefits over and above an annual program.”

“Having companies like Chunky Move co-operatively program at the same time as some of the more emerging companies”, says Richardson, gives younger companies and independent artists a chance to have their work seen in the broader context. “I think there’ll be some interest and benefit around the positioning of different kinds of work over the same time period.”

Visiting guests will have an opportunity to see complete works rather than excerpts. “The Australian Performing Arts Market does a terrific job in terms of a kind of broad brushstroke picture of the Australian cultural landscape. But I think having a genre-specific showcase, for want of a better term, creates all sorts of other possibilities. And the fact that we’re able to invite presenters or potential co-producers who have a very strong interest in dance, who can see 12-15 works over a six-day period—that’s a fairly attractive proposition for someone who’s engaged in looking at Australian work.” It’s also a less competitive environment for artists. “Presenting a full-length work with full production values is really important. It honours the work, honours all the effort that’s gone into making it.”

As well as the dance program, there’s an industry forum day on the Monday where artists who may not be in the program will talk about their work. “Australian dance is in a position now where artists have a greater degree of self-esteem and can just talk about upcoming work.”

“Since the demise of Greenmill”, Richardson observes, “there hasn’t really been a dedicated event focusing on contemporary dance. There have been a number of ancillary programs associated with arts festivals. But I think having a stand-alone contemporary dance project is timely and Melbourne is the place to host it. There’s already a critical mass and an ecology of dance in Melbourne that can support this practice. We have a very nice temporal moment, a good confluence of presenters in Melbourne who are open to this idea, so it’s time to give it a go.”

And if it all goes well, Dance Massive may well become a biennial event. Says Richardson, “We’ll certainly undertake some evaluation once we get through the first one and see if we’ve got the design close to right and make some adjustments after that. It may be we’re trying to do too much, or too little. And there are some gaps in the program. Contemporary Indigenous work is something we haven’t really been able to support this time. That’s the tyranny of distance, of resources, of funding. There’s some intercultural, cross-cultural work that, for various reasons, both to do with funding and resources but also to do with the availability of particular works, we haven’t really been able to present. But they’re definitely on the agenda. In fact, if I had to say where the gaps are I’d have to highlight those two areas of potential strength in Australian dance that we haven’t been able to support this time round. We hope to run three Dance Massive episodes as a pilot and see how we go after that.”

Dance Massive, March 3-15; www.dancemassive.com.au

RealTime issue #89 Feb-March 2009 pg. 14

play:ground

photo Irene Rincon

play:ground

IN 2008 I SAW A LOT. ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY EIGHT LIVE PERFORMANCES BY MY RECKONING, NOT INCLUDING LIVE MUSIC. AND I SAW A LOT OF KIDS ALONG THE WAY. I SAW KIDS SHOT OR GARROTTED, DRENCHED IN BLOOD (THE WOMEN OF TROY; THANKS BARRIE KOSKY) OR SCREAMING THEIR INJUSTICES AT ME. I ALSO SAW KIDS BARING RICTUS-LIKE SMILES AS THEY BEGAN PAINFUL BALLET CAREERS, AND KIDS WITH NO DREAMS OF STARDOM RELUCTANTLY DRAGGED ONSTAGE DURING FAMILY SHOWS. I SAW ADULTS ACTING AS CHILDREN, BUT THAT’S RARELY INTERESTING.

Maybe I’m presuming, but I’m pretty sure we were all kids once. I don’t have any children but I think childhood is a fine subject for any artistic worker. This opinion piece—and that’s all it is—is not really a comment on the Bill Henson debate, though it will necessarily intersect with the murky issues that case brought to public attention. What interests me here is less about the depiction of children in art and more about their participation.

Last year I attended a performance directed by a VCA masters student entitled play:ground. Claudia Escobar created the work as a response to the child soldiers who exist around the world, including in her homeland of Colombia. The piece was performed in a twilight-bound park by primary school children who engaged in mock battles, were terrorised or recruited by sinister authority figures, and turned upon each other in savage fashion as they became inured to the reality of violence.

For these child performers, as for real child soldiers, killing bore no more reality than a videogame or schoolyard playfight. This was the point of play:ground, in part. But the spectacle of pre-adolescent kids riddling each other with machinegun bullets or emerging from the trees covered in the sackcloth hoods of terrorists and toting fake semi-automatic weapons was authentically disturbing for its adult audience. An effective and deeply provocative evocation of a very real contemporary horror, yes, but also more unsettling in its involvement of real children playing out—and thus vicariously participating in—the problem.

Barrie Kosky’s Women of Troy was an equally violent spectacle. Its unending cacophony of ear-splitting gunshots was either traumatic or numbing, depending on your response. And near the work’s climax, as dictated by Euripides himself, the figure of a dead young boy appears, carried in a bloody cardboard box. As with play:ground, I doubt that the child in question was adversely affected by the performance. I played dead when I was a kid.

But I’m surprised that the spectacle of violence towards children doesn’t raise hackles in the way that sexuality does. I’m sure it’s something to do with our troubled notion of consent. Children are assumed (legally at least) to be unable to make informed, adult decisions regarding certain aspects of their lives, and laws and safeguards are in place to make those decisions for them. I have no problem with this. But the Henson affair barely touched upon a more challenging aspect of this system of protection: is a child’s right to self-determination also taken out of their hands in the realm of representation? That is, can an adult decide whether and how a child’s image may be presented in the public sphere?

An Anne Geddes calendar featuring babies in pot-plants or dressed as watermelons is a commercial goldmine, but how would the same buying public feel about similar shots featuring people suffering dementia or Alzheimer’s? Not so cute, sure. But ethically on the same level. Former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar has suggested that “a society is judged…by the quality of life which it is able to assure for its weakest members.” I wonder if that concept can be extended to the rights we accord others to control their self-representation.

For several years I tutored tertiary students in a subject on art and censorship. Every new class arrived with a surprisingly regular set of opinions on the topic— censorship was unequivocally wrong, and freedom of speech was an essential component of our culture. Western liberal democracy is founded on this rhetoric, though a little nudging suggests limits most people would agree with. Censorship might not be so bad when it comes to child pornography, religious vilification or racial discrimination, for instance. And indeed, if we broaden our notion of censorship from the simple state-imposed variety to the more organic forms of censorship—the way we censor our own thoughts and comments, or the community censorship that exerts an influence on the discursive relations amongst any social group—the black ban on capital-C censorship becomes more muddled.

And what irked me most about the Henson debate and its offshoots was that a most pernicious form of censorship was exercised by even the artist’s most strident defenders. What was absent from discussions was the voices of those in question, for whom we’re all happy to speak. Children simply do not have a public voice in the way that a mature white male artist or a newspaper columnist or a prominent politician has. The censorship of a child’s voice is not legally enshrined but it’s no less institutionalised. And I suppose my concern here stems from the fact that despite all the kids I saw onstage last year, I’ve never had a sense that anyone is particularly interested in speaking to, rather than for, a demographic whose minority status stems from age alone.

The one exception could have been Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day, which appeared at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Here, a few dozen children of various ages chanted a litany of complaints to their audience: “You teach us that in the world there are bad men/ That monsters are not real/ That words are only words/ That the shadows are nothing to be frightened of.”

My sister has recently been working on a documentary called Eleven, which features interviews with 11-year-olds from around the world. Her theory is that kids at that age are no longer children but not yet adults. The results are compelling. Her subjects speak about sexuality, terrorism, cold fusion technology, romance, action movies and politics, often in the same sentence. They are thoughtful and generous, mostly startled that someone would care to hear their opinions on things that are normally considered the discursive province of grown-ups alone.

I recommended That Night Follows Day to my sister, who attended a showing followed by a public discussion of the piece. She was disappointed to learn, as I had, that the text itself had been written by adults. A producer explained that the thoughts of the juvenile participants wouldn’t have produced the effective, impactful political statement which the work ended up delivering. They would have talked about rainbows and boyfriends. I have to disagree.

RealTime issue #89 Feb-March 2009 pg. 15

ITS UNIQUE BREADTH OF GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS AND ITS DISTINCTIVE SENSE OF PAN-ISLAND FRATERNITY HAVE ALWAYS SET TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND APART FROM ITS MAINLAND FESTIVAL COUSINS. FOLLOWING ON FROM HER WORK IN 2007, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ELIZABETH WALSH SEES THIS YEAR’S PROGRAM AS “GOING A BIT FURTHER” WITH REGARD TO PROVIDING AN EVEN MORE INNOVATIVE AND CHALLENGING PROGRAM OF EVENTS.

When I interviewed her, Walsh was in Melbourne for the opening of Woyzeck at the Malthouse Theatre. This particular translation and adaptation of the Georg Büchner play is by the Icelandic writer, director, actor and former gymnast Gisli Örn Gardarsson, whose version of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the headline productions at the Ten Days festival. The popularity of Gardarsson’s work on our shores, though seeming rather sudden, has been only a matter of time. With his theatre company, Vesturport (see page 3), Gardarsson has become a darling of the British theatre scene thanks to the extreme physical acrobatics he employs in his theatrical adaptations—the result of bringing his gymnastic skills and aesthetic to bear on projects from Romeo and Juliet to Faust. And, on most of these pieces, he has collaborated with Australian musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, whose output in recent years has increasingly included scores for stage and screen. In terms of theatrical antecedents, Gardarsson’s Metamorphosis is a very different dish to that served up by Steven Berkoff in 1969. Where Berkoff used his physical alacrity and invention to construct Gregor Samsa’s entire world from lights and a few bits of scaffolding, Gardarsson’s vision is grander and locates Samsa within a much more traditional theatrical design. Nevertheless, both are very much vehicles for physical virtuosity and, in that respect, Gardarsson’s pedigree is hard to fault.

On the topic of pedigree, Wu Hsing-kuo’s company has the potentially hubristic moniker of Contemporary Legend Theatre. However, having studied Chinese opera from the age of 11 and performed as lead dancer for the extraordinary Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Wu Hsing-kuo has earned the title. He brings to Tasmania what Walsh describes as his “party piece”—a solo performance of King Lear. Though Lear is not what everyone would call a party, there is something undeniably attractive about seeing such an outrageously ambitious project undertaken by such a capable performer. This kind of transcultural adaptation of Elizabethan drama into other equally strong theatrical traditions has some great forebears, such as Akira Kurosawa’s use of Noh elements in his acclaimed films Ran and Throne of Blood. In Wu Hsing-kuo’s version, the narrative arc of Lear’s fall from regal pageantry to barren essentialism is echoed in the costumed glory of traditional Chinese opera being gradually stripped away as the old king’s mind unravels before us.

On the musical front, Ten Days on the Island is flying Perth composer Ross Bolleter back and forth in search of Tasmania’s most attractively derelict pianos. John Cage made the ‘prepared piano’ popular and Bolleter does the same for ‘ruined pianos.’ In other words, he takes those weathered wrecks that have been sitting in a galvanised iron outhouse for a few too many decades and uses their unique aural fingerprint of decay to create his own particular brand of composition. For Walsh, this has been the perfect opportunity for the festival to interact both with the colonial heritage of Tasmania and smaller regional communities. For Bolleter, it is an opportunity to interrogate the idiosyncratic resonances of some truly decomposed ebony and ivory. And for the audience, it is a potentially inspiring call to arms and good reason to lift the sheets from those long-forgotten instruments. Having toured to Stanley, Derby and Ross, the pianos will eventually be installed in the equally neglected and remarkable Bond Store at the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery in Hobart, where their stories and their sounds will both be on show.

In a strangely beautiful parallel, another installation-cum-concert takes its aural inspiration from a far more modern instrument—the siren. Created by English sound artist Ray Lee, Siren stretches the possibilities of the Doppler effect to an enticing extreme. Presented at Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Walsh points out that the venue’s role as a nexus for science and art makes it the perfect place to install this musical experiment. Set on giant tripods, sirens and lights rotate on long arms to create a finely tuned field of sound that is interspersed with inevitable beats and natural harmonics. Within this space, the audience is encouraged to move around, adding another level of sonic mobility and distortion and thereby affording each listener an entirely personal experience of the sound. Together with fellow performer Harry Dawes, Lee moves around the space with the audience, operating the sirens and adjusting their tone. Lee is interested in what he describes, with a nod to outmoded physics, as the “circles of ether”—the invisible forces of electromagnetism and the like. In Siren, he creates an appreciable representation of these forces using the invisible yet sensible nature of sound to make manifest the waves and concentric spheres of radiation.

Someone else who radiates their own special brand of electromagnetism is the pluridisciplinary artist Hiroaki Umeda, who sneaks into the festival program with only a few performances. Bringing two dance works, Duo and ‘while going to a condition’, as well as a short video work, Montevideoaki, Umeda is one of the more exciting prospects in the festival. Watching Umeda dance in ‘while going to a condition’ is like seeing a human oscilloscope, as he builds his movements from Butoh-like restraint into frenetic climaxes. All of this occurs in front of a flickering wall of light and with the audience enveloped by an intensely loud field of electronic crackles and whirs. In Montevideoaki, Umeda’s dance is placed in front of the backdrop of the eponymous Uruguayan capital. The elementary wordplay of the title ought not obscure the fact that it was made in collaboration with Octavio Iturbe, a video artist who has previously made award-winning screen adaptations of Wim Vandekeybus’ choreography.

From the shores of another island-off-the-mainland comes Terra Che Brucia. This Sicilian combination of jazz and projected archival footage is led by saxophonist Massimo Cavallaro. The music fits quite safely into that mode of European electrojazz popularised (and done better) by the likes of Nils Petter Molvaer but the footage itself is a fascinating collection of documentaries on everyday Sicilian life made by Panaria Film between 1948 and 1950, when Italy, especially the impoverished South, was still recovering from the wreckage of the Second World War.

One of the more enigmatic forces in Ten Days on the Island will be the Icelandic Love Corporation. This trio of female artists (Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir, Jóni Jonsdóttir and Eirún Sigurdardóttir) produce installed happenings. Walsh met the group in Iceland and invited them to come to Tasmania largely on the basis of the way in which they made coffee. She is gleefully ready to admit that she has no idea what they are bringing to the festival, apart from the title of the show, Hospitality. One suspects there might be a few cups of something involved but the piece will undoubtedly have the wry whimsy that is bred in a country where everyone is related and the banking system has collapsed. You can catch the Icelandic Love Corporation’s particular brand of hospitality at Contemporary Art Services Tasmania in North Hobart for the duration of the festival and a few weeks afterwards.

Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania, March 27-April 5; visit www.tendaysontheisland.org for the full program

RECENT TALK OF PALESTINIAN “AGGRESSION” IN GAZA, AT A TIME WHEN HUNDREDS OF MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN WERE BEING SLAUGHTERED BY ISRAEL’S HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED MILITARY MACHINE, IS JUST THE LATEST EXAMPLE OF THE ONE-SIDED VIEW WE RECEIVE OF LIFE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. FOR DECADES THE WEST HAS POSITIONED ITSELF AS THE VICTIM OF ISLAM’S SUPPOSED ANTIPATHY TO DEMOCRACY, EVEN AS WE HELP STYMIE POPULAR MOVEMENTS THROUGHOUT THE MUSLIM WORLD. IN THIS CONTEXT, ARTISTIC VOICES FROM THE MIDDLE EAST PROVIDE AN IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY TO SEE THESE CULTURES FROM THE OTHER SIDE. MIXING MAGIC, TRAGEDY, HISTORY AND POLITICS, THE FIVE-VIDEO SERIES WOMEN WITHOUT MEN BY US-BASED IRANIAN ARTIST SHIRIN NESHAT OFFERS A SHARP REJOINDER TO ONE-DIMENSIONAL IMAGES OF IRANIAN WOMEN AND THE NATION’S MODERN HISTORY.

Neshat’s videos are based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1989 magic-realist novel of the same name, set against the backdrop of the US and British-backed coup in 1953 that toppled the secular progressive Dr Mohammed Mossadegh after he nationalised the country’s oil reserves. It was partly her desire to explore this period that drew Neshat to the project. “I found I wanted to return to this historical moment and touch on how the American government had a direct relation to the overthrow of a democratic government, which eventually led to the deep resentment of Iranians against Americans, and indeed paved the road for the Islamic revolution. I had no interest in making a documentary film or an approach that would be a history lesson, but rather I found it interesting and a challenge to build these events as a background to my story.”

Each of Neshat’s videos portrays a female character from Parsipur’s novel, which traces the fate of five quite different women eventually brought together by chance in the city of Karaj, a short distance from Tehran. The videos vary greatly in approach, but none is strictly realist. “Parsipur’s style fit my work perfectly, as she is known for her surrealistic literature…all her work has one foot in society, history and politics, but is also profoundly timeless, philosophical and universal in expression,” enthuses Neshat. Described by the artist as one of Iran’s “foremost contemporary female writers”, Parsipur was imprisoned by both the Shah and the subsequent Islamic regime before fleeing Iran to live in exile in the US.

Neshat’s videos “give a glimpse into the nature of each woman” rather than extrapolating the plot of Parsipur’s novel. “I basically took each woman’s dilemma and tried to reveal her spiritual, psychological, social or sexual issues”, says the artist. “Since each woman’s problems and aspirations were different, I created totally different narratives and stylistic approaches.”

women without men

Mahdokht, the first video made back in 2004, is the most abstract in Neshat’s series. Playing out simultaneously across three screens, it explores the split desires and tormented nature of a young woman terrified by sexuality, yet obsessed with fertility and children. In the novel, the character resolves this contradiction by planting herself in a garden and becoming one with nature.

Although Mahdokht contains striking imagery—notably the crazed central character knitting in a forest strewn with yellow wool—the video is the least successful of the five. The thematic and narrative relationship to Parsipur’s novel is a little too elliptical, and the symbolism too wide open to interpretation. While the other works stand up as discrete viewing experiences, Mahdokht makes little sense without some prior knowledge of the character.

In contrast, Zarin (2005) is a striking horror movie exploring the psychology of a prostitute suffering from anorexia. She is so alienated from her work and her own body that her clients become blank, faceless monsters. In an unbearably visceral scene in a public bathhouse, the young woman attempts to erase her withered frame and sense of guilt through frenzied scrubbing, until she is reduced to chafed, bloodied mass.

Neshat’s final three videos were completed in 2008. Munis most successfully draws together the novel’s magic-realist style, the videos’ commentary on the lives of Iranian women and the historical backdrop of the 1953 coup. The central character is harangued by her conservative brother as she listens to radio broadcasts reporting unrest on the streets of Tehran. Unable to go outside and participate in the demonstrations, she anxiously paces the rooftop of her home. When she witnesses a fleeing protestor shot on the street below, Munis steps off the roof, engaging in a conversation with the man in their shared moment of death. The video beautifully weaves together her personal tale and the broader historical setting, in a quiet reflection on the frustrated possibilities of Iran’s shattered democracy.

Faezeh unfolds as a nightmare of brutality and ruined happiness. A young woman constantly returns to the scene of her own rape, an indictment of the impossible expectations placed on women to maintain their ‘purity’ in societies that often turn a blind eye to sexual violence.

In the final video in the series, Farokh Legha, Neshat adopts a more realist mode, and once again evokes the ’53 coup as a moment of curtailed possibilities. The middle-aged central character hosts a party in a grand house surrounded by an orchard—a symbol of life and fecundity in an otherwise barren landscape. The party is rudely interrupted by armed troops, some of whom sit down to enjoy a lavish meal while their counterparts hunt down and shoot ‘opponents’ outside.

Some time later, the host returns to her house, now deserted and coated in a thick layer of dust. Discovering a young woman lying prone in a garden pond, Farokh Legha takes her inside, where the girl flickers with life. As the camera slowly pans across the room, the cobwebs fade and flames dance in the fireplace once again. The final image seems to be one of hope, a sign that Iran’s culture, as well as the ideals of the nation’s short-lived democracy, live on despite the traumas we’ve witnessed.

book to video to film

While Farokh Legha marks the completion of the Women Without Men video series, Neshat is currently completing a feature film also based on Parsipur’s novel. Utilising the same actors and Moroccan locations as the videos, the artist says the feature will take a more narrative-driven approach that foregrounds the tale’s historical context.

Part of the attraction for Neshat of a two-stage project lay in exploring the mechanics of storytelling in two quite different environments. “I have been very interested in how the experience of viewing the story may change completely due to the setting—a theatre versus a gallery or museum space”, she explains. “So in my construction and editing of the videos and the film, I’ve tried to address this issue. Once I finish the feature it will be up to the audience to draw parallels and distinctions between art and cinema.”

In exploring Iran’s sexual politics and culture, as well as Western complicity in the crushing of Mossadegh’s government, Shirin Neshat has helped kick open the narrow window through which we typically view Iran in the West. Her videos stand as a provocative memorial to a crucial turning point in the nation’s modern history, and the women who have survived the vagaries of Iran’s political strife. The coming feature promises to be another intriguing thread in the tapestry of images Neshat has woven from and around Parsipur’s fantastical novel.

Women Without Men, video series, director Shirin Neshat, based on the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur; Faurschou gallery, 798 Art Zone, Beijing, China; Oct 25, 2008–March 1, 2009

Nicole Kidman, Brandon Walters, Australia, courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

TITLING A WORK AFTER ONE’S COUNTRY IS A DESPERATE MEASURE, EITHER BORN OF CAUSTIC CRITIQUE OR BOUND BY PATRIOTIC TRAUMA. THE FORMER CREATES THE PALIMPSEST OF NEGATION WHICH DARKENS ANY COUNTRY’S FLAG AND ANTHEM; THE LATTER IS DEDICATED TO CLEANING, BRIGHTENING AND GENERALLY WHITENING THE SAME. ONLY THE DEAD WOULD MISS THAT BAZ LUHRMANN’S AUSTRALIA (2008) EVIDENCES THE LATTER. YET, UNEXPECTEDLY, I FIND THE FILM TO BE ADDRESSED TO THE DEAD: TO SPEAK TO THE GHOSTS OF THIS THING CALLED ‘AUSTRALIA’ WHO HAUNT THE PSYCHE, THE MEDIASCAPE AND THE POLITICAL FORUM WHICH FORM THE AUDITORIUM FOR VOICING THE NAMING OF ‘AUSTRALIA.’

While leftist-leaning critique of the film has centred on its inaccuracies in Indigenous historicism (which completely misses the hyper-iconic self-mythologizing purpose of Australian cinema in general), Australia offers an ulterior reading in its depiction of racial hierarchy. Ultimately, death haunts the film—particularly in its mega-melodramatic final act where the dream family of Australia’s future is thought to become extinct. There’s probably a White Paper (sic) floating around Canberra’s mindscape that dreams of genetically joining anal uptight colonialism (Nicole Kidman in 100 costume changes) with iconic post-convict machismo (Hugh Jackman at the gym again) with a para-animatronic Aboriginal kewpie doll representation of Indigenous culture (Brandon Walters and his flashing teeth). When they all hug at the end, it was like watching white zombies engaged in an unknowing ritual. I felt an overwhelming sense of how utterly dead Australia is and will likely be for a few millennia still. Australia is thus more a speculative sci-fi about a dying gene-pool attempting to forge a nation according to an inane self-politicising blueprint (not to mention a telling historicist aversion to Asia). The opening and closing statements about the Stolen Generations are less solemn reflections on forced Australian nationhood and more semiotic memes that invert that socio-genetic program within the film’s Hollywoodesque melting-pot of universalising (or market-maximising) story-telling. Like all maximal cultural artefacts, Australia says nothing that it thinks it’s declaring, but volumes of what it cannot hear itself saying.

Australia is neither an embarrassment of glazed nationalistic vulgarity, nor a flailing vision of grand auteur onanism. Sure, it’s bursting with flashy neo-camp affectations inseparable from Australian prerogatives to entertain (c1970s’ camp theatre revues). Sure, it’s driven by a pseudo-PoMo flaunting of artifice (c1980s’ art photography revelling in faux-cinematic tableaux). Sure, its full of dumb journalistic paraphrasing of white guilt and patronising enshrinement of Indigenous mysticism (c1990s’ pre-millennial reassessment of post-colonial politics). But what else should we expect from this film? Indeed—what else does a nation that cried over the bloated pomp of the Sydney 2000 Olympics deserve? And what else should an industry that reads a self-centred magazine subtitled “For Australian Content Creators” require from a $130m movie chowing down on a hefty tax rebate and a financial adrenaline shot by the ATEC (Australian Tourism Export Council)?

The film is inevitably an easy target—but using a narrow-gauge shotgun is an ineffective critical strategy when aimed at the nationalist mirage within which Australian cinema’s self-image has shimmered for over quarter of a century. A wide-spray Uzi handled by a blind drunk is a better tactic. Don’t shoot the film or the filmmakers: shoot the whole context within which they are positioned.

To deride Australia yet engage in polite and earnest dinner conversation over films like Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002) and 10 Canoes (2006) invokes a simplistic binary reaction typical of the Australian intelligentsia’s support of worthy ideals in ignorance of any semiotic evaluation of the works bearing those ideals. To me, it’s straightforward to view Rabbit Proof Fence, The Tracker and 10 Canoes as humanist universalising, artsy, wannabe-informed examples of post-Mabo cinema at its most obsequious. Australia takes those themes and tizzes them up like a Tivoli burlesque revival. Of course, the film’s core impulse to ‘pizzazz’ an audience is an artistic gesture retrieved from the mouldy stage attire of Reg Livermore and his 70s ilk. Indeed, Australia is like Betty Blokk Buster Follies meets Kevin Rudd’s televised ‘Apology.’ But if that’s what Australians want: give it to them.

Any film that starts with a voice-over telling you that you are about to be told a great and wonderful story is bound to induce nausea in anyone bar script doctors. And despite Australia’s relentless bludgeoning of the senses with its mock-crème production design, mum-look-at-me digital compositing, Venusian fantasy goddess costume design and Australian Tourism’s unending dome of panagliding cinematography, Australia’s foregrounded reflexivity amounts to false genuineness through having a half-breed cute-feral androgyne regurgitate Spielbergian monologues of childhood wonder. Having stated that, I nonetheless find that Australia does effectively compress and express its melodramatic heart, and successfully tugs at the appropriate emotional strings. Ciphers that they are, Kidman, Jackman, Bryan Brown, David Gulpillil, Jack Thompson and Ben Mendelsohn can and are allowed to project précised altruistic ticks of empathetic consonance within the film’s swirling artifice. But—as with Spielbergian templates developed in the first wave of Hollywood revisionism in the mid-70s—the effectiveness of such manipulations merely testifies to how any amassed audience is but a throng of humanised puppets responding to strings tugging their collective heart.

To align oneself with the Australian film industry as a ‘content provider’, a mortgage-paying ‘technician’, or a pithy ‘movie reviewer’ and remain uncritical of the cultural implications of the medium’s multiple crafts is unacceptable. If Australia has a ‘film industry’ then let it be a ruthless industry. Make pornography with girls who look like your first-year-uni daughter. Tell stories about footballers on drugs; bogans killing their kids; Dungeons-and-Dragons nerds massacring tourists. Cast wildly and inappropriately and tabloid the hell out of the production’s sensationalist drive. Write scathing comedies about law students who become topical panellists on national TV and wear chambray shirts; bourgeois ABC journalists who become bourgeois politicians; arthouse distributors claiming to know about cinema. Forget the international market because they care as much about you as you do about Finnish historical drama. Find any niche no matter how unsavoury and exploitatively hammer it to death. Do all this and damn everything that Rudd and his Creative Australia (gag!) think-tank proposed, and Australia will have a real industry—one that would dare its practitioners to stand up for the contentiousness of their work rather than allow them to hide behind the giant phantasmal puff-ball of proud ignorance that spawns gaudy carnivales of patriotism like Australia.

Each year, there’s a polite round-up in the mediascape about ‘Australia’s performance at the box office.’ A successful film receives a disingenuous slap on the back. It sounds like a fly-swatter hitting soggy Weetbix. The ‘worthy’ films that didn’t make a dent in the box office excite a plethora of reasons for their criminal neglect. No-one mentions the possibility that the films were simply not interesting as concepts in the first place. The upcoming year’s roster will be optimistic, and articles like the one you’re reading will be posed as ‘part of the problem not the solution.’ Yet those upcoming films will smack of the same insular ‘Aussifying’ themes which smell like state theatre company ‘finger-on-the-pulse’ productions or social studies curricula foisted on Year 11/12 inmates.

This may seem completely off-topic. Wrong. The context which creates then evaluates the likes of Australia is the problem. If all the other forms of alternative non-nationalistic exploitation were allowed in the industry, then Australia would simply be another option for entertaining an audience. And at such a chosen task, the film completely succeeds. What’s missing is all those other films. (Written on Australia Day.)

Australia, director Baz Luhrmann, writers Stuart Beattie, Baz Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood, Richard Flannagan, cinematography Mandy Walker, editing Dody Dorn, Michael McCusker, production design Catherine Martin, 2008

THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE’S EXHIBITION SETTING THE SCENE: FILM DESIGN FROM METROPOLIS TO AUSTRALIA SHATTERS THE CINEMATIC ILLUSION TO UNCOVER THE IMPACT OF ART DEPARTMENTS, FILM ARCHITECTS AND SET DESIGNERS ON THE HISTORY OF CINEMATIC STYLE. THIS EXHIBITION EXPLORES THE PROCESSES OF CREATION IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF ILLUSORY SPACES AND REVEALS HOW AESTHETICS INFLUENCE TONE, MOOD AND ATMOSPHERE IN THE CINEMA.

Setting the Scene is based on the Deutsche Kinemathek’s Museum für Film und Fernsehen exhibition Moving Spaces: Production Design + Film. The German and Australian curators collaborated to develop a series of diachronic “spatial constellations”, emphasising the evolution of art design and the impact of old and new technologies. ACMI’s exhibition is organised into interrelated zones including: Spaces of Power, Private Spaces, Labyrinth Spaces, Transit Spaces, Stage Spaces, Virtual Spaces and Location Spaces. What emerges is a heterotopia of design with more than 300 exhibits of still and moving images, concept artwork, storyboards, computer visualisations and scale models that coalesce and collide, producing dynamic contrasts and connections by prioritising art design.

The Spaces of Power constellation illustrates the signification of control in the depiction of vast spaces, minimalist design, monumental architecture and access to vision. This area is dominated by a large film still showing the prodigious elevated office designed by Erich Kettelhut for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The graphic symmetry of the gigantic window combined with heavy furniture supporting futuristic communications technology renders Jon Fredersen (Alfred Abel) a God-like figure, able to survey and control the city. Images of the subterranean war room set for Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) display a space filled with screens showing maps the size of walls, extending the connection between power and magnitude into the realm of parody. Both upper and lower spaces are constructed for surveillance and to inspire paranoia through cinematic revisions of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.

While these images are striking examples of control built from monumental set design, one of the smaller artefacts included in Spaces of Power reveals how illusions of entrapment can be created in miniature. A glass box protects a small set built by the production designer Herman Warm for Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). This model is the location of the prison scene, its black background with parallel white lines descending towards a spot on the floor are used to direct the eye to the hypnotist/murderer and to radiate a sense of his torture. This exhibit also underlines the influence of the German Expressionist visual style with its high contrast, painted light and shadows, absurdly dysfunctional architecture and its cities built on jagged lines.

The first screen of the Private Spaces zone features a scene from Jacques Demme’s recitative musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Demme’s art director Bernard Evein and costume designer Jacqueline Moreau collaborated to develop scenes based on a specific colour palette. The design of wallpapers and fabrics complement costume, resulting in a visual style so inextricably bound to mood and tone that textures become as expressive as characters. In one scene blue floral wallpaper in the bedroom seems to imply that Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) sleeps in a watery interior garden. A scene from Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) shows a neighbour touring the sterile, empty spaces of the villa Arpel, teetering across the concrete floors on her stilettos, barely able to sit on the furniture which exists for its design, not for comfort. This dysfunctional modernism barely conceals the social critique created by Jacques Lagrange’s spatial design and inherent in Tati’s cinema. The exhibition includes a model of the candy coloured modernist cube house with its obsessively manicured garden surrounding a giant fish water sculpture. The model has buttons that tilt a garage door open and animate a terrier in a tartan coat.

Research photographs, film stills, sequences and a model of the maze from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) are the most compelling aspects of the Labyrinth Spaces constellation. In Kubrick’s film, the Overlook Hotel is transformed into a site of terror with labyrinthine corridors carpeted in alarmingly contrasted colours, elevators filled with gushing blood and hallucinatory images of decay and death behind the doors of hotel rooms. Ray Waller’s production design reveals how cinematography and Steadicam can be used to insert a gliding spectral presence in interior and exterior mazes. Dante Ferretti’s film design, inspired by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, is also exhibited here, with production photographs and a wooden model of his staircase leading in all directions, but ultimately nowhere, from The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986).

Transit Spaces become visual signifiers of Marc Augé’s notion of “non-place.” Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004) is filmed on a bespoke, full-sized airport terminal set built by Alex McDowell and including escalators, elevators, furnishings and 35 retail franchises. Spielberg used a periscope camera to check camera angles. The airport terminal set is a heightened non-place, its depersonalised sites of transience and anonymity emphasise movement rather than stillness. Such a transit space becomes a home for the protagonist. A model of the set, sequences from the film and interviews with the production staff reveal the film’s base in the story of the Iranian refugee Merhan Karimi Nasseri (aka Sir Alfred) who was condemned to live in a Parisian airport for 10 years.

Whilst the 1.5 scale model of the Mach 5 car in Speed Racer (Wachowski, 2009) looks like a toy, it represents the zenith of futuristic set design. For this film the Wachowski brothers and their production designer, Owen Patterson, used “virtual cinematography” to create “reality bubbles.” Curator of Setting the Scene, Kate Warren, explains that Speed Racer’s composite spaces were built from digital images of locations including Italy, Morocco, and Death Valley. These panoramas were then stitched together, manipulated and composited resulting in the creation of an artificial global space that is both everywhere and nowhere.

Australian art directors have high profiles in Setting the Scene. The highly stylised visual aesthetic developed with Tracey Moffatt by Stephen Curtis on studio sets for Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989) and beDevil (1993) created surrealist inspired hyper-stylised landscapes. But some of the most striking images are shot on location, using few visual effects. A montage of research photos of post-apocalyptic locations shot by Chris Kennedy reveals images of New Orleans post-Katrina, Mount St Helens, mines in Pittsburgh and a deserted theme park in Pennsylvania, all preparation for The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name), a film yet to be released in the cinema.

All paths in Setting the Scene lead to the showcase exhibit, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008). This constellation includes topographic maps and interviews with art director Catherine Martin describing her initial ideas for the design, the impact of the landscape and the ways that design signals a narrative turn and implies cultural change. The most imposing and intriguing exhibit in Setting the Scene is the living room set of Faraway Downs, a key location for Australia. The set has been recreated specifically for ACMI’s exhibition and the visitor can peer into the domestic space and see the combination of European influenced heavy leather furnishings and pristine cut glass decanters sitting alongside woven baskets, boomerangs and bark sculptures. In Australia, visual design enables a subtle shift towards the inclusion of Indigenous cultures.

Setting the Scene provides a heterotopia of visual design constructed from an array of art and artefacts representing disparate times, spaces, ideas and possibilities. This exhibition highlights the visual affect, privileging the pathways, networks and rhizome-like connections between contemporary art direction and visual styles of the past and the future. With Setting the Scene, ACMI has curated a dynamic archive of the work of local and international art directors, revealing film design to be a radically evolving art form.

Setting the Scene: Film Design From Metropolis to Australia, Australian Centre for the Moving Image in collaboration with Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin; Melbourne, Dec 4, 2008-April 19, 2009

CULTURAL MEDIA’S MISSION IS TO STRENGTHEN INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN DIVERSE AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITIES THROUGH THE PROMOTION OF ARAB ARTS AND CULTURE. THE FIRST PALESTINIAN FILM FESTIVAL, A NEW INITIATIVE FROM CULTURAL MEDIA—A NOT FOR PROFIT ORGANISATION ESTABLISHED IN 2007—SCREENED OVER TWO WEEKENDS IN DECEMBER AT PALACE NORTON STREET CINEMAS AND SIDETRACK SHED THEATRE IN MARRICKVILLE. IT DREW LARGE, DIVERSE AND ATTENTIVE CROWDS WHO DEMONSTRATED THAT THERE IS INDEED A GREAT HUNGER FOR MORE OPPORTUNITIES TO ACCESS AND ENGAGE WITH PALESTINIAN LIFE AND CULTURE.

The program showcased a broad spectrum of films ranging from six acclaimed feature films to independent documentary production and university sponsored educational materials. The feature film with the highest profile was Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of This Sea. It had screened in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, was Palestine’s 2009 Academy Awards submission for Best Foreign Language Film and has won a number of awards at international festivals.

Shot in Palestine under difficult conditions, Salt of This Sea follows Brooklyn born and bred Soraya (Suheir Hammad) as she lives the dream to return to Palestine, from which her family was exiled in 1948. Stubbornly trying to reclaim her grandfather’s savings, frozen in a bank account in Jaffa when he was exiled in 1948, she is slowly taken apart by the reality of Palestinian life around her. She meets Emad (Saleh Bakri), a young man whose ambition, contrary to hers, is to leave his home in Palestine forever.

The other fiction feature film in the program, Laila’s Birthday, directed by Rashid Masharawi, follows a complicated day in the life of Abu Laila (Mohammed Bakri) an unemployed judge currently driving his brother-in-law’s taxi to make ends meet. His quest to get a present and a cake in time for his seven-year-old daughter’s birthday is constantly interrupted by surreal, sometimes comic events.

This film captures the streets of Gaza through the windows of Abu Laila’s taxi. The conversations with passengers, and the ordeals to which the taxi is submitted, capture the state of affairs in the territory in all their absurdity and poignancy. Each unpredictable daily difficulty cumulatively begins to wear on Abu Laila, unbeknownst to those he encounters, who continue to make their insistent demands. He finally cracks as he waits for his taxi to be refuelled, unleashing a tirade through a megaphone wrestled from him by its policeman owner. Returning home, Abu Laila finds peace as his daughter giggles at the state of his taxi, accidentally decorated for a wedding during the course of the day’s many events.

On a different note, Reel Bad Arabs and Edward Said on Orientalism, both directed by university professor Sut Jhally, were built around interviews with the authors of significant books on the representation of Arabs in the West. Both films provided sophisticated discussion about the politics of representation. The publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978 resulted in major shifts in contemporary thought, still reverberating around the world today. However, although Said talks here about the context in which his argument was first conceived and extends his discussions of the concept of Orientalism to media representations, the film shows its age and does not extend the late writer’s insights to the contemporary political situation subsequent to his death.

Sut Jhally’s other film is based on the book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, written by Jack Shaheen, Professor Emeritus of Mass Communication at Southern Illinois University. The video successfully integrates interviews with Shaheen and clips from myriad movies ranging from blockbusters featuring the likes of Arnold Schwarznegger right back to some of the earliest representations in the history of cinema—an excellent companion piece to Said’s Orientalism.

The most talked about film of the festival was Slingshot Hip Hop, directed by Jackie Reem Salloum. This unique documentary deftly intertwines stories of young Palestinians living in the West Bank, in Gaza, in refugee camps and inside Israel as they discover the power of hip hop as a tool for self-expression and cross-border communication.

Slingshot Hip Hop traces the origins and development of hip hop amongst two distinct groups, one located in the West Bank, the other in Gaza, its members young, male and female, who initially struggled against Israel’s stringent travel restrictions to meet each other. That was until they gained the support of an organisation promoting youth development projects across Palestine. These groups build hip hop into an educational tool to teach young people, to provide an outlet for self-expression and connectedness, which throughout the film is voiced in entirely non-violent terms. After the recent devastating attacks on Gaza, no doubt many who saw the film will be worried about the current circumstances of the young men and women from the group, whose stories imprinted themselves so strongly.

Writers on the Borders: A Journey To Palestine(s), directed by Samir Abdallah and Jose Reynes, likewise travelled across Palestine following artists and storytellers. It documented the journey of eight writers from the International Parliament of Writers who travelled to Palestine to visit renowned poet . Darwish, who could not leave his own country to attend their international festivals. This film continues Cultural Media’s focus on Mahmoud Darwish, following an event celebrating the life and work of the Palestinian poet at the NSW Writers Centre in October 2008.

Writers on the Borders incorporates the diverse perspectives of the international writers on the trip, each of whom muses on their experiences of Palestine in an impressive array of languages. This is integrated with readings by Darwish and others at events set up throughout the film and exciting to witness. Relentless in its documentation of almost every detail of the delegation’s journey, Writers on the Borders also successfully produces a series of intense eyewitness accounts of Israel’s ongoing, systematic project to devastate and disrupt the everyday lives of ordinary Palestinian people. It provided a useful context for understanding the relentlessness of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza. Among many injustices, the writers encounter roadblocks designed to prevent access to universities and homes and farmland freshly bulldozed to make way for the ever-expanding Israeli incursion into Palestinian territory. Such details tend to make it to our television screens only in times of crisis.

The Palestinian Film Festival successfully brought together a diverse array of people to share many different encounters with Palestinian life. Let’s hope it becomes a regular event on the Sydney screen culture calendar and has the opportunity in the future to travel to other parts of Australia.

2008 Palestinian Film Festival, festival artistic director Sohail Dahdal; Cultural Media, Palace Norton Street Cinemas, December 5–7; Sidetrack Shed Theatre, December 13–14

THEY’RE IN OUR POCKETS, THEY’RE IN OUR HOMES, IN OUR CARS, AND THEY’RE ALL AROUND OUR URBAN ENVIRONMENTS. IT’S HARD TO THINK OF A METROPOLITAN EXPERIENCE THAT ISN’T THOROUGHLY OVERLAYED AND INTERLACED WITH A HUGE VARIETY OF DIFFERENTLY SCALED SCREENS. THIS IS WHAT FIRST CAUGHT MY EYE AND LED ME TO ATTEND THE URBAN SCREENS EVENT IN MELBOURNE AT THE START OF OCTOBER 2008. HOW DO WE DEAL WITH ALL THESE IMAGE SURFACES AND NETWORKED DISPLAYS THAT TYPIFY THE PRESENT GLOBAL PUBLIC SPHERE?

When we think urban screens (as opposed to sub-urban, ex-urban or non-urban ones?), we typically conjure images of oversized projections strangely attached to Gehry-like buildings in hypermodern CBD plazas. Think Seoul. Think Times Square. Think Fed Square.

While the Bladerunner-scale of the moving image takes hold of our imagination and tends to hog centrestage, Urban Screens Melbourne 08 took a broader and more expansive view of the spatial impact of screen technologies in contemporary culture and cities. Urban screens can be seen as providing a new digital layer to the city, an augmented media space that folds and flexes its way into and out of contemporary urban experience. It was the event’s engagement with this broad field that made Melbourne’s Urban Screens 08 such an engrossing and stimulating event.

The third in an ongoing series of international projects (the first was held in Amsterdam in 2005 and the second in Manchester in 2007; RT84, p30), the Melbourne program focused its conference and related events around the theme of “Mobile Publics.” Consisting of a series of keynote addresses, panels and discussions, the conference provided a framework for the presentation of a wide variety of media works presented in public urban contexts. This multimedia program was developed by Mirjam Struppek, who was one of the originators of the Urban Screens conference in Europe, and a founding member of the newly established Urban Screens international network. The Mobile Publics Conference was jointly developed and presented by Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis and Sean Cubitt from Melbourne University’s School of Culture and Communication, and set the intellectual scene for the event as a whole.

It could be argued that Fed Square houses one of the most successful implementations of a large screen in a public mall/piazza space. Filling up an entire city block, the square was purpose-built in 2002 as a public meeting place for Melbourne. As Kate Brennan (CEO of Federation Square) noted in her opening remarks and comments during later discussions, the Fed Square screen has been programmed by the authorities/managers of that space at the same time as it’s been claimed by the general public. We see this most clearly in the public assemblies and displays of mass emotion around major sporting events and significant moments in our collective political and social history—witness the crowds around this and other large public screens for the Prime Minister’s Apology.

But does this mean that these outdoor screening spaces are appropriate for contemporary artists and media makers? Through the multimedia program, film screenings and joint broadcasting initiative, curator Struppek strove to engage audiences in the social/technical space of the Fed Square environs. This extended from the main 65-square metre Barco screen in the outdoor plaza to numerous indoor and outdoor public LED screens, interactive ticker screens and temporary projection installations. The scale of the programming, and the scope of the works was impressive, though ultimately impossible (for this reviewer at least) to see it all.

The large screen space was used to engage passersby in contemporary interactive works such as MobiToss—MobiLenin by Jurgen Schelble from Finland, SEED by Canadian artists Napoleon Brousseau, Gabe Sawhney, Galen Scorer, Dave Reynolds and Adam Bacsalmasi, and Troy Innocent’s x-milieu abstract interactive installation.

This context and curatorial strategy for works presented in Melbourne is not at all like the infamous SPOTS media façade in Berlin which began showcasing large-scale interactive artworks in 2005. Although this ‘screen’ and others of its kind in Europe were (for some time at least) devoted exclusively to electronic art and experimental/alternative content, the standard large TV format of Fed Square provides a very different, and arguably more difficult set of constraints for artists to work with. Many of the attempts I witnessed to involve the public in this kind of interactive engagement were not particularly successful, and highlight the complexity of making urban scale works that connect with ‘random’ publics.

The interactive program was complemented by a series of projection-based works that played open-air-cinema style in the evening. This is where the scale of screen, urban context and bodily rhythms of the audience fell into sharpest relief. It is incredibly difficult for these works to grab the attention of the casual passerby who has to find an entry point and an acoustic space for linear works such as these. A bit like outdoor cinema for the avant-garde, these works struggled to connect with the mobile and disengaged audience. Without the organising principle of a public political or sporting event, our bodily engagement with this form of public/social space collapses.

A number of speakers at the conference demonstrated these dilemmas from a variety of angles, focusing in on the ways media, art and technology collide with the practical construction and experience of urban space. Saskia Sassen’s opening night keynote was one of the highlights. Her talk, entitled “Heavy Metal and Fuzzy Logic”, neatly contrasted the liquid potential of media with the solid steel structures of the heavy architecture so predominant in the BMX Theatre where the conference took place. Building upon much of the work she has done as an investigator into global city/global slum (she invented the term), Sassen opened up a series of questions that were echoed by other presenters throughout the conference.

ANAT Director Melinda Rackham gave a beautifully illustrated overview of the types of work that artists and designers have been producing for a wide range of public spaces over the past few years. This helped set the scene for more culturally specific presentations by Yoshitaka Mori on “MobileTechnology Culture and the Emergence of ‘Mobile’ Subjectivities” in Japan and Aaron Tan’s impressive discussion of recent work from his Hong Kong design firm RAD. Other international speakers (such as Andreas Broeckmann, who spoke on the “Intimate Publics. Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments”, particularly as it applies to the contemporary reconstruction of Berlin’s social/screen space), and Leon van Schaik’s talk, “Spatial Intelligence”, expanded the theoretical horizons of the conference. Case studies presented by Manray Hsu on the Taipei Biennial and Soh Yeong Roh’s presentation on “The City as Open Creative Platform” were also noteworthy contributions to the discussions.

While it was difficult as a conference participant visiting from another city to find time to see all of the works presented around Fed Square in a couple of days, the informative display in the foyer outside the main conference theatre gave an interesting snapshot of the innovative ways that artists, designers and architects are dealing with screenspaces in urban settings.

It was apt to stage Urban Screens 08 at Fed Square, itself something of a success story in the unfolding narrative of large scale screens in public spaces. This event offered a number of provocative and fruitful ways into thinking about the claims made on behalf of public screenspace, and will provide stimulus for local endeavours in this field for some time to come.

IN MARCH, RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER WILL BE ONE OF THE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AT THE 2009 ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL. WHILE NOT A FILMMAKER IN ANY TRADITIONAL SENSE, LOZANO-HEMMER’S ART PRACTICE, WITH ITS INNOVATIVE USE OF LIGHT AND PROJECTION, IS HIGHLY RELEVANT TO THINKING ABOUT CINEMA IN A CONTEXT WHERE OLD DISTINCTIONS—BETWEEN FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO AS SPECIFIC MEDIA, BUT ALSO BETWEEN CINEMA AND ART AS ZONES OF PRACTICE—HAVE ERODED.

Although he has been exhibiting for over a decade and half, Lozano-Hemmer’s only work so far shown in Australia was Homographies at the Sydney Biennale in 2006. (Fortunately, he maintains an excellent website with an archive of works, including extensive still and video documentation.) This should change over the next year or two, with projects under discussion for Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, as well as the acquisition by Tasmania’s MONA of the Pulse Room installation shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

One thing immediately evident in reviewing Lozano-Hemmer’s practice is his interest in working in series. This is signaled firstly in naming, notably the titling of his large-scale public projection works as “relational architecture” and his various gallery-based works as “subsculptures.” It is also manifested practically in the restaging of works in new locales and conceptually in the reconfiguration of elements of a work to explore a particular line of thought. Lozano-Hemmer notes: “Often I work parasitically: I scout a site, for instance, meet local eccentrics and stakeholders, and learn about its constraints and peculiarities. The project uses any of that information as a starting point for development. Other times I am interested in a phenomenon or an effect and pursue variations of that in different scales, or speeds or contexts.”

For instance, Vectorial Elevation (Mexico City, 1999-2000), Amodal Suspension (Tokyo, 2003) and Pulse Front (Toronto, 2006) all involved the utilisation of powerful searchlights in public space. Unlike the dominant modern aesthetic of centrally-controlled urban light spectacles, exemplified by Albert Speer’s notorious “light dome”, Lozano-Hemmer designed forms of public access, making operational the Lettrist proposal that “All street-lamps should be equipped with switches; lighting should be for public use.” While all three projects are united by the aim of redistributing social agency in public space, each deployed a different interface. In Vectorial Elevation, the lights were manouevered via an internet webpage which also became an open platform for comment; in Amodal Suspension the protocol centred on the mobile phone and SMS; while Pulse Front utilised a network of sensors to align the rhythm and orientation of 20 searchlights around the Toronto harbour with the pulses of passers-by.

Series also overlap. The sculptural interface for Pulse Front was similar to that initially developed for Pulse Room (2006), and the biometric principal has also informed recent works such as Pulse Tank (New Orleans Biennale, 2008) and Pulse Park (Madison Square Park, New York, 2008). Lozano-Hemmer comments: “I have done so many pieces with a pulse interface that I have been criticised for ‘recycling’ the interface and not truly innovating; my feeling about this is that it is an experimental approach where you must undertake these variations to get closer to developing a language or typology of interaction. Until a particular combination of media is in concert one does not really know how effective it will be.”

Interest in exploring the typology of interactions is also evident in his subsculpture series, which often involve the movement of massed identical objects. Homographies consisted of 144 fluorescent lights arrayed in a conventional modernist grid. Distributed at ceiling level above the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ main entrance court, the lights were mounted on moveable fixtures controlled by computerized surveillance systems. Seven cameras tracked the movement of visitors, triggering the rotation of the individual light tubes. A series of plasma screens along one wall showed visitors seen from the perspective of the tracking system overlaid with positional data. Wavefunction, which was first staged in Venice during 2007, consisted of nine rows of four chairs arrayed in a grid. The chairs, which combined the classic Eames plastic seat with the famous Saarinen base, filled most of a small rectangular room. As the audience entered the room and walked around, the chairs responded to their presence by moving up and down their vertical axes, generating complex ‘waves.’

Automated movement of objects often generates a strong sense of the uncanny. With works like Homographies and Wavefunction, surprise at the fact of movement is quickly overtaken by interest in the nature of the movement. It is not the position of any one object that is significant, but the movement of the set. What is being actively defined in the interplay between observer and set of objects is a field of relations. If the science of non-linear causality can be understood as the attempt to reconceptualise apparently random phenomena, this undertaking has been paralleled by the increasing importance that contingency and chance has assumed in modern and contemporary art. For Lozano-Hemmer digital media raise new possibilities of “programming without teleology.”

It is the uncertain nature of this encounter between the human and the technological which continually animates Lozano-Hemmer’s art. It also propels him into new forms of collaboration with both peers and audiences: “I programmed enough to know that I am a lousy programmer and thus I work with people who are very specialized…My model is similar to the performing arts: I am the director but there is also a composer, a programmer, a designer, a photographer or whatever other specialisations are required by the piece. In the end, though, there is a definite bias or idiosyncrasy that must be followed in order to ensure that the project has consistency.”

His large-scale public space works such as Body Movies and Under Scan demonstrate the potential for counter-intuitive uses of surveillance technology such as motion tracking systems to generate novel and creative forms of affective sociality. Body Movies involved the projection of a database of large-scale portraits onto the façade of a cinema in a public square. However, the portraits were rendered invisible due to powerful xenon lights directed on them at ground level. It was only when pedestrians walked through the square and interrupted the light that the projected portraits were ‘revealed’ in the silhouettes of their shadows. Similarly, Under Scan involved thousands of ‘video portraits’ projected onto the ground in central city thoroughfares and public spaces. The portraits appeared intermittently in the shadows cast by pedestrians, their absent subjects turning and then looking away as the passer-by left the scene. Both works used sophisticated ‘real time’ monitoring of pedestrian movement: in Body Movies, to switch to another set of images whenever all the portraits in a given scene were revealed, in Under Scan to ‘place’ portraits in a pedestrian’s predicted path. This design shifted the nature of ‘interactivity’ from its common reduction to choice from a menu of relatively predictable consequences to a far more open horizon in which contingency and unpredictability assumed a greater role. Instead of the logic of ‘taking turns’, where single users control the apparatus and produce representations that others watch, multiple users could simultaneously explore a multitude of different pathways.

These projects are not just about watching images, but depend upon the co-presence of the crowd— on interaction with others—in order for things to happen. Lozano-Hemmer stresses the active role of the public in ‘completing’ these works: “That’s a collaboration that has often been identified (for example in Duchamp’s maxim “le regard fait le tableau”) but now it is inherent to any interactive proposal. In the end Body Movies or Vectorial Elevation are platforms that are taken over by the public…If no one participates the pieces simply do not exist.”

Lozano-Hemmer’s platforms are notable in achieving a deft balance between individual agency and collective interaction, between active engagement and reflective contemplation. While technically sophisticated, they promote modes of interaction that are not simply instrumental. Passersby aren’t initially sure what is going on, but can best learn by joining in. Habit is suspended in favour of experimentation. When Under Scan was staged in London last November, Lozano-Hemmer found the location improved this experimental aspect: “The project in Trafalgar Square benefited greatly from the fact that there is already a lot of foot traffic at night. This meant people would just ‘encounter’ the work as they went home after work, for instance, rather than having to go to a specific site to see it.”

Despite their scale, the aim of these works is to initiate playful encounters rather than sublime experiences. Lozano-Hemmer observes that Under Scan “is quite underwhelming if your expectations are to see a grand cathartic spectacle in the tradition of son et lumiere or fireworks shows. Yes, we did use the world’s brightest projectors and covered 2,000 square metres with interactive portraiture, but the goal was in fact to create a situation of intimacy not intimidation. Technologies which are used for advertising, or Olympics or rock concerts are here transformed to deliver discrete, individual experiences with no proscenium, no preprogrammed narrative, no privileged vantage point.”

Intimacy is also a hallmark of the recent ‘pulse’ works such as Pulse Room which featured at the last Venice Biennale. The work consists of a grid of 100 incandescent light bulbs suspended in a room. The rhythm and intensity of each discrete light varies in response to the pulse of visitors measured when they grasp a sensor. As new users contribute data, the traces of past visitors move to the next position along the grid. Eventually, the room is filled with a complex pattern made from the mixing of 100 different heartbeats. It is a breathtakingly beautiful work which offers a profound image of the weaving of individuals into a collective without the loss of their uniqueness: an image of multitude rather than mass.

Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Museum of Art, Art & Moving Image Symposium, Feb 27, 6pm, keynote address Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

VISITORS TO MELBOURNE’S IMMIGRATION MUSEUM HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO IMMERSE THEMSELVES IN PLACE-HAMPI, AN INNOVATIVE MULTIMEDIA, MULTI-SENSORY EXHIBITION THAT REVEALS THE WONDERS OF AN ANCIENT WORLD HERITAGE SITE IN INDIA. ON MY FIRST VISIT TO PLACE-HAMPI, A SMALL GROUP OF EXCITED INDIAN STUDENTS FILLED THE SPACE, THEIR VOICES DROWNING OUT THE SOUNDS OF THE EXHIBITION, THEIR SENSES ALIVE WITH THE FERVOUR OF THEIR INTERACTION. THESE STUDENTS WERE CREATING VIRTUAL JOURNEYS INTO CULTURAL HISTORY BY CONNECTING SPATIAL FRAGMENTS AND CONSTRUCTING NARRATIVES FROM THIS MAGICAL LANDSCAPE.

Place-Hampi is an exhibition that combines the imagery of archaeological sites and discoveries of ancient remains and relics with the sacred and the mythological. Experiments with new media technologies developed by Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Research at the University of New South Wales have resulted in the convergence of archaeology and dreaming. Place-Hampi was commissioned for France-India year (Lille3000) and installed at Lille’s opera house in 2006.

Place-Hampi is divided into four interrelated exhibits presented across adjacent rooms. At the entrance, a topographical aerial map spread across the floor reveals a scaled down version of ancient Hampi. The map details Hampi’s terrain, the proximity of its monuments and denotes architectural features and historical locations. It also invites viewers to project themselves into the space by walking across the landscape. This hints at the interactivity to follow. Place-Hampi visually redefines Michel de Certeau’s differentiation of place and space. For de Certeau, while place is a geographically given and can be mapped, space is constructed by presence and engagement. Place-Hampi begins by defining geographic place and then invites the participant to construct their own sense of this space through movement, interaction and immersion.

The first room houses an exhibition of photographs shot by researchers over a 25-year period. This collection features Hampi’s vivid ochre and pink temples, monumental stone structures and elaborate architectural ruins. Some landscapes are illuminated by direct daylight while others are intensified by hazy sunsets. Layers of panoramic photographs fill the walls orienting visitors to the site, while smaller images spread across a tabletop light box can be inspected using a magnifier. Here the viewer shifts from tourist to investigator, scanning the photographs and focusing on details.

Preparing the Seitz VR Roundshot stereographic panoramic camera for photography at the Krishna Tank

The darkened central room requires interactive participation. A circular screen surrounds a user-controlled projection system that invites the participant to step on to a motorised platform and begin an exploration of the ancient landscape. Once on the platform, the user selects from a range of cylindrical dioramas, which are captured and navigated laterally. The driver has the ability to traverse the space and zoom in to investigate buildings and objects within the site. This virtual tour is created from “immaculate shots” of Hampi—images recorded using two stereoscopic 3D cameras. The visceral immersion that results offers a journey into a landscape where tourists can discover relics, visit ruins and explore the wonders of this sacred site.

Virtual tourists share the space with visitors to Hampi, both material and mythological. On the console, an LCD screen displays an alternative map of Hampi emphasising its symbolic links to Kishkinda, the mythological kingdom of monkeys. The surrounding screen reveals composited images of the Hindu deities Shiva, Ganesha, Sita and Durga, adding a hallucinatory vision to the experience. Artists at the Paprikaas Animation Studio in Bangalore created impressions of these Hindu gods, capturing and modelling their movements on the motion of classical Indian dancers. Sarah Kenderdine describes encounters with the mythological as “somatic engagement”, an embodied affect inspired by the Indian aesthetic tradition of chromolithography. The inscription of mythology over archaeology produces magical realism, connecting present with past to emphasise temporal continuity.

The final room repositions the virtual tourist as a researcher, presenting an impressive collection of the fieldwork that underpins Place-Hampi. Images of archaeological artefacts, newspaper articles, historical photographs and journal entries are imprinted onto plastic pages, which can be projected onto a large screen. The four rooms of the exhibition combine to present an experiential, exploratory (rather than didactic) connection with this ancient landscape. This virtual journey invites an embodied engagement, animating historical artefacts and Hindu gods with the use of new technologies. With their commitment to Place-Hampi, Melbourne’s Immigration Museum invests in new forms of exhibition to offer a unique experience and new imaginings of an ancient site, challenging its visitors to create space from place.

Place-Hampi: Inhabiting the Cultural Imaginary, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw with John Gollings, Paul Doornbusch, Dr L Subramaniam and Paprikaas Animation; Immigration Museum, Melbourne; Nov 13, 2008-Jan 26, 2009;www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_hampi.html; www.place-hampi.museum

FILM DIRECTOR DAVID HINTON WAS IN SYDNEY IN NOVEMBER 2008 TO FACILITATE THE SECOND DANCE SCREEN LABORATORY RUN BY CRITICAL PATH AND REELDANCE. UK-BASED HINTON HAS DIRECTED NUMEROUS AWARD-WINNING DANCEFILMS MADE WITH ARTISTS SUCH AS DV8 PHYSICAL THEATRE, RUSSELL MALIPHANT, WENDY HOUSTOUN AND ROSEMARY LEE. HE HAS MOST RECENTLY MADE THE POETIC BIOGRAPHICAL FILM ENTITLED NORA, ABOUT AFRICAN DANCER AND CHOREOGRAPHER NORA CHIPAUMIRE, COMMISSIONED BY EMPAC IN NEW YORK, AND MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH RUSSIAN DANCE SCREEN CURATOR AND FILMMAKER ALLA KOVGAN (SEE JUSTIN SHIH PEARSON’S REPORT ON THE NEW YORK DANCE ON SCREEN SHOWING, P25). HINTON HAS ALSO DIRECTED MANY NON-DANCE DOCUMENTARIES ON ARTISTS SUCH AS FRANCIS BACON, BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI AND JOHN CLEESE.

When did you start to work with choreographers and, as a documentary filmmaker, what drew you to dance?

I knew nothing at all about dance until my early twenties. When I was at university I studied literature and thought I was going to be a writer. So dance wasn’t anywhere in my orbit or the orbit of my friends…I came across it basically because I went to work in television as a researcher on the South Bank Show. A colleague of mine, Geoff Dunlop, made a very good documentary on Merce Cunningham in the 1980s…and it really opened my eyes onto a whole new world that I never knew existed, and which I found very exciting.

Then when I started directing documentaries for the program, one thing became clear to me very quickly…If you make a film about a writer, it’s fundamentally a journalistic exercise rather than a cinematic one. The writer may be a fantastic interviewee but there’s not much you can do, film-wise, apart from setting up a shot of them talking. Dance was by far the most cinematic of the art forms. The minute you walk into a dance studio it’s all about what you can articulate through image and movement. So coming from a literary background, I quickly realised that film can’t really carry much literary content and that if you want to make something very powerful in a cinematic sense, then words are not the way to do it. I needed to find non-literary ways of working, and dance seemed to offer the best possibilities.

The cinematic influences you revealed thoughout the Dance Screen Lab—it seems you came to those after you had discovered dance and found the relevance of those directors to making the most of the cinematic potential of dance?

The influences have been progressive: as the years go by you discover new things and have new concerns. One of the first things that made me interested in film at all was seeing Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972). Up until that time I thought of the cinema as being James Bond movies. So, just as I’d grown up without dance in provincial towns in England, neither was film a big part of my life, certainly not art films. Someone like Herzog relates to dance because of the physicality of the work. He famously said, “film is the art of the illiterates”, and I suppose that relates to dance because its power is not literary.

What models of film were useful in adapting dance work that has narrative elements, or has specific things to say, such as the work of DV8 Physical Theatre?

An important thing to say about Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1989) is that we never thought we were making a dancefilm. When we made it I had no sense of there being a dancefilm culture such as there is now. In fact, one thing DV8 were emphatic about was that they hated the word ‘dance’ and called themselves physical theatre. So it is kind of ironic that that film is now talked about as an iconic dancefilm.

But isn’t the success of the film because of the connection or affinity with cinematic traditions? It was physical theatre, physical cinema, not dance.

For me what it represented was a chance to make a silent movie. It was a fantastic exercise in what can be expressed purely through action and image. Up until the end of the 1920s, every film was a dancefilm in the sense that it was all about what could be expressed through the body. There’s the issue of intertitles but, fundamentally, it was about the body. All the people that made cinema into an international success story—Keaton, Chaplin, Gish, Fairbanks—they are people who are very articulate with their bodies. All those references were in my mind when I did Dead Dreams…

Let’s jump from there to your new film Nora and the idea that Sergei Paradjanov—an Armenian filmmaker—was a reference point for you and Alla Kovgan. That hardly represents an African aesthetic.

Well that whole production was a kind of cultural melting pot, which was one of the things I liked about it. Alla wanted to work with Mko Malkhasyan, a cameraman from Armenia, and Nora wanted the male lead to be played by Souleymane Badolo who comes from Burkina Faso. On the set there were five languages being spoken. Apart from his tribal language, Souleymane could only speak French, Alla was speaking Russian to Mko, I was speaking English to Nora, the line producer was speaking Portuguese to the police because that is the official language in Mozambique. Then Nora was speaking Shona to the local tribal people who were taking part in the film. So just practically speaking, communication was glorious if nightmarish.

We knew we weren’t going to make an ethnographic film. We weren’t making a documentary about Shona culture. Nora is a Shona who grew up in Zimbabwe, but she’s spent many years living in New York, absorbing a lot from ballet and American modern dance which had a big effect on the movement content of the film. And behind the camera we weren’t pretending to look at the world purely passively like a documentary maker, or to look at it with an African eye. Alla’s a Russian living in America and I’m English and Mko is Armenian and it was very interesting for us to find a vision for the film that we all agreed on—but we found it a strong aesthetic, very vivid, that we all really like.

It reminded me of the Haitian footage that Maya Deren shot—in slow motion and trying to get inside this trance dancing that’s so powerful. And I’ve been thinking about the specificity of bodies, exemplified in the solo dancer in Nora—you are not watching an actor embodying a character, you are watching someone using their ‘real’ body and gestural world. So there is an affinity between dance and documentary.

Yes, it’s become a big issue for me. I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity in dance which is a huge part of its appeal; the fact that they are actually doing it. That’s what makes it different from acting, which is pretending. And it’s a massive issue how you achieve authenticity in dance on film.

So we are not talking about documentations of dance but the way in which the poetic film structures you find in dancefilm can still contain these very real and authentic film performances.

I’m really interested in both extremes. Paradjanov and Bresson—he’s another one—these directors are basically control freaks. It’s the same with Busby Berkeley. The person making the film has a very clear vision of what they want to create and I kind of like those creative visionaries; people who find the performers they need to fulfil their vision and that’s all they require of their performers…anything else they give is just a nuisance.

Absolutely, and often a lot of the tension between choreographers and directors is that they are both used to being tin gods in their professional worlds. It can be hard for them to give it up when they collaborate.

But a director who has a choreographic way of working with moving bodies and staging them for the screen—the way Paradjanov and Bresson do—that’s something you are able to do.

There’s a lot of different ways to make good work. The freedom is there to experiment as much as you like and take your influences from anywhere you like. Working in dancefilm now is like working in Hollywood in 1910—the rules haven’t been invented yet. You might make good work by being very controlling, or by allowing your performers lots of freedom. What interests me is when people really make up their minds, really make a decision about what they’re trying to do, and then push it as far as it will go. Then the result won’t be bland. I’m fundamentally incredibly optimistic about the future of the form.

IT IS A COLD GREY DAY IN EARLY JANUARY, AND I AM WINDING MY WAY NORTH ALONG THE HUDSON RIVER TO TROY IN UPSTATE NEW YORK. AMIDST HARD-PACKED SNOW LITTERING THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND SLEEPY INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS AWAITING REVITALISATION RISES THE BRAND NEW CURTIS R PRIEM EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA AND PERFORMING ARTS CENTER (EMPAC)—AN AU$300 MILLION ARTS, TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE CENTRE FOUNDED BY RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND OPENED IN OCTOBER 2008.

A monumental glassy structure perched on the side of a hill, the building contains an acoustically awesome 1200-seat concert hall, a theatre, two large studios able to be used as residency spaces, recording studios or flexible presentation environments, and a clutch of offices. With an emphasis on research and a healthy slate of commissions and residencies to date, EMPAC seeks to provide both a place and program in which technology and the arts can inform and transform one another. A curatorial team led by director Johannes Goebel together with the new building’s state-of-the-art facilities—from custom-designed soundproofing panels to its connection to Rensselaer’s own on-campus supercomputer—promise exciting opportunities for audiences, artists and scientists alike.

On the day of my visit concentrated activity was taking place in the theatre, as filmmaker Brent Green prepared for the coming season, and in one of the studios as a team of people experimented with 3D cameras and a live feed. New media artist Sophie Kahn and choreographer Lisa Parra had set up residence in a tiny blacked-out space high in the building where they were working on a new video installation, body/traces, one of this year’s EMPAC DANCE MOViES commissions.

A project started by EMPAC’s Dance/Theater Curator Hélène Lesterlin in 2007, with a gift from the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts, the commissioning program supports new work from the Americas in the field of experimental dance film and video. The commissioning program has now been through two highly competitive open calls for proposals, helping to produce four dance films in 2007/08 and three films and body/traces in 2008/09. For a field of practice that has been dominated by European makers, and (given our relative sizes and access to funds) is well represented by Australian and New Zealand practitioners, the EMPAC DANCE MOViES initiative provides a welcome boost to dance screen production in North and South America.

If the inaugural EMPAC commissions are anything to go by, there is a strong and diverse field of activity waiting in the wings. Last year’s four films premiered at EMPAC’s opening in October where they drew capacity crowds to the concert hall. I had the opportunity to see them at the 37th Dance on Camera Festival at New York City’s Lincoln Center one late night in January this year.

The program included Victoria Marks and Margaret Williams’ Veterans, a film featuring five young US veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder who play out memories of combat on the streets and beaches of LA. In Joby Emmons and Elena Demyankenko’s Kino-Eye a lone dancer’s moves through a Moscow apartment building are captured via video surveillance. Using split screen techniques to emulate the layout of security monitors and grainy, glitchy footage produced by the equipment, Emmons reminds us of the surface of the screen as both a flat assemblage of time and colour as well as a voyeuristic window in on the action.

PH Propriedad Horizontal is an excellent short from Argentinean team David Farías, Carla Schillagi and Maria Fernanda Vallejos. An abstract study of holding and being held, gravity and counterbalance, and the geometry of a long narrow alleyway, PH uses close-ups, extreme camera angles and editing to explore rhythm and relationship between the dancers, and between the dancers and their architectural space.

A highlight of the festival was the final EMPAC commission, Nora, directed by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton. Based on the life of Zimbabwean-born dancer Nora Chipaumire, this film is part biopic, part fable, part dramatic cinema and part dance film. Filmed on location in Southern Africa and lusciously coloured, Nora engages with concepts of self and memory, and the active process of remembering, using a language of dance. The traditional tools of filmmaking—lighting and landscape, pacing and movement—draw out story and character, and a searing performance by Chipaumire as herself, her mother, her father and other characters provides a strong emotional centre. Tableaux are carefully composed within the frame and in a gesture towards silent film scenes are punctuated by brief and sometimes humorous intertitles.

Cinema history emerged as one possible theme for this year’s Dance on Camera, with packed houses jostling elbows and braving sub-zero temperatures for a tribute to Busby Berkley, and several shorts in other sessions recreating early cinema aesthetics in new ways. Of these, Richard Move’s Bardo, a study of light on the human form after Martha Graham’s 1930s recording of Lamentation, and New Zealander Daniel Belton’s films Matchbox and After Durer were most notable. Belton, also a finalist in last year’s ReelDance Awards, has developed a highly distinctive style of dance filmmaking in which his dimly lit cast of characters is cleverly manipulated through speed and scale to create a flickering, black and white, Buster Keaton-like world of games, strange instruments, construction and toy theatre.

Korean filmmaker Dahci Ma’s Mysteries of Nature was the winner of the Festival Jury Prize. An accomplished and poetic contemplation of primordial and urban environments, Ma follows fingers probing at a downy skin, children emerging from mud and a man who becomes a torn plastic bag blowing in the wind. Unconventional screen proportions, a sharply dissected frame and inverted camera angles create dizzying but ultimately intriguing perspectives.

ALL FESTIVALS ARE ESSENTIALLY WORKS IN PROGRESS, WITH NEW DIRECTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS EVOLVING AND ADAPTING FROM YEAR TO YEAR. NOW IN ITS ELEVENTH INCARNATION, DANCE FOR CAMERA, RUN BY SOUTH EAST DANCE AND SCREENED UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF BRIGHTON’S CINECITY, IS THE LONGEST ESTABLISHED OF THE BRITISH SCREENDANCE CIRCUIT, WITH NEW INITIATIVES THIS YEAR SIGNALLING A SHIFT BEYOND THE REMIT OF TRADITIONAL PROGRAMMING.

Proceedings began with Screendance Expanded, a one-day symposium, jointly organised by University of Brighton, providing a gathering point for the otherwise geographically scattered screendance community, and attracting an internationally representative mix of students, artists and academics. Following keynote speeches from Vena Ramphal and Sarah Wood, sessional focus shifted between funding, providing for youth and distribution, with a discussion forum highlighting the currently narrow range of opportunities—including Birminghan-based Dance TV and BBC commissioning—for televised and cinema-based screening. A workshop on future trends underlined the importance of advocacy and artist-led curation, with former BBC producer Bob Lockyer emphasising the need for bridge-building between contemporary production models. In addition, a panel exploring modes of discourse included visual arts writer Sally O’Reilly and dance critic Donald Hutera, foregrounding the potential of critically-led cross-pollination for a genre hindered by lack of specialist writing.

Within festival scheduling, sell-out status required an immediate repeat screening for a newly introduced, experimentally oriented program of predominantly short, single mood works. These included Christina Von Greve and C-Schulz’s intensely-focused abstraction of intermittent light sources in the monochromatic Flicker (2006); Phil Harder, Rosanne Chamecki and Andrea Lerner’s pleasingly fanciful use of stop frame animation in Flying Lessons (2007); Yves Ackermann’s deconstruction of shoot-em-up mores in Prototype (2007); and the opulent spectacle of Shelly Love’s The Forgotten Circus (2008). A complementary program of work in longer form featured Danièle Wilmouth’s A Heretic’s Primer on Love & Exertion: 29 Incidents of Dual Consequence (2007). Here, a highly-coloured picaresque world evolved from recurrent episodes of poker-faced text and task-based playfulness, with a movement vocabulary of clicks, swings, hops and jumps, linked and punctuated by a deftly rhythmic grammar of camera motion.

Also new to the festival, a quartet of documentary influenced work, selected from open call, uncovered a range of understatedly effective screen conceptualisations. Film editor Walter Murch has described the process of editing as “a kind of frozen dance” and Jonathan Perel’s 5 (Cinquo) (2008) skilfully utilised the potential of the kinetic bridge by intercutting between separately filmed versions of the same studio-set sequence. Bruno Deville and Philip Saire’s La Boule d’Or (2008) combined talking head interview with quietly assured camera positioning, alternating overhead and point of view shots as Saire coached four impassive, middle-aged boules players through stylised still positioning and elegantly composed walking patterns. Dirk Hilbert and Kasturi Mishra located the visual richness of Kathak-based studio footage within a contemporary Indian, city-based cultural context in Krishna’s Dancer (2006), while Gideon Obarzanek and Edwina Throsby’s Dance Like Your Old Man (2007) set voice over against front-on framing, as a series of young women inhabited the movement patterning and stylistic tics of their fathers’ social dancing styles, gently illuminating the complex blend of amusement, irritation and affection of one generation for another.

The first of two programs exploring non-traditional curation showcased work created in partnership with, and selected by, adults with learning disabilities. From Oska Bright, Oliver Turnbull, Miriam King and Simon Wilkinson’s The Man in The Hat (2007) reversed the workings of time and gravity as a single male figure negotiated an ambiguous, grey-scaled landscape of leaves and sky in a strikingly effective use of retrograde motion.

Meanwhile Fresh Takes—a parallel program selected by Youth Jury—drew attention to the intense physicality of the young male experience and to the integration of movement and location. Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer believed that screen-based dance should arise from context “as part and parcel of physical reality”, and in Craig Viveiros’ Stereo Step (2006), an apparently continuous Michel Gondryesque follow shot tracked street and social dance tropes through a densely populated series of exterior and interior spaces, additionally highlighting camera journey as choreographic device.

In a significant example of inter-genre lineage, a through-line was clearly traceable from Peter Anderson and Rosemary Lee’s physical and psychic interrelation of protagonist and surroundings in boy (1995) to Sergio Cruz’ visually sophisticated blending of still image and point of view shot in Animalz (2006), which imagined into being a natural context for the heightened physicality of pre-teen b-boys. Evoking the fluidity of adolescent identity, both works inhabit a liminal, shore-set landscape of scrub, sand and waves, with the “ramifications of the moment” layered into a poetically-oriented, non-linear mesh of elements and imagery, as outlined in Maya Deren’s notion of vertical narrative progression.

Of particular significance, an expanded program of installations sited in and around the Lighthouse building moved viewing engagement beyond a sit-down, front-on, single screen model. Work ranged in scope from mobile-phone-created, one-minute pieces to Jeremy Radvan’s digitised chalk-and-slate-style reinvention of Victorian visual forms in MyrioRama (2008), and Billy Cowie’s continuing experimentation with 3D imagery in The Revery Alone (2008). Here, in contrast to the highly realised environment integral to In the Flesh (2007), the traditional signifiers of performance—music, codified movement, costume—were stripped away, confronting the floor-bound viewer with their own response to the life-sized, hologramatic image of a naked female figure, suspended from four ceiling-fixed hand and foot grips, and silently shifting through gymnastic contortion in an uneasy exploration of the power dynamic central to the interchange of gaze.

Elsewhere, the highly polished visual stylisation of the Quay Brothers, shown as part of Cinecity programming in Eurydice—She, So Beloved (2007), combined large scale screen-based images with peephole-glimpsed miniaturised models, housed within a coffin shaped interior.

Luke McKernan has observed that the origins of cinema are tied to “the study of motion”, and new initiatives at Dance For Camera held up a mirror to the range of territory currently opening to pioneering artists and audiences within contemporary models of production; curation; presentation and discourse in an ever-expanding range of 21st century potentiality.

WRITING THIS ARTICLE IN THE STERILE AIR CONDITIONING OF MY OFFICE IN SYDNEY I AM STRANGELY CLOSE TO THE ARTWORKS I AM REVIEWING. A SCENT DESCRIBED BY ARTISTS DAVID HAINES AND JOYCE HINTERDING AS “THE MOMENTS BEFORE A THUNDERSTORM” WAFTS OUT FROM MY NOTEBOOK. THIS PERFUME, IONISATION, IS AN INTERPRETATION OF THE SMELL OF THE SUN, OR MORE PRECISELY THE SMELL OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE AIR. IT IS ONE OF TWO FRAGRANCES IN THE INSTALLATION EARTHSTAR. WHEN I VISITED THE WORK WEEKS AGO IN BRISBANE, I STUCK A PAPER STRIP STEEPED IN THE FRAGRANCE AMONGST MY NOTES. IT IS 34 DEGREES OUTSIDE TODAY, AND I LONG FOR A THUNDERSTORM. THE SKY IS AN INTENSE BLUE THAT SHOWS NO SIGN OF CRACKING, BUT THIS STOWAWAY SMELL BYPASSES THE EVIDENCE OF MY EYES AND TELLS MY BODY SOMETHING DIFFERENT. IT IS A HARD, METALLIC, ELECTRICAL SCENT CHARGED WITH LATENT POWER. IT STIRS THE HAIRS ON THE BACK OF MY NECK AND TELLS MY EARS TO LISTEN FOR THUNDER.

Earthstar is one of two new collaborative works by Haines and Hinterding that include manufactured scents. If I turn back several pages in my notebook I come to another smell. This one is murkier—a combination of grass, mildew and a hint of car tyre. Ozone Rubber is the artists’ Eau de (and ode to the) Parramatta River. It aims to capture and intensify the olfactory experience of the salt-water part of the river below the weir, while a companion scent, Ghost Leaves, captures the subtly different scent of the river’s fresh-water upper section.

Two small bottles of the fragrances form part of a collection of objects in a boxed edition called The Immaterial’s: Language, Molecules, Vibrations. It was commissioned by Parramatta City Council as part of their outdoor sculpture programme Current 08 and is an imaginative and compelling interpretation of the idea of public art. The collection offers three different ways of recording and expressing the landscape of the river: a book containing notes, photographs and essays (language); the two perfumes (molecules) and a CD of electromagnetic field recordings (vibrations). The title’s ambiguous apostrophe suggests that this assemblage represents a set of things which are, or belong to “the immaterial”—a recurring theme in Haines and Hinterding’s solo and collaborative practices. Much of their previous work has used digital and technological structures to harness, transduce and reveal the imperceptible forces that saturate our world.

Their inclusion of scent within the category of the immaterial raises tricky questions. While art, particularly public sculpture, is often yoked to the idea of a material object, it nevertheless tends to privilege the immaterial sense of vision, which processes information that reaches us remotely through light. Smell on the other hand, is a proximal sense that requires physical contact with the thing that we are sensing. In fact smelling requires us to incorporate parts of a thing (the “molecules” of Haines and Hinterding’s title) within our own bodies. So while scent may be invisible and diffuse it is far from immaterial. In fact it is the visceral materiality of smell that makes it such an intriguing focus for art.

In their work with the electromagnetic spectrum, in both these new installations and in past works, Haines and Hinterding translate frequencies beyond normal human perception into forms that we can experience directly. With scent they are doing something subtly different—they are concentrating and intensifying an everyday experience which our senses can access, but which we rarely pay attention to. Both strategies have similar outcomes—a heightened awareness of the intimacy and complexity of our relationship to the world around us.

Richard Shusterman has argued, through a framework he calls “somaesthetics”, that the development of our perceptual and physical abilities to finely appreciate our surroundings should be central to our pursuit of the aesthetic (Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2008). One of the reasons that smell is rarely used in art is that, unlike our eyes or our ears, the nose is a rather blunt perceptual instrument. Most noses, excepting those belonging to sommeliers and perfumiers, have not had the practice to enable them to discerningly appreciate (or interpret) the information they receive. Oliver Sacks tells the story of a man who, after receiving a bump on the head, develops an almost canine sensitivity to smell and is flooded by a wealth of new information about the world around him. The Parramatta smell compositions are intricate, alchemical creations that deliver an exaggerated sensual experience of the mundane. The perfumes combine aromas of the area’s vegetation—mangrove, fennel, lantana and the “green grass of suburbia”—with hints of the rubber tyre plant next to the river. Haines’ assessment (emailed to me) of the Ghost Leaves fragrance gives an insight into the subtle, arcane process of perfume creation, and the sensitivity to our everyday experience which it requires: “I like its urinous aspects in the top note, a bit of suburban football oval toilet block in that…the watery part uses a chemical similar to Valium… it’s marine, ozone, stagnant pond all in one.”

While The Immaterial’s presents three different ways of representing the landscape of the Parramatta River, Earthstar offers three different, and extraordinary ways of experiencing the sun. I saw (heard and smelled) the work as part of the Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. The exhibition demonstrates the facts that, whatever the recent controversy over the term, the best “new media” artists are an avant-garde, combining scientific experimentation with new forms of art experience.

In Haines and Hinterding’s installation huge coiled antennas pick up the electromagnetic activity of the sun, which is amplified and played back in real time. During my visit this live sun sound-track sounded rather like a perpetual low hiss, with occasional fizzes and pops—like a soft drink being opened or an air conditioning system. A large screen shows pre-recorded images of the solar chromosphere—a layer of the sun’s atmosphere that is only visible with the naked eye as the aura at the edge of a total eclipse. Captured using a Hydrogen-Alpha telescope that filters out visible solar light, the glowing orb resembles a bloody post-apocalyptic sun with a short comet’s tail. A large refrigerator contains bottles of two “ozonic” smell compositions. These scents are made with chemicals that resemble the smell of ozone, which would itself be harmful if inhaled. Both are relational smells. The first, Ionisation, describes the interaction of the sun with the air around us, and has the sharp acridity of fried electrical wire. The second, Terrestrial, draws from the interaction of sun and earth, and has the smoky tang of campfires. The artificiality of these fragrances is made pointedly clear in labels that detail their composition. Terrestrial, for example, includes such mysterious ingredients as Helional (3-1, 3-benzodoxol-5-yl)-methyl propanol.

The installation speaks the performative language of a former age of scientific discovery. It has the theatricality of Faraday demonstrating the first electric dynamo to the rapt 19th century audiences of the Royal Institution. The work is both wonder-full and at the same time, physically and emotionally cold. Sunlight itself—as we directly experience it through the pleasurable sensations of light and warmth—is noticeably absent from the dark interior of the gallery. The work dismembers the sun into its component parts. Like Swift’s satire of the scientists of Brobdingnag, who extract sunlight from cucumbers, Haines and Hinterding’s installation can be read as a critique—perhaps of the hermetically sealed, inward looking nature of art galleries, where real world experiences are filtered and abstracted, or perhaps of a techno-scientific world view that sees natural phenomena as resources to be split apart and re-purposed.

Within the science-lab atmosphere of the installation the fragrances were presented clinically as synthetic simulations of real experience. They formed part of a collection of intellectual propositions that caused me to think a great deal, but feel somewhat less. Weeks later, however, I realise that scent has another property that makes it a particularly interesting medium for art—it lingers. Here in my notebook the ersatz smell of the sun persists, and transforms my memory of the work into something warm, visceral and alive. Weeks later, with my fingers on the keys of my computer and my eyes on the screen, the lingering scent in my notebook has a resonance that touches me as, perhaps, only a scent can. I hold the pages close to my face, close my eyes to my notes of analysis and evaluation, and inhale a different kind of record of the installation. Something in that smell triggers a rush of anticipation, memories that seem both personal and genetic—a coming storm.

Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, The Immaterial’s: language molecules vibrations (2008), Current 08: Sculpture Projects in the River City, curator Tia McIntyre, Riverbeats Festival, Paramatta, Nov 7-23; Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, Earthstar (2008), Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award Exhibition, curators Jose Da Silva, Nicholas Chambers, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Nov 1, 2008-Feb 8, 2009

The Room (1994/2007) exhibited in Gravity Be My Friend (2007-2008), Pipilotti Rist. Viewers of Rist’s video works sit on outsized lounges: “When we watch TV the reality around us shrinks or disappears.” (Catalogue)

THE CULTURAL MAGNET WAS IN FULL FORCE DURING LIVERPOOL’S YEAR OF CULTURE 2008. WITH AN IMPRESSIVE PROGRAM OF EXHIBITIONS, PERFORMANCE, DANCE, CONFERENCES AND ASSORTED EVENTS THE LURE TO LIVERPOOL WAS FELT FAR AND WIDE. ONE OF THE EPICENTRES OF THIS CULTURAL LOVE-IN WAS FACT (FOUNDATION FOR ART AND CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY), THE MOVING IMAGE AND NEW MEDIA CENTRE ESTABLISHED IN 1988 AND CURRENTLY UNDER THE ENLIGHTENED DIRECTORSHIP OF MIKE STUBBS.

Many in the Australian cultural sector would know Mike Stubbs from his time at Melbourne’s ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image). As Head of Exhibitions, Stubbs skilfully developed a range of programs that brought together sonic arts, moving image and new media. Now at FACT and working with a savvy team he is developing FACT as a focus for interdisciplinary practices in the UK.

The FACT building itself is surprisingly discrete and tucked away. Situated in the historic Ropewalks area of Liverpool and nestled in amongst warehouses and disused shops, the glass façade offers a stark contrast to the dark hues of Liverpool’s cobbled streets. In many ways the building, opened in 2003 and designed by architects Austin-Smith:Lord, is the direct opposite of the architectural signature style of most contemporary museums and galleries. Rather than screaming, “look at me I’m an icon of art and design”, FACT’s impact is integrated into the scale and history of its surroundings. It is this embedded approach into the fabric of the city that makes it an inviting and popular place for both locals and visitors.

With a café, cinemas, bookshop, black box performance space and galleries, FACT is always busy. There’s a sense that anyone can drop in at any time, have a coffee, read a book, check their email and see a film or exhibition. This welcoming approach in itself provides a gentle introduction for the general public to emerging forms of practice. New media and interactive artworks are often maligned, especially in the media for being user-unfriendly or inaccessible. FACT in many ways works to dispel this myth by directly engaging a wide public with the broad depth of contemporary art practices. The foyer entrance area is constantly in use as an exhibition space, providing an effective lure to explore the gallery, other spaces and ideas generated through FACT’s integrated programming strategies.

Having established itself as a centre for a range of audiences, the populist nature of the Liverpool Capital of Culture additionally provided FACT with a platform to raise its profile and to introduce a range of new programming and curatorial directions. A new director in any arts organisation will work with the team to shake things up, consolidate and develop an artistic vision for the future. With Mike Stubbs taking up his appointment in May 2007, the 2008 Capital of Culture provided an opportunity to introduce a series of annual themes that would engage with and create debate around wider cultural, political and social issues.

The first of these thematic directions, running throughout 2008 was Human Futures. The aim of this year-long program was to create an opportunity for prolonged and sustained debate about complex issues facing the future of humanity. In a series of exhibitions, performances, film programs and debates, questions were raised about how we deal with change, the impact of technology, the ethical and moral issues of scientific research, the limits of the body. The program brought together a broad range of international artists, thinkers, writers and critics to directly engage the public in often difficult and challenging debates. In the publication accompanying the program, Stubbs and Laura Sillars (Head of Program) wrote, “Through actively encouraging experimentation, provocation and interference, we acknowledge that it is artists who have repeatedly provided early warnings to the cultural, economic and political ramifications of new technologies through a variety of mediums, tactics and gestures.”

In developing a thematic discourse, FACT provides a platform for a broad spectrum of artists and positions new media and sci/art practice as a compelling genre from which to question the issues and challenges of the 21st century. With commissioning, exhibition and publication artists are provided with opportunities to expand their practice and develop new bodies of work. For Human Futures, the renowned Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist premiered a new work Gravity, Be My Friend with additional new elements designed especially for FACT. The international group exhibition Sk-Interfaces, curated by Jens Hauser, explored the idea of skin as a technological interface with installations by Orlan, Stelarc, the Arts Catalyst group, Tissue Culture and Art, Zane Berzina and Julia Reodica. In a very memorable and confronting performance on the opening night of the exhibition, Swiss artist Yann Marrusich sat perfectly still in a perspex box, having ingested methylene blue which, over the course of an hour, slowly seeped from the pores of his body. A symposium was also staged in October and BBC Radio 3 and Radio Merseyside’s Festival of Ideas focused on the broader themes of Human Futures with speakers such as novelist Will Self and the KLF’s [Kopyright Liberation Front] Bill Drummond exploring the 21st Century Brain and The Value of Experience.

In 2009, the thematic thread is Unsustainable and is a response to Liverpool’s 2009 Year of the Environment. A major thrust of this overarching theme is to engage the audience and throughout the year the Climate for Change program will involve workshops, residencies, labs and debates. In responding to the city-wide focus on environment, FACT will open its doors to school groups, students and local residents to become actively involved in the generation of an arts and cultural dialogue around questions around leading an ‘unsustainable’ lifestyle.

A highlight for the year is Abandon Normal Devices, a new festival of cinema and digital culture launching in September, which goes beyond Liverpool with events in Manchester and other centres in England’s northwest. As part of AND, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul will present a new installation Primitive, exploring further his preoccupation with myth, dream and memory, recounting the last 48 hours in the life of Boonmee, a passionate yogi who is able to remember his former lives.

This integration of cinema, digital media, interactivity and audience engagement is at the heart of FACT’s programming directions. It situates the building as a site for exploration and engagement, but also as a base to extend its reach into new arenas. The team at FACT is acutely aware of the rise and impact of the YouTube generation, DIY media and social networking, and in 2008 established FACT TV. This is an online channel dedicated to broader discussions of FACT’s programming, an outlet for showcasing film and video by artists and an opportunity for the local community to feedback and provide comment on events and exhibitions. FACT TV also provides an increased online presence for FACT’s resident community TV station tenantspin.

FACT is an example of an institution acting as an ‘agent of change.’ In its programming and curatorial approaches it aims to provide a platform for artists and audiences to respond to the transforming landscape of our society, environment and culture. As a regional centre it emphasises local involvement with an outwardly national and international focus. It takes seriously the challenge to our cultural institutions to be pro-active and engaged in the urgent debates of our time.

ROBERT COOK’S MELANCHOLIC MUSING ON THE PASSING OF THE ONCE BRIGHT CYBORG FUTURE (RT61) TRIGGERED MY OWN. AT A CERTAIN MOMENT A CYBORG TRANSFORMATION SEEMED INEVITABLE. SECURE IN OUR SLEEK, IMPENETRABLE SKINS WE WERE TO BE HYBRID, MUTABLE AND INVINCIBLE—HARDWARE TO THE CORE.

Amongst the beautiful but resolutely soft and human objects of Coded Cloth at the Samstag Museum, it’s apparent that we’ve abandoned this dream of glossy exteriors for ones pervious and porous, acknowledging the permeability of skin and cloth. Clothing, always intimately coded with social meaning, continues to offer itself as the interface, the second skin, between body and world. More flexible and adaptable, these skins in Coded Cloth are for weaving code into, transmitting, embedding and wiring.

And so the cyborg has been stripped down through the development of what started variously as installation art, game theory, design, computing, engineering, textile work and science of every description into wearable computing, locative media, bio art, cyborg tech, bio-tech, portable platforms and social networking, dispersed into tags, locators and nodes—pliable, conformable to our bodies and brushing up against our skin.

Coming out of ANAT’s reSkin 2007 wearable computing lab [RT78], Coded Cloth exhibits diverse objects that initially, aside from their material base, seem unconnected. There are few embedded devices here and the connectivity is unwired. The show is, in fact, a sampler of the huge web of intersecting transdisciplinary fields of enquiry around bio art, wearable computing, intelligent textiles and so on and on. What these objects share are operational logics and particular modes of use that extend beyond the interaction of individual and object. The coding here is not necessarily in the weave of the cloth.

Elliat Rich’s Yala Sofa (2008) is made of simple plywood forms. The Yala flowers are invisible until the heat of a seated body makes them bloom—the upholstery is richly printed with thermo-reactive ink. Gathering the Yala, a type of sweet potato, is a communal event for the Pintupi people of the Western Desert that symbolises the connections between people coming together for an action as simple as drinking tea. Even without this knowledge, the flower’s blossoming in the body’s heat suggests a trace of habitation and an intimate event.

Alice Springs-based Rich creates objects and spaces around which events can occur and social practices be sustained. Her Urban Billy (2006) is a self-contained glass billy can that makes a tea event possible anywhere. Rich’s utilitarian objects focus on the spaces and connections created in social moments. In their creation of memory maps and ephemeral traces, her works are themselves a kind of locative media.

Woven of 50% cassette tape, Alyce Santoro’s 2008 Sonic Sails (The Tell-Tail Thankgas) are coded at many levels. The Texas-based artist integrates an almost obsolete technology into the very fabric, doubling the coding with a personally significant sound collage. As the sails lift and shimmer the collage of samples on the tape are played with a tape head decoder producing a densely layered sound tapestry.

In the making of her Sonic Fabric Santoro activates networks keeping skills and tools alive, from the rescue of a specialised loom to cloth production by Tibetan women. Like Rich’s practice, sustainability here goes beyond material choice and connectivity is achieved via eloquent objects.

High Tea with Mrs Woo is a cult Newcastle clothing label with a distinct, almost Edwardian fashion aesthetic. Hidden (2007) is a modified coat dress for the intrepid female, equipped with invisible pocket warmers to enable the wearer to travel light and warm. There’s a touch of steam punk about Hidden, both in the style and in the expressed love of design, innovation and over-engineering. Unlike other wearable computing where integrated devices embed the wearer into the network, Hidden is a very self contained, private kind of wearable connecting only to the body of the wearer. Creating a closed loop, Hidden hints at the hermetic world of the traveller and historical ideas of the properly feminine—stitched down and hidden from view.

Fibre Reactive (2004-08), by Perth-based Donna Franklin, is a simple organza evening dress that provides the base for a tactile skin grown out of the orange bracket fungus. Its unusual elegance overlays a subtle and sophisticated examination of the bio-technological manipulation of living things. Wearing it is a complex act that places the wearer in the position of guardian of this fragile living thing and creates a relationship of equivalence between both lives, questioning, through our relationship with clothing, the commodification of and disposability with which we treat nature.

All of the works in Coded Cloth mine and are part of rich fields of enquiry that are fluid, overlapping and driven by experimentation. Clearly, in the video clip of the ReSkin lab, the participants were having serious fun, yet that sense of productive play hasn’t translated here, due largely to a traditional installation. Located in a dimmed room with spotlit objects on plinths and polite “Please do not sit” signs, Coded Cloth presented as very serious indeed. The show isn’t really about the objects but about their potential in connection with the body. However, interactivity here is limited to just one square each of the Sonic and Yala fabrics. A less reverential presentation might have made for a more engaging experience with what is fascinating work.

Writing about why technology hasn’t democratised the blogosphere, academic Saskia Sassen argues that it’s not the internal logic of the technology that matters but the social logic of the users (Networked Publics Symposium, California, 2006). That social logic changes and subverts the inbuilt logic of the technology. It’s not the wires or the technology but the unwired invisible logic embedded in our brains that counts. Understanding this, the artists of Coded Cloth seamlessly harness and connect internal and external worlds through our second skins.

Coded Cloth, New Media Textiles, curator Melinda Rackham, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Oct 30-Dec 19, 2008

PIEQF, Parkfield Interventional Earthquake Fieldwork taken by Kite Aerial Photography,

PARKFIELD IS A STRANGE PLACE TO HOLD A PARTY. THE CENTRAL CALIFORNIAN TOWN, POPULATION 18, HAS ONE RESTAURANT AND ONE SMALL INN, AND GETTING THERE TAKES SOME DOING. IT’S IN ROLLING-HILL RANCH COUNTRY HALFWAY BETWEEN SAN FRANCISCO AND LA, FAR FROM THE SEA.

But what happened here on a warm Sunday morning this past November was definitely a party. Dozens of people—young and old, hipsters and housewives—crowded the rough-hewn tables of the Parkfield Café, loading up on half-pound burgers and big country breakfasts. Others lounged on the oak-shaded lawn just outside, eating picnic lunches, drinking beer and watching someone’s golden retriever splash about in the café’s fountain. Still more milled around in a dusty lot next to the lawn, staring down into a pit that could bury a brontosaurus.

At the bottom of this hole sat an ungainly contraption, a chest-high platform the size and shape of a tennis service box. But any association with tennis was fleeting, because the thing was not genteel. It was all sharp corners and rugged bolts and cables and hoses. Thirty 10-foot-high metal rods rose from its steel-slat surface, scraping the blue Autumn sky. It looked like a giant mechanical spider lying on its back in an open grave.

And everyone was here to see it. The machine was the Parkfield Interventional Earthquake Fieldwork (PIEQF), a melding of science and art. Sydney-based artist DV Rogers set it up in Parkfield in August, after more than a decade of planning, recommissioning, tinkering, and scrounging for funds. This was its last day of operation, and the gathering, at least 75 strong, was a send-off.

The PIEQF is a modified shake table, which engineers use to test how buildings handle earthquake stresses. Rogers linked it up with a network of United States Geological Survey (USGS) seismic sensors across the state. Any time a quake above magnitude 0.1 struck anywhere in California—and this happens about 40 times every day—hydraulic pistons made the PIEQF shudder, rattle and clank. The steel rods bent and swayed like coral polyps in a current. The more intense the quake, the longer the shake.

Rogers put it here, in this tiny town two hours from anywhere, because Parkfield is the earthquake science capital of the world. It sits directly on the San Andreas Fault, a 1300-km-long gash in the ground where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates meet. If California ever cracks off the West Coast and sinks into the Pacific, the San Andreas will likely be to blame. Slips of the fault caused both the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (magnitude 7.8, 3,000 dead) and the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor, centred just north of Monterey Bay (magnitude 6.9, 63 dead).

Parkfield itself gets hit hard and often. Since 1857, seven magnitude 6.0 quakes have hit the area every 20 to 30 years, the last coming in September 2004. Scientists reckoned they could learn a lot about quakes—and maybe even improve their predictions—by studying a place with such regular, repeating ones. So in 1985 the USGS established a massive monitoring presence in Parkfield, and the agency has been here ever since.

The PIEQF—“part machine, part earthwork, part performance”, according to Rogers—was like a seismic antenna, transforming subterranean shock waves into machine-mediated sound and motion. And it was here to give anyone who stopped by, or visited Rogers’ website with its live video feeds (http://pieqf.allshookup.org/), a glimpse of the earth’s churning, straining heart. The PIEQF was very much a site, in the sense articulated by one of Rogers’ biggest inspirations, the American land-art pioneer Robert Smithson. That is, it drew a great deal of its power from being here, in Parkfield, on one of the planet’s widest, longest wounds. All this activity is right under our feet, and we never think about it. Forty quakes a day. Listen to your earth. And watch it move.

The PIEQF made visual the buried dynamism of the landscapes in which we live. It firmed up our sense of place, and our sense of time. For this force, 40 quakes a day, may destroy our buildings, our roads, our bridges, but at heart it is generative. It raises mountains and clears paths for lava to rise from hot, hidden depths. It has shaped the Earth steadily, constantly, over billions of years, and seeing those rods dip and sway reminded us of this fact.

This was a message Rogers wanted the PIEQF to get across. “We engage with geological time in a very shallow way”, he said. “I’m interested in introducing a human timescale to geological time.”

At 12:30, Andy Michael clambered atop the PIEQF, trombone in hand, joining two cellists and a vocalist on the mechanical beast’s back. Michael, a USGS seismologist, initially got Rogers interested in Parkfield a few years ago. And he helped get Rogers the official-sounding (but unpaid) title of USGS artist-in-residence.

The four musicians played two short songs Michael composed: “Earthquake Quartet”, written in 1999, and “Fanfare,” conceived the night before at the party in Parkfield. “Earthquake Quartet” incorporates actual seismograms as percussion, and it is the reason Michael and Rogers first touched base: Rogers heard about the piece and dropped Michael a line.

At the end of “Fanfare”, as the vocals died and the keening of strings leached into the dust, the PIEQF got a solo. For 30 raucous seconds it clattered, clanged, and shuddered, its metal slats rising and falling. But then the pistons stopped pumping, and, after 91 days of continuous operation, 43,000 webcam frames, and more than 4,000 earthquakes, it too was silent.

Now the PIEQF sits in secure storage, waiting for its next curtain. In many ways, Parkfield was just a warm-up. Rogers wants to install it in an urban setting as soon as he can raise the funds. He’s thinking LA, 2010. It’s another earthquake-prone city, and one that desperately needs an appreciation of deep time.

DV Rogers, PIEQF, Parkfield Interventional Earthquake Fieldwork, Parkfield, California, Aug 18-Nov 16, 2008. http://pieqf.allshookup.org

FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE DORKBOT CONCEPT, IT CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS A COLLECTION OF COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD WITH A COMMON INTEREST EXPRESSED THROUGH THE MOTTO “PEOPLE DOING STRANGE THINGS WITH ELECTRICITY.” ESSENTIALLY DORKBOT PROVIDES A LOOSE NETWORK AND STRUCTURE TO FACILITATE ACTIVITIES OF THOSE INTERESTED IN THE FUTURE OF ELECTRONIC ARTS. STARTED IN NEW YORK BY DOUGLAS REPETTO, THE DORKBOT IDEA HAS SPREAD AROUND THE GLOBE. THERE ARE NOW DORKBOT CHAPTERS IN ALMOST ALL AUSTRALIAN CITIES.THE CANBERRA DORKBOT, ESTABLISHED IN EARLY 2008, FINISHED THE YEAR WITH AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS PRESENTED AT THE CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE IN MANUKA IN NOVEMBER.

The immediate impression on entering the exhibition space was of a generous collection of creative practices reaching out into the physical world. The locus of this initial impression was Alexandra Gillespie and Somaya Langley’s collaboration, Collars, with electronics and programming by Ben Lippmeier. This minimal installation, comprising shirt collars on stands with electroluminescent strips of text showing through the material, symbolically questioned power, control and social status. The sound component, based on collected stories from those associated with the shirts, added a further tangible dimension to this installation.

The two other works that functioned in time were by Josh Wodak and Michael Honey. Wodak’s new wave cinema work, Powers That Be, brought together a collage of four voices and associated images into what Wodak described as a “synaesthaic audiovisual relation.” In this instance, one sensory mode triggers or illuminates the other. This synaesthetic experience was interactive in the sense that it is activated by the position of the viewer in the gallery. Honey’s interactive work, Eigenstate, inverted the idea of interaction by generating algorithmic visualisations when the presence of a viewer was not detected by the system. This was a work with explicit reference to scientific concepts, yet the evolution of the imagery had a singularly poetic quality.

In Estuarine Flows, Tracey Meziane Benson presented a series of solar-powered backlit transparencies. These digitally manipulated map images of the boundaries between land and sea reflected the beauty in the structural intricacies of vast environments. The presentation format also seemed calculated to inspire intimacy or personal reflection on the images.

Nathan McGinness’ Leaves was generated through the Processing programming environment. The outcome was visually intriguing and on reflection seemed to question the nature and implications of process in art. It was interesting to consider that although an almost infinite number of outcomes are possible through such a process, the final selection for public presentation is an aesthetic decision made by the artist.

Mitchell Whitelaw’s Limits to Growth reflected a much longer association with generative systems. The elegant prints (about 15) of growth in a model world have a convergent organic and visual information quality. Like the early 1920s works of Mondrian, this collection has the viewer drawn to certain structures without quite knowing why. It would be interesting to correlate a viewer’s focus with the constraints under which the engaging prints were generated. Whitelaw’s second work Watching the Street, was another time-based outcome through the use of slitscan, a time stretching technique using a long series of time-lapse images where narrow slices of each image are extracted and recompiled. The outcome was a visualisation of a scene with curious patterns and an objectivity that we would not appreciate as direct witnesses.

Using recycled materials Miles Thorogood also explored the idea of growth. In The Developers, a three-dimensional construction made from various materials could be seen as an instance from an Artificial Life simulation. Attached to a vertically mounted image were insect-like objects, which seemed to have emerged from a two-dimensional space. One reading of the work is suggestive of our unrelenting expansion and exploitation of the natural environment.

In PROCESS = ARTWORK, Benjamin Forster presented productions from his “drawing machine.” As a triptych of three long “prints”, these reflected an intriguing mechanical insight into interpretation. The work drew on text from Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, writings of the Marquis de Sade and images of the grass in Forster’s backyard from the machine itself. The works had a more immediate sense of process when suggesting action and the characteristically nervous scrawl a compelling naiveté. It would have been interesting to see the work generated in real time along with some completed outcomes.

Clem Baker-Finch took a quite different approach in Congregation of the Index with three print works based on the New Testament. Three square prints represented three concentrations of word order: alphabetical, frequency and occurrence were generated. The compelling effect of these lexicons on the viewer was to induce a desire to scan for words and ponder their use and association. This very act prompted curious and often humorous remarks from viewers.

On reflection, the Dorkbot cbr exhibition exemplified the diversity of creativity in electronic arts that is an inherent, long standing and clearly continuing part of the Canberra contemporary art community. To this end, support for the exhibition by David Broker, the director of the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, is to be commended. As with such exhibitions of hybrid practices, diverse formats and sound, the challenge continues for effective presentation with limited time and resources. The complexity and subtlety of each work demanded attention, analysis and reflection and while this could be a challenge for any viewer on a single visit, the overall impression was inspirational.

Dorkbot cbr: Exhibition, People doing strange things with electricity, artists Clem Baker-Finch, Benjamin Forster, Alexandra Gillespie, Michael Honey, Tracey Meziane Benson, Nathan McGinness, Miles Thorogood, Mitchell Whitelaw, Josh Wodak; CCAS (Canberra Contemporary Art Space) Manuka, Nov 7-15, 2008; http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotcbr; International Dorkbot group, http://dorkbot.org

THREE STANDOUT WORKS AT THE JUDITH WRIGHT CENTRE IN BRISBANE LATE LAST YEAR HAPPENED TO RUN CONCURRENTLY. SEEN CLOSE TOGETHER, WHAT STOOD OUT ABOUT THESE PERFORMANCES WAS THAT IN WILDLY DIVERSE WAYS THEY APPEARED MORE OR LESS CONSCIOUSLY TO BE MINING VEINS FROM THE 1960S AND 70S, NOT IN A RETRO SENSE BUT THE BETTER TO LEAP FORWARD. EACH CAN BE SEEN AS CONTINUING INVESTIGATIONS INTO “THE INTER-IMPLICATIONS AND MATERIAL PROCESSES THAT CONNECT ART TO DAILY LIFE” (JAMES CUNNINGHAM, JONDI KEANE) THAT PREOCCUPIED THE EARLIER PERIOD. THIS APPARENT RETURN TO THEORETICAL AND FORMAL CONCERNS OF A SEMINAL EPOCH SEEMS TO ME TO BE OPTIMISTIC RATHER THAN A GESTURE OF HELPLESSNESS IN THESE TIMES, AN ATTEMPT BY THOUGHTFUL ARTISTS, IN TS ELIOT’S PHRASE, AT “PURIFYING THE LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE.” GOD KNOWS WE NEED IT.

This was most clearly the case in Tuning Fork, created and performed by James Cunningham and Jondi Keane. Theirs was a work that deliberately engaged with the new performance parameters propounded in the 60s by the likes of Kaprow and Cage, lending them an elasticity that authentically stretched to the present. Tuning Fork was a time-based performance which took place in the shopfront at the Judith Wright Centre and was thus visible to passersby. Monitors displayed time-lapse footage of the erection and dismantling of the work.

Discounting good natured exhibitionism and the odd caustic critic (“art wankers!”), this out of sync discrepancy with the live action proved a beguiling hook for many onlookers, while others apparently succumbed to that most peerless of activities: watching others work. Watching the audience inside too, working at being an audience. The performance, however skewed and unrelated to any pragmatic function, nevertheless resembled a construction site. Common construction materials—wooden doors, beams, steel, carbon fibre rods, tape measures, electrical tape—were all utilised to reconfigure and suggest new links between the height, length and breadth of the original site subdivided by I-beams and three large window boxes set into the shopfront. Carbon rods described parabolas within the space, imperceptibly suggesting the metaphysical tension of Cunningham’s lovely, Leunig-like image of a room as a little box (cube) on the curved surface of the round world. Held aloft, they shimmied together, emitting a susurrus from the natural world. At other times, rods were used as chitinous antennae. Steel rods slid along the floor smashed into walls, decrying limits. Cunningham leans backwards supported by the combined tensile strength of rods. At one point, Keane inserts rods through Cunningham’s clothing, transforming him into a weird kind of kinetic sculpture, a grunge creature reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Macbeth in Throne of Blood stuck like a porcupine with arrows. In the end, more rods connected the performers’ heads to the ceiling as they slowly revolved like a model of the Copernican universe.

Tape measures were given an anarchic life of their own in order to function as agents of misrule. Or else to pinpoint minute aspects of the space, as when suspended from a hitherto invisible nail or crevice in the wall. In this way attention often shifted from minutiae to larger dimensions of action in the space, lending the space itself the characteristic of a breathing animal. At other moments the silence and absolute stillness made it seem as if it was the space holding its breath. This tallied with the stated objective of trying to reverse the figure-ground relationship so that the site might come to the fore and take on new meaning. Moreover, the performers’ proposition that “a tuning, attuning, or retuning of the base-line of perception and action is the next productive (versus reactive) step” was more than ratified by moments I relate to the Buddhist idea of tathata, suchness, the recognition of the irreducible, indescribable nature of an object, a sound, a person. From this perspective, the work might be seen as incorporating a powerful environmental politics.

There was an obvious dialectic between the approaches of the two performers. Coming from a dance background, Cunningham seemed more focused on objects as extensions of the body, or touching other objects to elicit the life of the object itself. At the same time his movements were more abstract, more concerned with exploring the space as a performer. By contrast, Keane was task-orientated. As he says, he operates within a field of consciousness that is related to professional sports, performing actions with an awareness of how they are both backgrounded and foregrounded. While the architectonic result was a well mapped out composition, the process was not directed towards the creation of a work of art. Rather it was a case of enacting embodied moments that join the common world. As Keane expresses it, “we’re not doing art and we’re not doing non-art. We’re doing stuff together.” Sculptural and other elements in the course of the performance remained separate—constituting a performance of resistance where the dialectical process proceeds and contradictions are synthesised, only to break out again into contradictions. Tuning Fork was a valid demonstration of the concretisation of meaning and material processes as an essential element of the dialectical process itself. A source of quiet marvels. The good stuff.

The Opposite of Prompt, a collaboration between the independent artists of Phluxus Dance Collective and dancer-actor Brian Lucas, happily took on the self-critical and Brechtian strain of the 70s along with madcap elements of Dada. It delightfully deconstructs and demystifies, playing a tricksy match of handball with the audience, positing “the inescapable solid reality of performance versus the wildly imaginative and unpredictable thing that is reality.” A life-sized model of a black and white cow plays a prominent role in this regard (“Stop looking at the cow!”). Originally it was meant to be a real cow, but I can see the problems…Life, after all, is artifice, and Art? Well, Art has abandoned itself. Or at least abandoned us. Art occurred offstage, behind drawn curtains; we were only witnesses to the exits and entrances. To the hysteria. To the needs. We ourselves enter and exit OP side. Stuck in life. As Lucas says, “I’m in my apartment, in a wheelchair. I’m crippled, and I see a lot of suspicious things happening. But I connect the dots, I work out what’s happening. Or perhaps not.”

Certainly the Luciferian Lucas has the ability to pull the carpet from under our feet, revealing the abyss. He told the story of a woman who had a sick friend whom she helped to suicide to avoid needless suffering. She was convicted and sent to prison. But the woman was terminally ill and, terrified of dying alone in prison, in turn killed herself. The story is repeated several times during the performance, accompanied by a sequence of dance gestures. Finally it is the gestures themselves that tell the tale, in a characteristic Lucas move. It was pure pleasure to be reminded that Lucas is such a superb dancer, particularly in the beautifully clean, incredibly controlled, hence expressive and humorous duet performed with an equally polished Chaffia Brooks—all within the constraints of aircraft seats.

The Opposite of Prompt was a participatory sport. And there was so much more. It seduced the audience without resiling from the questions it blithely threw up in the air. Largely this was attributable to the quality of inclusiveness Phluxus extended, translating into a uniquely grounded collective style—seriously funky.

Jacqui Carroll’s To Have Done With The Judgement Of God for the Bell Tower 11 Series 2008 espoused the roots of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty first introduced to the Anglo-Saxon world by Peter Brook in the 1960s. Based on a 1947 radio performance by the man himself, this work-in-progress goes somewhere else in terms of Ozfrank’s previous work. Carroll’s investigation into the male psyche was shocking, scatalogical, darkly liturgical. I loved it.

Tuning Fork, created and performed by James Cunningham and Jondi Keane; Shopfront, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, Nov 19-23 & 26-29; Opposite Of Prompt, artists Phluxus Dance Collective (Nerida Matthaei, Chafia Brooks, Skye Sewell) and Brian Lucas, lighting design Keith Clark, soundscape construction Brian Lucas, costume design Rosa Hirakata, set construction Corrin Matthews, Shane Rynehart; Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, November 26-29; Ozfrank, To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, creator, Jacqui Carroll; Theatre Rehearsal Room, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, November 27, 2008

“THE EMERGENCE OF THE ‘FRAME’ IS THE CONDITION OF ALL THE ARTS AND IS THE PARTICULAR CONTRIBUTION OF ARCHITECTURE TO THE TAMING OF THE VIRTUAL.” ELIZABETH GROSZ

In Chaos, Territory, Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), Elizabeth Grosz writes of the frame as a basic element of the artwork. The frame provides an edge. It separates so that we can experience that which it frames. Shelley Lasica’s Vianne institutes many kinds of framing. Physically it is set inside a large, downstairs city theatre space, flanked by laneways on two sides. We can see out onto the laneway. Its fading, crepuscular light establishes the interiority of the room. During the course of the performance, a large light illuminates the lane. Later, another arises inside, shifting the origin of light—fashioning a series of emerging and dying suns. What we see, we see in virtue of these tangible sources. Their emergence and diminution draws attention to the relation between each light source and its zone of illumination. Looking beyond the room (into the laneway) circumscribes the room. It is not the world, rather it is a world within the world.

And within that world is constructed an even smaller world. This small world is a cube made of soft plastic (by Anne-Marie May). Hoisted into position by the dancers, it frames an inner space, another space of action. Some of the dancers traverse that space, others stay inside it for a while. This small world collapses, breathes out, flattens. Spatial boundaries are thus fluid. Like the lighting (Ben Cobham), the physical objects and their manner of framing are subject to change. A liquid-like sculpture is suspended from the ceiling towards the back of the room, flowing into the floor. Later, a related soft, plastic, linear thread is suspended between two dancers. In each case, we are invited to watch the action within, across and according to these shifting frames.

The room itself calls for choices on the part of the audience. Since the action moves across and between large steel poles that support the roof, we have to decide who and what to watch. The action does not entirely dictate these choices, for there is more going on than we can see. Our focus variously engages the shifting points of action, lighting and construction. That movement between structural, shifting elemental qualities, including the roving perceptual field of the audience itself, constitutes an ongoing framing and reframing process. This is permeated by the shifting rhythmic qualities of the music (Milo Kossowski and Morgan McWaters). The music moves imperceptibly between a range of tones and qualities: ambient, insistent, thumping, stellar, epic, abstract. It is evocative but not dominating.

Five dancers march into the space, all dressed in sparkling jumpsuits. One (Deanne Butterworth) stands out, rendered different by the colour of her costume, orange. There is a sociality to this nexus of human interactions, though their meaning is not obvious. Over the course of time, a narrative of sorts unfolds, suggestive of some kind of drama, though remote at the same time, as if its canvas has been painted over, sanded back and bleached (but not emptied) of emotion. Movement phrases are individually executed, alongside the formation of duos and trios. The partnering evokes a range of feelings: tender, aggressive, intimate, depending on who we watch and how they work together. However interpreted, we see dancers move together, push against each other, give weight, circle each other, execute phrase materials, and return to repeat the exercise. A mini-world is created, with boundaries that some respect, and others transgress. Sometimes everyone comes together in a row, shifting weight back and forth, a Greek chorus compared with so much atomic and molecular (inter)action.

If Butterworth is Vianne, she is not the central figure of this work. She orbits and enters the action as a human amongst others. There is no hero here, rather a complex mingling of physical subjectivities in a range of shifting formations. There is a play between the ways the bodies are shaped by their context and the agency of those bodies. The audience is also held accountable for its engagement with the work. The dancers are crisp and clear, responsible and reliable. If I could add my own preference, it would be to make of their own bodies another interiority, to take more time to feel that which occurs within in the context of their moving. The collaborative texture of Vianne suggests that no one person holds the key to its interpretation.There is no bird’s eye view, just the feeling that there is more to be revealed of this intricate composition.

Vianne, choreographer, director Shelley Lasica, dancers, Deanne Butterworth, Timothy Harvey, Jo Lloyd, Bonnie Paskas, Lee Serle, music Milo Kossowski, Morgan McWaters (PEACE OUT!), design Anne-Marie May, costumes Shelley Lasica, Kara Baker (PROJECT), lighting, design consultants Bluebottle/Ben Cobham; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne. Dec 3–14, 2008

A MAN (ROBIN ARTHUR), IN A CRUDELY PAINTED SKELETON SUIT WHICH LOOKS A LITTLE TOO SMALL FOR HIM, WALKS OUT ONTO A BARE STAGE, GLANCES AROUND HIM, RUBS HIS CHIN. HE’S PERPLEXED. IT’S EVERY ACTOR’S NIGHTMARE: THE SET ISN’T WHERE IT SHOULD BE, NONE OF THE OTHER PERFORMERS ARE THERE, THE WARM-UP GUY HASN’T TURNED UP…NORMALLY, HE INFORMS US NERVOUSLY, NORMALLY THERE ARE POTTED PLANTS…IN THE ABSENCE OF THESE NORMS, HE RUMINATES, “AM I REALLY THE RIGHT PERSON FOR THIS POSITION?” HE FRETS ABOUT THE RIDICULOUSNESS OF HIS APPEARANCE (“THIS ISN’T HALLOWEEN”); HE SIGHS, “IT’S A STRANGE WAY TO EARN YOUR LIVING.”

Eventually a woman (Claire Marshall) appears, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and announces into the microphone that she has come to do her death scene. This is a parody of all death scenes—something like a cross between a fatal poisoning in a Victorian melodrama, a soldier on the battlefield or a re-enactment of the infamous Alien stomach explosion. Her violent dying takes her across the width of the stage; it moves but is not moving. Arthur starts to critique her technique, offer suggestions: the sobbing is good, it’s subtle; but what does a dying person need with a microphone stand? And so Spectacular continues exactly along these parallel lines of enquiry for an hour and 15 minutes.

Throughout, Arthur tells us how we would have been reacting if we were watching the other show, the show that should have been. This absence is something of which we become increasingly aware. There’s the absence of the rest of the collective, the absence of any development. Conceptually, this could be interesting. Instead of passive spectators, avidly consuming spectacle, we are required to become co-creators, using Arthur’s descriptions of the mythical lost performance (one in which he makes his entrance on a staircase, in which there is a band, and girls who dance in figures-of-eight, and flickers of ticker tape) to create our own private shows. (Mine is sheer vaudeville; Spectacular Spectacular as the Moulin Rouge song goes.) This ploy is not unlike that of a Croatian arts critic who used to write reviews of performances without seeing them. Unaware a concert was cancelled at the last minute, he wrote his review as usual and was rumbled. His response to complaints? He’d seen the work in his head so, as far as he was concerned, it happened. It’s not new to Forced Entertainment’s practice either; it has often relied on our participation. (If you were bored after a couple of hours of their show 12am: Awake and Looking Down it meant you weren’t working your imagination hard enough.) Actually, in many ways Spectacular is more accessible than previous Forced Entertainment shows. We are watching an actor coming to terms with the loss of his play and this self-reflexivity is familiar territory for theatre audiences (Pirandello explored this terrain in the 1920s).

The difficulty I have with it in practice is that the absent show in Spectacular is also the ghost of shows past. Spectacle is something Forced Entertainment used to do so well: television screens, paper crowns, animal masks, cardboard signs, neon text, bad wigs, velvet capes, John Avery’s music, a whole starry universe, physical exertion, text like poetry that overlaps and contradicts and refuses to cohere…I’ve followed their work since 1990 but there is Robin Arthur, patting his belly, telling us his age (45), reminding us the collective have moved on. There has been a stripping down of their aesthetic, a desire to push audiences further. During their 25 years, preoccupations have changed. Forced Entertainment member Cathy Naden once said the Gulf War occurring during the making of Marina and Lee “crept into the text and little parts of the show” but was never explicitly referenced; here the Iraq War is. Why do we want to see death in the theatre when we are surrounded by it, Arthur asks? Yet death has always been a preoccupation (shootings, hostages held at gunpoint in apocalyptic newsrooms), so the question is perhaps self-directed.

The performers are still incredible. Claire Marshall has the kind of presence that means she could just sit there and you would want to look at her. (In fact, she did just sit there in Hidden J, in1994, with a sign around her neck saying “Liar.”) Robin Arthur’s actor in the skeleton suit is a tour de force. Except this time it isn’t enough. We are supposed to be watching two deaths: Marshall’s physical one, Arthur’s metaphorical one (‘he died a death on stage’, we say of an unfunny stand-up comedian) except that neither one dies. Marshall may only have a few lines but she has a guttural repertoire of grunts, groans, screams and heavy breathing and, like the bogeyman in a slasher horror, she too just refuses to die. This is the paradox: in a show about absence or space, there is no space. (Arthur even says so: “There’s no space here.” Barely a hiatus in his monologue. It’s as if he’s scared of the silence.) Despite the humour, it’s relentless. Not even painful. Just boring.

Lights go on and off, on and off, Arthur says. A reference to Michael Creed’s infamous Turner Prize installation? I begin to feel excited by spotlights wavering on empty spots (again like actors with no roles), or alternating between pink and yellow. Is this the point? That if you remove everything, we will invest whatever you give us back with more significance and delight? I can’t help feeling David Weber-Krebs’ This Performance set up expectations and frustrated them in a more elegant, minimal way (see Virginia Baxter’s review).

I don’t doubt the boredom is intentional. “It’s a little bit disappointing”, Arthur says. It takes guts to drag your audience with you, to challenge their desire to be stimulated, to almost goad them into walking out and maybe it’s something Forced Entertainment can afford to try. (Is this the first time the collective lives up to its name?) The company has, deservedly, a loyal following. And when the mid-life crisis passes, we’ll all still be here, looking forward to something spectacular.

Forced Entertainment, Spectacular, director Tim Etchells, text Tim Etchells, Robin Arthur, the company; performers Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall, design Richard Lowdon, lighting design Nigel Edwards, Riverside Studios, London, Nov 6-15, 2008

DAN SAFER, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF NEW YORK BASED PERFORMANCE COMPANY WITNESS RELOCATION (FOUNDED IN 2000) APPROACHES PERFORMANCE MAKING AS AN ATTACK—MORE AKIN TO A BOXING MATCH OR A SPORTING EVENT. THE WORK AND HE ARE “PLAYING AGAINST EACH OTHER, COLLIDING WITH EACH OTHER, FACING EACH OTHER IN THE EYE.” IT IS THE STRUGGLE THAT IS IMPORTANT—A SERIES OF PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED. AS A RESULT, MOST OF HIS SHOWS HAVE THE WORD ‘VERSUS’ IN THE TITLE: DANCING VS THE RAT EXPERIMENT OR DANCING VS BLOOD ON THE CAT’S NECK (NOTE THE ANIMAL THEME).

While in New York, thanks to the Victoria University Solo Residency Program, I‘m lucky enough to be invited into rehearsals of Witness Relocation’s most recent work, The Bluebird, a play by Mikuni Yanaihara of the acclaimed Japanese dance company Nibrol. The work premiered in January 2009 as part of the Spotlight Japan Festival of new Japanese work. The Bluebird is Yanaihara’s first play and the first time in years that Safer has worked on a script rather than a devised work. It’s partly inspired by a 1980 Japanese anime series, is set (possibly) in a psychiatric institution, and revolves around “scientific conundrums, the rescue of endangered species and the search for one’s personal blue bird.”

Before entering the studio for my first day of rehearsals (they have already been working for one week), I meet Safer at a nearby coffee shop. He is a wonderful mass of contradictions. His tight black jeans, chains and tattoos belie a fiercely intelligent and passionate graduate of New York University’s Tisch School—where he is now also a sessional teacher. Over a typical New York ‘bowl’ of coffee, we talk ideas and theatrical obsessions. We concur on our love of Tim Etchells, DV8, Wiliam Forsythe, and David Lynch. He is a big fan of nightclub cabaret where he used to perform as a go-go dancer. He also appeared in shows with Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) and his group Blacklips. Safer’s work is very influenced by punk/drag/cabaret/night club genres.

His mission for Witness Relocation is to “combine dance and theatre with the energy of a rock show—to explode contemporary culture into intensely physical, outrageous, poetic, and sometimes brutal performance.” He tells me that all his work is about violence and the end of the world. I ask him how he came up with the company’s name. The answer: when someone asked him where he recruited people willing to do ‘such things’ on stage he jokingly replied that they were part of the government witness relocation program—and it struck him that this was the perfect name for his new company.

Before entering the studio, Safer warns me he thinks that most of the work he does can be on the edge of being incredibly awful. Inside, the 10 performers are warming up—preparing for battle stations. The spirit of the rehearsals is playful, yet incredibly focused. They start with a barrage of dirty jokes. The rivalry has begun as they verbally spar with each other.

They are called to arms—soldiers on the front line of contemporary performance—and begin with a ‘dance’ choreographed out of their initial response to the script. It is fast paced, humorous and refreshingly original—the search for the ‘bluebird’ of the title. Safer asks his performers to give him a shell of a choreography that he can then “fuck” with. He doesn’t go for perfection. Although the choreography is strict, he is more interested in the diversity of the individual characteristics of the performers—their personality quirks, performance styles and body types. And these particular performers are variously small, thick set, young and old, traditional dancers and straight actors.

Safer’s directing style is wild and discordant yet still exacting and precise. His motto is “faster, louder, funnier” and the word “uncomfortable” is often heard in rehearsal. He gauges the workability of a piece by his own ‘boredom’ tolerance. He says: “If I get bored, I change things. If I am bored then the audience is bored.” And change happens swiftly as a result. He pushes his performers to the extremes, challenging limits and playing with what he can get away with. In one Witness Relocation show, Vicious Dogs on Premises, he randomly changes, nightly, the order of scenes as well as the performers’ roles.

And the performers never flinch. There is an unmitigated ‘yes’ attitude in the rehearsal as the performers up the ante by challenging and daring each other. The ultimate winning moment in my weeks with them was a spontaneous feigned act of cunnilingus—creating a pause of disbelief, then fits of laughter.

Rehearsals continue with regular script editing (at least one third of the text is cut), music (which plays a central role) and vocal and physical play. Much like a film director, Safer works on random parts of the script, eventually weaving them together. He creates ‘movie swipe’ style transitions—four performers crossing the space, perhaps looking for the lost bluebird species—to magically reveal the next scene. Shells of scenes are built with gestural choreography and heightened language. The tragic last scene, where the inmates all realise the futility of their existence, emerges as Safer clashes epic Michael Nyman music with the text—forcing the performers to rise to the challenge.

The deadline looms. How does it all fit together? I leave Witness Relocation on the last day before the New Year break and before the first performance. Back home I wonder how I can continue this relationship with a company whose extreme performance style resonates within my own core. The season starts and they play to full houses. I ask Safer about the response to this wild piece. He tells me that someone said they thought it was so funny but then suddenly they realised how sad it was. He‘s happy with that, and with another response (and his favourite): “That was amazing and a total mind fuck”.

IN BACK OF BURKE, SALLY LEWRY SPINS US A YARN, A TRUE STORY, OF HER FATHER AND HIS ANTICS, TOLD WITH HUMOUR UNDERLINED WITH UNEASINESS. LEWRY IS ALMOST NEVER HERSELF: SHE IS FLAG-FOLDING EXPERT, FATHER, LOCAL JUDGE, BUT MOST OFTEN SHE IS A SHEEP. IN WOOLLY HAT AND FIRST PERSON SHE TELLS OF THE UNTIMELY DEMISE OF A NUMBER OF SHEEP EMPLOYED AS PART OF HER FATHER’S ECCENTRIC VERSION OF BACKYARD BLITZ. IT SEEMS IT WAS A ROUGH LIFE FOR THESE SHEEP IN BLACKTOWN, AS WE MAY ASSUME IT WAS FOR THE ARTSY-FARTSY DAUGHTER (THE BLACK SHEEP), NOT TO MENTION THE MOTHER, SHIRL, WHO IS ONLY MENTIONED IN PASSING BUT WHOSE IMAGE IS LEFT FOR US TO CONTEMPLATE AT THE END.

Back of Burke has some good writing, and Lewry is a truly engaging and edgy storyteller. An overhead projector is a neat device for DIY imagery particularly well used when she ‘illustrates’ stories. My niggling issue with the piece is about the flag-folding sections that bookend the show. Though these allow for the manipulation of the ‘flag’ as projection screen, it feels like a near-miss metaphor. Flying your flag, your past, your allegiances, or “putting them in the bottom drawer”, kind of works, but the flag is also a strong symbol of nationalism and militarism, a far cry from Lewry’s portrait of her fiercely individualistic father. These overtones muddied the metaphor and as the idea is only alluded to at beginning and end, with no presence in the central body of the work, it felt like an attempt to wrap up the work too tightly—to fold it too neatly perhaps. Metaphoric debates aside, Lewry is a skilled writer and performer and I look forward to more work from her.

The Paper Woman is mostly a physical performance, a form in which XX has been developing her own vocabulary: angular and suspended yet undercut with moments of frantic frustration, sometimes abject and always curious. The Paper Woman’s world consists of a bed, some suitcases, falling grapefruit, an industrial fan, various sound transmitting devices and a shopping trolley. X squat walks, crawls and gallops around this world interacting with the objects and the architecture of the space creating curious images that don’t strike immediate resonances: she holds a grapefruit under her chin, she carries a mattress up the staircase, she dribbles milk in front of the fan. These images are not from our world, but the Paper Woman’s and they all make complete sense to her. The Paper Woman is perhaps the closest to a performance of dream logic I have seen. Actions are started and stopped with equal abruptness, but undertaken with complete absorption. Within this logic the Paper Woman’s world is strangely complete yet devastatingly fragile—balancing awkwardly like X on her tippy-toes. I don’t really know where I am in this and as a viewer perhaps it is best not to impose waking rules but rather see where X takes you. What I do know is that only XX can make this world, and that renders it something quite special.

Two New Solos: Back of Burke, Sally Lewry, mentor Deborah Pollard; The Paper Woman, XX, mentor Regina Heilmann; PACT presents… initiative, Sydney, Jan 23-Feb 1

Mohammed Ahmad, Janie Gibson, Roderic Byrnes, Katia Molino, Stories of Love & Hate, Urban Theatre Projects

IT IS A DUBIOUS GENRE TO HAVE WITHIN THE NATIONAL REPERTOIRE BUT THERE ARE NOW SEVERAL PLAYS WRITTEN IN RESPONSE THE CRONULLA RIOTS IN 2005. THESE INCLUDE SUZIE MILLER’S ALL THE BLOOD AND ALL THE WATER, NOELLE JANACZEWSKA’S AND ATYP’S THIS TERRITORY, LAURA SCRIVANO’S THE CRONULLA PROJECT, AND BIGHART’S JUNK THEORY. AMONG THE MOST RECENT AND MOST ACCOMPLISHED OF THESE IS URBAN THEATRE PROJECTS’ STORIES OF LOVE & HATE.

Rather than confronting the Cronulla riots directly, director Roslyn Oades comes at the issue from an angle, stating in her program note that the play “is not a work about the riots, but rather a work about the ordinary people who were there.” As with her previous effort, Fast Cars & Tractor Engines (RT 70, p41), Oades has interviewed dozens of people in order create an audio-script, which is then played through headphones to actors, who repeat the lines as they hear them.

The first voice we hear is Oades’, piped in over the loudspeaker. She is in the process of setting up an interview with a young man and asking him for a definition of love. He offers one before endearingly asking “Is that alright? Do you agree?” We also meet a middle-aged couple, whose love is such that he still buys her flowers: “the other day,” he says; “the other month”, she says simultaneously. For others, love is less about a person and more about an activity such as surfing—“It’s like being in the fallopian tube again, I reckon”, “It’s a whole-body out-of-body experience”—or driving. One of the young men finds the sound of the bass literally heart-stopping—“It’s true!” he exclaims, “You can die from bass!” From here we segue into Love Song Dedications and as the strains of Kenny G’s saxophone waft through the space, Richard Mercer takes a call. These love song dedications scenes recur throughout the production to lessening effect—they seem a touch contrived and too easy to parody. Nevertheless, they provide sound artist Bob Scott with the opportunity to air a few old favourites including “Sexual Healing”, “Under the Bridge”, “O What a Beautiful Morning!” and “I Wouldn’t Trade You For the World.”

Having circled around the topic of love, the play slowly spirals inwards towards issues of hate and eventually to the events themselves. Intriguingly, divisions emerge within as well as between communities. One character is careful to point out that Punchbowl is no Mount Druitt and three young Lebanese men jokingly refer to their “ghetto” and debate whether or not they are Lebanese, wogs, Middle Eastern Australians or Middle Eastern wogs. Likewise, surfies are dismissive of those who have Southern Cross tattoos that mean nothing whereas they have scars that tell “ridiculous stories.” When the discussion finally moves to the day of the riot, the surfers insist that there were hardly any locals at the scene, that it was mainly “roo shooters and Romper Stompers.” Whoever was there was intent on violence, as a policeman and photographer reveal. A flower-giving husband is revealed as the baton-wielding policeman who saved two men who were being beaten on the train. So shocked is the photographer by the ferocity of these attacks, he says simply, “I put my camera down. I put my camera down.”

Playing against type, gender, and ethnicity, the actors do not always manage to bridge the gap between performer and character. However this does not make the work any less interesting for the spectator. On the contrary, it is fascinating to listen to Roderic Byrnes imitate the intonations of a proud Lebanese father, to hear Mohammed Ahmad giggling as a schoolgirl, to see Katia Molino’s uncanny incarnation of a conceited Cronulla schoolgirl, and to watch Janie Gibson adopting the language and posture of a young Lebanese man.

In the final scene, we hear the recording of an old lady as well as Molino’s repetition of it. Inevitably they are not the same and this serves not only as a metatheatrical reminder about the nature of repetition and mediation, but also makes visible the invisible labour of listening. Listening is a strain, it demands intense concentration, and despite our best efforts we sometimes mis-hear and repeat something else as in Chinese Whispers. The mention of this game hints at the hidden connections between multiculturalism and verbatim theatre. So much of the rhetoric surrounding both is about enabling subaltern or minority subjects to speak to the mainstream. But through its distinctive performance mode Stories of Love & Hate succeeds in shifting the emphasis from speaking to listening. In doing so the work shifts the language of multiculturalism itself, returning responsibility to mainstream subjects and asking ‘How do you listen?’ To whom and in what context? And when was the last time you really listened?’

The arduous listening of Oades and her cast contrasts sharply with the profound absence of listening that lies at the heart of the Cronulla riots. In repeating these stories of love and hate with such sensitivity and artistry, the performance provides us with an opportunity to re-hear our fellow citizens and to rehearse new modes of local, cultural, and national belonging.

Urban Theatre Projects, Stories of Love & Hate, direction & original concept Roslyn Oades, performer Mohammed Ahmad, Roderic Byrnes, Janie Gibson, Katia Molino, designer Clare Britton, sound artist Bob Scott, lighting designer Neil Simpson; Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery, Gymea, November 19-22; Olympic Parade Theatre, Bankstown, November 26-29, 2008

THE POLITICS OF THEATRE ARE RARELY MOMENTOUS, YET THEY ARE ALWAYS OF THE MOMENT. REGINA VS CONTEMPORARY ART IS A TRANSPLANTED PERFORMANCE, FROM ANOTHER TIME AND PLACE. FIRST PERFORMED IN PORTUGAL IN 2007, THE PIECE IS STYLED AS A PRESS CONFERENCE OR DEBATE, AN ENTERTAINMENT OF TALKING HEADS. BUT IT IS ALSO A BODILY ENCOUNTER, A PHYSICAL CONFRONTATION OF IDEAS, SIZE AND SEXUAL POWER.

Paulo Castro, as “master provocateur Doctor Ribeiro” in hipster jeans and shoulder-length hair, is compact and dynamic. Towering over him is Regina Fez; an immensely tall yet shy, retiring drag queen, she wears a figure-hugging black satin dress, her blond locks coyly covering her face. We applaud their entrance. Castro dances a little for us. Leafing through a newspaper, he presents the news of the day—or yesterday. “It’s Sarah vs Condi”, shrieks a headline. But now it’s late November, post-election. A new politics awaits.

Castro is a theatre director and performer from Portugal, now based in Adelaide (RT88, p37). Regina Fez, from Spain, presents a mysterious figure, hailing from some European border zone between the high seriousness of performance art and the avant garde of underworld porn. In her signature piece—offered to us upstage on hazy video—she vomits goldfish in a car park. As they flip-flop on the concrete, I care about their fate—more, perhaps, than I should.

The subjects of Regina vs Contemporary Art are sex, art, war, activism and terrorism. These are subjects of great moment and passion. But here in Adelaide’s tiny Bakehouse Theatre, at the end of the month-long celebrations of Feast Festival, their passion has all but dissipated, their moment seems displaced.

The tone is confrontational, unreasonable and excessive. The audience is edgy and uncertain, reluctant to respond. There are open-ended offerings in this work, and something quite freewheeling about its form. Castro strips off his shirt and dances with self-erotic pleasure. Regina pulls a tub of Yoplait from her handbag and eats it with a spoon. Invitations are extended to partake.

There are some fellow travellers in the audience—directors, performers and other artists. One reads a passage from Pinter’s War, while another wins a kiss with Regina. A third offers, upon request, his “most bombastic” sentence: “My cock is a weapon of mass destruction.” But I don’t believe his ego. I prefer the soft-edged irony of Regina’s “Lick my Gaza Strip.”

In one fond moment towards the end, Castro and Regina dance in a ballroom embrace, having wrapped themselves in such sentence-signs which they gently shed as they rotate. The sweetness of the moment is sharpened by a pervasive current of sexual aggression. At other times, they argue and they fight. They take their violence offstage and bring it back again. But Regina seems to lack the energy or inclination to offer much in the way of fighting back.

This jangling, nervous elegy to the politics of elsewhere recalled for me the past rhetoric of futurist performance, its audience anxieties elusively translating the dislocation of European desires.

Regina vs Contemporary Art by Paulo Castro with texts by Pinter, Houellebecq, Pasolini with Regina Fez and Paulo Castro, presented by Feast Festival & Castro Stone Productions, Bakehouse Theatre, Adelaide, Nov 25-29, 2008

Julian Crotti, Chris Tamm Hard, Its Passing By Me (VIP ROOM), Willoh S. Weiland, Hard Party

ON JANUARY 15, A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE IN HIGH WAISTED JEANS, CHROMATIC TIGHTS AND EXCESSIVE EYE MAKE-UP GATHERED AT EAST CIRCULAR QUAY TO BOARD A BOAT. HYBRID PRACTITIONERS IN AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTEXT, EVERYONE RESEMBLED ONE ANOTHER SUFFICIENTLY SO THAT THE PASSENGERS COULD IDENTIFY EACH OTHER AMONGST THE PASSING TOURISTS ON THE CORSO WITHOUT EFFORT OR DOUBT. THEY MILLED AROUND SMOKING HAND-ROLLED CIGARETTES AND EXCHANGING FESTIVE GRIMACES, WAITING FOR THEIR SHIP TO COME IN.

The group in question was waiting for the Hard Party boat to dock. An exhibition on a boat and a “Harbour Cruise Party”, Hard Party was a three hour long irony-laced critique of how youth culture has become dominated by binge drinking, celebutards and meaningless glamour (note how important the placement of the inverted commas were to the meaning of that sentence, and how much it would have changed if they’d been placed around “boat” or “exhibition”).

The audience was free to roam the boat, mingle, dance to party anthems and fool around with a video juke box (a sort of video art parody of the endless video clips played in conventional night clubs). Post subverted wet t-shirt contests by holding a wet t-shirt contest, which I saw from behind, and involved a lot of endurance pogoing to orders given by the inimitable Zoe Coombs-Marr until the performers coughed blood all over their breasts. Brown Council stuck their heads in buckets of water every time the song “Take My Breath Away” played, in a sort of auto-erotic asphyxiation game, and looked correspondingly moist and refreshed. DAMP, a Melbourne based collective, wore rubber noses and talked amongst themselves. Every now and then, revellers received an anonymous SMS, like this one:

“Babe where are you? The DJ suck.. I just dropped my phone in the toilet!: Meet me in the sweat corner next to bar! Cum on!” 21:36

I don’t really know what a hybrid practitioner in an interdisciplinary context is any more than the next boatswain, but do you know what cognitive dissonance is? Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term that describes the state of mild discomfort caused by holding two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time. It dates back to a classic 1959 experiment by psychologists Festinger and Carlsmith, in which three groups of voluntary test subjects were asked to perform an unutterably boring and tedious task, turning wooden pegs for an hour, and then requested to persuade a third party that what they had done was fascinating. The first group was paid nothing, the second group a dollar, and the third group twenty dollars. When asked to describe how they actually assessed the experiment, the second group was most likely to rate it positively. They’d been bribed, but with an amount so paltry that they’d been forced to internalise the lie they’d told, as they couldn’t reconcile their dishonesty with such small gain.

Full disclosure: I wrote a short essay for the Hard Party catalogue. That was my dollar. However I’d be lying if I pretended it was clear to me where the ‘irony’ stopped and the party started. That was clearly intended, but the problem that the event faced is that it couldn’t really succeed as a party without failing as a critique, not without some horrifying ship-of-fools climax in which the boat crashed into the pier. All the same, the crowd didn’t turn into the egregious drunken rabble the organisers might have feared or hoped for. That was chiefly due to the micro-economics of the situation. Most artsy types turn up to these sorts of events with less than $20 in cash (excluding tickets). Drinks were around $7 each, you couldn’t bring your own alcohol, and there was no ATM on the boat. Even the impeccably besuited Gilbert and George (Lucas Ihlein performing as George the Shit, and Mickie Quick playing Gilbert the Cunt, or vice versa), who were doing a reprise of the 1972 12-minute video “Gordon’s makes us Drunk” (for three hours), were only two sheets to the wind, as the ship’s purser had confiscated their 1 litre bottle of gin in the first half hour.

“I just saw somethin really full on I feel a bit sick, can we go now?” 22:28

Doubtless the best work of the night was Willoh S Weiland’s. Having cottoned on to the importance of exclusivity in maintaining glamour, she established a VIP room under extraordinary spatial constraints. The VIP tent consisted of a Leigh Bowery style confabulation of metres and metres of soft pink fabric held in shape by two huge burly gay genies. One of them was “security”, the other was “door bitch.” If one was lucky enough to get past “security” and could sweet talk “door bitch”, one was allowed to climb under the genie’s skirts into a synthetic womb, where the diminutive Weiland was eager to “do lines”, which consisted of repeating an arbitrary sentence, such as “there’s treasure in that sunken chest of yours”, over and over until it was perfect.

“i feel hot and heavy and everything. and weird. Do you know those kids who never made it through the party? xxxx” 23:22

Nothing much else happened. One of the members of DAMP, when I asked how they thought the night went, said that it was impossible to tell if it was good or bad because “Sydney is such a category error. Everything here is so wrong, there’s no point judging it.” Considering how lazy and boring their performance was, that just seemed like terrible manners. At least one drunken outlier who was actually wearing a cocktail dress had the audacity to confiscate Gilbert and George’s megaphone and boom at them, “You don’t even have any more gin. You guys are lame.” The ship came into dock. No one fell overboard, and the remnants of the exhibition drifted down to Jackson’s on George, a notoriously awful pub, for more ironic drinking. And that was it.

Hard Party, Artist interpretation of a party cruise, curator Lara Thoms, performers Brown Council, Post, Willoh S Weiland, DAMP, Teik Kim Pok, Tully Arnot, Hana Shimada, DJ V NRG, Lara Thoms, video jukebox Katarzyna Kozyra, Tara Marynowsky, artistas amistosos de neukölln, Corey Coda, Mathew Hopkins, Sally Rees, Rachel Scott, Emile Zile, TR Carter, Sue Dodd; Sydney Harbour, Jan 15

Sasha Cohen and Faustina Delany, The Three Minute Bacchae and other Extreme Acts

Each year, PACT Youth Theatre’s Impact Ensemble program provides eight months of regular weekly training and skills development sessions for young theatre makers. In the last three months the focus is on the development of a new work. Under the direction of Regina Heilmann, the 14 members of the 2008 ensemble created The Three Minute Bacchae and Other Extreme Acts. Drawing on motifs from Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, the performance is a poignant exploration of the nature of extreme acts and their impact on the everyday.

While we’re in the foyer, a young woman armed with a stopwatch delivers a three-minute synopsis of Euripides’ gruesome revenge story revolving around Dionysus, God of wine and inspirer of ritual madness and ecstasy. He cruelly punishes his cousin, King Pentheus, and his mother for not worshipping him. It’s an impressive feat of telling given the sprawling narrative and interminable lineup of characters. Once inside the theatre, the spirit of Dionysus is invoked by serving the audience wine. The performers engage in a series of everyday rituals of varying pace and duration—getting dressed, preparing a meal, chatting on the phone, brushing teeth, smoking a cigarette. These diligently executed actions seem controlled and considered but there is a sense of underlying threat, barely contained. There is a glimpse of it early on when a male performer drinking a longneck VB is suddenly grabbed and hosed down with water.

Firmly anchored in the here and now, a lot of the actions in the first half of the piece revolve around a ‘to do’ list written up on the wall, like a menu, with each task struck off once completed. Most of them have as their target a young man lying naked on a large wooden table, as if in a morgue. Yet references to The Bacchae are soon incorporated and proceedings take on a more pointedly theatrical tone. Short passages from the play are read and the line “I had a dream last night, mother; I dreamt I was decapitated” is transmuted into a song delivered by four chorus girls. It also becomes clear that the man on the table is Pentheus, victim of Dionysus’ revenge. Eventually the performers transform into a heaving mass of rolling bodies, gradually closing in on Pentheus, trapping him under the table. Fast, rhythmic hand drumming on the table is a prelude to the group turning into a violent mob. Pentheus is flung from side to side, and eventually lifted up and dropped to the floor. After a powerful, gospel-like chorale consisting principally of the line, “Oh savage truth, my son is dead”, Pentheus rises and, with a knowing look at the audience, lies back on the table as before.

Supported by a cleverly arranged soundtrack by James Brown and Emma Ramsay and sumptuous lighting by Frank Mainoo, The Three Minute Bacchae and Other Extreme Acts is a skilfully constructed, thought-provoking piece of contemporary performance. Heilmann’s direction is assured and sensitive, the ensemble perform with commitment and maturity.

The Three Minute Bacchae an other Extreme Acts, director Regina Heilmann, performers imPACT Ensemble 2008, sound design James Brown, Emma Ramsay, lighting design Frank Mainoo, dramaturgy Bryoni Trezise, scenic artist Robyn Higgins; PACT Theatre, Nov 19-Dec 7

IN HOLLIS TAYLOR’S “THE MUSIC OF NATURE AND THE NATURE OF MUSIC”, A SATURDAY AFTERNOON LECTURE AT THE 2009 NOW NOW FESTIVAL, WE ARE INTRODUCED TO ZOÖMUSICOLOGY. USING EXAMPLES SUCH AS THE THEME AND VARIATION OF THE LYREBIRD, THE CUT AND PASTE OF THE PIED BUTCHER BIRD, OR THE SHIFTING PHRASING OF DINKY THE DINGO, TAYLOR QUESTIONS WHETHER ANIMALS ARE MAKING AESTHETIC CHOICES WHEN THEY SING. EDUCATIONAL AND ENTERTAINING, THE TALK FORMED THE PERFECT PREFACE TO THE NEXT 24 HOURS OF CURIOUS PERFORMANCES BY THAT STRANGE ANIMAL, THE IMPROVISING MUSICIAN.

The Saturday evening concert at Wentworth Falls School of Arts commenced with festival founders Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas, on a brief return visit from Berlin, playing with Robin Fox and Martin Ng. Thomas leaps straight in, using his repetitive bowing technique to create a drone of harmonics, nicely matched by tumbling, crumbling static from Fox on laptop, while Ng manipulates his turntable producing pops, cracks and quick vinyl swipes. Cooper on guzheng provides a subtle, yet suturing layer, the timbre of her instrument intermingling with the bass but also mimicking electronic textures. The piece winds itself into a climax pushed on by high-pitched feedback coming from Ng holding his headphones to the stylus; and then it’s over. Thomas seems surprised…perhaps the improvisation might have gone somewhere else, but as it was, it was tidy and concise.

The next set featured Joe Derrick and Simon Ferenci on trumpets—a challenging combination for players and listeners. The musicians explore the possibilities of the instrument while trying to avoid playing too many notes: sustained breathy half rasps, the sound of clacking valves, various mutes and materials over the bell to vibrate and mutate, watery spittle sounds, scraping the brass. While both players are very thorough, the set never moves beyond a series of elements.

The extreme vocals grouping lived up to its title. Kusum Normoyle, Aaron Clarke, Rivka Schembri and Bonnie Hart all have their moments of screaming, the female banshee wails nicely tempered by the death metal bawls of Clarke. Normoyle alternates between screams and purrs, Schembri rocks on the floor out of sightline so it’s hard to attribute noises to her, but I suspect she is adding the more textural, animal sounds. Hart has a set of guitar effects pedals to augment her throaty utterances with feedback. The piece is interesting as a series of overlapping proclamations, but have they been trapped by being labelled as extreme? As with the trumpeters, I had a sense these artists in combination with other instruments might have produced more complex explorations.

Helmet Head is the audiovisual pairing of Anthony Magen and Rod Cooper. Cooper stands mid-stage wearing a white welding mask with a metallic frame attached—like a set of antlers—supporting a screen. Magen, in front of audience, uses an Elmo (a souped-up overhead projector) to create visuals displayed over Cooper’s head. The sound is played from tape, chopped up by manual fastforwards and reverses, with crunchy noises of curious origin. Magen places objects he has found around the area onto the Elmo—bubble wrap, a cauliflower, toys with lights—the extreme close-up and lighting shifts rendering all things alien. For many in the audience the directness of live visuals along with Cooper’s battle against gravity was enough, however I found the performance rushed and lacking trust in the materials—sonic and visual resonances were hinted at, but not quite achieved…though I’d like to see Helmet Head again.

Sandwiched between two hyperactive visual acts was the contemplative trio of Magda Mayas, Monika Brooks and Laura Altman. It’s very, very quiet, the overlapping of soughing and sighing from Brooks’ accordion and Altman’s clarinet creating a sustaining environment for the rattles and moans coaxed from the piano by Mayas, who without ego leads this concentrated exploration. This trio exemplifies what I find most interesting about improvised music: each musician equally in the moment, equally open to discovery, listening at the very deepest level and choosing their techniques in relation to each other, to create an absorbing, cohesive whole.

Originally from Brisbane, BOTBORG has been touring across Europe for a few years so it was great to finally see them in New South Wales. However the BORG has undergone a kind of mitosis, with one half—Scott Sinclair—remaining in Linz, while Joe Musgrove plays around Australia. Their early explorations were mesmerising as their cannibalistic process of audio feeding video feeding audio and round again created an aggressive cyberpsychedelia. The process has now been refined, Musgrove presenting a slick sculpting of synaethesic images and sounds: ever shifting horizontals and verticals eating each other to become voluptuous swirling patterns. The projections were on a side wall, both speakers on our left, and eventually the intensity of the process confounded the projector (or someone was sitting on the lead), but what we shared proved that BOTBORG have developed an enthralling audiovisual experience.

Then there was the late night gig at the artist run space Akemi a bit further into the mountains, where we all squashed into a big living room to watch an informative film about the Scratch Orchestra and experienced the wild country music of Eugene Chadbourne—quirky songs, weird instruments and playful extended improvisations by his supporting team of Monica Brooks, Clayton Thomas, Reuben Derrick and Neill Duncan (whose skiffle work on the washboard was amazing).

Sunday afternoon and no NOW now is complete without a performance by the Splinter Orchestra. With at least 20 players, individual elements rise and submerge again into the morass which is not so much murky as like a thick undergrowth of overlapping drones textured with scraping, grinding and jittering. There are no noticeable transitions yet somehow things change; the intensity waxes and wanes as subgroups slide in and out of consensus. There is an almost ending that a few extend into a coda illustrating that The Splinter Orchestra is a complex entity—it pursues a hive mind while allowing for individual provocation.

The Loop Orchestra (John Blades, Richard Fielding, Manny Gasparinatos, Hamish Mackenzie, Juke Wyatt) also played a rare gig. Using tape and video loops sampled from Blades’ electric wheelchair, the piece, titled Wheel to Wheel, is challenging in its relentless repetition, yet like good minimalism rewards the listener with subtle shifts that constantly recreate rhythmic structure.

However the real highlights of the Sunday afternoon, and perhaps the festival, came from the solo performances of Anthony Pateras and Mike Majkoswki. Pateras is always good, but in this performance he was extraordinary. Closing his eyes, he adjusts the seat and jumps in, playing LOTS of notes. Emphatic and fearless, he starts at such a level of intensity we wonder where he can go from here. His fingers fly, he syncopates with his fist—energy not aggression—plays cascades of notes with his forearms that envelop the room until it is saturated with bouncing frequencies. Pateras knows his instrument and his own abilities and can shift pace, volume and tone, without losing any vibrancy or tension. It was literally awesome. He had to take two bows—unheard of in experimental music gigs!

When I first saw Mike Majkoswki play double bass in the early NOW now festivals I thought he was a shy young thing, however I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Majkowski is perhaps one of the most performative improvisers I’ve seen. A true showman, he sings along to the notes he is eeking out, whips the air with his bow, stamps his feet, dangerously thwacks the cap of a guy in the front row. It’s an angular approach of sudden shifts, sharp shocks and elegant sustains, constantly working the gesture. A bold, playful yet utterly serious exploration, Majkowski brought the concerts at the Wentworth Falls School of Arts to a perfect close.

The move to the Blue Mountains, initiated last year, suits the NOW now, giving it a slightly more casual and open atmosphere without any loss of rigour, and allowing for a greater engagement with environment and site, with activities like the early morning performances in Kings Cave and the interactive kites of Jon Rose. There is a truly festive feeling and audience numbers illustrated that there is also considerable local curiosity. Watching artists like Mike Majkowski develop through this scene indicate that the NOW now festival is providing a vital environment for these improvising creatures to grow and run free.

The NOW now festival, curators Jim Denley, Alex Masso, Mike Majkowski, Monica Brooks, Peter Farrar; Wentworth Falls School of Arts & Akemi, Jan 16-18

THROUGHOUT WERNER HERZOG’S FITZCARRALDO AND AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD, THE JUNGLE PLAYS A CENTRAL ROLE AS A PROTAGONIST OF THE HIGHEST ORDER. SHOT IN THE FURTHEST REACHES OF THE PERUVIAN AMAZON, EACH OF THE FILMS PLACES THE JUNGLE, BOTH ITS PHYSICAL AND SONIC CHARACTER, AS A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH, A POWERFUL AND OFTEN IMPENETRABLE WORLD THAT HIDES MORE THAN IT REVEALS.

As Herzog comments in the documentary Burden Of Dreams, the jungle is an all-encompassing world of the “prehistorical. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished yet…[a place that maintains] a harmony of collective murder. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication.” While typically Herzogian in its colour, this quotation does point to the drama that the Amazon jungle tends to draw out of people who encounter it.

Travel a good few days down from the headwaters of the Peruvian Amazon and you arrive at Manaus the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonia where the confluence of Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes takes place. It’s here field recordists, composers and sound artists from across the world gather for Mamori Art Lab.

Mamori Art Lab is a residency program overseen by Jordi Ilorella and Asier Gogortza, Spanish photographers whose preoccupations include the ways in which environments influence and ultimately shape art. Each year the pair collaborate with Spanish sound artist Francisco Lopez to produce two 14-day workshops that focus on the practice of field recording, concrete sound and other questions pertaining to the creation and exhibition of contemporary audio arts.

Field recording is a complex area of investigation that positions itself in histories of location recording, documentary filmmaking, bioacoustics and, as David Toop summarised it in Uovo Journal (Issue 14, 2007), “Bird watching and similar ocular pursuits, exotic sonic backgrounds, post Cageian environments.” The variations of the art form have expanded in recent years thanks to portable recording devices, leading to a mounting exploitation of natural sounds in a range of music and art practices. The intensifying mist clouding the art of field recording provokes questions as to why exactly this practice is undertaken—something strongly investigated by Francisco Lopez during the workshop.

The Art Lab’s physical presence is a collection of three small buildings on Mamori Lake, roughly four hours south-west of Manaus. The residency encourages discussion surrounding the creative use of found sound, provides opportunities for field recording excursions and participants are also encouraged to present works composed from recordings collected. It offers a chance for participants to engage deeply in one (albeit diverse) environment and explore a range of technical and theoretical ideas drawn from field recording practice.

For Melbourne based sound artist Camilla Hannan, among the residency group in 2009, “it was fantastic to be focused on the sonic environment for an extended period of time. Even when I wasn’t actually recording I was thinking about the sonic landscape, listening for different sounds, thinking about compositional structure and about how sound resides in space. Mamori offered a unique environment of sounds ranging from the cacophony of a thousand frogs to the delicacy of syncopated insects. At times, the ‘natural’ became truly bizarre.”

If one theme did permeate much of the residency it was the relationship between the natural and the synthetic—framed through Lopez’s insights into absolute concrete sound and the transformation of reality. Nights, dense with the high pitched clicks, whistles and sizzles of insects, bats, mammals and birds sounded like some highly orchestrated electro-acoustic composition. In fact if one aspect of Mamori’s sound world was to leave a lasting impression it was the sheer ‘weight’ of sound present—each square metre of jungle and swamp was loaded with countless sound emitters—making the location of individual elements quite difficult if not impossible.

Departing from the Mamori camp part-way through the residency for a three-day boat trip to the Lago Yuma, all participants were offered a chance to explore a range of new environments, including locations at which hydrophonic (and atmospheric) recordings of the Boto Rosa (the pink Amazonian dolphin mythologised as the shape shifter Encantado) could be made.

It’s difficult to convey the feeling of being in such articulate mammalian company, to hear these creatures communicating underwater and then gasping for breath as they emerge from the depths mere metres away from the small boats housing the participants. The intensity of engagement was unrelenting and brought into sharp focus a range of issues pertaining to the act of field recording and indeed listening. “Every minute (I was) hearing dolphins breathing loudly all around us,” recalls German artist Marc Behrens of the time on Yuma, “the sounds from the jungle further away and muted, the water surface completely still, no wind at all.”

As it came time for the final presentations to be made, each of the works told a story of impressions (and perhaps levels of connection) varying from participant to participant. For example, Behrens explored a concrete compositional approach using transformed sound against a backdrop of untreated field recordings. Cedric Maridet from Hong Kong took a more diarised approach, shifting between environments and illustrating the sheer diversity of sound collected. In contrast, Irish electronic composer Hillary Mullaney’s composition was a high-pitched oppressive drone that seemed to typify the harsher aspects of the environment—a work perhaps fuelled as much by her habitus as the jungle itself.

Leaving Mamori for Manaus at the conclusion of the residency was a surreal experience. Bodies were sore (following a harrowing soccer game with the locals; of course we lost, 10-4) and minds tired yet elated. It’s a difficult emotional jumble to summarise, one that reflected the rare chance for isolation from the modern world, as much as the sense of disconnection from any notion of ‘globalisation’—life had been extremely local and focused in a way that’s increasingly difficult to encounter.

Whether because of exhaustion, malaria medications and extreme environmental conditions, or simply the totality of experience itself, Mamori Art Lab provided a truly distinctive opportunity for collective understanding of explorations into sound art, field recording and the orbiting relationship of art and environment. The further the boat travelled from Mamori and the closer ‘civilisation’ became, the greater the yearning to return to that unique space and also the greater the dream-like quality of the entire residency.

INTERPLAY: LIVE SURROUND SOUND PERFORMANCES VIA COLLABORATION BETWEEN ACCLAIMED AND EMERGING ARTISTS WAS ORGANISED BY QUE NGUYEN OF THE ROYAL MELBOURNE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY STUDENT COLLECTIVE, WITHIN EARSHOT. THE EVENT CONSISTED OF FIVE PERFORMANCES FROM MEMBERS OF THE COLLECTIVE PAIRED WITH MORE ESTABLISHED MUSICIANS. THE STUDENTS WERE INVITED TO CHOOSE THEIR COLLABORATORS, GENERALLY RESULTING IN PAIRINGS WITH ARTISTS WITH WHOM THEIR OWN PRACTICE SHARED A GREAT DEAL.

Due to financial and time constraints (it was that time of year in universities after all) each pairing had limited opportunities to work together. Nevertheless the students and their counterparts undertook an informal mentorship process in preparing for the performances.

Cross-generational collaboration in Australia has been rare among musicians and sound artists. It is also reasonably uncommon to see more established artists in this area work consistently with younger artists. Interplay was an exciting and necessary step in attempting to further develop opportunities for young artists to work with, learn from and perhaps even influence their more established contemporaries.

Natasha Anderson and Que Nguyen opened the night. At the outset Nguyen had an interesting microphone setup with four positioned in a rectangle, each at a distance of a metre and a half. This allowed her to walk between them to effect panning of her vocals across the four speakers, while also processing her own voice with various effects from the now ubiquitous and quickly discernible Ableton Live software on her laptop. While visually fascinating this rendered the panning effect somewhat one dimensional and cumbersome, preventing Nguyen from being able to address all four speakers at once. Anderson meanwhile built on the signature staccato bursts of noise and low tones she coaxes from her contrabass recorder and laptop using a great deal of playback material, which she explained is sourced from the various theatre projects she has worked on in the last few years, lending the set a more dramatic turn than I had expected. Towards the end Nguyen took all four mics in hand and Anderson built an uncustomary crescendo which saw the sounds produced by the two begin to congeal and push toward a satisfying conclusion.

Philip Samartzis and Tessa Elieff performed the second set of the evening, both working with playback of various field recordings as well as various tones and, in the case of Samartzis, output from his EMS Synthi AKS Synthesizer, which the pair used to slowly fill the audible spectrum, starting with recordings of irregular rhythms which were gradually underpinned by bass notes and finally high frequency modulations. It was difficult to tell which sounds were coming from which performer, the palette of each overlapping to such a degree and providing an interesting ambiguity to their displaced concrete sounds. The various elements gradually extricated themselves and as the piece came to rest Samartzis looked up at Elieff with nothing but the recorded beep of a digital clock repeating alone until she hit stop, revealing their individual roles at the last possible moment.

The most successful set of the night was undoubtedly that of Darrin Verhagen and Martin Kay. It felt like a natural collaboration between two performers with a deep rapport and understanding of one another’s work. Strangely the set sounded much like the solo performances I have heard from Verhagen in recent times, gradually building to a violent crescendo from ambient beginnings. But it was in fact largely driven by Kay on laptop with the usually Pro Tools-bound Verhagen playing shakuhachi live with various processes and feedback setups, recalling his previous, more performative work such as Shinjuku Thief.

Robbie Avenaim and Nick van Cuylenburg were first up after the obligatory mid-evening breather and set out with an awkward beginning in which Avenaim waited to let van Cuylenburg set the tone for the set, producing grand granular sweeps from his computer. Eventually the two came together as the set began to build. Avenaim had positioned drums with his motorised drumsticks at either end of the room, seating himself opposite van Cuylenburg with more drums and devices. As the set developed van Cuylenburg produced a broadening range of percussive sounds which underscored the cacophony that developed as Avenaim activated all his various devices.

Closing the evening were Robin Fox and Vijay Thillaimuthu, performing on Max/MSP, oscilloscope and controllers and mixer, pedals and TV respectively with their individual setups linked into a recursive feedback network. Powerful and visceral, fully utilising the spatial potential of the surround setup at their disposal, the set started strongly but perhaps struggled to hold attention for its length. I was fascinated to see Fox’s processing of his collaborator’s output fold back on itself. The set forcefully demonstrated the possibilities for musicians of different generations to push one another in different directions.

It was clear throughout the evening that the younger artists did look to their more experienced collaborators for guidance and that deliberately transparent structures based around a central crescendo of some sort were the order of the night. This is to be expected with most first time collaborations when artists are sizing one another up and attempting to find common terrain. Overall the standard was very high and interestingly the most successful performances were the ones where the collaborations felt natural and the students pushed their mentors into new territories.

Interplay demonstrated the value of cross-generational projects in Australian experimental music and sound arts. It was clear that the opportunity to work with established musicians was invaluable to the students involved. Artists of different generations would clearly benefit from the opportunity to work with one another more regularly and hopefully more projects like this one will offer further opportunities in the future.

Interplay: Live Surround Sound Performances Via Collaboration Between Acclaimed and Emerging Sound Artists, Within Earshot Collective and Guests, supported by RMIT Union Arts, Horticultural Hall, Melbourne, Nov 9, 2008

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, From Here to Ear (2009), mixed media, Long Gallery, Hobart,

MONA FOMA ARRIVED QUICKLY IN HOBART, GESTATING AND HATCHING IN A VERY SHORT PERIOD. THERE WAS AN ODD MARKETING CAMPAIGN AND THEN IT WAS UPON US, ON THE STREET AND EVEN IN THE LETTERS COLUMN OF THE MERCURY, AS PEOPLE COMPLAINED AND PONTIFICATED ABOUT FUNDING AND TIMING. THE DAMN THING WAS EVERYWHERE.

MONA FOMA was something different. The convoluted acronym translates as: Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art. MONA is not yet open but when its mastermind David Walsh went public with the idea last year, the arts landscape in Tasmania changed dramatically—word spread of a collection of apparently incredible stuff in a unique museum that would be free for all to see.

Violent Femmes member Brian Ritchie emerged as festival curator, backed by the Salamanca Arts Centre. Suddenly an event was looming. The whole thing fell from the sky and Hobart was dazed and confused, which appeared to be the idea.

The festival opened with a huge free night-time show in Salamanca Place. Performances on a stage in a blocked off street, opera sketches by IHOS, aggressive, violent contemporary dance by Balletlab and a whole lot of art to see drew in a huge crowd. People voted with their feet, and given that it was all free (well, except for Nick Cave) that was easy to do.

The festival was fun and exciting and more than that, it felt like something we really need in Hobart—a big, bright, sprawling festival that isn’t about The Wilderness or Local Produce and doesn’t primarily feature nice music to have a pinot to. Instead we got art that wowed, charmed and seduced and the city loved it.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, From Here to Ear (2009), mixed media, Long Gallery, Hobart

It was the content that did it. Hype and controversy made people curious but this would have backfired had the work not been so engaging, and exhibited so differently. The Roaming District Church, a mobile work by Jensen Tjhung, appeared and disappeared around the city. Its weatherboard exterior, polished interior and the calming psychedelic loops that oozed from the speakers evoked memory and a sense of time somehow; but if there’s something that music is truly about, then it probably is time—each beat and bar measures time passing. This thought became something of a theme for all the work for me. The little church was very evocative.

Time, again, was investigated by Manon De Boer’s short film Two Times 4’33”. Yes, it was the John Cage work and, yes, it’s about the other sounds that take place when a piano is not being played, and indeed the impossibility of silence. And we knew that, but the film took the ideas somewhere else by letting us watch the bars of no playing being read, and then for the second run through, a pan of the intent audience swiftly brought the experience back to oneself, sitting in a specially constructed screening room at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery that had instructions for entry: not when the red light is on, thank you. Time and sound were pulled apart in very strict fashion.

The Long Gallery at the Salamanca Arts Centre was transformed entirely by the insertion of walls, headphones and a special room. The headphones contained a selection from the exciting 21:100:100 Sound Art exhibition from Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne last year—by all accounts a truly thrilling exhibition, firmly stating the important place sound art has in Australia and the world (RT 88, p43). It’s such a wonderful installation—half the fun is watching people stoop and perch to listen, becoming monks for a moment.

In the Sidespace, just off the Long Gallery, Raef Sawford combined tiny screens on black plinths, an electronic rendition of Greensleeves and a fluttering projection around the darkened room into a work that wore time on its sleeve, entitled In Search of Lost Time. This work seemed to want to be larger and more all encompassing than allowed to be by the space, but the spread of darkness and its punctuation by differing use of light was neatly done.

Scot Cotterell’s work over in Kelly’s Garden, was a stark contrast, largely because it was rather funny. He combined black plastic, mirror balls, sludge metal sounds oozing from a 2001 style edifice and a joyously tasteless garden fountain spluttering Coca-Cola. The fountain was a lurid pink and the installation a monument to the awful glory of consumer crap everywhere.

Back in the Long Gallery there was a room within a room. Here was the centerpiece of MONA FOMA—From Here to Ear by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. It featured 35 live zebra finches hopping about on cleverly tuned Les Paul guitars placed horizontally on stands for easy perching, scattered in an environment of sand and wild grasses. The guitars had amplification and even a little distortion, and as one moved about the room and the birds reacted, sound emerged. It was hypnotic and seductive to a high degree—this was the work Hobart really did fall in love with. People returned again and again to experience the fragile, beautiful creatures, colourful and fleeting like the perfect dream of a rock star. It was gorgeous.

The work that held me most, though, was outside: Cameron Robbins’ Marine Test Rig perched on the edge of the harbour. A little wooden cabinet containing pipes that stretched down into the river, it made sound as the motion of the water pushed air up into the cleverly constructed pipes. It hooted and blew with the imprecise rhythms of the sea, and it crept up on me-—what it was, how it worked and what it said about nature and time. The small music-making hut was all by itself, the sea playing it whether anyone was there or not. The motion of air and water came together and as my hair ruffled, I heard music that really was time and tide.

MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art, curator Brian Ritchie, Museum of Old and New Art in conjunction with All Tomorrow’s Parties, Salamanca Arts Centre, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart, Jan 9-12

ARTSPACE CELEBRATED ITS FIRST 25 YEARS WITH 24/25, A MARATHON WEEKEND-LONG PARTY OF INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCES. OVER THE SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 24 ARTISTS WERE SHOWCASED IN A NON-STOP PROGRAM RUNNING CONCURRENTLY IN THE TWO MAIN GALLERIES. ARTISTS WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR EACH TO INSTALL, EXHIBIT/PERFORM AND TAKE DOWN. JOAN GROUNDS, WADE MARYNOWSKY, EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS, MARK TITMARSH, THE KINGPINS, KATTHY CAVALIERE, JULIAN DASPHER, JULIE RRAP, DENIS BEAUBOIS, LIZ DAY, MIKALA DWYER, MATTHYS GERBER, RICHARD DUNN, JIM ALLEN, BROOK ANDREW, DEEJ FABYC, GEORGE TILLIANAKIS, MARK BROWN, JILL SCOTT, NUHA SAAD, MIKE PARR, R E A AND DEREK KRECKLER PRESENTED A TRULY DIVERSE RANGE OF PRACTICES.

In the heady mix of full-hour performances, quieter installations and videos, the audience mingled or browsed the considerable Artspace collection of catalogue essays and press reviews which had been bound for the occasion. The mighty tome of essays from Nick Tsoutas’ long tenure as director was an impressive material remainder in itself, a reminder of the sheer number of artists and volume of work that has been produced or installed inside Artspace’s walls.

Representative of a quarter century of non-commercial art practice, the celebration more than aptly demonstrated Artspace’s committment to its mission to show conceptual/political work with little or no material remainder (nothing for sale). Twenty-five years on, Artspace, now directed by Blair French, is as vibrant as ever, a testament to the success of its mission and the collective worth of the work—ongoing and evolutionary in its exploration of issues, strategies, unlikely mediums and technologies. Initiatives such as Artspace have altered the perception of what constitutes art. Without it and other alternative venues, like Performance Space, would the Art Gallery of New South Wales have had its Level 2 program? Or MCA its strong local contingent? And would younger artist-run spaces like First Draft, itself now qualifying as a long-term establishment, have been viewed as necessary platforms for a tier of younger emergent artists?

Under Tsoutas’ direction, Artspace established a strong international agenda, with an important residency program, and a strong association with the Biennale of Sydney (housed upstairs in The Gunnery). Artspace nurtured and developed a style of practice which gave Australian artists the opportunity to rub shoulders with their international peers—and not just every two years at the Biennale. Tsoutas would seek out the weird and the wonderful, for example the handmade sci-fi of Finland’s Veli Grano, work you wouldn’t see elsewhere. His support for the gay community extended from Pope Alice to the music video generation of George Tillianakis and The Kingpins; and, equally important, through the catalogue essays he developed art writers and theoretical practice in an ongoing series of seminars and conferences.

Whatever your thoughts on the severe Marxist-revolutionary photocopy-styling of those Tsoutas-commissioned catalogues, the point was that he got them out quickly and economically with each and every show, and fostered serious artist-writer dialogues as assiduously as he collected reviews from the mainstream press. In those catalogue essays artists puts their work in dialogue with serious contemporary theory at an order of working through that was beyond mere review. The essays were a kind of conceptual testing ground for artists. Now, bound together, the essays are an invaluable research resource fittingly displayed in the foyer, central to the celebration.

Given the sheer volume of artists and projects, director Blair French is to be congratulated on succeeding in the difficult task of selecting a mix of established and younger artists to encompass both the gallery’s history and contemporary perspectives.

With a practice going back more than 30 years, Joan Grounds is a seminal figure in performance-installation in Australia. In her Sunday morning slot she was both performer and object in her own installation as she sat quietly, blindfolded by the skein of blue wool which wrapped her head, before trailing outside the gallery, along the footpath, and up a lampost where it secured a small, leafy branch. This tranquil, reflective work summed up a century of installation practice going all the way back to when Duchamp blocked access to a 19th century gallery by filling up the interstices between the paintings with a cat’s cradle of wool. The Duchamp mantra of “nothing to see” was echoed in Grounds’ blindfold: installation art is less about seeing per se and more to do with a conceptual understanding.

As such the historical dimension of this performance affirmed Artspace’s mission. Grounds’ exchange beween inside and outside, culture and nature, affirmed the history of happenings, the use of everyday materials (not the rarefied paint of high-born, sublimated ‘high art’), and the actions of artists whose site was very often the street (Gutai in white labcoats washing Tokyo’s pavements in the 1950s). In contemporary terms, Grounds’ performance ‘action’, though paradoxically calm, bound her to a tree and tall timbers, highlighting the sacrifice of nature to the city, and our blindness to its current state in the ongoing global warming and energy crisis.

Mark Titmarsh’s expanded painting likewise positioned Artspace in art history, playfully usurping the 1950s action painting of Jackson-the dripper-Pollock. With a diverse practice as both artist and writer (he co-edited the postmodern journal On the Beach in the 1980s), Titmarsh has a long history with Artspace and was an early experimenter in internet subjectivity (Space Invaders, 1992). Returning now to live action and to paint—not traditional painting, but painting in its expanded form as the lamella-thin surface of things—Titmarsh performed as a chucker of colour, flinging paint and all manner of bright and shiny baubles and multi-hued flat cards around the gallery. Colour dispersed in flight. Notably he later chaired the Artspace forum on expanded painting.

Liz Day’s remarkably rapid installation of a square of riotous weeds in full bloom was contextualised by video documentation of her garden project inside a women’s prison. Her aberrant plants, like aberrant people, conjured the tensions between institutionalisation and freedom, bureaucracy and social formation of the self. Day, known for her slow practice of growing and exhibiting grasses and root systems within a conceptual frame of histories of power and colonisation (whitey’s patch of lawn eradicating Indigenous custodianship of the land), resorted to a shorthand of quite fantastical store-bought weeds to fit the one-hour timeframe.

For many established artists, the tight one hour of Artspace 24/25 was but time enough for a showbag sample of usual practice. Julie Rrap made time the focus when she set the heat to melt a line of ice stilettos (and in so doing recalled the iconic role of the shoe in her work on the female body and its fetishisation). Eugenia Raskopoulos’ dark and haunting video provoked the viewer to puzzle out what they were seeing (in synecdochal relation to her large scale 2007 Artspace installation where, inside a Mies van de Rohe styled glass box, she staged her smoke and red flares rebuke to Rumsfeld’s media lock-down on Gulf War Two).

Further samplings included Katthy Cavaliere’s discarded rag doll performance and Mikala Dwyer’s installation of an uncharacteristically non-floppy, rigid monotoned structure. Wade Marynowsky’s Dalek-inspired floor robots caught the mad flavour of his Artspace-installed masterwork, Autonomous Improv (which, in a nod to Bruce Nauman, combined video snippets of performance and sound artists with footage of the strangeness of clowns). The Kingpins donned their green tracksuits and inhabited their trademark boy rappers—live. Denis Beaubois showed a video of a soothsayer he had hired prior to the event to predict Artspace’s future and what would happen on the day.

Given the daunting, even impossible task of a full Artspace retrospective (simply too many good artists), Artspace 24/25 cannily consolidated its historical mission with a party offering a satisfying sampler of favourites.

VIDEO ART WAS ORIGINALLY CHAMPIONED FOR ITS DEMOCRATIC IMMEDIACY, WHICH ARTISTS JUXTAPOSED AGAINST THE COLD FORMALISM OF HIGH MODERNISM. EVEN TODAY, DIGITAL VIDEO TENDS TO BE MORE ABOUT CONTENT THAN FORM. LIKE AMATEUR NEWS FOOTAGE, THE IMPUTED REALISM AND BANAL YET OFTEN FORCEFUL MATERIALITY OF VIDEO CONTINUES TO UNDERPIN MUCH OF ITS POWER, EVEN AS DIGITALISATION ENABLES EVER GREATER DEGREES OF MEDIATION. THIS PLAYING OFF OF ‘REAL LIFE’ VERSUS ‘MEDIATED ARTIFICE’ ANIMATES ALEX KERSHAW’S INSTALLATION, ONE OF SEVERAL CENTRES, RECENTLY EXHIBITED AT THE FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE, WHILE NOTEBOOK AT PICA BY THE UK’S JOHN WOOD AND PAUL HARRISON LIES FIRMLY IN THE REALM OF FABRICATED FORM.

Kershaw’s work, underpinned by vacant tones and marginally noisy field recordings mixed by Gail Priest, is a response to Australia’s mythic red centre. Filmed in and around Alice Springs, Kershaw presents a surprisingly urban vision. Indeed, as the title implies, there is a strange sense of decentredness to the installation. Kershaw’s sites seem eternally at the periphery, forgotten spaces nestled about a pleasingly rusted, semi-industrial circuit. We see, from inside, a local and her dog repeatedly circumnavigating an empty water tank; an all but deserted street roundabout being laid with rolls of grass; a Maori busker singled out against a concrete wall; an empty carpark behind a yellow warehouse (shades of Melbourne’s once neglected ‘Yellow Peril’ sculpture, Vault) wherein a young man, recalling Buster Keaton, noisily stacks cheap plastic chairs to a dangerous height; and even a darkened playground, illuminated by torchlight, as one man moves about its geodesic climbing frames. Like the field of yellow backing the carpark, the playground carries suggestions of Modernist failure, given that geodesic domes were proposed as utopian architectural forms.

At times, Kershaw’s vision recalls for me Agnès Varda’s Mur/Murs (Walls/Murmurs; 1980), notably where we see a figure carefully measuring a public mural. Both Varda and Kershaw worked with photography before shifting to moving images, and they share a liking for the locked-off, wide-frame shot, replayed with minimal sound, to effect both a re-enchantment of urban space as well as a wistful melancholy. These are fragile relationships between figure and surroundings, which might not survive beyond filming. The ordinary urbanity of these Alice Springs locals in their own environment gives the work the feeling of a poetic documentary, with extended viewing revealing a gentle artifice of framing, rhythm and space. Projection on two screens enhances this, giving a languid, minimalist flow to the work.

For all the subtle, slow moving delights of One Of Several Centres, Kershaw is not Varda, and his scenarios do not all match. The self-conscious, actorly performance of the chair-stacker and the rare use of a cut to an upper body close-up make this sequence jar with the others, which (as with the wanderer in the graffitied water tank) otherwise coil and stream more easily in their relaxed minimalism of editing, framing and performance. This is nevertheless a highly affective work for those with the patience to await its charms.

More striking is the installation by Wood and Harrison. The old joke about contemporary art—and in particular early video art documenting artists performing mundane tasks—was that it could be made by anyone. This is manifestly not the case with Notebook, whose visual precision (ironically) allies it with Modernism, Malevich, de Stijl, Bauhaus artists and their peers. Notebook consists of 101 shorts, each filmed in the artists’ crisp, white studio with featureless grey walls and evenly distributed light (largely from above). Most involve a perfectly rectangular, gleamingly blank table, and each starts with an initial pause or lull in which one has just enough time to evaluate the set-up. Then an event is triggered, in most cases with the artists (and even their hands) out of shot. Actions happen sometimes with a snap, but more frequently via a temporal arc in which the occurrence eases into realisation before a sharp conclusion. The camera then allows one to reflect on the consequences, before fading to black, and the next one-to-two minute event is played.

Humour—of the austerely blank type—hovers over these performances, spoofing in part the ideals of Modernist aesthetics. Painters such as Kandinsky and the French Cubist Gleizes often described their work as formalist experiments, as parascientific tests of what would happen if one related colour to shape according to a particular rule, or if one altered perceptual frames following precise principles. Wood and Harrison likewise relate a series of aesthetic and physical propositions. What happens if one drops a grid of uniform green apples, hung by fishing line, suddenly over the space defined by the tabletop? One is offered a rubber band affixed to the diagonal points edging the table and length of the band constrained about its rectangular margins, before it is released to define a dark line across the surface. This experiment becomes an aesthetic gesture akin to Mondrian’s lines and brushstrokes.

Drawing on both the history of performance art, and criticism about Pollock and Field Painting (their vast canvases as standing in for the artist’s body), the oeuvre of Wood and Harrison is animated by tensions around bodily absence and presence. This is highlighted by those rare pieces in which the artists themselves appear. I particularly enjoyed the sight of one, dressed in anonymous black, lying unemotional under the tabletop, before a shower of plaster from above scattered across its surface and onto the floor about him. Where the artists do not appear, objects and spaces are redolent of their displaced physicality.

Notebook succeeds by its varied appeal. One can think deeply about its formalism, and its clear austerity gives it a look little video art attains. Or one can laugh at its comic physics lessons. Perhaps most importantly, this is not—to quote Adrian Martin—another “little black box [TV] inside the big white box” of the gallery, which insists one view it in the same way as one watches cinema or television. The visitor can enjoy the full duration of the 101 variations, or dip in and out, watch five minutes, leave, and return for another 30 seconds, and still appreciate this artwork—a welcome relief from the bloated durations artists such as Matthew Barney arrogantly demand. If only all video art was so crafted, yet unassuming.

Alex Kershaw, One of Several Centres, 2-screen HD digital video & surround sound, concept, camera operation, editing Kershaw, sound designer Gail Priest; Fremantle Arts Centre, Nov 29, 2008–Jan 25, 2009; John Wood & Paul Harrison, Notebook, digital video; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Dec 3, 2008 –Feb 1, 2009

AT MELBOURNE’S CONICAL INC., KEL GLAISTER INVITES US INTO A DE-CONSTRUCTION SITE THAT IS CLEAN AND BARE BUT FOR THE SLICK METAL RUNNER THAT CARRIES A GIANT BALL-BEARING TO ITS RESTING PLACE, EMBEDDED IN THE GALLERY WALL; WHILE ARLO MOUNTFORD OFFERS A COMFY SEAT AND FLUFFY WHITE ‘BEARSKINS’ AS THE SETTING FOR HIS QUIRKY FILM THAT FOLLOWS A RANDOM IDEA TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION.

At face value, Mountford’s scenario is whimsical: a deer—well, a guy in an antler hat and ‘deer’ pants—wanders around the Victorian alps with a cuddly polar bear, discussing the making of art, until the two meet a real ‘Wanderer’, straight from C D Friedrich. They have a picnic in the snow, then wander some more. The work is the product of a filmed-but-forgotten late night conversation, which we see at the start of the piece: a drunken Mountford, inspired by a damaged neon sign that reads “—NDINAVIA”, paints a rambling verbal picture of a deer in a wintry forest, tossing snow with its antlers to the sounds of a massed chorus.

Mountford’s post-dubbed dialogue is a sardonic reflection on why an artwork is created and the inevitable compromises of its making. Artistic references abound—most markedly to Fischli and Weiss’s rat and bear films—as do self-referential loops of critique-within-critique. The cartoon-like bear seems to play the devil’s advocate, countering lofty statements with comments like “So you didn’t get funded.” (The deer replies, “Piss off.”) Mountford creates a clever, critical conversation about the artist’s pursuit of an idea: the culmination of this discussion is the ‘deer’ on his knees, ecstatically tossing snow, arching and turning in slow motion to a choir that sings ‘NDINAVIA’ over and over.

Return to Form: NDINAVIA seems to take the animated characters of Mountford’s previous works and bring them to life in the ‘real world.’ The mauve-tinted, snowy landscape is lush and alluring; and for all their absurdity, the hapless deer and cuddly bear padding through the wilderness are strangely appealing. As the rhetoric expounded by one so often falls comically flat against the banal response of the other, the theoretical weight that might otherwise alienate is lifted to another realm, one of sheer irony and playfulness.

The perfectly-drawn Wanderer in his cameo role gets the last laugh, in a sense, for the film’s sensual climax is a kind of sublime homage to all things Romantic; a triumph of ‘artistic vision’ that renders theory irrelevant. Beauty, in the end, reigns supreme and the artist stays true to his idea—even when the idea is an unremembered, drunken rant. Mountford’s film is completely engaging for its sheer oddness, and at the same time cleverly pulls off something both conceptually rich and visually seductive.

For Busting Out, a melting block of ice at the exhibition opening served to set Glaister’s ball rolling. Her elegant metal runner delivers it to its final destination, half-in, half-out of the gallery space it relies on for its existence. The work seems a streamlined version of the ideas that drove Glaister’s Immovable Object (2007, RT 80, p53). This time she uses polished steel rather than cinderblock, much as one might take up a well-tempered sword rather than a blunt club. The shiny, still sphere reflects the viewer, the room, the edges of the broken wall and the metal run itself. The space is empty and silent, but full of the imagined trace of the movement; the never-to-be-repeated gesture, the path of the ball through the gallery.

Far from Mountford’s directly tongue-in-cheek tone, Glaister’s installation appears to take itself seriously despite its claim to be “a bratty attempt to make itself defunct.” It is a deliberately futile effort: the wall itself is reinforced with steel plate so the ball can never in fact ‘bust out.’ The physical work is as sleek and sophisticated as the idea it articulates. The resulting hole is not random but perfectly round, an ‘embossing’ as much as a break—though this changed later in the exhibition’s run, when some gallery visitors mistakenly took the piece to be ‘interactive.’

Glaister’s piece is smoothly constrained, cool-headed, while Mountford’s film ultimately gives unashamed voice to the notion of beauty. But Glaister’s work has a seductive beauty nonetheless—where will her increasingly refined efforts lead in the future? Mountford seems indeed to be wandering in new territory, and it will be interesting to see what medium will be employed next in his exploration of the history of art and ideas.

Arlo Mountford, Return to Form: NDINAVIA; Kel Glaister, Busting Out, Conical Inc, Melbourne, Nov 8–29, 2008

Self-release 2008
www.markcauvin.com

A double CD of works for solo double bass is unique and special. The bass normally complements other instruments in an orchestration, supporting rather than providing the primary melodic direction. The name “bass” is interchangeable with its place on the stave and defines its presumed musical character. But, as a solo instrument, the identity of the bass is transformed, and it can be made to produce the widest range of pitches, beyond its typically subsidiary role.

This is an absorbing CD from virtuoso Australian double bassist Mark Cauvin, and something of a challenge for the novice listener. I had to work at understanding what was happening, but careful attention is greatly rewarded. Cauvin is clearly a passionate and eloquent exponent of the instrument, its varied and challenging literature and the aesthetics emerging from developmental composition. He has collected some of the great examples of work written or transcribed for it and performs them with consummate facility. This CD is a collector’s item not only for students of the bass but also for any student of twentieth century music, as it includes compositions by major composers such as Berio, Xenakis and Scelsi.

The first thing you notice is the extraordinary production. The bass is so closely microphoned it's as if you are sitting right next to the performer. You hear every nuance, and the resonances and harmonics that such an instrument can produce can be breathtakingly sensuous, even erotic. This is a confrontingly intimate performance, which must be heard on a quality hi-fi that can reproduce accurately the subtle overtones and deep notes that characterise the sound.

The CD opens with a 1975 transcription by Fernando Grillo of Giacinto Scelsi’s Ko Tha I, II and III for guitar. As with the guitar version, the instrument is laid flat on its back, and both the body and the strings are played with the hands. The CD notes indicate that, in this version, the performer must bow both in front and behind the strings and also insert knitting needles between strings, in the style of prepared piano, to create novel sonic effects, greatly extending the range of possible sounds that can be orchestrated into the whole. The overall effect is ethereal.

Cauvin has studied with contrabass master and teacher Fernando Grillo whose compositions and influence generally pervade the CD. Grillo accounts for two compositions on CD 1, including a study written specifically for Cauvin, and the monumental Suite 1 for Double Bass (1983–2005) that occupies the whole of CD 2. Grillo’s are demanding works, especially the Suite, the manuscript of which is accompanied by a 17-page instruction booklet indicating in minute detail how the work must be played, including graphically described bowing techniques. Grillo’s Suite adopts the Baroque format as well as character, and the work proceeds from Bach’s legendary studies for solo cello. The work has the emotional power and uplifting melodic lines characteristic of the Baroque suites, but with digressions into more meditative and experimental compositional and technical territory. The emphasis is also on the resonance, timbre and sonority of the bass, complex chords, sudden changes of tempi and extended techniques such as simultaneous bowing and plucking. The bass can produce a sweetly seductive cello-like sound and then abruptly plunge into darkly reverberant depths some octaves lower, rapidly shifting the listener’s awareness from the sentimental to the visceral, and thus offering an unparalleled compositional palette.

The Grillo Suite is not the only Baroque reference on the CD—Cauvin also includes Swiss composer Julien-Francois Zbinden’s 1951 Hommage a Johann Sebastian Bach (Op 44) which takes the musical form into quite different territory.

Some of the works on the CD require extraordinary technical gymnastics. For example, Iannis Xenakis’s θEPAΨ—Theraps for contrebasse solo (1976, dedicated to Grillo) includes not only chords, but polyphonic glissandi. László Dubrovay’s haunting piece Solo No 10 for Double Bass (1991) opens with high pitched whistle-like glissandi that evoke a mournful soprano voice, and also requires quadruple stopping.

Overall, the selection of works on this CD constitutes an exhaustive exploration of the sonic and musical capacities of the instrument short of amplification or electronic mediation. And the 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, which are demonstrably at least as great as those of any other stringed instrument.

Naturestrip NS3007
www.naturestrip.com/

The work of American Loren Chasse can be largely characterised by his attentiveness to environments. This is what ties his work in with the myriad groupings of the Jewelled Antler collective and their idiosyncratic form of nature-bound acoustic psychedelia, often performed and recorded in outdoor settings, and his solo work that explores space, place and the act of listening through the use of location recordings. In this solo incarnation, Chasse’s work is closely associated with that particularly west coast group of sound-artists, which includes Brandon LaBelle, Jim Haynes and Steve Roden (all collaborators of Chasse over the years), who have explored a particularly post-‘industrial music’ notion of ambient sound making.

Environmental sounds form a major current in the history of music, a strong eddy of which has flowed through sonic experimentalism since the 20th century. However in the wake of this has come a range of issues about the conceptualisation, mediation and representation of the sounds of the natural, physical world within aesthetic projects. Where often the material manipulation and editing of these sound sources by artists can deflate what might otherwise be taken for a plea for naturalism (or indeed realism), much of the rhetoric that surrounds these practices drifts towards the essentialist, in that recordings are posited as somehow capable of relaying phenomenological aspects of actual places and environments along with the listening experiences that might occur within them.

Some of these issues come to the fore on The Footpath. The text accompanying the disc describes the sensations experienced during an afternoon spent on foot, pondering the sources of sounds heard and their locations. This text relates closely to “Arbor Pores”—a work in three tracks that forms two fifths of the album’s running time—which is constructed from recordings made in outdoor settings, and is to varying degrees a successful attempt to evoke the feeling and impression of a place or space.

More problematic is “Footpath Apparitions” which comprises the majority of the album. Edited from recordings of performances in Europe and America, environmental recordings are simply one component within a more overtly musical scheme. Here Chasse seems to prefer a palate composed of deep, muffled reverberances for conveying notions of depth and spaciousness, and along with the incorporation of melodic fragments (whatever their source), effects and winding drones, they tend to render the recorded locations as but one texture among many. The oceanic pace and fade-in fade-out edits—all too familiar hallmarks of much contemporary sound art—unfortunately tend to move the work towards the ponderous rather than the sonorous.

Then again, “Footpath Apparitions”, rather than evoking the sensations of the field recordings used in its construction, or of the live context in which they were later performed, perhaps best represents the difficulty of the practice of giving preference to the sounds of the environment: how to impart that which is ever present—the sounds, experiences and places of the physical world—which are yet under-heard. To this end the more straightforward approach of ‘”Arbor Pores” is telling, if perhaps to some ears less inviting.

2008

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Venus, Natural Crystal Chair, Tokujin Yoshioka, from the 21_21 Design Sight show Second Nature, directed by Tokujin Yoshioka, Tokyo

to all our readers
have a cool xmas and
a calm new year rest
readying yourself for
the high dramas and
the great art of 2009
the editors

Image: Venus, Natural Crystal Chair, Tokujin Yoshioka, from the 21_21 Design Sight show Second Nature, directed by Tokujin Yoshioka, Tokyo, Oct 17,2008-Jan 18, 2009. See page 15 for a report on this fascinating bio-art exhibition. www.2121designsight.jp www.tokujin.com

IN THEATRE, THAT OL’ BRECHTIAN ALIENATION EFFECT IS ABOUT AS CONTEMPORARY AS IAMBIC PENTAMETER. IF THIS YEAR’S MIAF WAS ANYTHING TO GO BY, THOUGH, AESTHETIC DISTANCING IS THE BIG THING IN DANCE TODAY. KRISTY EDMUNDS’ TIME AT THE HELM HAS ALWAYS BEEN MARKED BY A STRONG CHOREOGRAPHIC FOCUS AND IN HER FINAL YEAR AS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR SHE PRODUCED A PROGRAM WHICH BOTH SHOWCASED THE DIVERSITY OF DANCE AT THE CUTTING EDGE WHILE MAINTAINING—PERHAPS INCIDENTALLY—CERTAIN COMMON THREADS INTERWOVEN THROUGHOUT THE FESTIVAL.

From Deborah Hay’s “counter-choreography” to Chunky Move’s literal interrogation of process, the dance works on offer variously deconstructed, reinvented and defied conventional expectations of the form. Of course, frustration as an aesthetic goal has its obvious limitations—in asking an audience to think about dance, the sheer wonder of performance can slip away in favour of a purely intellectual appreciation.

wendy houstoun’s desert island dances

The perfect contrast in this sense would be Wendy Houstoun’s coolly rendered Desert Island Dances and the vast, impenetrable Sunstruck by Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham. Houstoun’s solo performance was an oral meditation on the history of movements she has acquired or been given over her long career, a cerebral exercise which purposefully prevented the audience’s immersion in its physicality by constantly pulling back to discuss it. Sunstruck, on the other hand, was an event of pure dance that challenged its spectators’ ability to rationally understand it, instead creating an intensely overwhelming experience that could not be reduced to words. In this sense, Sunstruck truly merits the term ‘sublime’, a word overused in arts writing and seldom deserved.

Houstoun is a leading artist who has worked with an enviable range of fellow dance- and theatremakers, including Lloyd Newsom’s DV8 and Tim Etchells’ Forced Entertainment. Etchells’ influence is especially evident in Desert Island Dances (and as a side note, it could be argued that Forced Entertainment has been the most profound influence on a massive range of Melbourne theatre at the moment, too). Desert Island Dances relentlessly questions the act of performance-making and liveness; like Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess, it attempts to invoke a sense of immediacy and spontaneity while actually maintaining an incredibly tight structure and logic. Houstoun talks her audience through a series of speculative moments: what if this happened? And what if I did this? And what if I then did this? It all seems loose, off-the-cuff, a performance always on the verge of beginning. But in this constant deferral, Desert Island Dances becomes a very cool work. Houstoun appears a fascinating dancer who only occasionally allows us to witness her, well, dancing. Moreover, the restrictions of the work’s solo nature become evident. It’s difficult to create a dialogue around dance-making when there’s only one voice to discuss it.

chunky move’s two faced bastard

Chunky Move’s Two Faced Bastard explores similar territory to far more sophisticated effect. A large playing space is bisected by a curtain of vertical blinds; the audience is split in two, one half on either side. The work we see depends on our placement—on one side an abstract, contemporary dance begins while on the other a panel discussion on performance occurs. There’s a certain bleed between the two from the outset. The gently swaying blinds allow infrequent glimpses of “the other side” while the microphoned forum can be heard in both halves of the space. And soon enough, the collision of worlds becomes more obvious, as performers enter one another’s space and influence their new surroundings. Brian Lipson interrupts dancers to question the meaning of their movements; a relationship begins between dancer Stephanie Lake—who is situated on the “dance” side throughout the performance—and actor/dancer Vincent Crowley, who begins as a pivotal figure on the discussion side.

As things proceed, the engagement becomes more hysterical. At one point performers suit up in robotic battle outfits fashioned from boxes and polystyrene and charge through the curtain to wage war on their counterparts. At another, the audience is offered the chance to cross the stage and see what effect a new perspective will provide. And at no point are the performers able to step offstage; with no wings to speak of leaving the playing space simply means moving into another.

What all of this results in is a wonderfully dialectical form of performance. It is the presentation of conflict—between action and interpretation, dance and theatre, body and mind—which creates a third space of meaning. For much of the work we are acutely aware that we’re missing out on something, that our position only affords access to half of a work. But when, finally, the curtain pulls aside and all of the performers are made visible across the space, we realise that this concealment is itself an integral part of theatre, and that what we have been watching all along has been a single, coherent work, not two distinct productions which intersect at vital points.

Two Faced Bastard’s duality is probably due to the differing interests of its creators—it feels at times to be an exchange between Lucy Guerin’s focus on the moment of dance, on dance as a form of presence, and Gideon Obarzanek’s more conceptual explorations of the framing of works. It’s a deeply intriguing, and often very funny exchange, and it’s also apparent that the performers themselves have been crucial to the formation of the work.

lucy guerin inc’s corridor

Several of Two Faced’s dancers also contributed to Guerin’s Corridor, a work that more closely adheres to the ongoing investigation of the theme of communication which has marked much of the choreographer’s output. Here, it is the way in which movement itself is communicated from one body to the next which is put into relief: set along a narrow strip bordered by an audience row on either side, the dancers ‘pass’ motion to one another in a variety of ways. Instructions are given via microphones, MP3 players, whispers and written text. Spontaneous choreography bounces back and forth along the space as dancers imitate one another’s moves; and the signal distortion increases as dissimilar bodies hastily attempt to replicate a particular phrase created by a distant figure.

Like Two Faced Bastard and Desert Island Dances, Corridor is dance about dance, in this case the process of instruction and translation of motion. It also serves up many memorable sequences of actual movement, preventing it from becoming a navel-gazing exercise or a piece which undermines itself in order to provoke. It’s smart, witty and very rewarding.

deborah hay dance company, if i sing to you

Deborah Hay occupies a different stratum entirely: the veteran US choreographer has created a vocabulary of dance that speaks to her contemporaries while remaining utterly distinct. She challenges her subjects to unlearn the inherited movements of their history; to become aware of the body’s momentary existence in any particular spatial and temporal environment; and to respond to the cues sent by this body in every instance. Hers is a kind of cellular choreography, and she asks her dancers to try to sense the signals of the trillions of cells which make up a single human figure. She has written extensively of her craft, and the writing is often obtuse and provocative in its esoteric nature. But it was a privilege to witness Hay’s theories in action, and If I Sing to You is a difficult but unforgettable experience.

The six dancers themselves appear a kind of sluggish organism as the work commences. It’s hard to delimit a particular starting point as they stand vacantly while the audience take their seats, and no conventional cues—the dimming of house lights, for instance—occur to mark off the performance. They stand closely, swaying slightly, surveying their surroundings. We are not watching six bodies performing. We are watching bodies ageing, evolving, existing. They may make noises. They may shift a foot, or lean, or react to another’s leaning. They are listening and watching.

Over the next hour, these dancers don’t dance. At least not in a recognisable sense—there is much movement, but it is startling in its unexpectedness. As trained performers, of course, these movements are not naïve, but are instead a kind of physical version of the negative space of visual art, the physicality that is made absent by choreographic convention. Hay forces her audience to think about dance not by telling us to do so—as does Houstoun’s work—or by explicitly exploring the problematics of thinking about dance, in the way that Chunky Move succeeded in doing. Hay simply does something so different that one’s preconceptions need revising.

If I Sing to You’s dancers are all female but decide upon the gender of their performance shortly before it begins. Some will dress in male attire if they choose, and the result will apparently affect the dynamics of the performance. Apart from a hilariously oversexed routine in which a facially-haired performer indulged in some animalistic thrusting, this conceit didn’t really contribute much to the performance I witnessed. This is a minor quibble, however. For a newcomer to Hay’s work, this piece was confounding, brilliant and impossible, without any dressings.

helen herbertson & ben cobham, sunstruck

And so to Sunstruck. In a gigantic, pitch-black warehouse in a remote area of Melbourne’s Docklands huddled a ring of chairs. Two dancers moved around the space. A lofty golden light on a rail-track circled behind us, casting luminescence and shadow upon the pair. It was a sun; we watched a world. The shifting light made shadows dance, evoking planetary cycles, a human sundial or shifting continents. There was no context, no explanation, but this interpretive openness conjured up uncountable possibilities. The two performers presented a rich contrast, Trevor Patrick a brittle, pointed form to the earthy muscularity of Nick Sommerville.

After the many, often successful choreographic experiments of the 2008 MIAF, Sunstruck alone seemed to genuinely achieve that daggy, old-fashioned result so rarely sought these days—theatrical magic, and the sheer wonder of the living body.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Desert Island Dances, devisor-performer Wendy Houstoun in collaboration with John Avery, music John Avery, lighting Nigel Edwards, Arts Centre, Oct 9-13; Chunky Move, Two Faced Bastard, direction, choreography Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin, performers Vincent Crowley, Antony Hamilton, Michelle Heaven, Stephanie Lake, Brian Lipson, Byron Perry, Lee Serle, design Ralph Myers, lighting Philip Lethlean, costumes Paula Levis, composer Darrin Verhagen, Arts House, Meat Market, Oct 8-12; Lucy Guerin Inc, Corridor, choreography Lucy Guerin, performers Sara Black, Antony Hamilton, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Harriet Ritchie, Lee Serle, sound design Haco, set design donald Holt, lighting Keith Tucker, costumes Paula Levis, Susie Gerraty, Arts House, Meat Market, Oct 16-25; Deborah Hay Dance Company, If I Sing to You, choreography, direction Deborah Hay, performers Michelle Boulé, Jeanine During, Catherine Legrand, Juliette Mapp, Chrysa Parkinson, Amelia Reeber, Malthouse, Oct 19-21, Sunstruck, by Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham, director Helen Herbertson, performers Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville, design, lighting Bluebottle, Ben Cobham, set realisation Alan Robertson, soundscape Livia Ruzic, music Tamil Rogeon, Tim Blake. Shed 4, North Wharf Road, Docklands, Oct 13-18

PREMIERING AS PART OF THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, JENNY KEMP’S LATEST WORK, KITTEN, DRAWS INSPIRATION FROM THE STORY OF ICARUS. THE WAX AND FEATHERS ARE GONE, REPLACED BY NEOPRENE AND MICROPHONES, AND KEMP’S FASCINATION LIES NOT WITH THE YOUTHFUL CURIOSITY OF ICARUS NOR WITH THE NATTY CRAFTSMANSHIP OF DAEDALUS, BUT WITH THE NARRATIVE DYNAMIC OF THE MYTH, ITS FREEFALLING VERTICALITY.

However, Kemp inverts the arc of Icarus and begins underwater. A woman, Kitten, realises her husband, Jonah, has somehow descended from the cliff outside their house and disappeared into the waters below. Her husband’s friend, Manfred, continues the archetypal nomenclature and acts as a well-worn third wheel. The ensuing action, narratively speaking, follows Kitten as she and the watchful Manfred search for Jonah but find each other—a romantic structure as old as L’Avventura. Like Antonioni, Kemp is not interested in the narrative suspense of the search, but on the other hand, neither is she interested in the relationships. The only driving force behind Kitten is the internal life of the eponymous character.

This life is refracted through the prism of Kitten’s triple casting. Margaret Mills and Natasha Herbert, regular collaborators with Kemp, as well as Kate Kendall, don’t play vastly different versions of the role, but their combined energies suggest the fracturing of Kitten’s mind. Beset by the trauma of Jonah’s disappearance, Kitten is plunging through her grief without rational anchor points—Manfred is a characterless vacuum, only capable of bankrolling Kitten’s increasingly tangential searching.

In the end, Kitten’s freefall takes her, and the audience, from the thick, submerged world of the first act, through the temperate naturalism of the second act into the stark, clinical clarity of a psychiatric ward. At this point, jumping into a liminal space of polar bears and inflated tuna, Kitten performs a concert. Kemp stays true to her inversion of the Icarian arc and finishes with this theatrical parachute, a floating denouement, where the audience leaves the theatre to find themselves in Crete.

There are no parachutes in Back to Back’s Food Court. Bruce Gladwin and his team of co-creators have produced a formidably terrorising piece of theatre that also achieves astonishing beauty.

Back to Back is a remarkable company in itself, not least because it maintains a steady ensemble of actors. Throughout the company’s 21-year history, these actors, all with disabilities, have aimed at challenging audiences to reconsider their “unspoken imaginings.” Within this paradigm, the pieces that are created also serve to challenge and re-energise the performers—the ensemble’s welfare being integral. However, to regard the company’s work as primarily therapeutic denies the danger of the theatre that is produced and merely serves to reaffirm the binary of abled/disabled that is being deconstructed.

Food Court begins and ends with music. Led to the orchestra pit by torchlight, the inimitable trio of The Necks begin by building a slow trickle of sound in the dark—a cymbal scratch here, a solitary chord there. Their music has always created a sense of inevitability. Its driving pulse and dynamic is constantly building towards a climax that never quite arrives and a resolution that leaves no conclusions, simply space for silence.

In Food Court, The Necks meet their theatrical parallel. The action onstage opens in front of a curtain with a lone man placing a chair in the darkness. He then walks downstage, removes a white marker from the floor, and places it at the foot of the chair. A brilliant conceit—is the mark wrong, or is he? And in that question, in that moment, we are faced with our own judgment and perhaps taken aback by his confidence, his precision and his comedic sensibility. It is the first delicate, perfectly-pitched note.

Then, like figures from a Diane Arbus monograph, two women, clad in lurid gold leotards, take to the stage and begin an innocuous conversation. “Have you ever eaten a hamburger?” But with the arrival of a third woman at the other side of the stage, their attention and manner shift markedly. They begin to tease her about her intellect, her personal hygiene and her weight.

The barrage of abuse continues and becomes both abstracted and reified behind what appears to be a plastic scrim. In fact, it’s an inflatable cube of plastic that diffuses the shapes inside it while providing front and rear screens on which to project images and text. Beyond its practical attributes, the bubble acts like a Jungian ewer of the objective psyche—displaying a dreamlike state of archetypes engaged in sadism, torment, desire and struggle. Throughout this, The Necks drive on, carrying us through a forest of our own shadows.

Finally, our voiceless victim finds herself alone. It has taken 50 minutes for her to speak and, when she does, her voice cracks the air with a rush of forthrightness tinged with venom. She speaks the words of Shakespeare’s Caliban (“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises…”) and, in so doing, throws off and embraces the weight and complexity of theatrical representation and history, leaving us both punctured and inspired.

Shakespeare is given another rather different outing in OKT/Vilnius City Theatre’s accomplished production of Romeo and Juliet. The Lithuanian company is headed by the wry, floppy-haired Oskaras Korsunovas, who treats the text with élan—setting the action in rival bakeries and giving the story both the seriousness of social drama and the pep of bawdiness.

Korsunovas’ first gambit is a textless overture of competition, envy, sex and curiosity. The large cast immediately display their physical agility and alacrity, zipping from vignette to vignette across the steel bench tops. The set has both the whimsy and the darkly fantastical detailing of a Jeunet and Caro film and the posturing of the Montagues and Capulets is cleverly undermined by the mirror-image sameness of their respective kitchens. Korsunovas reveals that, for all their fear and loathing, their differences are merely imagined, yet this, in turn, renders them all the more tragic.

From this departure point, Romeo and Juliet steadily develops and expands. It captures the expressive youthfulness of its romance and matches it to the deep ferocity of its older generations. It also builds up a bank of imagery based on the vocabulary of the kitchen—ladles become weapons of masculine scorn, flour gives both life and death—that pulls the play back into the concrete world of social drama without in any way diminishing it. As it began, the production concludes wordlessly, but now, rather than hubristic poses, the tragedy is rendered by a silently aching collapse.

In Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day, there is no such poetic physical imagery. That is not to say that there is no poetry—the wonder of this production is in its essentialism. Working with the Belgian company Victoria, Etchells has crafted a brilliant provocation in a deceptively naïve guise.

The cast of sixteen children are a chorus of voices listing with mantric clarity the ways in which adults construct the cosmos around them—“You feed us. You dress us…You tell us to be quiet…You act surprised.” The children stand across a stage decked out in the features of a multi-purpose school hall. It is a beguiling and carefully created simulacrum—the chairs are the right size, the playground antics seem genuine, the screen for surtitles even has the powdery finish of a chalkboard, surely the clothes worn by the children are their own. Of course, the clothes are not their own, they are costumes, and the playground scene is choreographed, after all, this is theatre, this is artifice. But Etchells also knows that his audience of adults look to children not for artifice but for authenticity, for that elusive prelapsarian truth.In this respect, That Night Follows Day is as much a show about theatre as it is about the adult-child connection. Like Food Court, it engages the audience with an artifice that subtly subverts the traditional discursive structures of spectatorship—not by literally stamping on theatrical convention but by metaphorically returning the audience’s gaze. As a result, both pieces provoke questions, not answers and shift our perspectives rather than merely pleasing them.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Malthouse, Kitten, writer, director Jenny Kemp, performers Chris Connelly, Natasha Herbert, Kate Kendall, Margaret Mills, designer Anna Tregloan, composer, sound designer Darrin Verhagen, lighting Niklas Pajanti, choreographer Helen Herbertson, Malthouse, Oct 8-25; Back to Back Theatre, Food Court, director, designer, devisor Bruce Gladwin, performer-devisors Mark Deans, Rita Halabarec, Nicki Holland, Sarah Mainwaring, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Sonia Teuben, Brian Tilley, music The Necks, set design & construction Mark Cuthbertson, lighting design, technical direction Andrew Livingston, bluebottle, animated design Rhian Hinkley, sound design Hugh Covill, costumes Shio Otani, Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre, Oct 9-12; OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Romeo and Juliet, writer William Shakespeare, director Oskaras Koršunovas, set design Jurate Paulekaite, Arts Centre, Playhouse, Oct 22-25; Tim Etchells and Victoria, That Night Follows Day, concept, text, direction Tim Etchells, design Richard Lowdon, lighting Nigel Edwards; Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre, Oct 22-25

ANY WORK OF ART IS A WORLD UNTO ITSELF; ONE THAT ALSO ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNICATE TO OTHERS ITS OWN IDIOSYNCRATIC CULTURE. IN RECENT TIMES THIS LINE OF COMMUNICATION HAS MOSTLY RESIDED WITHIN AN HIERARCHICAL FRAMEWORK. THAT IS, THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PERFORMER AND AUDIENCE HAS OCCURRED AS A STRICT PROTOCOL BETWEEN THOSE BEING OBSERVED AND THOSE DOING THE OBSERVING. THREE RECENT WORKS AT THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL AIMED TO CORRUPT THIS PROTOCOL. IRONIC, ECCENTRIC, AND AT TIMES QUIETLY DEVASTATING, THEY SET A FRESH BREEZE BLOWING THROUGH THE MELBOURNE PERFORMANCE SCENE.

nyid: the meaning of moorabin…

I’m sitting in a freshly upholstered mini-bus with two punters from Perth when our driver Lydia loads a disc into the CD player. The gently mocking voice of concept creator David Pledger of NYID (Not Yet It’s Difficult) announces four less than salubrious Melbourne landmarks as we make our way to Moorabin, and invites us to consider our journey to this inconspicuous south eastern suburb alongside some classic Australian rock anthems. The Angels’ Doc Neeson rails against suburban oppression in the band’s rendition of “We gotta get out of this place” while Dave Warner from the Suburbs reminds us that he was indeed from the suburbs, in his cheeky pop mock tune “I’m just a suburban boy.” “Warner’s from Perth”, pipes up one of the punters from the most isolated city on the planet, while I’m successfully reminded of a boozy night spent in Moorabin’s South Side Six Hotel some 35 years earlier. Yes, the meaning of Moorabin is open for inspection, as we both begin to dissect memories from our respective lower middle-class pasts.

Arriving at a house that NYID Real Estate will eventually mock sell during a ‘public’ auction is at once novel and savage. Each room within this house, as well as spaces defined by the presence of wardrobes and bare mattresses in bedrooms, shirts and an ironing board in a sunroom, film projected upon a venetian blind in the lounge room and the obligatory incomplete white Holden panel van lurking in a masculine bound and sexually charged garage, have as their foundation text Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 seminal work The Poetics of Space. In search of inspiration, artists need look no further than the spaces contained within a domestic dwelling, and the labyrinth of the unconscious that these spaces of memory, mind and imagination inspire. With this work though, NYID have upped the ante. In 2008, a participatory culture is also one in which the commodification of intimate experience has become an explicit characteristic of artistic practice. Regardless of the quiet tragedy of a life lived in the suburbs, the meaning of Moorabin, like black gold, is now a marketable commodity and indeed, open for inspection.

“The successful bidder will receive a visual documentation of The Making of the Meaning of Moorabin including excerpts of selected video artworks and selected footage of interviews with potential buyers and associated research subjects which will have been uploaded onto the company’s project website during the presentation and viewing of the property. The successful bid will be donated to charity.” http://themeaningofmoorabbin.com.au

panther: exercises in happiness

Climbing a narrow stairwell to a first floor space situated above a tyre repair business, I’m immediately handed a scorecard. Co-creator Madeleine Hodge then fires off a series of questions meant to test my suitability for Exercises in Happiness. Yes, I live alone. No, I’m not involved in a permanent relationship… And on the questions go until, thoroughly qualified by an increasing sense of isolation, I go to the top of the class and am permitted to explore Panther’s eclectic environment.

As I investigate each exhibit and attempt to rate each on a happiness scale of 1-5, I become unhappy. If NYID commodified intimacy, Panther requires we assess subjective experience via techniques of market research. There’s “Things to do before I Die”, which induces a fine sense of melancholia, not because of a fear of annihilation, but because the majority of answers scrawled on a white wall in lead pencil avoid the question. Over by the north wall resides “The Garden Wilderness” comprising miniature human figurines placed within and alongside king-sized pot plants and other insurmountable and arbitrary greenery. Nature’s devastating indifference and our narcissistic inability to recognise this makes me sigh, then want to cry, and throw myself face down on the floor and die…But this is not to be; Panther’s other half, Sarah Rodigari, has other ideas.

As if trying to sell me a vacuum cleaner, Rodigari corrals me toward the “Piñata Shot.” We share a hit of tequila amidst a mutual concern for the state of our speckled livers, then like some humiliated and blustering town idiot I’m blindfolded, given a big stick, spun three times in order to accentuate the rush of 30 proof alcohol to my pallid brain and prompted to strike a papier mache donkey that hangs somewhere in the turbulent darkness. By the end of it all I have acquired an exhilarating sense of despair. That fast fading idea of the recuperative power of art has been put through the mincer, and so have I. Forced to participate in an ironic dissection of my own pithy understanding of what art has become, I am bundled back down the stairs and out onto the street as a marketable commodity; fully researched and ready for my chosen demographic, all prepared to spread the word and commodify.

lone twin & the suitcase royale: newsboys

This commodification of the individual achieved catharsis in Newsboys. A humble show, it nevertheless, in retrospect, provided the previous two with a progressive through-line that, all three combined, became a caustic comment on the state of the art during a global economic meltdown.

As a former paperboy myself, I was empathetic while watching members of The Suitcase Royale attempt to give away copies of a broadsheet titled The News during peak hour on Federation Square. Dressed like characters from Oliver Twist—floppy caps, grandpa shirts and knickerbockers—they were largely ignored by a crowd preoccupied with i-Pods and 3G mobile phones. Yet this intervention of an archaic form of communication into a culture largely unconcerned with its history was also a wry commentary upon the desperate status of the artist in the 21st century.

Selling newspapers was a performative act, as those of you who can remember the rhetorical rendition of a newspaper’s title—registered by pubescent vendors on city streets—as being a primal scream for commercial means. If you did not perform you did not sell, and many a paperboy succumbed to the fear that accompanied being forced to scream in public at peak hour. And so it is for the artist in the 21st century. Intervening in a cultural flow and criticising the conventions that govern our lives is an act of courage that often goes unnoticed. And so it was in Fed Square when I approached a member of The Suitcase Royale and requested a copy of The News. “Thanks mate”, he said, and his appreciation was heartfelt. Later, when reading the broadsheet, it became clear that its stories were private anecdotes of people interviewed for the project. One headline read: EVERYBODY’S OUT OF JAIL. Like The News, these performances by NYID, Panther and The Suitcase Royale that cast a critical eye over the commodification of the individual were free of charge, part of MIAF artistic director Kirsty Edmunds’ broad agenda to encourage audience participation in the festival. Freedom from the trite constraints of commodification is a necessary component of any participatory culture.

The Meaning of Moorabin is Open for Inspection, concept/creation David Pledger, project coordinator Lydia Teychenne, sound Lawrence Harvey, lighting Niklas Pajanti, website designer Alex Gibson, online Video Artist Jarrod Factor, photography Michael Williams, film editors Greg Ferris, Mark Atkins, Moorabin, Oct 9-25, http://themeaningofmoorabbin.com.au/; Exercises in Happiness, Panther & Tape Projects, creators Sarah Rodigari & Madeleine Hodge, Tape Space, Oct 11-25; Lone Twin & The Suitcase Royale, Newsboys, Federation Square, Oct 8-13, Melbourne International Arts Festival, October 9-25, www.melbournefestival.com.au

A MATRIARCH STANDS OVER HER DEAD DAUGHTER’S PALE, SUPINE BODY. SHE HAS AWKWARDLY DRESSED HER LONG-LIMBED ADULT-CHILD, WEEPING THROUGH HER FRUSTRATION, CHOKED BY MATERNAL PAIN BUT DETERMINED TO CONTINUE, TO REMAIN A CONSTANT THAT THE REST OF HER FAMILY CAN RELY ON. HER GRIEF-STRICKEN FACE IS FRAMED BY TWO OVERSIZED PIXIE EARS, HER BATWING-SLEEVES TRAIL FRINGES OF MOUSEY HAIR. BUT DESPITE THIS GNOMISH INCONGRUENCE, SHE COMMANDS RESPECT.

All eyes are drawn to her, a bold figure in the sparse white landscape of the stage. Beyond the platform where her daughter lies, on the outskirts of the colourless expanse, large rubber stags stand pallidly in line and the small ivory torsos of deer are heaped haphazardly under rows of huge antlers hanging on the far wall. Family members take their time at the corpse’s side, her long blonde hair falling over them onto the bare podium as they hold her.

The mother—the inimitable Viviane de Muynck—moves downstage towards us. No longer crying, her canorous voice is strong and unstrained as she addresses us directly. For now she is no longer the mother of the girl, but Viviane the performer, the storyteller recounting the back story to what we have just witnessed. She speaks about a Europe that has become a wilderness, and a family seeking refuge from the atrocities of war in an abandoned station, deep in the countryside. This is the deer house, a sanctuary from which they sell antlers to survive. As her musical words paint landscapes in the imagination, her round eyes settle on every one of us. Her gaze captures me and I could be sitting by a fire listening to fairytales. She is mother to all of us.

But something goes wrong. The mesmerising flow of her speech stalls and sputters. She’s lost her way, she struggles to finish a word, she can’t push it out of her mouth. Her eyes panic, glaze and fix on a distant spot. The family crowds in as she crumples. A jumble of languages rises from the bodies huddled round her. We crane to catch a glimpse of her, shocked into tenseness as the represented world invades its own narration.

For tonight we all seem to be part of this family, as Jan Lauwers and Needcompany tell us about community and death and the blurry boundaries between theatre and the world, where the real and the simulated merge and overlap, and intimate human conflicts are a microcosm of encompassing global occurrences. The performance centres on an actual event: the death of dancer Tijen Lawton’s brother, a war photographer killed in Kosovo while Lawton was on tour with the company.

At the start of the show we see the company’s dressing room reconstructed: the performers cavort around semi-naked, cheekily attention-seeking as they exchange jeans and tracksuits for rustic elfin tunics and large impish ears. Although playful, they’re equally absorbed in darker topics, stories of violence and death. They read extracts from a diary discovered by Lawton in Pristina when she identified her brother’s body, and from this a new story arises.

A war photographer is forced to choose between shooting a mother or her child to save the other. He kills the woman, and journeys with the body to the rural home of her relatives. They must decide whether he should die for his crime, and then whether his killer should also die. The Needcompany family assume the roles of this folkloric clan with a Brechtian-style self-awareness, presenting a narrative that dips in and out of its own frame, as the characters —and the corpses—step in and out of the action, attempting to alter or prevent the story’s progression.

The Deer House is the third part of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany’s Sad Face/Happy Face trilogy, following on from Isabella’s Room (2004) and The Lobster Shop (2006). While the first two parts focused on the past and the future, this third instalment looks to the present. And the company’s frenetic, unpredictable presentation aptly reflects its fleeting ephemerality. Dance, music, performance meld into a new, self-reflexive form, embedding skilfully manipulated reference to earlier mythologies, including the mourning rituals of Greek tragedy. The multilingual musician-performers also mix and match French, English and Dutch, the surtitles flashing as ideas fire simultaneously, tightly packing in ambiguous images to constantly widen the breadth of associations.

The show careers ahead of us and moments we can’t catch are swept up in the commotion; sometimes it’s a struggle that fragments our concentration, but then we are reined back in, particularly when characters attempt to take control of their present, trying out alternative possibilities. Their stories are a way to stall death: perhaps this bag is full of stones instead of a child’s body; perhaps the photographer doesn’t have to die. But ‘no-one writes their own story’ and the present inexorably progresses, even though we can’t see how after such momentous and tragic events. Just as the matriarch picks herself up and carries on with the tale, life itself continues after bereavement. Routine and order are broken, but trepidation is eased away as a new structure is settled on. Stories rise from death, providing ways to continue.

So at the end of this epic journey, hope grows from despair. Perhaps, as the characters suggest, grief is “the only thing that keeps all cultures from falling to bits”, providing “the driving force for the new.” The performers sing out a final image of community in this fantastical, ridiculous world: “We are a small people with a big heart, we love each other and it’s a real art.” Spectres of the chorus from an ancient Greek tragedy, perhaps.

Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, The Deer House, text, direction, set design Jan Lauwers, music Hans Petter Dahl, Maarten Seghers (except “Song for The Deer House”, Jan Lauwers), performers Grace Ellen Barkey, Anneke Bonnema, Hans Petter Dahl, Viviane De Muynck, Misha Downey, Julien Faure, Yumiko Funaya, Benoît Gob, Tijen Lawton, Maarten Seghers, Inge Van Bruystegem, choreography the company, costumes Lot Lemm, lighting Ken Hioco, Koen Raes, sound design Dré Schneider; Kaaitheater, Brussels, Sept 25-27

FERGUS LINEHAN COMPLETES HIS SYDNEY FESTIVAL DIRECTORSHIP WITH A MEATIER THAN USUAL PERFORMANCE PROGRAM, ONE POPULATED IN PARTICULAR WITH EPIC WORKS FROM FOUR TO NINE HOURS; A SLENDER DANCE LINE-UP (AFTER THE AUSTRALIAN RICHES OF 2008) ALBEIT WITH THE SUBSTANTIAL PRESENCE OF STAR UK CHOREOGRAPHER CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON (WORKING LARGELY OUT OF THE US); AND A CONTINUING PASSION FOR THE SERIOUS END OF THE POP MUSIC SPECTRUM. AS EVER WITH LINEHAN, SYDNEY ARTISTS OF ANY IDIOM ARE LUCKY TO GET A LOOK IN—ERTH VISUAL & PHYSICAL AND SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY ARE THE FAVOURED TWO IN 2009. THERE’S ALSO A WELCOME FESTIVAL KIDS SEASON AT RIVERSIDE THEATRE, PARRAMATTA, THE HIGHLIGHT BOUND TO BE ERTH’S ADAPTATION OF NOVELIST PATRICIA WRIGHTSON’S NARGUN AND THE STARS. HERE’S MY FESTIVAL WISHLIST.

robert lepage: lipsynch

Marie-Anne Mancio wasn’t convinced that the 8 hour 35 minute work by Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina altogether cohered when she saw it at London’s Barbican Arts Centre (RT 87, p3), but along the way there was much to appreciate. She wrote, “In order to concentrate on the notion that voice is genetic (almost part of the fabric of the soul, whereas language or speech is encultured) Lepage courageously eschews the stunning visuals for which he is known. So, sets are witty and efficient—the side of a plane morphing into a train—but not spectacular. Instead, there is a glut of sound from singing to speeches, to a baby’s cries, to advertisements, to canned laughter. In a Los Angeles restaurant, conversation is punctuated with simultaneous translation and ringing telephones. Characters switch languages as do actors—text is in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian. On occasion, where surtitles are unclear, we are immersed in pure sound and sometimes, as [one character] tells us, music transcends failing language. As her son departs for California, [another] sings from Górecki’s Symphony no. 3 the lament in which the Virgin Mary asks Jesus dying on the cross to ‘Share your wounds with your mother.’ In other episodes we learn: we can speak without saying anything (President Bush is quoted); the content of speech—however plaintive or important—can be reduced to an analysis of harmonics and frequency; by recording permutations for British Rail announcements, you could read your own obituary. And death does not mean your body stops farting.

“To its immense credit, Lipsynch is often very funny, moving, insightful and never boring. It deserves multiple viewings to appreciate all of its references and nuances, the motifs of loss, of absent fathers, biblical characters, dualism; the incredible performers who take us on journeys as their multi-faceted roles age, change context or gain knowledge.”

nature theater of oklahoma: no dice

Also focused on communication, this time around kinds of telling, is No Dice from New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Jana Perkovic in her review from Zagreb’s Eurokaz performance festival wrote, “Starting with traditional oral narrative as a model, No Dice is an epic, four-hour replication of hours of telephone conversations between group members (ranging from artistic laments to complaints about work, drinking and eating disorders, to ‘dinner theater’ experiences). It employs tropes of oral epic (repetition, variation) which clash with the tropes of Shakespearian theatre (acts, climaxes), which in turn clash with the overturned tropes of good acting (misplaced foreign accents, hyper-articulation, exaggerated costumes). Modes of communication split apart, nothing quite matching: even the gesticulation employed is their own confusing invention (including, but not limited to, the sign of the cross, thumbs up, mimed wall and some nameless but recognisable gestures, such as intravenous drug use). It is a legible, but closed system of references, until it suddenly opens towards the end: the actors take their wigs and sunglasses off and address the audience: ‘The question is, what do we require in order to enjoy ourselves?’ Communication itself, they conclude. Poignant, semiotically imaginative, intellectually provocative but emotionally rich, Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s performance—with its roundabout, illogical, confusing conversations—is a manifesto of faith in our ability to engage with each other through speech.” (RT86, p56). At only $25 a ticket (compared with Lip Synch’s $100-140), No Dice could be the festival bargain for the adventurous but cash-strapped performance-goer.

stc actors company: the war of the roses

Another welcome epic, The War of the Roses will allow us an extended glimpse (at eight hours) of rarely performed plays by William Shakespeare that offer a view of English history that is at once idiosyncratic and predictably Tudor. The cutting and pasting and editing of these sizeable plays (to make the playing time manageable and the history presumably comprehensible) is by Tom Wright (most recently Barrie Kosky’s collaborator on The Women of Troy) and the show’s director Benedict Andrews, who can always be relied on to create lateral but faithful and telling interpretations of classic works. The STC Actors Company, in their last outing, is joined by Cate Blanchett and Robert Menzies (Brutus in Andrews’ Julius Caesar) and the design is by Alice Babidge, who impressed with her set for The Women of Troy. The War of the Roses Part 1 includes Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, Part 2: Henry VI, and Richard III. The rise and fall of kings and queens, their allies and enemies on fortune’s wheel, and of their own volition, right or wrong, is the grimly exhilarating stuff of the younger Shakespeare’s vision and will doubtless achieve additional topicality in the hands of Andrews and Wright.

morphoses/the wheeldon company

This is bound to be a fascinating program, not least because it’s the Australian premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s own innovative company, such a rarity for a ballet choreographer these days, and includes the exacting Slingerland Pas de Deux (an excerpt from the truly surreal full-length postmodern ballet by William Forsthye, music by Gavin Bryars) alongside Wheeldon’s own creations, Fools’ Paradise, accompanied by a chamber orchestra, and his acclaimed Polyphonia, set to piano music by György Ligeti.

malthouse: the tell-tale heart

Barrie Kosky’s account of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart for Melbourne’s Malthouse with the virtuosic Martin Niedermair as the haunted murderer and director-adapter Kosky on piano (for songs by Bach, Purcell and Wolf) has induced trepidation and excitement wherever it’s been played around the world. John Bailey wrote, “This is a theatre of ellipses, in which the unsaid holds as much weight as the spoken word” (RT 82, p8).

katona józsef theatre: chekhov’s ivanov

Budapest’s Katona József Theatre and director Tamás Ascher set Chekhov’s early play Ivanov in the context of Hungarian rural culture after the Soviet Russian crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. If we see Chekhov’s plays as precursors, in a metaphoric rather than literal sense, of the Russian Revolution, then this version of Ivanov makes for an intriguing reversal of expectation. Here the focus is not “the fading Russian bourgeoisie” but is “planted…firmly within Hungary’s ascendant peasant classes of the 1960s.”

belarus free theatre: being harold pinter

Company B are hosting Belarus Free Theatre, an underground theatre project formed in 2005, and still banned, to battle the censorship imposed by dictatorial President Alexander Lukashenko. Being Harold Pinter draws on the playwright’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and uses excerpts from his plays to reflect on life under dictatorship. In Belarus, the company continues to perform in homes and other unadvertised locations despite police harassment and job losses in a culture where theatres are otherwise state controlled. The Free Theatre’s performance style is reputedly raw and anarchic, winning praise for its performances in the UK. Sam Marlowe wrote in The Times (Feb 20), “Beneath a photograph of Pinter’s own watchful eyes, the cast of seven, dressed in grey suits…create a nightmarish kaleidoscope of darkness, light and blood-red. Their hands are stained as if by stigmata; their delivery is packed with punchy aggression, and the menace of Pinter’s writing becomes uncompromisingly overt.” Being Harold Pinter will also play at Q Theatre Penrith.

erth: the nargun and the star

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A classic of literature for children here in Australia and the world over, Patricia Wrightson’s Nargun and the Stars (1973) was awarded the Australian Children’s Book of the year (1974) and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal (1986). When a boy’s parents are killed in a car crash, he is moved to a sheep farm to live with cousins he doesn’t know and there encounters and befriends mythical Indigenous creatures. But development in the area unleashes a vengeful spirit, the Nargun, in the form of a giant murderous rock. The boy must act, to save lives, but also the land. Adapted by playwright Verity Laughton and directed by Wesley Enoch and Erth’s Scott Wright, and blessed with Erth’s considerable skills at creature making and large scale puppeteering (like their baby dinosaurs for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles), Nargun and the Stars should be a festival highlight for children and adults alike.

LA FURA DELS BAUS IS KNOWN FOR ITS HIGHLY PHYSICAL AND CONFRONTING PERFORMANCE SPECTACLES. THE COMPANY HAS DEVELOPED ITS OWN THEATRICAL AND VERBAL LANGUAGE (FURAN), STYLE AND AESTHETICS. MY MEMORIES OF THEIR EARLIER WORK INCLUDE BEING CHASED AROUND BY MUSCLE BOUND MEN WIELDING CHAINSAWS, BEING PELTED WITH OFFAL AND HERDED AROUND BY GIGANTIC CARDBOARD BOXES.

La Fura’s work bursts out of the chaos of Barcelona. I discovered that nothing there is straightforward—not even finding out about their show, SUB. After a futile online investigation, I decided to leave it to fate. As I wandered down the back alleys of Barcelona, desperate to find some clue, I literally walked into the wall that bore the only extant poster anywhere in the city. And, as it happened, the last night of the performance was my last night in Spain.

The venue, Naumon, is an old Norwegian icebreaker ship that La Fura bought in 2003, saving it from being turned into scrap metal and returning it to life as a floating theatre on Barcelona’s harbour.

In SUB the line between theatre and life is blurred. The experience begins outside the boat, while the audience wait to board. Loudspeakers bark orders in a neat reversal of maritime law—women and children first! All the women talk and laugh nervously with each other—strangers bonded through fear and excitement at the mysteries awaiting us. One by one we proceed up the gangplank, leaving the men behind. Bags and bodies searched, we are pushed and shoved, forcefully herded down the dark stairs into the belly of the ship, a small torch our only source of light.

Down, down into the hold, like descending into hell. It’s dark and claustrophobic. We are forced to sit on the floor—bodies squeezed very closely together. Finally the men enter, with their energy and the stink of sweat, herded aggressively and made to sit opposite us. Doors shut, occasioning slight panic. It is now impossible to escape. We are all imprisoned—slaves or illegal refugees crammed into a freighter. Or into an Orwellian world in which people are powerless. And then La Fura dels Baus pull out all their party tricks—and it is one hell of a ride.

A performer drops through the ceiling hanging naked from a rope. Is he being punished for trying to escape? Are we all being punished? What is our crime? An amplified version of “Love Me Tender” booms from the opposite end of the boat. A woman, in boiler suit, sings karaoke as she descends the staircase, leading in the latecomers—the dispossessed. Her plea for love goes unheeded. Instead she is defiled, raped and hung from a meat hook. A powerless trophy of war?

Above us, two women and two men hurl paint, the drips forcing the audience to shift uneasily in the first of the company’s manipulative crowd/body orchestrations. Characters emerge from all directions—above, below, from the sides…Who is that big bellied man lurking in the shadows? A slave master ready to pounce? In a moment of pure theatrical release, the separated male and female audience members are allowed to reunite. In this subterranean domain there is panic to locate partners, wives, husbands, children—all of us forced to think about the ones in reality who will never find each other.

One side of the ship opens to reveal a ‘human aquarium.’ A man drops into the water, almost naked, a breathing apparatus in his mouth. The water turns red as another body plunges in. And another, and another, now without a line of air. The tank is getting overcrowded, limbs pressing against the scratched glass wall. At first they help each other breath, happily sharing their lifelines but friendship quickly dissolves into a watery struggle for oxygen and space. Outside the aquarium we are powerless—fated to watch but unable to help. And yet, how generous would we be in such a life and death situation? Would we share our last gasp of air with a stranger?

More airless moments: another two bodies are strung up—each totally covered in plastic, a snorkel their only source of air. But, instead of it bringing air into their plastic cocoon, air is being sucked out—the bodies become literally vacuum packed. The amplified wheeze of their breath echoes in this cavernous prison.

A booming voice-over infiltrates the space. A mythical tale unfolds, set in Queensland of all places, in which people are ordered to drink whatever they can find—but to purify it with a pill (a reference to the current debate over drinking recycled sewage). Following orders, a performer, suspended on the side of the boat, flops out his penis, relieves himself into a watering can, puts in a tube and then proceeds to drink this ‘precious’ liquid. Has he gone too far? Extreme circumstances cause extreme transgressions.

And, all throughout the performance, while bodies are dragged across the ground, suspended, vacuum-packed; or as we are chased by gigantic electric fans; while water gushes into the boat, is caught in buckets and thrown at the audience, or is sprayed at the performers; while they are finally strung up against a blank canvas only to be painted out of existence, there is the constant flash of mobile phones and cameras as members of the audience clamor to record the events. The horror preserved for later observation—once we are safely removed from the experience.

As I make my way through Barcelona’s streets, filled with the excitement of having been totally consumed by this performance, I reflect on how much I have been hankering for this style of extreme performance back home. On board the train, I sit in an airless carriage totally controlled by raucous hash-smoking Spanish teenagers. Is this part of the show? Have the lines between theatre and life totally disappeared?

La Fura dels Baus, SUB, text Ahmed Ghazali, Rafael Argullol, direction Younes Bachir, Carlos Padrissa, performers Samuel Delgado, Oumar Doumbouya, Irene Estrade, Zamira Pasceri, Younes Bachir, producer Isabelle Preuilh, coordination Adrìa Guadagnoli; venue Naumon, Barcelona, Sept 22-Oct 12, www.lafura.com

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR MARCUS CANNING’S EXHIBITION CELEBRATING ARTRAGE’S 25TH ANNIVERSARY DEPICTED A FRINGE ORGANISATION DETERMINED NOT TO GROW UP AND TO REMAIN THE EDGY, EXPERIMENTAL—AND SOMETIMES HIT AND MISS—INSTITUTION OF ITS YOUTH. THE MESSY LIVE WIRE OF THE RETROSPECTIVE ASIDE, THE SUCCESS STORY OF THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL WAS THE DANCE PROGRAM, ATTRACTING STRONG HOUSES AND REVIEWS.

Choreographer Bianca Martin presented her first large scale, full-length production, Home Alone, complete with an impressive if sparse two-storey set and onstage drummer, placing three dancers within an abstract world of troubled domesticity. Keira Mason-Hill—best known for her work with youth dance group Buzz—was the most happily playful of the performers, making one interlude where she was grabbed about the throat by an abusively dominating Joe Jurd all the more affective. In contrast Kathryn Puie’s aggressive athleticism combined with sliding grace saw her and Jurd clambering up walls and hanging from the steel-rimmed rafters in what occasionally looked like a homage to Fred Astaire’s famous ceiling dance in Royal Wedding (1951). Particularly in Mason-Hill’s dancing, there was a tendency towards ground movements and swinging body-twists in a low centre of gravity, contrasting with the up/down, climbing trajectories elsewhere apparent. A mime game of dinner involving cutlery and three cans of tinned goods traded amongst the performers appeared several times, imparting a sense of rhythmic continuity and return. Generally though, the piece was dramaturgically opaque, and the drummer was not used as often as one might have expected, with recorded music more frequently employed.

Compared with Paradise City and other athletic, post-Pina Bausch dance-theatre works seen in Perth in recent years, Martin’s Home Alone did not quite reach the right level of chaos, power, or density of relationships to fully soar. After Home Alone’s abuse scene, Puie retired to the upper level to crouch into herself and push about an old and out-of-place fake Christmas tree, suggesting a spirit in the attic whose physicality reflected through a glass darkly the actions of her fellows. With more attention to making visible such abstract relationships between the performers, Home Alone could make a fine contender for a Mobile States touring program.

Dyuetto presented choreography by locals Sete Tele and Rachel Ogle alongside Japanese duo Selenographica (Maho Sumiji and Shuichi Abiru), together with a less effective, schlocky socio-sexual critique from Melbourne’s Luke George. In recent years, Tele and Ogle have been working with the differently-abled company The Get Downers (RT87, p18). Not having observed the pair perform such technical material in their own work before, what struck me about N_TN_GLD was the physical difference and dialogue present throughout every aspect of their actions. Tele is black, weighty and masculine, Ogle white, female and long-limbed. The production generated a wonderful slipping and sliding of affect and stylistics across the pair, from moments when similar inflections, poses and ways of holding the criss-crossing bodily forms of the two seemed to meld them into a construct of very similar modalities, to other instances where Ogle’s lengthy extension of form or Tele’s meteoric redirection of inertia and mass carved two almost irreconcilable forms onstage.

The spatial dramaturgy and lighting reinforced the structure of the piece around this dialogue of separation and confluence. Tele started alone, in blackness, spot-lit from above, vibrating and articulating in a manner which erased his awareness of anything outside of the body and its neuroanatomical sensations. Here the performance recalled butoh. Then in a duet the dancers’ focus was still deeply internal, suggesting something of the non-human or posthuman in these bodies. N_TN_GLD ended with Ogle alone, hair masking her visage, and a sense of deep weariness and resistance to further action evident in her arms, her hands and the sometimes clawed shapes that decorated the space about her intermittently jerking, yet elegant columnar form.

French reviewers have focused on the exotic orientalism of Selenographica. What Follows The Act certainly could be read in culturally specific terms. The central role of critiques of the alienated husband-and-wife team in modern, post-WWII Japanese society and the arts after Mishima, butoh and Suzuki, does inform What Follows The Act. Selenographica however had none of the deliberate attempt to shock or to invoke taboos which was such a feature of this earlier work, reflecting a different trend in Japanese performance which has become more prominent since the 1990s, characterised by a deadpan, potentially comic lightness of touch. This is a mild, charming work, focusing on semi-improvised play and games between Sumiji and Abiru who begin by exploring how many movements and dialogues can be sketched between the pair as they sit, somewhat anxiously, at a domestic table, or later move towards and climb a prominently displayed ladder (a sign of escape perhaps?). To read such allusions in national terms would overstate matters. It is not just the Japanese who admire minimalism or enjoy quirky moments within an otherwise seriously performed work. In one particularly rich moment, Sumiji reclined on the table to let one hand snake and coil filigrees in the air, a totally pointless act whose joyful affectivity lies precisely in its unnecessary character. Such motifs place Selenographica at least as close to Euro-American dance theatre as to the particularities of Japanese aesthetics within today’s world of globalised performance—something which this company seems to embrace.

Outside of the world of dance, Mar Bucknell presented A History Of Glass. Better known for his more extreme performance art works, Bucknell’s Glass was a surprisingly gentle piece consisting of a soporific set of prose-poems describing a population caught within a room of glass, blasted by light from outside, and within which the boundaries, meaning and structure of everything become evermore hazy. Bucknell’s recitation was accompanied by an electronic soundscape whose organ tones evoked film-maker John Carpenter’s music, while Stuart Reid used a digital sketch pad to project a yellow tinted doodle which he constantly added to, its curling scratches and deep, inky outlines lending a third rhythmic element to this gradual unfolding of sound, text and image, filling the space and the time of the performance. Overall the piece had a durational quality, the experience of its slow length being a key part of its structure and affect. Bucknell’s prose could have used a firmer structure—several apparent climaxes arose in which the inhabitants suddenly became free to walk beyond the glass and across the yellow sands, before returning to their prison—but this also helped give a sense of repetitive sustain and detailing, which made for an enjoyably somnambulistic yet existentially dystopian work; shades of Sartre’s No Exit, to be sure.

A festival highlight was director Matthew Lutton’s return from Sydney and Melbourne to stage Humphrey Bower’s adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Red Shoes. Lutton’s most mature work so far, the production had a sparse, Grand Guignol nastiness to it. Paris’ infamous horror theatre of the early 20th century, the Grand Guignol employed a taut, dramaturgical understatement before releasing a fervid, melodramatic excess and buckets of blood. It was a theatre of shock, a style of performance structured more around scenographic electrocutions and tensed release than any coherence of narrative or character. Staged on a blindingly white stage, complete with trapdoors into which objects could be dropped and a piano centrestage behind which material was hidden, The Red Shoes positively blazed with red when the perverse young male protagonist Kevin (Brendan Ewing, also showing a level of craft over and above previous achievements) finally asked the woodsman to sever from his feet the glistening, imprisoning devil shoes which had overtaken him and forced him to dance, Tourette-like, forever.

George Shvetsov, his lanky form often casting gargantuan shadows above and behind him, was an equally sexually troubling presence, not a perverse character per se but certainly one capable of seducing all on stage (and in the audience) as they trembled before him. Igor Sas however virtually stole the show as a cross-dressing temptress (the Ice Princess) and Kevin’s stern, comically Catholic conscience (Auntie C). Explosions in intensity within this otherwise minimal structure were heightened by Ash Gibson Greig’s score, varying from eruptive noise to almost Weiner cabaret.

The Red Shoes could have gained clarity from dramaturgical development—quite what, for instance, was signified by having Kevin’s mother, the Princess, Auntie C and other female characters collapsed into the dangerously sexy form of Sas was unclear—but as indicated, horror is not necessarily a form which requires transparency of meaning. This was a theatre of effects, and such scenes as where the naked Ewing quaked in a veritable seizure of pain and desire as dark red liquid dripped across his white skin was sufficient to bind The Red Shoes into a richly affective, sadomasochistic pleasure.

2008 Silver Artrage 25th Anniversary Festival, curators Marcus Canning, Andrew Gaynor: Company Upstairs, Home Alone (The Suburbs Dream Tonight), choreography Bianca Martin, performers Kathryn Puie, Keira Mason-Hill, Joe Jurd, design Jamie Macchiusi, drums Tim Bates, lighting Deidre Math, Rechabites, Oct 30–Nov 8; Thin Ice Productions, The Red Shoes, text/adaptation Humphrey Bower (after Hans Christian Andersen), director Matthew Lutton, performers Brendan Ewing, George Shvetsov, Igor Sas, designer Claude Marcos, music Ash Gibson Greig, sound Kingsley Reeve, lighting Matthew Marshall, PICA, Oct 18–28; Bright Edge, History Of Glass, text/recitation/digital-slides Mar Bucknell, sound Allan Boyd, projected live drawing Stuart Reid, Blue Room, Oct 29-Nov 8; Strut, Dyuetto, N_TN_GLD, performer-devisors Rachel Ogle, Sete Tele, lighting Mike Nanning; Selenographica, What Follows The Act & It Might Be Sunny Tomorrow, direction, choreography, performers Maho Sumiji, Shuichi Abiru, direction, design Genta Iwamura, music Koichi Sakota, PICA, Nov 5-8, Artrage, Perth, Oct 17–Nov 23

IN THE OPENING PANEL DISCUSSION OF THIS IS THE TIME…THIS IS THE RECORD OF THE TIME, A TWO-DAY SYMPOSIUM ON INTERDISCIPLINARY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE AT THE PERTH INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS, JULIE VULCAN REMARKED OF UNREASONABLE ADULTS’ GIFT/BACK (2006) PERFORMANCE PROJECT THAT “YOU OFTEN DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN TILL FURTHER DOWN THE TRACK.”

With its wordy titular focus on the here-and-now, titt…titrott was staged to mark the 10-year anniversary of pvi collective establishing their practice in Perth, and situated deeper within the retrospective context of the Artrage festival’s Silver anniversary program. That both of these auspicious events took place at all, would seem like acts of defiance against the city’s natural-born tendency to efface local cultural memory and to continually replace and renew. Silver, a compelling historical exhibition of visual art and artefacts connected to Artrage over 25 years—installed throughout the vast spaces of PICA—celebrated the work of local practitioners both past and present and also served as a reminder, to me, of the more recent demise of the artist-run initiative in this my former hometown.

But while the mineral boom and rising real-estate values have pushed out artist-run spaces from the city, organisations like Artrage has shifted focus to devising programs that assist artists with longer-term development of new work. They have maintained ongoing relationships with practitioners—Artrage presented pvi collective’s first performance project, Easy Listening Under the Truth Serum, in 1998 and has continued to support the efforts of the collective ever since. Perth is also the site of two significant and collegiate national centres for research in emergent and cross-disciplinary art forms: SymbioticA, now a Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, and the pvi collective’s newly established Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts (CIA), both of which provide opportunities for residency, exchange and discourse with peers nationally and internationally. SymbioticA were hosting a visit by Steve Kurtz of the USA-based Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), who had been cleared in June of all criminal charges brought against him and another scientist in 2004 for procuring harmless bacteria cultures for an exhibition. It was around Kurtz’s lecture at UWA entitled Crossing the Line—a convergence of politics, activism, democracy, terrorism, freedom of expression, citizenship and justice—that the participants gathered, setting the tone somewhat for the symposium and performances to follow.

The event drew artists together from across the country including panther (Melbourne), Spat ‘n’ Loogie (Sydney), David Williams of version 1.0 (Sydney), Sam Fox of Hydra Poesis (Perth), Unreasonable Adults (Sydney/Adelaide), Deadpan (Melbourne), Something In Common [sic] (Perth) as well as producers Cat Jones from Electrofringe (Newcastle), Rebecca Conroy from Performance Space (Sydney) and Jeff Khan of the Next Wave Festival (Melbourne)—many of whom initially worked with pvi on their TTS Australia and Reform tours. Pvi collective divided the symposium event into two parts: this is the time…, an evening of performances held at The Bakery, and this is the record of the time, a two day symposium which book-ended the performance night. This is the time… provided an occasion for the participants and audience to reflect on a vignetted representation of an artist’s/group’s practice before returning to articulation and discussion around the realisation of their work. As such, punters arriving at this is the time… as a separately-billed event, expecting pvi to deliver on the promotional hyperbole of an evening that “promises to rattle the cage of contemporary performance practice as we know it”, might have been confused by the lecture-style delivery and necessarily pared-back nature of some of the works.

One of the main topics of discussion throughout the symposium was the site-based or non-institutional nature of much of the work being produced by interdisciplinary performance practitioners in Australia today, and of the risks, challenges and possibilities of creating work on the “hybrid stage of public space” (a useful description offered by Andrew Donovan of the Australia Council’s Inter-Arts Office), collapsing the distance between art and everyday life while finding, engaging, implicating and including new audiences in performance experiences. The cabaret and installation format of this is the time… while somewhat paradoxical to the methodologies of most of the artists involved (Michelle Outram’s political oratory and endurance-based performance Not The Sound Bite!, for instance, originally conceived for Speaker’s Corner in The Domain in Sydney had an obviously decontextualised resonance when re-staged in The Bakery’s courtyard) afforded a semblance of projects past, present and in-development that all hinged around particular contingencies, whether political, societal, temporal, technological or environmental.

The scheduled part of the evening of live art, this is the time… began with Unreasonable Adults’ If Not For You Then Who with Jason Sweeney performing live and Fiona Sprott emerging from the white-noise-ether of videotape to deliver dark and self-annihilating monologues on sex, failure and illness. As a part of their collaboration, Unreasonable Adults are adaptable and deliberately flexible to the specificity of the moment in which a work is being made, choosing to deliver performance and other outcomes across the internet, through installation, videos and performance. For this event Sweeney punctuated the meditative slowness of the grainy black and white video and audio environment after each of Sprott’s confessions by writing in loud staccato on an amplified blackboard in chalk, questions like “ARE YOU DEAD INSIDE?”, renting apart the darkly comic reverie created in these scenes by questioning the emotional health of the audience.

Among the participants in the symposium Sam Fox of Hydra Poesis identified a personal intent to create a platform for outrage, pathos and emotion to be directed at perceived injustices as an honest form of communication back to the ”hegemony”, reflecting more violently comments by Michelle Outram during the symposium that artists should be “agents within their own culture” and by David Williams of the desire to “perform citizenship.” For this is the time…Hydra Poesis created a one-on-one interactive performance utilising a threatening teleprompter with the intention of causing the sole participant to feel fear or aggression. Meanwhile, panther, an artistic duo also interested in person-to-person relationships, arrived in Perth fresh from presenting their new work Exercises in Happiness for the Melbourne International Arts Festival [p6] wherein audience members could perform and articulate the things that made them happy, or occasionally find deep-seated sorrow as a result of being rejected from an experience of the work. For this is the time… panther also yelled at the stars in a proclamation that mixed nihilism with optimism, pessimism with passivity and gave philosophical answers to pragmatic questions (and vice versa).

On the first panel David Williams of version 1.0 responded to questions regarding the sustainability of an issues-based theatre and the actual time it takes to bring new work to the stage. Williams counterpointed the rapid delivery of much of version 1.0’s verbatim source material—Hansard, the transcript of parliamentary proceedings being complete and available on the day after a sitting of the Senate or House of Representatives—against the need for continual revision of a script in order for its issues to remain pertinent both to the company and to an audience cognisant of changing world affairs. Embellishing the history of version 1.0 in a performance lecture for this is the time… Williams also alluded to the inadequacy of critical language in providing feedback to new and developing forms of performance by quoting from the retinue of version 1.0 reviews, “Apparently we were ‘challenging and hilarious.’ Apparently we didn’t ‘have strong characters’ and, as such, ‘had no clear character motivations’.”

Cat Jones, a performer and a curator of Electrofringe also manipulated language through the relatively new form and sonic intonation of avatar dialogue through a ‘play reading’ of a cat_gURL interactive event. Delivering a verbal introduction to the experience of entering a previous installation, Jones intercut video documentation and her reading with live performances of webmistress cat_gURL’s automated, gendered script about sexing and finding definitive sexuality. Creating another kind of visceral/virtual paradigm that connected the fleshy with the flat and pre-recorded, Spat ‘n’ Loogie’s Holiday took members of the this is the time… audience away on a sensorial approximation of an exotic holiday, replete with cocktails, a walk in the sand and a mushy holiday romance.

In closing this is the time…this is the record of the time, a producer’s panel convened to discuss the ways in which certain organisations including Next Wave, Electrofringe and Peformance Space are continuing to support the development phases of interdisciplinary performance practice through programs such as Kick Start and by working in concert with one another. With the understanding that the field is continually redefined, reframed and revised by both practitioners and the changing nature of the social and political spheres in which they choose to make work, this is the time…this is the record of the time, was an invitation to participate in the nurturing of an artist-led commitment to hybrid performance practice. And it took place in Perth. While this was the place and a particular moment, the effects and the influences of the program will continue to be felt “further down the track.”

this is the time…this is the record of the time conference presented by pvi collective in partnership with PICA and Artrage, PICA, Oct 31, Nov 1; performances: The Artrage Bakery Complex, Oct 31

Courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery, Hobart; Heiser Gallery, Brisbane; Johnston Gallery, Perth; Karen Woodbury Gallery,

FOR HALF THE YEAR TOKYO IS ONLY ONE HOUR BEHIND SYDNEY—SO CLOSE YOU CAN CONDUCT NORMAL BUSINESS ACTIVITIES AND MAINTAIN RELATIONATIONSHIPS AS IF YOU WERE JUST IN ANOTHER PART OF AUSTRALIA. MELATONIN LEVELS ARE RELATIVELY UNMODIFIED WHILE SENSES AND SOUL ARE OVERWHELMED BY OTHERNESS. PERHAPS THIS IS WHAT MAKES TOKYO FEEL NOT SO MUCH LIKE A FOREIGN COUNTRY BUT MORE LIKE A PARALLEL UNIVERSE.

trace elements

I was in this parallel universe for seven weeks undertaking a residency at Tokyo Wonder Site Aoyoama. Co-initiated by Artspace, Sydney the residency culminated in a group exhibition, Diorama of a City: Between Site and Space with fellow Australian artists Alex Gawronski and Tim Silver and Japanese artists Hiraku Suzuki, Exonemo and Paramodel. Co-incidentally another Australian/Japanese collaborative exhibition had just opened at Tokyo Opera City—Trace Elements: spirit and memory in Japanese and Australian photomedia—curated by Bec Dean from Performance Space with Shihoko Iida.

As with most activities I undertook in Japan, I got the instructions slightly wrong and entered the exhibition via the exit. This meant that the eroto-gothic photo manipulations, Wormwood (2005-07) by Jane Burton (Australia), were my introduction—sensual curves of female bodies caressed by shadows and forest branches. Burton’s images are richly evocative of adult fairy tales, perhaps a little undercut by the sterile corridor in which they are hung. However the resonance with Lovers (1994) by Teiji Furuhashi (Japan) in the next room installation serves as the correction.

As the video artist for Dumb Type it’s not surprising that Furuhashi’s is quite a performative installation. Images of naked people walk slowly around the four walls, meeting, embracing, passing through and by each other. Slide projectors on turntables rotate around the large room casting scanning lines across the images, while ceiling-rigged projectors throw messages onto the floor: “do not cross the line…” Melancholic chimes ring out, setting the meditative pace of the work that is all activity but with curiously little action. Its overly fussy mechanics reveal this is an early example of an immersive ‘multimedia’ environment.

Mixing with Furuhashi’s chimes are the clamouous explorations of Philip Brophy’s Evaporated Music (Part 1 A-F [2002-04, Aus]), in which the artist has remade the soundtracks to a series of popular music video-clips. Treating myself to the comfortable armchair I experienced the horror show that Brophy has made of Celine Dion’s ‘It’s all coming back to me now.’ The diva croaks through her lyrics, in desperate need of an exorcist, accompanied by wild foley and swirling 5.1 spatialisation. Infinitely more interesting than the original clip, full of film soundscape theory experiments, Brophy’s work provided a spikey element within the generally contemplative exhibition.

Continuing my backwards journey I worked from end to beginning across Japanese expatriate Seiichi Furuya’s series of images of his wife Christine. This course allowed me a little more ambiguity, and sense of discovery, in what is essentially a linear pictorial essay of love and loss. Accompanied by a booklet of excerpts from both Furuya’s and his subject’s diaries, the photos are mostly snapshots, personal moments, forming a deeply moving document of love and the tragic decline of a woman into irrevocable despair. Furuya has also made several publications, rearranging and regrouping the images to make sense of the course of events. Learning this later in the bookshop, I find the artist’s obsessive remembering even more tragic.

The small and seemingly unassuming works of Lieko Shiga (Japan) offer much for contemplation in their surrealistic photomontage of humble snapshots and provide a nice foil to fellow Japanese artist Kazuna Taguchi’s slick monotones of young girls treated with an etching-like finish. Poses are contrived, faces disappearing into contentless backgrounds. The irony of the images creeps up on you.

Taguchi’s cool and efficient pieces are in turn a nice match for the prints of Sophie Kahn (Aus/US) exploring the medical imaging of her body—twisted vectors alluding to muscle and bone. The body is simultaneously seen from inside and out, fractured by movement, refusing to be finally known. Also exhibited is a bronze cast of Kahn’s head—like a death mask—the brutal gouges and gashes made from finessing processing glitches rendering it both beautiful and disturbing.

An undercurrent of the exhibition was the relationship between moving and still images and their different powers as vehicles of memory. Genevieve Grieves’ video work, Picturing the Old People (2005), dresses contemporary Indigenous Australians in turn of the century clothing, re-enacting the portraiture of the time. These subjects refuse to remain still, to become the forgotten anonymous ‘natives’ of the archival images that Grieves was researching through the State Library of Victoria. It is a neatly conceived work, full of meaning for both Australian history and the history of photography and its role and responsibilities in documenting culture.

She dissolves (2000) by Chie Matsui (Japan) was a curious work secreted on tiny monitors in several parts of the gallery. The artist’s first video creation, it documents a performance in which a woman repeatedly disappears down a ladder under the floor and reappears a few minutes later soaking wet, up another ladder back into the room in a seemingly endless cycle.

This pared-back performance documentation modality appeared in several pieces I experienced in Tokyo, the most remarkable example by Yosuke Amemiya (Japan) at Tokyo Wonder Site in Shibuya. In the gallery Amemiya meticulously constructed a space (a set) involving buckets, apples and gym lockers and captured a series of Absurdist, minimal performance vignettes. He left the set intact and projected the video documentation, lifesize across one wall. The slippage between the screen reality and physical reality in the gallery created a sense of disembodiment most often experienced in telepresence works. On screen a man appeared out of the locker and you couldn’t help but look at the real object to see if maybe he was still there. And sometimes he actually was, because for the month of the exhibition, Amemiya and collaborators offered improvised afternoon performances. Sitting in a liminal zone between live art, sculpture and video performance this artist’s work is truly fascinating.

Rubbing up against the hyper-real of Chie Matsui’s work in Trace Elements, Dislocations (2005-6) by Alex Davies (Aus) felt more performative than in previous viewings. Davies interweaves the realtime presence of viewers with bizarre pre-recorded presences. Some sequences are more seamless than others, and the overly moodly, multichannel soundscape is ambiguous, but viewing this work in the middle of Tokyo was totally surreal. As I stood there looking at myself, a series of people I know walked in beside me—Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs, Swerve from DualPlover…what are they doing here? In those moments I was truly in a parallel universe.

For a group show of 10 artists, Trace Elements was generous yet spacious and the curation felt rigorously considered. No one work felt stronger than another, rather the choices and arrangements allowed the resonances of the various formal approaches to photomedia, and cultural approaches to ideas of memory and history, to strengthen and challenge each other.

time crevasses

In the final days of my time in Tokyo, the art stars aligned to bring about the third Yokohama Triennale offering a bold focus on time-based activities beyond the normal scope of video to performance and sound. Art of Body, Art of Action, housed at the Red Brick Warehouse, featured several rooms dedicated to documentation of performance art and happenings in Japan from the 1950s to the 70s including works by Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, Hi Red Centre and manifestations of the Fluxus movement in Japan. Several of the installations had perfomance elements such as the impressive if precious installation Fragments of Time (2008) by choreographer Saburo Teshigawara (Japan) consisting of a room full of glass shards into which ventured an occasional dancer. There was also a performance program including Jerome Bel and Pichet Klunchun, along with a series of sound concerts co-ordinated by Oren Ambarchi including Robin Fox, Merzbow, The Incapacitants, Tony Conrad and William Bennett.

While the warehouse style of the Shinko Pier proved challenging for the sound installations, there were many interesting works. In the cavernous space of constructed walls it was easy to miss the piece by Mario Garcia Torres (Mexico/US). The free standing right-angled wall partition sported two superflat speakers, playing back a detailed recording of the construction of the aforementioned partitions in situ. A very neat conceptual package and the documentation of a performance of sorts to boot.

The faux construction fetish continued into the next room housing Brunelleschi (2008) by Tony Conrad (US) which, along with a replica wall and door construction, featured a Civil War canon ball suspended like a pendulum over a low tray of yellow paint. As the ball swings across the surface the paint is quite daintily dispersed—visually and kinetically interesting. I am told that the wire holding the ball was also amplified, but I admit for once a sonic element passed me by.

photo Norihiro Ueno, Courtesy of the Artist and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N (2008) by Cerith Wyn Evans (UK) broke with the minimalist ethos. Walking around the gently bobbing giant mobile comprising flat discs of mirrors, you’re in for a multi-dimensional sonic and visual experience as your being is fragmented and multiplied, accompanied by the exotic rumblings, text shards and klang of a soundscape by avant art band Throbbing Gristle.

Drawing on a more popular music is The Second Sentence of Everything I Read Is You (2006) by Stephen Prina (US). The sonic element here is a beautiful, multitracked pop song with voices split between individual speakers (in mini Janet Cardiff style), however the physical installation is quite confounding. Designed as a self-contained touring kit, the packing crates turn into large benches with pastel upholstery. The text “…things Felix forgot to tell us…” marked up on the wall alludes to artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), from whose writings the title is derived. With these elements Prina is suggesting larger issues, as taken up by Gonzalez-Torres, regarding art audiences and art consumption. Perhaps it’s the extreme self-consciousness, the awkwardness of this work that make it so beguiling.

Java’s Machine: PHANTASMAGORIA (2008) by Kuswidananto aka Jompet (Indonesia) was perhaps most intriguing for its performativity, and not a performer in sight. Rather there were three rows of automated Javanese palace guards made purely from articles of traditional clothing. Some of these bodiless robots integrated small video screens showing a documentary piece also projected on the walls while two big bass drums played themselves at the front of the contingent. Beautifully constructed from low tech tools, the Disneyland automaton feel took on a strange mix of menace and subversive humour.

Spread across four venues including a site-specific element, Time Crevasses had many hidden joys, and provided an introduction to the cultural resurgence taking place in Yokohama including a new local government supported artist-run gallery district in the former redlight zone. Sitting in the amazing boat-come-hill construction that is the international passenger terminal after my day in Yokohama, I caught sight of two separate suns setting across the water behind me (a reflection of a reflection)—I was in a parallel universe indeed.

Trace Elements: spirit and memory in Japanese and Australian photomedia, curators Bec Dean, Shihoko Iida; Tokyo Opera City, July 19 – Oct 13. Trace Elements: will be presented at Performance, CarriageWorks Sydney Feb 19-March 21 2009, http://www.operacity.jp/ag/exh96/e/index.html

Time Crevasse, Yokohama Triennale 2008, various venues Yokohama, Sept 13 – Nov 30
http://yokohamatriennale.jp/2008/en/

The second stage of the residency-exchange between Artspace and Tokyo Wonder Site will take place at Artspace in Feb-March 2009 with the exhibition opening March 13.
http://www.tokyo-ws.org/english/
http://www.artspace.org.au/

IN A STONE HALLWAY ON YOUR WAY TO THE SECOND NATURE EXHIBITION YOU COME UPON A SMALL TREE IN A BLOCK OF ICE INSIDE A REFRIGERATED GLASS CABINET. THE TREE, A CYPRESS PINE, HEALTHY, RICHLY GREEN, APPEARS TO FLOAT BEFORE YOU, THE ROOTS TRAILING, BUT UTTERLY STILL. IN A WAY MAKOTO AZUMA’S SHIKI 2 IS A COOL, GENTLY PREPARATORY GESTURE FOR THE WORKS OF TOKUJIN YOSHIOKA ASSEMBLED IN A LARGE ROOM WHICH AT FIRST ASTONISHED GLANCE HAS THE APPEARANCE OF AN ICE CAVE. IT’S LIKE WALKING INTO A FOG HANGING JUST ABOVE AND SOMETIMES IN FRONT OF YOU, BENEATH WHICH ARE PLINTHS DISPLAYING OBJECTS COMPOSED OF NUMEROUS CRYSTALS. OTHERS SIT IN SOLUTIONS IN GLASS TANKS, STRAY CRYSTALS CONTINUING TO FORM ON THE WALLS AMIDST THE SLOW BUBBLING OF LIQUID.

Second Nature is an exhibition of artworks in a program directed by Tokujin Yoshioka, the major component of which is his own most recent work which occupies and transforms the largest of the semi-subterranean galleries of 21_21 Design Sight. The gallery, established and directed by clothing designer Issey Miyake and partners, is built into the gardens beside the towering Tokyo Midtown business and shopping monoliths in Roppongi. The focus of 21_21 is design (Second Nature was also part of Design Tide Extension), bringing together artists, scientists and designers, including the increasing number who embody a number of disciplines. A key impulse for the Second Nature show is biomimicry (emphatically not to imitate or resemble nature, but to learn from it): “future-oriented ideas born from once again inquiring of nature.” The very title suggests that the creators of these works are drawing on something innate, in ourselves and in nature, but, writes the catalogue editor, Kazuo Hashiba, this “’second nature’…symbolises a ‘new kind of nature’, one that is desirable for the future of design.”
Shiki 2, Makato Azuma

The ‘fog’, titled CLOUDS, is made of thousands of immaculately gridded, thin translucent plastic fibres hanging from the ceiling (installed with the assistance of 100 design students). Below, the objects on plinths or hanging on walls are finished works: rectangles of crystals hanging like paintings, and couches—some chunky and rigidly symmetrical, others like sleek modernist chaise longues (their form inspired by Titian’s Venus of Urbino). They all glow and sparkle, conjuring cold and the magic of diamonds. The works inside the glass cabinets are still forming, growing on thin, curling synthetic fibres. In the cool, but not at all cold, calm of the room, passages of 19th century classical music can occasionally be heard: these turn out to be providing something more than relaxing ambience.

You can sit on a slab of glass titled Water Block, deep but strangely transparent, solid but evoking rippling liquid, and watch a film that shows Tokukjin Yoshioka researching and growing his crystalline sculptures, revealing painstaking attention to detail, complex procedures and a very surprising component of the process. The crystals are shaped by music—and not merely by inspiring the artist. The forms that eventuate are determined by the playing of music during the crystallising process: the works “are completed by the laws of nature and embodying a beauty born of coincidence”, writes the artist. The process is not explained, but Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata has helped generate one work; another, forming in a blue-ish solution in the gallery, is aptly parented by Schubert’s Symphony No 7, The Unfinished; another, titled Destiny, by Beethoven’s Fifth.

A single human shape can be found among these works, a small classical statue of Venus on which crystals have grown, the past encrusted by nature, another layer of art.
Cellular Automation, Origin of the Species 2, Ross Lovegrove

Cellular Automation, Origin of the Species 2, Ross Lovegrove

Another aspect of the human is evoked in Ross Lovegrove’s Cellular Automation, Origin of the Species 2 (UK, 2008). Lovegrove has made bone mass structures that replicate and build on the discovery that “the science of structure was in making holes” (Michel Ragon, cited in the catalogue), His shapes appear beautifully organic but comprise small, often identical units, ‘digital’ in appearance. The catalogue editor writes that Lovegrove is seen as heir to Arne Jacobsen and Charles and Ray Eames “in a quest to recreate natural organic forms in mass-produced products”, but that he goes further in evolving organic design: “Instead of the designation ‘designer’, it might be more appropriate to call Ross Lovegrove a designer-cum-cell morphologist-cum-biologist.”

Before experiencing Second Nature at 21_21 in Tokyo, my companions and I walked an 8km section of the old Kyoto-Edo Highway across the Magome Pass to the village of Tsumago in the alpine Kiso Valley. Everywhere we witnessed and revelled in the artfulness of nature: boulders shaped as if sculpted, adorned with perfectly symmetrical moss patterns; the patterned shafting of light through bamboo forests; the musical dance of water rushing, flowing, trickling from every direction. Japanese artists, designers, poets, musicians and gardeners have long distilled these already essential forms into enduring art works. Second Nature continues a rich tradition, looking both to nature and the science of nature for inspiration.

Second Nature, directed by Tokujin Yoshioka, works by Tokujin
Yoshioka, Ross Lovegrove, Makato Azuma, Campana Brothers, Asuka
Katagiri, Keiji Moriyama & Takeshi Kushida, Yukio Nakagawa, Ambe
Noriko; 21_21 Design Sight, The Issey Miyake Foundation, Tokyo, Oct
17, 2008-Jan 18, 2009

THE ARTS HEALTH SYMPOSIUM BROUGHT TOGETHER ARTISTS, RESEARCHERS, MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS AND ALLIED HEALTH PROFESSIONALS FOR A TWO DAY EVENT. THE PRESENTERS ARTICULATED DIFFERENT VIEWS ON HOW THEIR SPECIALISM INTERSECTED WITH THE ARTS HEALTH PARADIGM. PATRICK FUERY, DIRECTOR OF THE ARTS HEALTH CENTRE, UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE, CHEEKILY ASSESSED THE UNION BETWEEN THE TWO DISCIPLINES AS BEING LIKE TWO POTENTIAL LOVERS DESPERATE FOR A FIRST KISS, BUT NOT SURE HOW TO INITIATE IT.

The four keynotes provided some broad architecture to the debate. The first speaker was Jane Davison, University of Western Australia, who wove together a useful overview of the history and evidence of music in a range of social contexts with examples from her practice involving the development of choirs with isolated older people. She argued for the concept of ‘musicking’, or the need to emphasise music in everyday life. Her research was based on the way music generates social capital: the pragmatic benefits of bringing potentially isolated people together, with the qualitative and indefinable qualities that music-making offers participants.

The need for evidence-based practice was a strong feature in a number of papers. Clearly this was a response to the dominance of scientific paradigms. If the arts are to prove themselves in a health context, they need to define themselves in terms that are acceptable to the orthodoxies of the field. Clive Parkinson, from the so-called ‘ministry for the bleeding obvious’, otherwise known as Arts for Health, Manchester Metropolitan University, argued that for most health professionals the link between the two disciplines is self-evident. However there is a strong political argument to be made particularly in a sensitive environment where a dollar spent on an arts health project is a dollar not spent on vital resources.

In the second keynote Graeme Sullivan, Columbia University, offered an alternative insight by critiquing how conventional systems of research are being challenged by post-disciplinary perspectives. Sullivan argued that the ‘empirical traditions’ of research are limited in solving problems in all contexts, and that increasingly a network approach is developing that seeks to ‘braid’ cross-disciplinary understanding. Sullivan’s theme was also reflected in a paper given by Christine Putland, Flinders University, who identified significant shortcomings in the present definition of what constitutes ‘evidence.’ She argued for new approaches to capturing the meaning of art in a health context, involving concepts such as pleasure, happiness and engagement in living.

The third keynote was a double act: Lizbeth Goodman, Director of SMARTlab Digital Media Institute (University of East London), and her colleague Mick Donegan. Goodman’s contribution provided an impressive overview of the work of SMARTlab, whose ethos is to invent technological tools that address specific social needs. This is high-tech community cultural development, which attempts to work from the needs of individuals and groups. Goodman’s achievements have won her and the team considerable global attention, and the presentation outlined an extensive range of innovative projects from an online support service for women and children experiencing domestic abuse (SafetyNet) to an international multi-media, multi-lingual disability performance piece (A Street Called Home).

Her co-presenter, Mick Donegan, beautifully underplaying his supporting role, develops interfaces for assistive technology, specifically with clients suffering from cerebral palsy or severe head injuries. Donegan’s personal motivation in the research is to lessen the shortfall between the potential and the ability of individuals with degenerative diseases and paralysis. The Mytobii eyegaze system allows users to access computer software through recognising and following the movement of the eyes. Adapted from a marketing tool, the technology has been used to help people with a variety of disabilities to compose music, write emails, play games and listen to CDs. The presentation was a powerful reinforcement of SMARTlab’s commitment to humanising the possibilities of technology.

The final keynote was from Oron Catts, Director of SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, and was scheduled, unapologetically, as a provocation. SymbioticA is an ‘artistic laboratory’ focused on the research, learning and critique of life sciences. The centre is pioneering and exploring the relationship between the arts and a range of bio-medical research areas. The research is grounded in artistic experimentations under laboratory conditions; this is not artist as outsider, but artist as scientist. One of the examples was Victimless Leather, a Tissue Culture and Art Project which developed a “semi-living” leather jacket grown in the laboratory. Another example was Disembodied Cuisine (2003) in which the team attempted to grow frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer for potential food consumption. A biopsy was taken from an animal which continued to live and was displayed in the gallery alongside the growing “steak.” The installation culminated in a “feast” where the performers/scientists eat the steak.

If there is something of the freak-show mentality present in the work, it is a conscious one. Catts describes the practice as “philosophy in the wild”, of artists having an informed knowledge of scientific methods. He argues that artists should not just present or render scientific protocols, but should be conceptual artists manipulating working prototypes that simultaneously resist and explore scientific ways of seeing.

The keynotes were striking in their presentation of convergent and discordant issues that established some of the parameters of the debate within the field. The paper sessions were equally diverse with 26 papers organised into five thematic sessions, explored arts and health from a range of perspectives. There were presentations about Occupational Therapy and the use of photography, analysis of hospitals as cultural sites, the role of theatre in the wellbeing of refugees, a fascinating case study reflecting on the healing capacity of a Childers Backpacker Memorial, the socio-historical relationship between spirituality and medicine, and an analysis of how artist engagement with the AIDS campaign shaped and influenced changes in attitudes and behaviours.

The way artists interact with scientific paradigms was broadly interpreted. Birgitta Nordstrom’s delicate work with funeral textiles (Funeral Pall: Textile as Comforter; Sweden) explored the ways artists engage with death and the rituals surrounding it. The process of mourners taking ownership within the ceremony, of unfolding and draping the pall over the coffin, was described by Nordstrom as “the last opportunity to make a cosy and secure bed in which a loved one can rest.” Leah Heiss (School of Archiotecture and Design RMIT University) described her residency with Nanotechnology, Victoria. Rather than simply representing the technologies she found, Heiss developed “therapeutic jewellery” with the scientific team in which the design of the applicators (in this case for the treatment of diabetes) was considered in both aesthetic and practical terms.

Taken as a litmus test of where the arts health field is, the symposium made clear that definitions were elusive, and that the developing field struggles with borrowed terminologies that impact on its abilities to define its own discourse. There is still broad suspicion within the medical scientific field that the arts have a limited contribution to make, at best as an educational tool, at worst an indulgence. However, based on the quality of the contributions during the symposium, it was equally clear that the interactions and intersections between practitioners from both disciplines were filled with curiosity, appreciation and considerable respect for each other. There was a determination that medicine, science and art can have a potentially efficacious relationship, and a growing trust and interest in articulating how aesthetic-scientific networks might evolve.

The debate will continue with the launch of two new journals in 2009, Arts & Health (Routledge) and the online Australasian Journal of Arts Health, plus the promise of a follow-up symposium in Newcastle next year.

IT’S A MOMENTOUS YEAR FOR FILM IN AUSTRALIA, BRINGING A NEWLY CREATED SUPER-AGENCY WHICH WILL PROVIDE ALL FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SUPPORT, AND A NEWLY BEDDED IN PRODUCER TAX REBATE (OF 40% FOR FEATURE FILMS AND 20% FOR TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS AND DOCUMENTARIES) WHICH CARRIES THE PROMISE OF A SYSTEM THAT WILL RE-ENERGISE LOCAL PRODUCTION. THROUGH A CONCENTRATED PROCESS OF MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS, DISCUSSION PAPERS, DRAFT GUIDELINES AND INDUSTRY AND FILMMAKER MEETINGS AROUND THE COUNTRY OVER THE LAST MONTHS, IT’S BECOMING CLEARER JUST WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR FILM IN AUSTRALIA; A FUTURE, IN THE WORDS OF ARTS MINISTER PETER GARRET, IN WHICH THE GOVERNMENT IS EXPECTING THE FILM INDUSTRY TO “DEVELOP COMMERCIALLY FOCUSED SCREEN BUSINESSES.”

Speaking at a Melbourne Film Festival forum earlier in the year, Garrett said that filmmakers would be supported for developing productions that attract strong financial backing and are genuinely appealing to audiences; he emphasised that those who work in the industry “must change, look outward to the country and the world and enthusiastically reach out to them on the screen.”

What’s now becoming clear is that succeeding in this new environment is going to be a challenge to both experienced and emerging filmmakers. Much of Screen Australia’s support will be directed at producers with track records, albeit ones who also offer support to less credentialed filmmakers. With preference going to those with a range and a diversity of projects, a producer should be clever, hopefully original, and definitely very enterprising. The most immediate aim is to get Australian audiences interested in Australian films again; after the heady days of Muriel, Priscilla and Crocodile Dundee, when Australian films were taking a substantial slice of the box office. Local box office returns have shrunk in recent years to a miserable few percent.

Screen Australia has a stated commitment to screen culture (that rather nebulous area of support that includes film festivals, publications, screen industry awards, screening programs, industry conferences and seminars), as well as to distribution and marketing, but details of just what this commitment amounts to have not been released. In fact, those areas are apparently not even being considered until early next year. What has been on the table is what Screen Australia believed they could achieve in the coming calendar year.

Formed by the merger of the Film Finance Corporation, the Australian Film Commission and Film Australia as part of a process of review and implementation that extended over three years and through two federal governments, Screen Australia formally came into being on July 1, with the existing programs of the three agencies continuing until the end of the year while the necessary reorganisation and restructuring took place. In its draft guidelines the new agency has collapsed an enormous array of programs into quite a small number, arguing that funding was being spread much too thinly. It will still be responsible for development and production funding for what it calls “a range of audience engaging and culturally relevant” feature films, television drama, children’s TV drama, and documentaries. It will also fund workshops, hoping to do this in partnerships with the states and other bodies, and digital media through the Innovation Program, encouraging producers to look at multiple platforms for their projects.

What it will not be funding, and who it will not be supporting, has caused the most concern and adverse comment. It will no longer finance short film production and will also considerably reduce its support for new or less experienced filmmakers, arguing instead that producers supported through the new Enterprise Program (with a slate of productions), or the state funding agencies, can take up those activities. A number of filmmakers, either singly or in joint submissions, have argued strongly against this, saying that a viable industry needs up and coming talent, needs to nurture developing filmmakers, and that hoping or expecting producers or the states or some other entity to fulfill this activity is not good enough. At the very least, they argue, criteria relating to the outsourcing of professional development for emerging filmmakers should be applied to experienced producers supported by the Enterprise Program (currently the Enterprise guidelines include no criteria that require experienced producers to devote a percentage of those funds to help cultivate new and establishing practitioners).

And just how realistic is it that all the short and innovative projects currently being thought up by emerging filmmakers can now really only come to fruition through either cashed up Enterprise Program producers or the state agencies?

Both the Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) and the Australian Directors’ Guild (ADG) have made very strong comments regarding what they see as the unnecessarily high bar applying to writers and directors, and the disproportionate emphasis on producers and production companies. What annoys them most is the inequity between the experience required of a producer, and the higher standard set for writers and directors. They question the research behind these standards, arguing that the levels of experience required are inappropriate. The AWG comments that “Screen Australia’s assertion at its consultation sessions that there are in excess of 70 screenwriters who qualify under the ‘three features’ requirement is incorrect; five to 10 is the accurate range. As such the guidelines will close yet another door to experienced writers in the Australian screen sector.” The AWG wants to see in the guidelines an acknowledgement of the importance of the script; recognition of the vital role of the screenwriter; and acknowledgement of the essential need for intensified, prolonged and properly funded script development.

The ADG also argues that while Minister Garrett stated that the industry would have a voice in the review process, they believe that “policy was largely crafted behind closed doors, and when consultation began, we were presented with broad principles that had been devised without any open debate about the big issues we face.”

Documentary makers, too, are concerned that Screen Australia is moving away from supporting and encouraging fresh talent, from giving emerging filmmakers opportunities to experiment and challenge while refining their craft, and have expressed this concern strongly. However, the documentary sector is very pleased with the National Documentary Program, and particularly with what they’ve understood to be part of the new Terms of Trade, the retention of rights by filmmakers and the abolition of the role of executive producer. That’s something documentary makers have been fighting for in the industry consultations for the past months.

Screen Australia has a new CEO, who took over mid-November. Dr Ruth Harley was CEO of the New Zealand Film Commission, which had been transformed during her tenure, with a sizable increase in the number of films produced, in revenue generated, and in both the size of the audiences and number of awards received by New Zealand filmmakers. She is a very interesting appointment, upholding the feeling within the industry that the government was looking outside the recognised possibilities. With more than 20 years experience in the film and television industries, Harley has a serious academic background and is a former Fulbright Scholar. She says that “getting Australian films to connect with Australian audiences is what everybody has expressed to me as their biggest concern”, and “is something I’ll be wanting to talk to a lot of people about, and I think a lot of people have got theories, and with luck we can pull those theories together into something that can make a difference.”

Already two feature films and seven documentaries are well under way using the producer offset. Screen Australia has been given financial stability for the next three years, although the federal government has removed some $10m from what would have been the total AFC, FFC, and Film Australia budgets which will affect the 2009-10 budget. The government believes that the reduction reflects the increasing role of the producer offset, and that “overall, the level of funding available to the film industry from the uncapped film offsets and Screen Australia has increased significantly.”

Following the final consultation process, Screen Australia is to release its final guidelines in December, with the new agency commencing activities under those guidelines on January 1. It will be instructive to see if any of the strongly worded comments and criticisms received has resulted in any changes.

Details of Screen Australia’s programs, the guidelines, and the many comments received can all be found on the Screen Australia website, www.screenaustralia.gov.au.

THE VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (VIFF) IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THE WAY THAT FESTIVALS PERFORM TWO OPPOSITE FUNCTIONS: THEY ALLOW PEOPLE TO SATISFY THEIR CURIOSITY ABOUT THE FOREIGN AND THE UNFAMILIAR, WHILE ON THE OTHER HAND, THEY CAN ALSO BE INTENSELY LOCAL AND PAROCHIAL. THIS TRANSLATES TO TWO MAIN PROGRAMMING STRANDS. THE DRAGONS AND TIGERS SECTION ON NEW ASIAN CINEMA HAS BEEN RUNNING FOR 15 OF THE FESTIVAL’S 27 YEARS. IT GIVES VIFF ITS INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION, AND THIS YEAR DREW REPRESENTATIVES FROM MOST OF AUSTRALIA’S FILM FESTIVALS. IN THE SECOND WEEK OF THE FESTIVAL, THIS STRAND GIVES WAY TO THE CANADIAN IMAGES FOCUS, WHERE NATIONALISM IS PAID ITS DUES.

Given Canada’s status as a Commonwealth country whose nationalist impulses are generally constructed through finding ways to distance themselves from the overpowering presence of the United States, there are grounds for considering analogies between Australian and Canadian film production. This is no new idea, dating back to the influence of John Grierson in founding the National Film Board of Canada and providing the conceptual basis for documentary production in Australia.

When Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka wrote their history of the Australian film renaissance at the end of the 1980s [The Screening of Australia, Vol 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema, Currency Press, Sydney, 1988], they referred disparagingly to the possibility that the Australian cinema might become prone to “Canadianisation”, that is, it might become a place overtaken by Hollywood production. Closer to the present day we have the meagre domestic box office of both industries and similar government responses divided between location subsidies to attract Hollywood (we should be so lucky as to be Canadianised!) and tax credits to encourage the locals.

The films shown at VIFF this year encourage a further analogy between Australia and Canada based on a growing interest in the othering of the cultural mainstream.

deepa mehta’s heaven on earth

It was significant that directors whose reputations are tied to their cultural otherness made the most prominent Canadian films at Vancouver this year. Deepa Mehta (Earth, Water, Fire) is an Indian-born Canadian resident who makes most international middle-class viewers’ favourite Indian films. While she has moved her production activities back and forth between Canada and India, Mehta has constantly foregrounded the ways in which Indian cultures victimise women.

Her new film Heaven on Earth (you ought to be able to guess that the title is ironic) is no exception. Bollywood star Preity Zinta plays the decidedly anti-glamorous role of a battered wife in a Canadian-Indian family. There’s not a lot in the film to surprise you with the familiar narrative arc of (1) woman as victim, and then (2) victim finds her inner strength. One of the more interesting things about the film is how matriarchal families produce and reinforce positions of oppression for women. Chand, the protagonist, finds her strength to resist from the inspirational story given to her by her mother, but Rocky the brutish husband is a mummy’s boy who beats his wife with his mother’s consent and tacit encouragement.

While India is heat and colour, Canada is cold and blue. The power of the matriarchy is the constant between the two, suggesting that power over sons is a very different thing from power over daughters. Mehta suggests that maternal power over sons breeds a resentment, which finds its outlet wherever it can—and usually this means spouses.

atom egoyan’s adoration

Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) is perhaps Canada’s best known art cinema director given that he has never been tempted into genre filmmaking and enticed south of the border like David Cronenberg. Critics have made much of Egoyan’s Armenian-Egyptian background, though he has lived nearly all of his life in Canada. His new film Adoration returns him to familiar territory where a slowly tracking camera moves constantly across the surface of a brooding landscape. Conversations always appear pregnant with meaning as every utterance gestures towards something more.

A schoolboy creates an online sensation by revealing his father’s terrorist attempt to blow up an airliner. Things are rarely what they seem however, and terrorism becomes a symbol for more intimate forms of dysfunction. Egoyan’s narratives (think of The Sweet Hereafter) often work through reference to some primal trauma, and this is no exception. For Egoyan’s characters, the present is generally a way of working back to the past. His films are the fictions of inwardness and, for them to be effective you need to find the right wavelength for encountering their specific form of stylisation.

There is a lot of blather in the film about online discussion of morality, about the lack of an imaginative understanding of the sufferings of people from Middle Eastern cultures, but the terrorism that Egoyan sees as the model for all trauma and revolt is that inflicted within families. At this level, perhaps his film enters into a conversation with that of Deepa Mehta.

So what’s the bridge back to my analogy between Canadian and Australian filmmaking? For all of the rhetoric of cultural nationalism, all of the Daryl Kerrigans and Crocodile Dundees, of telling our own stories, the most fruitful strand of Australian cinema comes from the engagement of Australia and distinctly separate cultures. I’m thinking here of the tradition of Film Australia docos in Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific and Asia.

australia & other people’s stories

The contemporary inheritors of this tradition can be found in the work of George Gittoes in the Middle East, or in recent films such as Benjamin Gilmour’s Son of a Lion made in Pakistan. The Australia represented by (if not in) these films is not the inward looking one conjured up by the rhetoric of a nationalism obsessed with its own stories. Rather it is the Australia that has finally started to look outward at its region, to insist that Australia must engage with the people of the Middle East on a personal basis and not just through superpower politics.

The case in point at VIFF was Faramarz K-Rahber’s documentary Donkey in Lahore. The Australian-Iranian documentarist, who is based at Griffith University, follows a Queensland goth puppeteer in his unlikely pursuit of Amber, a young Pakistani girl with whom he fell in love during a brief stay in Lahore. Brian (or Aamir as he renames himself after his conversion to Islam) is an unlikely hero but clearly a romantic in every sense of the term. He takes in his stride the repeated kicks in the head the world delivers to him, reasoning that sooner or later, it is only reasonable that brute reality will have to lie down in the face of his ambitions.

The most interesting thing about the film is the way K-Rahber starts to function as a go-between for Brian/Aamir in Pakistan and an interpreter of his actions for viewers of the film. The film neatly reverses the cultural politics of much traditional anthropological filmmaking where Anglo-Australian filmmakers occupy a high ground of knowledge and truth, explaining the quaint ways of the natives.

Donkey in Lahore gained additional stature from the comparison with The Convert, a Thai film in the Dragons and Tigers section. This documentary also tells the story of a woman who converts to Islam in order to marry. The problem here is that the filmmakers simply don’t have much that is very interesting at which to point the camera. This is a problem compounded by the fact that the couple who are the subject of the film obviously participate in the shooting of it. Rather than the growth of a productive (if potentially painful and embarrassing) relationship between filmmaker and subject, there is a closeness here which seems to preclude insight, as if you don’t want to pry too closely into the troubles of someone close to you.

So, maybe this is the conclusion to bring away from Vancouver: to praise not the telling of our own stories, but the curiosity to stick our noses into the stories of those who are different from us.

LAKE PEDDER LOOMS LARGE IN THE HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA’S ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT, A FOUNDATIONAL MYTH WITH A LOST SHANGRI-LA AND A MARTYR AT ITS CORE. A STUNNING INLAND BODY OF WATER IN TASMANIA’S REMOTE SOUTHWEST, FLANKED BY A PRISTINE TWO-MILE-LONG BEACH, PEDDER DISAPPEARED BENEATH DAM FLOODWATERS IN 1972, A VICTIM OF THE ALL-POWERFUL HYDRO ELECTRIC COMMISSION’S DRIVE TO INDUSTRIALISE THE ISLAND STATE. TASMANIAN-BORN DOCUMENTARY-MAKER SCOTT MILLWOOD TOUCHED UPON THE CAMPAIGN TO SAVE PEDDER IN HIS AWARD-WINNING FILM WILDNESS (2003, RT60, P17), AND HAS RETURNED TO THE STRUGGLE WITH HIS LATEST FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY, THE MURDER MYSTERY-CUM-PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BRENDA HEAN?

Hean and pilot Max Price vanished without trace on the morning of September 8, 1972, while flying to Canberra to emblazon ‘Save Lake Pedder’ across the capital’s skies and lobby federal politicians on the ground. It was three months out from the federal election that was to bring Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party to power after 23 years in opposition, and Hean was seeking to make Pedder’s flooding a federal issue. The cursory police investigation that followed her disappearance failed to cast light on the activist’s fate, although there was evidence that the plane’s hangar had been broken into the night before the flight. Rumours of sabotage and a cover up have persisted ever since.

In the opening moments of the documentary, Millwood evokes the sense of loss that came with Pedder’s inundation through ageing colour archival footage of the lake and its stunning surrounds. The area’s ethereal beauty is obvious even through the scratches and dust flecks scattered across the film’s surface. Shots of Pedder are intercut with black and white news coverage of Hean and Max Price as they prepare for their flight north in Price’s ancient Tiger Moth. At the end of the introductory montage, Millwood enters the film through a contemporary radio broadcast and a TV interview, announcing a $100,000 reward for information leading to the solving of Hean’s disappearance.

Millwood began his career with the essayistic Proximity (1999), an autobiographical account of a soul-searching trip around the globe that took the filmmaker from shady homoerotic encounters in Iran to time in an Indian leper colony. Wildness was a more conventional, if still quietly poetic, made-for-television documentary. Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? lies somewhere between the two earlier films, returning to the Tasmanian environmental concerns of Wildness, while foregrounding the filmmaker’s authorial presence as he delves into the fog of contradictory stories, rumours, myths and insinuations surrounding the Brenda Hean mystery. In doing so Millwood documents the Pedder campaign and the beginnings of Australia’s Green movement, but also probes the dark recesses of Tasmania’s history, and by extension his own identity as a Tasmanian.

Having established his hotline and publicised the reward, Millwood starts to follow various leads, ranging from amusing cranks to eye-witnesses to the ill-fated flight. He speaks to a farmer who claims to have seen Hean and Price fly over his family’s property as a boy, adding that he also once spotted a Tasmanian Tiger. A more credible series of witnesses report having seen the plane on its way up the state’s east coast. We also journey out into the Tasmanian bush with Stan Hanuszewicz and Derek Kooistra, who have been obsessively traversing the island’s northeast for over a decade, searching for the plane wreck using information provided by a clairvoyant.

The most startling turn comes when several interviewees suggest the Tiger Moth was sabotaged not in order to prevent Brenda Hean reaching Canberra, as has commonly been assumed, but to dispose of pilot Max Price. The aviator was, it seems, a well-known philanderer, and among other local women was having an affair with his sister-in-law. In addition, Price had supposedly uncovered information indicating his business partner was embezzling funds from their company, Tasmanian Aviation Services, and was planning to hand over the incriminating evidence to police upon his return from Canberra.

After more than an hour of false leads and conflicting theories and accusations, both Millwood and viewers are left feeling utterly confused. We see the filmmaker looking lost and alone on a hotel bed, admitting to his information hotline operator, “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the bottom of this mystery. Not because we’ve found so little truth, but because there seems to be so much truth.” But just as Millwood’s search and the film’s narrative seem to be floundering, Whatever Happened changes gear.

Having conceded he is unlikely to learn what happened to Hean, Millwood begins to consider whether the swamp of innuendo and secrecy he finds himself mired in speaks of a deeper truth regarding Tasmania’s culture of repressed atrocities and extreme violence. In the process Whatever Happened becomes a film about the frustrations—perhaps the impossibility—of writing history in such a close-knit, tight-lipped community. Tasmanian Greens Senator Christine Milne comments at one point, “In other places, after 10 or 15 years, usually mysteries are cleared up. There are always ways in which the truth eventually comes out. But in Tasmania it never does. The secrets go to people’s graves with them.” In this context, the act of retelling the story of Brenda Hean, and the lake she fought to save, is almost as important as revealing the truth of her fate.

Throughout the film, Millwood obsessively returns to archival images of Hean and the lake, clinging to two central facts amongst all the deceit and legend surrounding this strange story. Hean was an ordinary woman who stood up to extraordinary power, and the lake was an extant place destroyed in a misguided ideological drive to turn Tasmania into the “Ruhr Valley of the south seas.” If we simply allow the story to fade into myth it becomes all too easy for the violence at its heart to recede into comfortable abstraction, divorced from a brutal reality of greed and political struggle. Furthermore, as Tim Flannery tantalisingly reveals towards the end of the film, the fulfilment of Hean’s dream is still possible. Unlike the extermination of Tasmania’s Indigenous population or the forced extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger, Lake Pedder’s flooding is a catastrophe that can be reversed, since the beach and the lake’s surrounds still lie intact beneath the dam reservoir.

In the film’s final sequence, Millwood travels by boat to the site that was once Lake Pedder and plunges into the dam waters. We follow him down as his flashlight illuminates a glass bottle lodged in the submerged sands. A relic of some long ago beach party? The last trace of the final vigil on the Lake’s shores? As Millwood scoops up a handful of buried sand we think back to the opening images of the snow-white expanse nearly four decades ago. We recall Brenda Hean walking on Lake Pedder’s shore and planning her flight north. We ponder Flannery’s claim that this beach, and the lake it once hugged, could be brought back to life. The sand trickles through Millwood’s fingers and is dispersed in the water, an ephemeral reminder of what Pedder was and the potential wonder that still lies beneath the dam’s surface.

Whatever Happened raises more questions than it answers, but perhaps their posing is all than can be expected of a humble documentary. What Millwood’s film does reveal is that answering the question of whatever happened to Brenda Hean will require more than just bringing to light the buried truths specifically related to her disappearance. The mystery surrounding her death speaks of a broader, more profound culture of silence, cloaking a systematic abuse of power and campaign of violence against the people and environment of the island state.

Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean?, writer, director, producer Scott Millwood, producer Michael MacMahon, writer Mira Robertson, Big and Little Films, Australia, 2008

SYDNEY’S MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART RECENTLY HOSTED TWO INTERESTING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CONVERSATION AROUND MOVING IMAGE ART IN AUSTRALIA. THE VIDEO LOGIC SHOW AND A TWO-DAY CONFERENCE EVENT HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE EXHIBITION, DISAPPEARING VIDEO, PROVIDED INSIGHTS INTO VIDEO ART HISTORY AND PRACTICE IN AUSTRALIA, AND ADDRESSED SOME OF THE ISSUES CONFRONTING WORK IN THE MEDIUM.

Video Logic curated by Russell Storer, consisted of a select set of works by artists who have contributed to the development of video work in Australian art: Eugenia Raskopoulos, Denis Beaubois, John Gillies, Adam Geczy, John Conomos and Philip Brophy. It cleverly revealed the breadth of video practice, ranging from Beaubois’ very video-specific investigations into surveillance technologies, to hybridisations with other forms, such as Raskopoulos’ work, which explores corporeality in ways that marry with performance art, and Geczy and Sculthorpe’s colour organ, connecting with the history of light art, music and abstract film. The compact selection offered an economical expression of the irreducible heterogeneity of video practice.

The Disappearing Video event, organised by Ross Harley and John Gillies, began with a rare historical survey screening which, Gillies explained in his introduction, was curated around the canonicity and availability of important works of Australian video art. It’s exhilarating to see a big overview program with a broad chronological sweep, and this one, taking in three decades of experiment, and most of the big names and key works, was a real ride. From the brilliant magnetic meddlings of electronic art’s earliest explorations to heavily distorted video clips and subversive scratch video, computer art, performance documentation and theatrical experiments, the screening developed a fascinating portrait of a diverse national history. What we saw in the program’s 90 minutes was a vivid demonstration of the many uses and pleasures of video for artists over the last 40 years: video as both plastic and graphic medium, valued for its ability to capture the ephemeral, as well as for its own expressive potential. Seeing the works all abutted, as they must be in a single-screen program, can be a rather intense experience—I saw a few furiously blinking eyelids at the screening’s conclusion as spectators’ heads swam with electronic imagery. Some momentary processing delays are, however, surely worth it for the sheer nourishment that a program such as this provides.

Installed in the conference venue was one of the first bona fide video artworks in Australia, Mick Glasheen’s Teleologic Telegraph from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buckminster Fuller (1970, 28min), a seminal work in the ‘synthetic’ cinema described by Gene Youngblood. It featured, amidst various vibrant synthesised electronic imagery, a talk by the utopian architect on a 1968 visit to Australia. As Stephen Jones notes in his remarkable PhD research, Fuller’s talk is processed with “laser disk slow-motion, reverse-motion and freeze-frames, colour mattes, luminance keying and various kinds of video wipes some of which are modulated by Fuller’s voice” with effects “mixed through one of the earliest colour video mixers in Australia.” I loved it that this work, which illustrates the persistence of experimental and utopian documentary urges in Australian moving image art history, was posted in such a prominent position at the event. I also really loved the wry staging—plonked up on a plinth, almost at eye-height, the sculptural qualities of the installation meant that Fuller’s hypercoloured head floated amongst conference delegates’ own, delivering a disembodied address from the past on the future (and making for fun and games in the coffee breaks). This installation also subtly foregrounded the conference’s enquiry into preservation and restoration. Compared to the grimy, dropout-ridden U-matic tape I first viewed of this work some years ago, Stephen Jones’ digitalised preservation version of Teleologic is bright, clean and crisp—virtually another work altogether. The experience was both sobering—for the realisation it ushered in about the role format loss and degradation play in the experience of a work’s textuality—and joyful. It looked fantastic.

The conference proceedings began with Jones’ “dissassembly” of video art. Teasing out some of the elements which have been ‘subsumed’ in the (scant) narratives that exist of this kind of work, he explored the methods and intentions of the first generations of artists working with art and technology. Undergirding the extraordinarily technically detailed discussion was Jones’ archaeological approach, which grounds electronic art in a specifically televisual—as opposed to cinematic—tradition. Tracing video history back to the history of scanning technology, which first emerged in the mid-19th century, he showed how thinking about time-based art could be connected to an electrical, scan-based tradition which extends beyond narrative into the abstract. I found his emphasis on why we should be interested in interactive processes of input/output, video feedback, and their relationship to human consciousness, particularly resonant for thinking historically about video art.

This was the ideal opening salvo in what was to be an intense day. In my own talk I discussed “disappearing” in the context of forgetting and remembering in Australian history and art. I suggested we could take a few cues from other nations whose foregrounding of “artists’ film and video” discourse—as opposed to “new media art” and “video art” etc—seems to have paid dividends in terms of both institutional recognition and audience awareness of the work. I was then completely eclipsed by the dynamic John Conomos who followed with an extraordinary, performative address about the moving image as a form of writing with special focus on the essay. Laced with irony and delivered with total panache, Conomos’ free-ranging talk left some big impressions (for me, not least, his description of being “cauterised to [his] seat” at the Bucky Fuller session captured by Glasheen in Teleologic, while being “totally intellectually raped” by the visiting American).

In his confrontation with the disappearance of historical works from public memory amidst the ascendancy of the “morphing cult called new media”, Conomos noted the lack of dedicated videographic facilities at key art institutions. This theme was the one developed with most intensity, even ferocity, in the discussions after talks. Genuine, impassioned debate broke out over what exactly the remit of institutions in providing moving image access facilities is, and should be. Scholars and participants recounted tales of cupboards full of mouldering tapes, mass culls, threadbare collections, overstressed staff, deterrent-level fees and other ongoing tragedies. While there is doubtless much that needs to be remedied at the level of institutions taking moving image art and its history seriously, as others pointed out, institution-bashing, though cathartic, is not the most useful long-term strategy. Rather, the consensus seemed to be that a set of deliberate strategies, starting with a heritage mindset and emphasis on preservation and access, might be the way to start redressing the loss of cultural memory and ‘cultural amnesia’ many speakers noted as endemic to Australian (moving image art) history.

Intensifying our understanding of the particularity of Australian work, Lyndal Jones’ elegant presentation offered a fascinating survey of her work in moving image. This brought a welcome focus on artistic practice over a period of immense technological change, and provided some much-needed insights from the artist’s point of view, from how to compose for the pragmatics of sound in installations (“we don’t have earlids”), to other thoughtful observations on the construction of works for empty versus peopled spaces. I particularly liked Jones’ quotation of Hélène Cixous’s notion of “writing by the light of the axe” as a metaphor for the way artists not only make work, but have to talk about it.

In her spirited address, Louise Curham provided a glimpse into the climate-controlled terrain of moving image archives, and shared with us the fascinating world of physical, biological and chemical decay. Though she was perhaps too modest to mention it herself, I was struck by the crossover between Curham’s professional expertise in the arena of decomposition and her artistic interest in deliberately ‘tortured’ hand-processed film in the projected environments and single-screen works for which she is rightly feted. Discussing the archival detective work that makes the encounter with “orphaned” and other mysterious works so electrifying, Curham argued convincingly for an approach which considers, and attempts to preserve, both the work, and the context of which it is part. She also spoke to the critical mass gathering around the “historical turn” in thinking about the moving image—at the precise moment when, as digitalisation is nearly complete, the reality of format obsolescence is beginning to make itself felt, and various other major initiatives to preserve and restore moving image work are underway.

Visual art critic Andrew Frost wrapped things up with a timely rumination on the unfolding possibilities of a medium which has mutated so much in just a generation. “Once a career step to obscurity and outsider grumbling”, Frost noted, “video has now become mainstream practice.” His amusing prognostications for what might lie ahead for the changing landscape of video art masked the more serious mood uncovered at the conference as the realities of a reeling economy and decomposing materials sank in. As John Conomos said, the “nagging, half-glimpsed” realisation is that the “continuing dialogue between the past, present and future” of video art is up to us.

Video Logic, video art exhibition, curator Russell Storer, Aug 19-Nov 2; Disappearing Video conference, organiser Ross Harley, John Gillies, speakers Stephen Jones, Danni Zuvela, John Conomos, Louise Curham, Lyndal Jones, Andrew Frost; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Oct 23-24

IT WAS QUITE REFRESHING TO SEE A FILM THAT DID NOT CONCERN ITSELF WITH WHAT I’VE COME TO SEE AS DOMINANT TROPES IN TASMANIAN CULTURAL FORMS, WHICH I USUALLY NAME AS CONCERNS WITH PLACE AND HOW PEOPLE FIT INTO IT. IT’S ALWAYS BEEN EASY TO SEE WHY, GIVEN THE ASTONISHING LANDSCAPE AND THE DRAMATIC WEATHER DOWN HERE, BUT THERE ARE OTHER STORIES THAT NEED TELLING THAT MAY NOT BE QUITE SO FOCUSED ON BEING HERE, LEAVING HERE, AND RETURNING HERE. THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WHO HAVE OTHER ISSUES TO DEAL WITH.

Next of Kin, Rose Schramm’s nine-minute short could really have been made anywhere and this is part of its achievement as a film made in Tasmania; it doesn’t look or feel particularly of this place. Far from an interaction with cold mountains and dense bush, the film has a distinct urban feel, when the plot takes us outside at all—it could be out west in Sydney, it could be a chunk of Zone 3 Melbourne. Much time is spent inside in tight, slightly odd interiors that are subtly colour coded; the film has a fairly meticulous, stylised feel. It’s a tiny world with just two people in it: Angela (Gemma Gates) and Laurie (Alex Martin). Martin, in particular, gives a remarkable performance, all the more noteworthy when you learn he’s never acted before and probably never will again. Laurie’s been away, somewhere, and has been out of touch with Angela for some time. She’s shocked, and possibly worried, when he contacts her after he’s been released from some kind of psychiatric hospital. Laurie has named Angela as his next of kin which, as Schramm pointed out to me when I spoke with her about the film, makes Angela responsible for him. Laurie has changed somewhat in the lengthy time since Angela knew him last, ie, from male to female. This change is far more a broad symbol than it appears at first to be though; the filmmaker has worked to capture a sense of the shock of someone you knew very well being different somehow, whether by accident or design.

“What I first wrote it about was how sometimes a child-parent relationship can turn the other way—particularly with mentally ill parents, [children can] end up becoming the parent[s]. It’s sort of about mental illness, but I don’t want to exactly say that. It’s not about transgender; it’s deeper than that. I mean I already did that [Schramm’s 2004 student documentary, Rachael, told the story of her father’s journey to becoming a woman at 65 years of age]. I wasn’t writing exactly from my point of view, it was more about a daughter who’s trying to be an adult or a father who won’t take responsibility for his role. It’s not my life but I can draw from my experience to make those characters believable, because it’s an unbelievable situation. There’s not a lot of reality in that. But it’s real.

“I was also writing about how, sometimes the child, grown up or not, doesn’t really want to hear a lot of things; it’s hard enough. It would be quite surreal sitting next to your father and he’s dressed in a frock. I was also looking at how you’ve got to grieve in a way, because you know that the person they were is never coming back. Seeing someone with different inflections, all the old gestures disappearing and that sort of thing, I wanted to portray a bit of that no going back.

“I just got these two characters in my head; they stayed in my head for about six months. I’d just done a script writing course. I was bored and they just came up. It’s not the film that came into my head, it was the characters. Now I’ve got three more characters who’ll be in the next film. I haven’t actually written a script, I just spend all day thinking about the characters, for about three or four months, but I can’t write a script unless the characters are there. I never thought I was going to write drama, ever. I always thought I would make documentaries. When I went into film making I thought that’s all I want to make. Then I was bored.”

Ideas are one thing, mechanics are quite something else. Schramm is a camera operator and editor by trade so the film’s existence comes as something of a surprise, not in the least to her. She seems to have almost made it by accident, but it was all due to her participation in the Raw Nerve 08 program.

“It’s an initiative between Wide Angle Tasmania and Screen Australia; they’ve been going on in other states for a few years and last year we got funding to have one in Tasmania. There was an invitation to put in either a first draft of a script or an idea for a script; if you were accepted on your first draft you went through a lot of script development, given a script development mentor, an executive producer and then given not very much money, $2000, almost all of which went on the cinematographer Simon Gray. He was worth it. He was great. People were telling me not to, they were saying you can’t get him, he’s from Sydney and I knew nothing about him. I went completely on intuition. I‘d not seen anything he’d done. He was the director of photography, so I was behind the camera, but he was working it. I even had a focus puller. It’s the first professional shoot I’ve ever done. Now I’ve got a Slingshot grant and I’m going to try and get Next of Kin into festivals.”

Schramm has another film project on the horizon, a story about growing up Catholic in the 80s. When she told me what it was about, I laughed a lot. It sounds deceptively simple, but later I wondered, with a little trepidation, what territory she would take that simple premise into, given the raw and potent emotion she produced in Next of Kin.

Next of Kin, producer, writer, director, editor Rose Schramm, cast Gemma Gates, Alex Martin, director of photography Simon Gray, series producer Chris Gallagher, executive producer, Beverly Jefferson; made with the assistance of Screen Tasmania, Wide Angle Tasmania, Screen Australia, SDA; Raw Nerve 08 program

RICHARD, THE MOST INTERESTINGEST PERSON I’VE EVER MET, IS A FUNNY-SAD DOCUMENTARY OF THE LIFE OF AN IDIOSYNCRATIC INDIVIDUAL—RICHARD BLACKIE, 41 YEARS OF AGE, A FORMER AND VERY CONVINCING MICHAEL JACKSON IMPERSONATOR, BONSAI GARDENER AND TOY COLLECTOR OF 20 YEARS, WHO BECAME AN ANTIQUE AND VINTAGE TOY SHOP OWNER AND WHO SUICIDED BEFORE MAYA NEWELL’S FILM WAS COMPLETE. SHE WAS 17 AT THE TIME AND A STUDENT AT THE SYDNEY FILM SCHOOL AND UNTIL PERSUADED OTHERWISE, THOUGHT THERE WASN’T ENOUGH OF RICHARD’S LIFE IN HER FOOTAGE TO MAKE A COMPLETE FILM. HOWEVER IT PREMIERED AT THE 2007 DIRECTOR’S FORTNIGHT IN CANNES, IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD AND DESERVING OF A WIDE AUDIENCE.

The power of the film is generated by the dynamic between how little we learn about Richard (Newell eschews standard documentary story-telling and there are no interviews with her subject’s friends or acquaintances of whom there were possibly few) and the feeling that we’re building a very strong impression of an intensely private and secretive man—narcissistic, obsessive, authoritarian, but all in the nicest possible way. This is compounded by Newell’s approach, which is informal, patient and gently probing, and Richard’s response which is cautious and evasive, but at the same time characterful, often droll and very immediate. He’s also very controlling, visibly determining the duration of a conversation or deliberately keeping his distance from the camera. At one point early in the film he takes the camera and turns it on the filmmaker, a moment illustrating his playfulness, authority and the acknowledgment perhaps of a creative partnership, and one where, with unconscious prophetic irony, Newell shyly promises to make his collection of toys live on. He wants this film—of “the most interestingest person you’ve ever met”—to be made.

After Richard’s death well-known poet and screenplay writer Billy Stoneking Marshall told Newell, who felt her project was lost, that she had the makings of a film not so much about Richard as her relationship with him. Not surprisingly then, except for the brief glimpse of a cemetery at the film’s opening, a few shots of the immediate front of Richard’s shop and, much later, his doomed foray into an auction house, there’s no sign of the outside world save the visit of an occasional customer or postman. Tellingly, you’ll find some wider shots of the street, and some plainer statements of fact (Richard telling Newell that he was an orphan), in the out-takes on the DVD. Clearly Newell and her editor have focused the film tightly on Richard’s closed world and his meetings with the filmmaker, and cleverly and effectively so for a film which, on the surface, displays so little artifice.

This interplay of immediacy and the witholding of information and speculation is amplified by frequent filming of Richard in hand-held close-up or medium shot in the crowded confines of his shop, in narrow corridors, or perched by display cases having a smoke, or with his small dogs in his tiny kitchen, the camera looking around the corner or over his shoulder. The viewer constantly reads the strange, handsome architecture of Richard’s face—male, female, Aboriginal (compounded by occasional touches of Aboriginal English), the result of surgery? But if information is short, emotion is not, and although not expressed overtly we are witness to Richard’s growing anxieties about the failure of his shop and the need to sell his beloved toy collection (to get himself out of debt). He dreams of creating a museum from his remarkable collection (with which we grow steadily and fondly intimate), but he can’t get local council support. He’s momentarily buoyed by the prospect of profit from the auction, but, at around that time, in his sleep he smothers the one puppy he was going to keep from a new litter. The film’s most emotionally demanding passage is of Richard placing the body of the dog in box, adding Newell’s name to the inscription, and then burying the box in his backyard. Here, there’s restraint on both sides of the camera and we feel we’re in the grip of a chilling inevitability. In the notes accompanying the DVD, Newell writes that she had no idea that Richard would kill himself. That only became clear as she looked back over the five hours of footage she had recorded over three months and is subtly built into the film’s structure. The youthfulness of Newell’s voice, the naivety of some of her early questions and the wisdom evident in her final voiceover make Richard an unusual rite of passage film. Early on, Richard tells Newell, “I become under a code in life where you don’t reveal your life too much, you know. You’re more behind the curtain for what you do. So you’re very very privileged.” And thanks to Newell, so are we, because she has lifted the curtain just a little to reveal a fascinating, seriously funny, complex person, and asked that perplexing question, can we ever foretell a sucide?

Angie Abdilla’s 25-minute documentary Wanja is, at one level, a fond eulogy for Wanja, a blue heeler with an intense dislike for police officers. At another, it’s a lament for a dying community, Redfern’s The Block, in inner suburban Sydney. The interviewees are mostly Aboriginal elders, some bitterly hostile to the police, suspecting them of having killed Wanja. One man blames his own community for its troubles as much as the police, not least because of drugs, another the government for eliminating a large number of houses and reducing Aboriginal control of the area. These brief statements are insterspersed with re-created images of Wanja in basic blue-tinged video, wandering the streets like a phantom guardian of the community, and other footage that lingers recurrently over the pruned back Block, wasted houses and the art and graffiti of Aboriginal occupation on building walls. Other footage constructs the imagined view from the police surveillance cameras atop the tall building diagonally opposite The Block. Save for its moments of anger, Wanja is a gentle, carefully paced weaving together of points of view (personal and cinematic)—a meditation on a culturally signficant but sad place.

Richard, the most interestingest person I’ve ever met, a film by Maya Newell, 2007, Siren Visual DVD, 52mins, www.sirenvisual.com.au; Wanja, writer, director Angie Abdilla, producer Tom Zubrycki, editor Leah Donovan, sound design David White, cinematography Kim Batterham, Sean Bacon, 2008, 25minutes.

THE MOST STARTLING MOMENTS AT THIS YEAR’S SYDNEY UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL (SUFF) WERE NOT THE VOMIT, SLASHINGS, BLOOD, TURDS OR SLIME—THOUGH THERE WERE PLENTY OF THESE—BUT THE AUDIENCE’S DISBELIEF WHEN CONFRONTED BY THE MAINSTREAM, ESPECIALLY HOLLYWOOD. THIS REACHED A HIGH POINT AT THE AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE OF SLIPSTREAM, THE FEATURE-LENGTH MOVIE STARRING, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ANTHONY HOPKINS, WHO ALSO WROTE THE MUSIC.

There were incredulous whispers: “Is this the Anthony Hopkins?”, “Anthony Silence of the Lambs Hopkins?”; “Sir Anthony Hopkins”? But indeed it was. Co-starring John Turturro and Christian Slater, Slipstream owes something to David Lynch but also to the globally dominant cinema that created Hopkins the Oscar-winning actor and has given us distantly similar forays into memory-lapse such as in the Bourne franchise movies. MTV also has some sort of relationship to the extraordinary and often extremely rapid editing in Slipstream that takes us in and out of the fantasy and reality in the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter (Hopkins) who may or may not be mad.

Slipstream was a real surprise for anyone believing the gap between mainstream and the underground to be huge and who define the underground in terms of its art and opposition to all that it is conservative, reactionary and commercial.

Another big surprise was the quantity and quality of Australian films. Caroline Huf’s Ticketweavels, for example, is a short, sad love affair between two Sydney train tickets that creates an animated existential crisis for the lovers. The deserved winner of the Material Effects award, Jessica Mutasco’s Paneye, is an impressive stop-frame exploration of corporeality as the conduit for converting inner perception into an external image. Peter Newman’s formal Paperhouse: the 5:19 is a disturbing video fusion of image and meaning. Geoff Wheatley’s achingly lovely Light/Strike (An Open Window) captures uncanny, wafting images from the past with a 1975 original Sony Portapak.

And, as ever, Paul Winkler’s fertile imagination refreshed our inner-eyes with his glorious technicolour (not actually, but certainly glorious) Many Buddhas. Running film partially exposed in horizontal and vertical stripes and patterns through his camera as he has done for many years, Winkler’s images bore their way into our mind’s eye where they resonate, echo and repeat like a visual ear worm—while also managing to be different each time.

Was it the presence of senior filmmakers of the experience and calibre of Hopkins or Winkler which created a strong historical ether that pervaded the weekend? Whatever the cause, it became increasingly difficult to understand claims of the avant-garde to be at the forefront of filmmaking practice. In the turbulent storm of moving image art which is, or aims to be, ‘progressive’, the past tends to appear and reappear in underground cinema: it’s a two-way process and it is hard to know which way history’s angel is looking.
Paineye

The documentary, a genre devoted to the past is not widely associated with the underground although there are many instances—Buñuel’s 1932 Las Hurdes (Land without Bread) is a notable early example. Many of the docos at SUFF this year outshone the fictional, the abstract and the frequently rather conventionally formalist avant-garde and experimental and called into question the whole definition of underground.

George Gittoes’ The Miscreants is a superb documentary. Reflexive, self-deprecating, and fiercely political, this is the last in his trilogy about the impact of US aggression in the Middle East upon art and creativity. Humour and hyper-reality are so mixed up that it becomes impossible to know whether a gun or a camera is doing the shooting. One can’t always fathom who’s doing the shooting, nor distinguish between the good and the bad guys. Laughter quickly turns to chilling fear as realisation of the implications of Bush’s foreign policy sinks in.

SUFF co-director Stefan Popescu claims Gittoes is a ‘film artist’ who responds to state sanctioned terror through his art. But is he an underground film artist? His is a doco, after all, that might well be screened on mainstream television, perhaps even in the local multiplex.

Less difficult to categorise is the compelling Czech documentary, Lost Holiday (director Lucie Kralova). This makes innovative use of sound and form to shape a story about some missing holiday photographs into a mesmerising experimental transnational detective story and a reverie upon the role of the camera (still and moving) in the evermore intense and speedy passages of global cultural flows. This is more clearly the work of a film artist than many of those in the diverse collection screened over the weekend.

But does it make sense to claim the film artist for the underground? Where does this leave the national mainstream cinema? Over and over, Hollywood has not only proved the genius of its system by absorbing ideas, images, sounds and other cultural phenomena from alternative cinemas to create something new, but also by introducing invention and creative innovation to its so-called radical ‘other.’

One criticism I have of the SUFF is that too often the curators gave the benefit of the doubt to the film when more rigour would have been valuable. It’s not just that there were a few too many cute-but-naughty animated lumps of clay, silly penis jokes and women getting vigorously bonked from the rear (not always violently but usually so), but that these do not the underground make.

SUFF was successful, however, in showing just how heterogeneous the underground is and, in effect, pushing the definition of underground filmmaking to new (or back to old) boundaries.The festival offered films ranging from John Waters’ still outrageous 1981 classic Polyester to the undeniably enjoyable, if Tarantino/Rodriguez-inflected, Austrian On Evil Grounds (Peter Koller) which is more B-movie than underground; and from the wondrously abject New Zealand short Eel Girl (Jennifer Scheer) to Song Sung Blue, Greg Kohs’ documentary feature about the husband and wife tribute band, Thunder and Lightning. This very straight doco has been selected for some very conventional mainstream film festivals this year: does this make the Philadelphia or the Melbourne International Film Festival underground? Or does it mean that mainstream and avant-garde exist in productive tension?

I like blood, pus, piss, sex, cum and a good dollop of sparagmos and evisceration as much as the next underground addict. But it felt good to be reminded that the intellect can be challenged as well as the gut and the genitalia. After the weekend the SUFF morphed into a symposia and an art gallery event at the Sydney College of the Arts. Poorly attended, maybe, but hugely valuable.

We were treated to an exhibition curated by Jenny Brown of films and other artefacts by the New York’s celebrated underground Franklin Furnace Archive and some lunch-time lectures. Melbourne Underground Film Festival Director and filmmaker Richard Wolstencroft showed an extract from his new film, The Beautiful and the Damned, teaching us that the underground can include a film based on a book that appears on many an undergraduate literature reading list. Sydney experimental media artist, lecturer and author John Conomos offered us yet more blurring of cultural boundaries. After seeing a couple of bewitching extracts from his amazing repertoire, including one work in progress filmed at Canberra’s disappearing and reappearing Lake George, I drove straight to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see his film Autumn Song Take 2 at the Video Logic exhibition [page 20]. Conomos is the sort of filmmaker who leaves you wanting more.

In offering such diversity and by paying attention to cultural crossovers, audiences could learn, or learn anew, not only how to challenge and how to see, or ‘read’ underground cinema but also how to reimagine mainstream cinema. SUFF, now two years old, has become indispensable to Sydney screen culture.

Sydney Underground Film Festival, co-directors Katherine Berger & Stefan Popescu, The Factory, Sydney, Sept 11-14

THE SEARCH FOR AN IMAGE OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IS A CENTRAL PREOCCUPATION IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN CINEMA. THIS IS HARDLY SURPRISING—RUSSIA’S BEEN THROUGH A LOT OF SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN THE PAST 20 YEARS. THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIALISM, THE RESULTANT RECESSION, THE MORE RECENT BOOM AND THE WAR IN CHECHNYA HAVE UNFOLDED DURING A TIME OF SIGNIFICANT MIGRATIONS BETWEEN THE OLD SOVIET REPUBLICS. DEMOGRAPHICALLY, ECONOMICALLY, CULTURALLY, RUSSIA TODAY IS A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE THAN IT WAS ONLY A FEW YEARS BACK; SO MUCH SO THAT MANY OLDER RUSSIANS CLAIM TO BARELY RECOGNISE THE PLACE. IN LIGHT OF SUCH MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS, IT MAKES SENSE THAT RUSSIAN CINEMA SHOULD BE FOCUSED RATHER INTENTLY ON DOCUMENTING WHAT KIND OF A PLACE THIS ‘NEW RUSSIA’ IS. AND AT THIS YEAR’S 5TH ANNUAL RUSSIAN RESURRECTION FILM FESTIVAL, THIS CONCERN FORMED THE THEMATIC BACKDROP TO ALMOST ALL OF THE NEW FILMS SHOWN.

At the top of this year’s list was Andrei Zvyagintev’s second feature The Banishment (2007), to my mind it is one of the few genuinely great narrative films of this century. Delicately composed around a scenario of grief (the details of which are, believe it or not, of secondary importance), The Banishment employs style over plot to enter an emotional, metaphysical, even spiritual narrative realm. It’s a realm beyond language, of sounds and passing visions, an uncanny space where dream, reality, nightmare and archetype overlap, and through which humans pass, often unaware of its many details. The vision Zvyagintev presents of this life is uncompromising, life is difficult, and no doubt many viewers will find the director’s typically Russian preoccupation with death too bleak. But there is also potential redemption here. So much of our lives, it seems, remains unspoken, unshared, unnoticed, and it is these gaps between expression and between each of us, that the director seeks to open up with The Banishment. I was left spiritually shaken by this film, as if a formally dormant part of my life had been prodded and awoken. There are few cinematic experiences I can compare it to.

If The Banishment was the dark jewel of the festival, the gala film (the type of feature that goes rather well with smoked herring and vodka cocktails) was Karen Shakhnazarov’s The Vanished Empire (2008). Set in 1973 at the high water mark of the Soviet state, this refined pseudo-autobiography unfolds around the slow awakening to adulthood of young Muscovite Sergey Narbekov (Alexander Lyapin). A brash, cocky, “would-be-intelligent-if-he-weren’t-so-stupid” kind of guy, Sergey is your standard model, post-adolescent male who just happens to live a few blocks from the Kremlin. Uninterested in the glorious history of the Communist Party, Sergey’s principal concerns include acquiring a black market copy of The Dark Side of the Moon, smoking grass with his loafer friends and getting it on with the leggy brunette who sits two rows in front him at the pedagogical institute. This is, at least, until the high energy of Sergey’s hormonal influx is met and pulverized by the equal and opposing force of true heartbreak.

A nostalgic film, full of happy colours and conspicuously free of secret police, The Vanished Empire is far from the dark history of Brezhnev era Russia that audiences might expect. Indeed, its director Shakhnazharov has been criticized by more than one reviewer for indulging in an unforgivably rosy representation of life in the late Soviet system. Such criticisms are further provoked by the film’s coda, where a now 50 year old Sergey bumps into his former chum Kostia in Moscow’s vast and depressing Sheremetyevo airport. Both have now left Moscow and both are relatively bemused by what they find. “Where’s Moscow?”, the sad and puffy eyed Kostia asks. “I look around, and I don’t recognise anything—everything is foreign, evil.” While this is a view that Shakhnazharov cares neither to affirm nor refute, what remains at the end of The Vanished Empire is a strong sense of the disappearance of an identity, both national and personal. It is perhaps the ageing Sergey’s nostalgia not for Russian socialism but for his young self that colours this film so strongly.

A more modest production was the young director Vera Strozheva’s Traveling with Pets (2007), winner of the Best Film Award at the 2007 Moscow International Film Festival. A minimal narrative, Strozheva’s film tells the story of Natalia, an enslaved and emotionally frozen young woman who suddenly finds herself freed from bondage when her cruel overlord/husband drops dead one cold morning. As Natalia hauls the fat corpse to the morgue, a younger and far more desirable Russian beau makes his move on the woman’s body. And though for a time Natalia submits to her new mate, it soon begins to dawn on her that this is all tastes a bit too much like the same old wine. So she paints a canoe and begins a search for happiness elsewhere.

Like the more difficult The Banishment, Traveling with Pets provides a clear example of the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky on young Russian filmmakers. Although not a particularly complex, religious or philosophical drama, Strozheva’s film nevertheless employs the distinctively Tarkovskian approach by engaging its audience in a kind of metaphysical journey through a subjectivist Russian landscape (captured in typically beautiful de-saturated tones by director of photography Oleg Lukichev). Simultaneously personal and allegorical of the nation at large, Traveling with Pets was another film concerned with the finding of identity, in this case not an identity lost, but an identity yet to be discovered. Watching Natalia’s face gradually open over the course of the narrative, Strozheva invites her audience (though without obligation) to witness the thawing of Russia.

These were just a few of the stand-out films at this year’s resurrection. It was a fine season—a real reflection of the health of the Russian film industry today. And had I the room I would just as willingly heap praise on Nikita Mikhalov’s legal drama 12 (2007), Sergei Dvortseyov’s lovely Tulpan (2008), Alexei Uchitel’s harrowing war-drama Captive (2008) and Aleksei Popogrebsky’s multi award winning Simple Things (2007). All of these films were, of course, quite different. But in saying that, it’s not altogether irrational for a person to claim their general appreciation for Russian cinema. There is a perspective that a national cinema adopts—a position in relationship to the rest of the world. And in Russian cinema this position tends to be at one step removed from what we are used to here in Australia. It’s an aloofness to the rules of the game that we might label “reflective”, or “eccentric” or just plain “deep.” In any case, it’s helpful to take a deep breath of Russian cinema’s aloofness, because in doing so, we can also afford to take a step back, and begin to discern, at the very least, what does and does not matter.

A GENEROUS, INSTRUCTIVE AND MOVING BONUS FOR SYDNEYSIDERS ENJOYING THE 2008 RUSSIAN RESURRECTION FILM FESTIVAL WAS THE SCREENING OF AN EXCELLENT PRINT OF THE 92 MINUTE SILENT FILM CLASSIC NEW BABYLON (1929), PROJECTED ONTO A LARGE SCREEN AND ACCOMPANIED BY THE ORIGINAL DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SCORE PLAYED BY THE SBS YOUTH ORCHESTRA. IT WAS THE COMPOSER’S FIRST FULL-LENGTH SCORE AND HIS ONLY ONE FOR SILENT FILM. THE RESULTING JUXAPOSTION OF MUSIC AND IMAGE WAS REVELATORY, NOT LEAST IN THE COMPOSER’S RESTRAINT, LARGELY WORKING AGAINST THE COMPULSION TO LITERALISE OR, WHEN HE HAD TO, WORKING TO GLORIOUS EXCESS, MATCHING THE FILMMAKER’S MONTAGED DELIRIUM OF DECADENCE AND REVOLUTION.

Gregoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s New Babylon is endlessly inventive, always coherent and complexly empathetic despite a couple of stock class villains and predictable but brilliantly realised juxtapositions of war and shopping. Set during the Paris Commune of 1871, a young woman working in a luxurious department store, a crystalline palace, identifies with the city’s exploited workers, but her attention is increasingly drawn to a young soldier. Exhausted, empty of emotion, he seems a likely candidate for the cause but, despite his growing love for her and his own maltreatment at the hands of the bourgeosie, he remains on the side of the establishment, digging our heroine’s grave, by way of grim tribute, as she awaits peremptory execution in flooding rain. Throughout, the camera’s gaze allows us to read emotional subtleties in faces that underplay rather than overact, and there’s music in the very editing. The orchestra, conducted by Matthew Krel (who also played the piano passage in synch with the doomed musician on the onscreen commune barricade) rose to the occasion with a clarity and delicacy of playing that revealed in the score both the exuberance of the early Shostakovich symphonies and the austerity of the later.

The reception of the film and its music in 1929 was restrained, both regarded as ironic and intellectual, a taste of the brutal oppression of the arts to come in the 1930s. This Australian premiere screening of the film with live music provided clear evidence of the innovations and the nuances that Stalinism would not tolerate. The audience, many of them Russian-Australians, applauded this Soviet era classic fulsomely.

2008 Russian Resurrection Film Festival, New Babylon, directors Gregoriy Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, music Dmitri Shostakovich, conductor Matthew Krel, SBS Youth Orchestra, City Recital Hall, Sydney, Nov 9

WONDER IS THAT AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE CHARACTERISED BY THE PLEASURE OF AMAZEMENT, ADMIRATION AND DELIGHT IN THE QUALITIES OF A THING, A FEELING OF THE FRESHNESS OF THE WORLD. RENÉ DESCARTES DESCRIBED IT IN HIS PASSIONS OF THE SOUL AS “A SUDDEN SURPRISE OF THE SOUL THAT BRINGS IT ABOUT THAT THE SOUL GOES ON TO CONSIDER WITH ATTENTION OBJECTS THAT ARE RARE AND EXTRAORDINARY TO IT…IT MAKES US LEARN AND RETAIN IN OUR MEMORY THINGS THAT UNTIL THEN WE WERE IGNORANT OF.” WONDER OFTEN HAS AT LEAST TWO MOMENTS, THE FIRST PLEASURE OF SURPRISE THAT IS MORE STRONGLY SOMATIC, IMMEDIATE AND UNREFLECTIVE—THE ‘AH!’ OF WONDER—AND THE SECOND THAT IS MORE STRONGLY INTELLECTUAL, THE DRIVE WITHIN WONDER TOWARD CURIOSITY, QUESTIONING AND THE SEARCH FOR EXPLANATION.

American philosopher Philip Fisher argues that wonder, or “the aestheticisation of delight”, is “the most neglected of primary aesthetic experiences within modernity”, a movement more often characterised in terms of the terror of the sublime. It is an aesthetic experience he (along with several other philosophers and art theorists in recent times) seeks to revalorise, for contrary to the sensations of privation and fear characterised by the sublime, in wonder the beholder’s perception is ego-transcending and unselfish, at times so struck by a thing’s originality that preconceptions or a definite goal or purpose fall away. In wonder, the world is seen as beautiful, cognition is more receptive, and the viewer is more open to new ideas.

I begin with this short (apparent) digression on the philosophy of wonder because it was my primary aesthetic experience on visiting the latest temporary exhibition in Madrid’s renowned museum of modern and contemporary art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Máquinas & Almas (Souls & Machines) may come packaged in rhetoric reminiscent of ‘new media’ technophilia of the 1990s—transformation, connectivity, interactivity—yet most of the works elude these curatorial constraints with élan, striking the viewer with a wonder that leads to an enlivened and broadened thinking about the world in general, not just the role of technology and its impact. And together with that broadened thinking comes a sense of genuine delight at the ingenuity and creativity of the makers (a feeling that does not mark one’s exit from an exhibition of contemporary art often enough!).

In a dim room, a round pool of dense black oil suddenly springs to life: conical bubbles surge in formation to the surface, rising to an implausible height, creating ambiguous impressions in constant movement: miniature cities, lunar landscapes, or microorganisms multiplying in agar. At first, wonderment triggers pleasurable flights of fancy, before pricking the curiosity and releasing the pleasure of intellectual inquiry: could the forms be caused by magnetic fields interacting with iron filings? Saciko Kodoma’s Protrude, Flow (2001-2008) is in fact one instance of a large body of work in which the artist uses computers to regulate the movement of metallic fluid—as in electronics and medical diagnostic tools—by magnetic forces. The viewers’ process of inquiry eventually leads them to realise that it is their voices and ambient noise that causes the fluids to change form. The work renders invisible digital networks tangible, imbricating the viewer in that network in a way that ultimately becomes comprehensible.

The subtlety of Kodoma’s interface and the work’s potent embodiment of digital networks in formal elegance are evident in a number of works here (no ‘drag and click’ anywhere, thankfully!). Daniel Rozin’s ‘mirror works’ recall the theatre warm-up game where one actor follows the actions of another as in a mirror reflection. However, standing opposite us is not another person but a mechanical ‘canvas’ composed of a formal amalgam of small parts that swivel and click into position to reflect our movements, not unlike stadium cards. That each part is a recognisable object in its own right, either a graphic disc, or, in Rozin’s most amusing kinetic sculpture Trash Mirror (2002-2008), individual pieces of rubbish picked up off a New York street, renders the canvas’ transformation into a screen even more astounding. The work offers a physical analogue of the pixel that helps the viewer cognise the ‘mysterious’ process of digital image making. The revelation of the intricate working mechanisms—a nest of wires and circuit boards encased in Perspex behind each piece transforms real time video into motion calibrated to a grey scale—doubles the delight the audience takes in playing ‘follow’ with what first appears to be an abstract painting. This play between mediums of representation—painting, photography, video and computer graphics—and their respective relationship to human subjectivity further enhances the viewer’s engagement with Rozin’s work.

Yet another work that gives material presence to ‘immaterial’ computer networks—specifically social and communication networks—with humour and ingenuity is Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s Listening Post (2002-2006). A collaboration between an artist and a professor of statistics, this large-scale installation comprises several hundred LED panels that transmit in real time choice phrases from internet chat room conversations. As the panels flicker ‘Korea will be delt [stet] with by China and Russia I bet’, or ‘Toothless blonde, whoever you are, you made my day’, and a digitised HAL-like voice reads selections out loud, the viewer is literally immersed in the network, imparted with a physical sense of being inside other people’s intimate thoughts and desire to connect. Whether the exchanges be facile and banal, or poignant and revelatory, the installation presents their variety and density in such a manner as to inspire awe in human communication and imagination, and of course in the capacity of computer networks to facilitate this connectivity: this is truly a wonderful work.

Philip Fisher’s treatise on wonder centres around the drive to explain that most wonderful of natural phenomena, the rainbow; it is the rainbow’s awe-inspiring beauty that sparks its investigation. This conjunction of scientific inquiry and aesthetics permeates this exhibition. Trained as an artist and a physicist, Paul Friedlander practiced for many years as a lighting designer for major theatrical events before devoting himself to art. His spectacular kinetic light installations (including Abstract Cosmology, 2008), where again a purportedly immaterial medium is rendered concrete, demonstrate the intricate links between these disparate discourses. Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures, such as Animaris Modularis (2008), also represent a cross-over between art and science: the artist builds animal-like structures from electrical ducting which are then ‘evolved’ into ‘intelligent’ creatures through a combination of computer programming and field testing (on the windy beaches of Holland). Musician and Renaissance man David Byrne lent his voice to robotics expert David Hanson’s sophisticated specimen to create an eerily ‘alive’ synthetic character, Julio (2008), who ahhs and umms, clears his throat, and looks self-consciously around before breaking into heart-felt song.

Thoughtfully and accessibly installed—the number of works is not overwhelming, there are beanbags to encourage longer contemplation, and the works are well-separated through lighting and screens—Souls & Machines brings together an exceptional selection of works that I would argue go beyond the ‘new media’ categorisation. Rather, the best works here spark wonder, leading the viewer from surprise, through to curiosity and understanding, not only about the impact of digital technologies but more broadly about the current nature of human perception, relationships and our being in the world.

Máquinas & Almas (Souls & Machines), curators Montxo Algora and Jose Luis de Vicente, artists Antoni Abad; David Byrne and David Hanson; Daniel Canogar; Vuk Cosic; Evru; Harun Farocki; Paul Friedlander; Pierre Huyghe; Theo Jansen; Natalie Jerimijenko and Angel Borrego; Sachiko Kodama; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; John Maeda; Chico MacMurtie/Amorphic Robot Works; Antoni Muntadas; Daniel Rozin; Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, June-October

THERE’S QUITE A BIT OF HYPE COMING OUT OF BRISBANE’S GALLERY OF MODERN ART (GOMA) ABOUT THE PREMIER OF QUEENSLAND’S NATIONAL NEW MEDIA ART AWARD. NINE WORKS, 10 ARTISTS, $75K FOR THE WINNER AND A SWEET $25K TRAVELLING SCHOLARSHIP FOR SOME LUCKY EMERGING WORTHY AS WELL. GOOD MONEY IN THE CONTEXT OF AUSTRALIAN ART FUNDING. (THERE’S A LOT OF THESE PREMIER’S AWARDS FOR SOMETHING OR OTHER IN AUSTRALIA. PEOPLE OFTEN SLAG OFF AT POLITICIANS BUT YOU CAN’T DENY THE GENEROSITY. I THINK ANYBODY WHO FORKS OUT THEIR OWN MONEY LIKE THAT TO SUPPORT THE ARTS OR MEDICAL RESEARCH OR WHATEVER DESERVES THE BADGING RIGHTS. GOOD ON THEM.)

Anyway, into GOMA and up some stairs to the show. The space is smallish and dimly lit. Four of the works are in shared or open space and the five others are in rooms of their own—sort of. Sort of, as during the times I visited there was no sound dampening which meant that all the works shared the same soundtrack—a blend of the three loudest pieces and whatever sound (if any) they had of their own.

On to the show. Being new media there are a few projection/screen based works. The winning piece, Everything (see cover image), by Peter Alwast (it’s an acquisitive award so into the GOMA collection it goes) uses three large projections of what seem to be cut and spliced together clichés of digi-art animation. Shiny pipes, translucent shapes, clouds, mountains, CAD style building frames, lickable butterscotch cars, reflections into shiny domes to show off some projective geometry/linear algebra. Over the top runs a soundtrack that also seems to recycle the standards of collaged and cut-up sound, even down to the slightly manic sounding street preacher. (Subpsychotic street person rant = gritty urban equivalent of salt-of-the-earth charming peasant folk wisdom?) Overall, there’s an aura of slick and meaningless process, an empty consumption of surfaces that gets a bit creepy.

Another projection piece is CuteXDoom II from Anita Fontaine. Fontaine has used the Unreal game engine to build a simple race-against-time game. Basically you get poisoned and have to find a bunch of stuff and escape or die. The effect of the poison—a blurry sort of wooziness to the graphics is a nice touch. Modding Unreal levels is popular amongst gamer types—it’s a whole nerdy sub-culture—and I’m not sure where work like this fits—it doesn’t seem to function as game, as critique, or as resonant play.

Onward to the works with actual monitors. Sam Smith’s Control structure. A giant head—nicely tiled plywood facetted like a crude avatar—spills black plastic gunk onto the floor. From one eye protrudes a camera lens. Out the back of the head—reference occipital lobe for visual system—is more gunk and a flat panel with some animation/footage playing. Bits of static, some views of what looks like a control room, people about, two screens. Image of bloke with long shiny-rubber tubes coming from each eye and joining into a lens. It’s got an 80s Videodrome look about it. Critique-wise, the giant head is alone, the body is gone. Without the body, the brain is in a vat and all the inputs—digital or analog —are equivalent. Hence the head explodes and black gunk oozes out.

Near the entrance is Adam Nash’s Seventeen unsung songs, an installation for the online virtual space, Second Life. Nash has produced a typical 3D landscape to wander about in, and populated it with interactive virtual, and sculptural, sound devices—sound toys. Many of the sound toys can be manipulated real-time by the user. As a single user a virtual space like the slightly clunky Second Life cannot really provide the quality experience for interactive sound that dedicated software can, but it is as a multi-user opportunity that this sort of artwork potentially shines. It is also impossible for a gallery to guarantee a multi-user experience and so in some ways this means that the exhibited work is indicative of the possibilities of the real work rather than the real work itself.

John Tonkin provides an engaging interactive work: time and motion study v2. You enter a room with monitors on all four walls. One has a camera and mouse control. You put yourself in front of the camera and appear on the screen as a sequence of time lapse photos trailing off into the past—sort of 3D Muybridge with a little memory loss. The monitors on the other walls play back the past recordings of others who have used the work. It’s fun to use and, eventually, your time with it will enter into the database of previous visitors to be played for someone else.

Oottherongoo (your country) is a four-panel video by Julie Dowling. You sit on a bench, sounds above, screens in front, and watch what seems to be a home movie/audiovisual display split into four parallel image streams. There’s a journey to the bush, shots of the bitumen, some old family photos, some beautiful shots of a sun-bleached stock holding pen. A dry as a chip dingo strung up from a tree. A woman’s face looks out—a little tentative, later there’s a trace of tears and sadness.

Mari Velonaki’s Circle D: Fragile has two well crafted wooden boxes sitting next to each other on top of another, equally crafted, wooden stand. The boxes have matt screens on four sides where sentences will appear when you rotate or handle the boxes. This is quite a lovely piece although it can be hard to operate and get the full effect—but the nostalgia of the craftsmanship and materials, the apparent human agency in the way the text appears to be handwritten, and the need to hold the objects (to bring them closer as if accepting or caring), is quite poetic.

Next to Peter Alwast’s Everything is Natalie Jeremijenko’s eco installation Green Light, which functions both as an object and as a possible intervention into community energy use. Ferns in glass bowls hang like a nice display at a nursery or in some corporate space. The ferns are of a type that filters the air. Individual lights above each bowl funnel energy down from solar collectors on the roof. There’s a big X on the wall and a small video showing (somewhat obliquely) how the system might be installed in a domestic or small scale environment. Jeremijenko has produced a large body of exceptional work that functions across engineering, art and design. Green Light is more in the engineering design camp—lacking the symbolic moment that her piece Tree Logic has, where oak trees are suspended upside down to grow and bend up to the sunlight in a kind of aspirational tropism.

Finally, what for me was the best work in the show, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s Earthstar, which uses the tools of scientific investigation to create a poetic engagement with the Sun. Two tables sit in parallel at the centre of the room. On top lie large antennae—graphite rods bound with copper wire—and a bit of audio mixing gear, picking up and playing real time bursts of radio frequencies from the Sun. On the wall a large video projection of the solar chromosphere—a layer of super heated hydrogen only revealed though radical filtering of the image. Opposite the projection are two enclosed vessels, gorgeous refrigerators carefully holding something precious and fragile—molecular solutions designed as fragrances of the Sun. We can sample the smells using paper sample sticks held up to the nose—another gesture of approach.

The effect of the sound in Earthstar is to encourage close listening and contemplation. The video encourages a kind of awe at the astonishing power and immensity of the Sun. And the fragrances, bushfires and insecticide, ozone and coriander, free molecules brought into contact with the nasal epithelia, evoke the memory of touching a world that can only exist when it is itself in contact with the Sun.

Outside of the sophisticated poetry of the Haines and Hinterding piece the show is steady and a little safe. For me some works fit more into design or video, or lack the generative poetics of deep art. There is nothing that strikes me with the excitement or ambition of a work such as Kurt Hentschlager’s astonishing ZEE (Austria), which uses fog and stroboscopic light to induce overwhelming visual hallucinations, or has the smarts of Ruth Schnell’s Disappearence (Austria), which can only be seen by the peripheral vision, disappearing when looked at directly. Closer to home, how could an artist like Keith Armstrong not be represented—either with work such as Intimate transactions (as part of transmute collective) or Shifting intimacies (with Charlotte Vincent and Guy Webster)? If the award is to live up to the marketing hyperbole (“…some of the most exciting developments in contemporary art today”) a more adventurous and poetic selection is to be hoped for in the future.

Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award, artists Peter Alwast, Julie Dowling, Anita Fontaine, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Natalie Jeremijenko, Adam Nash, Sam Smith, John Tonkin, Mari Velonaki, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Nov 1-Feb 8

In a significant boost for new media arts, the Queensland Government, in partnership with the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), has instituted a major national prize of $75,000 for an Australian new media art work from a selected nine judged by Tony Ellwood, Director, Queensland Art Gallery; Melinda Rackham, Executive Director, Australian Network for Art and Technology; and Liz Hughes, Executive Director, Experimenta Media Arts.

The inaugural award was announced on October 31 by Premier Anna Bligh. The judges also highly commended the multi-media installation Earthstar 2008 by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding.

Melinda Rackham in her account of the selected works wrote, “The Premier’s Award recipient Peter Alwast’s 3D-rendered, visually luscious hyper-realistic space, titled Everything, utilises a multi-layered mashup aesthetic, inserting divergent source material seamlessly into a three channel video installation” (“Big Bang for Australian Media Arts”, ANAT Communications, email, Nov 11).

Not since the establishment of the $25,000 acquisitive biennial Ann Landa Award (the first award exhibition in Australia for moving image and new media work, inaugurated in 2005 and administered and shown by the Art Gallery of New South Wales) has there been an award that now ranks in value with prizes in literature and visual arts. It’s a timely ackowledgement for the whole new media arts field given difficulties artists have faced in recent years.

As well as the major prize there’s a $25,000 Premier’s New Media Art Scholarship for an emerging Queensland artist to travel and study. This was awarded to Leah Barclay, a Queensland Conservatorium of Music graduate whose “new media sound compositions draw on environmental and political themes.” Barclay is also co-director with Kayte New of the inaugural Ignition new media and film festival coming up in Noosa, May 2009.

New media arts is enjoying somewhat of a resurgence, if more evidently under the banner “media arts.” This new award for both established and emerging artists will give hope to the many artists who have dedicated themselves to the creative mastering of ever-mutating technologies. It’s good to see the Queensland Government leading the way in publicly acknowledging their skill, commitment and artistry. RT

On February 7, 2009, audiences in parts of regional Queensland can join finalist Adam Nash for a tour of his Seventeen unsung songs 2007 in the online environment of Second Life.

Peter Alwast is exhibiting at GBK gallery in Sydney, opening November 27; www.gbk.com.au.

ONCE, THIS WAS A FESTIVAL WHOSE NAME SUMMARISED IT NEATLY, AT LEAST IN MY RAPIDLY DECAYING MEMORY. ELECTROFRINGE WAS THE CROOK BETWEEN THE BURGEONING BRANCHES OF FRINGE DOOF CULTURE AND THE EMERGING ELECTRONIC ARTS. FLOCKS OF DARKWAVE CYBERPUNK FASHIONISTAS AND SQUAT ACTIVISTS GATHERED THERE. THE COIN IN TRADE WAS ESOTERIC SKILLS LEARNED ON THE KNEE OF EXPENSIVE AND TIME-CONSUMING EXPERIENCE BEYOND THE REACH OF THE OWNER’S MANUAL.

But these days everyone totes subscriptions to MAKE magazine and workshops in the ubiquitous Arduino microcontroller are regular in every major city…Locative art projects are a consumer commodity and major companies compete in elaborate excursions into augmented and virtual realities, and dance music seems to have fallen out of vogue as a vector of revolution since Australian Idol. The idea of turning up in person to learn how to get into the esoteric new media seems about as timely as taking a bachelor degree in alchemical transmutation of elements.

Electrofringe organisers Alex White, Elmar Trefz and Somaya Langley seem ready to ride the zeitgeist. The festival this year is exhaustingly diverse, with a line-up examining hybrid arts and fringe culture from all manner of unexpected angles. Technological art is no longer something held together with string scavenged from the dumpster and Japanese mail order—although Aras Vaichas gave an impressive workshop in building his Wävrüta digital effect unit from little more than that. Rather, the new media skillset is a commercially valuable commodity. Where Electrofringe is still fringey is in the collaborative, defiantly independent atmosphere it fosters.

I’m prepared to bet that by most plausible measures the technical sophistication of technology on display has decreased over time. The exception might be the online works—my favourite example of this is Pip Shea’s amusing interactive Neoconfessional, a hybrid online/video installation piece. Online, a standard social video sharing network collects uploaded footage of TINA’s compulsively boundary-testing punters admitting their trespasses into conservatism; offline, projectors and speakers in the performance venues toilets show those video clips and the stalls echo with a novel variety of public obscenity: “I don’t even like new media art.” In general, though, the shows this year have tended towards the technologically simple, and steered away from competing with the staunchly funded technological extravaganzas of your ISEAs and Biennales. Most of the successful works cluster around the ideas of the collaborative, the interactive, the site specific, and the low-budget.

The Tape Projects show certainly looks to an op-shop kind of electronics for its display, filling a gallery with flip book animations and turntables playing copies of a single locked-groove record through second-hand stereos, speakers arranged at random. The spartan presentation hides some sophisticated production; tracks on the disc include dozens of micro-compositions from as many luminary composers jumbled together with little to identify them to the listener (although the flip books have front-page credits). Punters lower the tonearm at whim and find themselves participants in a centreless, endless performance of phasing sound. I’ll admit I am unnecessarily fond of multi-speaker installations, but this is quite something. The gallery space sports a handful of listeners seated on the floor transfixed—I can’t recall the last time I saw that outside of a performance.

The League of Imaginary Scientists have a handmade aesthetic, but with a chaotic flavour; in labcoats and glasses they distribute parodical school kid activity packs filled with bits of simple cardboard and lenses and invite you to stake out real estate space with the telescope you make from the parts. There’s some dance and a bit of live video too, so that we can call it new media art, but it hinges upon the engaging personalities of the performers more than any technology. Indeed, at their artist talk at DORKBOT/Sydney the preceding week, they left the audience dumbfounded by the absence of technological obscurity behind the presentation. Their subject matter is inversion of space and time: riding a bike back into your childhood, passing objects through a video camera, colonising the stars with cardboard and plastic because the planet is doomed. It’s the most cheerful investigation of our dire planetary circumstances that I can imagine, pulling at least a wry utopianism out of our scientifically projected apocalypse.

At the other end of the technological spectrum, the intricate algorithmic stylings of the Advanced Beauty show were getting a lot of media anticipation. Projected on the wall of the John Paynter Gallery for a two-week season overlapping the festival proper, this is a series of algorithmic single-channel video pieces exploring ideas of synaesthesia, and the algorithmic cogeneration of sound and visuals. But if that experience is to even start to approach the totality that synaesthesia implies, it is worth sticking to the surround-sound cinema screening (which sadly I missed). Otherwise, you may as well watch it at your leisure on the web.

By contrast, across the hallway from the gallery in the old gaol museum, Fiona McGregor stages You Have The Body, a site-specific one-on-one durational performance. It’s a didactic endurance piece, which is to say: precisely what I would avoid seeing if I had read about it. In the flesh it’s totally engrossing. You are led into the venue bound, with a bag over your head, and drawn through a weird transmutation of the gallery-going experience into an Orwellian abduction. McGregor’s attention to detail makes this a formidable piece, a pastiche of totalitarian horror and Australian bureaucratic mundanity. I won’t divulge the whole piece, mind, since that’s half the point of the experience, and performances are ongoing.

Back in the Paynter Gallery, Sengewald’s interactive video works arrest a few of us—an interactive video projection appends shadow tails to gallery visitors and places them amidst a swarm of rats that flee from their outline. However, the simplest and most interactive of all, by my statistically questionable 10 minute survey of the space is German collective TheGreenEyl who’ve covered a gallery wall with removable orange stickers and invited the public to do what they will with them in a work they call Appeel. The name is a low point, but the work is better—the negative space left by the absent stickers leaves a fascinating trace as much as do the orange dots that soon adorn every sufficiently slow-moving dry surface in the city. The evolving, democratic, negative image in the gallery is satisfying; but so is the sporulation of dots across the city as gallery-goers become willing dispersers to the day-glo seed; and later on new orange sticker walls germinate across the city, until my sleeves come away fluorescent from the table at the festival club.

Between Birchville Cat Motel (NZ), KK NULL (Japan) and Maruosa (Japan) there is a multicoloured bouquet of noise musics, worth hearing indeed but less interesting to write about. (“Loud!”) RAVENATION though, is a performance worth detailing—worth, even getting thrown out of for disorderly behaviour and sneaking back in over the beergarden fence. Curated by Melbourne performance collective Gooey On the Inside, the show assembles a kind of mocking electro cabaret that veers between deft satire and simple mockery but mostly hangs out in the vicinity of general mayhem.

Half a generation since the festival was founded, Electrofringe’s early days are already fodder for (re)appropriation by the young turks as much as the pop culture canon; everything from breakcore to cabaret is compressed in RAVENATION into a parodical three hour hyper-rave with smoke machine, lasers and fake MDMA included, not to mention an animatronic latex penis mask, all broadcast in animated GIF art on Myspace. These folks are not just staking out a claim for their area of practice on the fringes of the mainstream, but wresting it back from the ageing cohort who now run the flagship, and producing an impressively slick show while they’re at it.

Programming touring international artists is fantastic for Electrofringe’s profile; but it’s the ability to invite the cream of troublemakers into the halls of marginally-more-power that keep it alive and relevant. I can’t wait until Gooey on the Inside get their comeuppance in turn in a few years’ time.

AUSTRALIA’S FIRST INTERSTELLAR MESSAGE WAS TRANSMITTED LIVE FROM MELBOURNE’S SIDNEY MYER MUSIC BOWL ON MAY 31 2008, THE CLOSING NIGHT OF THE NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL. THE MESSAGE WAS AUDIO RECORDED AND FILMED, STREAMED ONTO THE WEB AND TRANSMITTED BY DEEP SPACE COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK (FLORIDA) INTO OUTER SPACE UP TO THREE LIGHT YEARS AWAY. THE NATURE AND CONTENT OF THE MESSAGE WERE UNPRECEDENTED IN THE HISTORY OF INTERSTELLAR MESSAGING.

A crowd of 500 gathered under the Autumn night sky to witness the event, which was stylishly introduced by Anton Enus, best-known as a presenter for SBS Television’s World News Australia. The message itself was delivered as a highly subjective letter of approach from Earth; a funny, tender and musical appeal to whatever extra-terrestrial other—or others—might, somehow, be capable of responding. It was created by an artistic team led by writer and performer Willoh S Weiland.

The Music Bowl event was one performative facet of Yelling at Stars, a project of sustained, collaborative enquiry focused on interstellar communication. October 2008 marked a new phase of development for the project: Weiland and researcher Nicky Forster presented Yelling at Stars in Glasgow, at Less Remote (www.lessremote.org), an international forum for cross-disciplinary dialogue about the future of space exploration. Less Remote ran parallel with the 59th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) and, during both events, Yelling at Stars was meanwhile seen in Glasgow as a “performance research installation” at the Centre for Contemporary Art. In anticipation of the UN International Year of Astronomy in 2009, Weiland told me the following about the experience of Yelling at Stars so far, and its evolving scope.

feeling the void

“Speaking for the interstellar transmission was very different from any other performance experience I’ve had. It was like feeling the void a little bit. The sensation was wonderful, but it was a big responsibility to be articulate. I’d been carrying a hope that people would connect with a sense of the impossibility of looking for an answer in the vastness of space. The joyous laughter from the audience was a relief. I was hoping that the large frame of the Music Bowl would hold, would allow the small person to be real, and it worked. I wore a bright orange dress, gumboots and a necklace of pegs. I stood in a simple wooden canoe holding a posy of blue roses, and the canoe was surrounded by a landscape of spheres—our own constellation in close-up. It wasn’t spectacular. It was really, really simple, the simplest thing I’ve ever done, which is hilarious.

“It seems strange calling the message a ‘script’ because I didn’t want to speak on behalf of anyone else in the world. There was nothing in the text of the message that isn’t true, that I haven’t experienced directly, or that one of the members of the Yelling at Stars team hasn’t experienced. In the performance I had to try to say everything as if it was real, not acted, so it felt very vulnerable. ‘I don’t know how long we should keep talking before we let the silence be an answer’—that’s one of the lines that gives a sense of the message. Probably if I were a dancer, I would have danced the transmission, but my background is in poetry, and poetry is integral to my sensibility. The spoken language was always heard in relationship to Pip Norman’s sound design; my voice and his music were structured together, as a conversation, artistically encoded.

“The theories, history and issues surrounding interstellar messaging are immense. From the beginning I wanted to keep informing myself, and wanted the audience for the transmission to be informed. I started collaborating with Nicky Forster, who’s a cultural geographer, trained in looking at the wider human context. She worked on generating the information for phase one of the project, the Yelling at Stars website. We come from different backgrounds, but our similar goal is to maintain the integrity of the science.

“Christopher Fluke, at Swinburne University, was our astronomy consultant for the live transmission. He made us aware that the act of sending a message is highly controversial. He drew our attention to the debate that’s been taking place in the astronomical community about ‘who has the right to speak for Earth?’—and to the SETI Institute’s guidelines on interstellar messaging. Then he helped us crunch all the numbers to work out how the message would be sent; explained the scientific detail. He has a deep belief in the arts, yet the performance was very exciting for him as a scientist, in terms of astronomy outreach: all of a sudden, at a hybrid contemporary arts festival in Melbourne, people were engaging with astronomy because of the show.

“The first motivation for Yelling at Stars came from a kind of disordered fact: reading, via Google, that television transmissions are going into space all the time, and that the American sitcom I Love Lucy was one of the first transmissions sent. My response was, ‘I don’t want to be represented to space as a dumb redhead!’ I studied what I could find of the sent messages: they’re dominated by a white, male, post-Enlightenment, positivist agenda which assumes that the world can be categorised into facts, facts that in turn can be condensed and therefore interpreted in a certain way.

“Whether sent out with the Pioneer spacecraft, or as equations via radio waves, the messages really make no attempt to convey the plurality, chaos and poeticism of existence. And because they’re transformed into code, they’re also dominated by issues of translatability. So they seem to magnify problems of representation that I encounter on this planet all the time. And if the human desire to communicate with outer space is based on an authentic desire to share knowledge, then presenting ourselves as a well-adjusted bunch of geniuses won’t start an honest dialogue.”

being part of the conversation

“From the IAC in Glasgow my impressions are that on the surface, the aesthetic of space industry culture—from NASA down to the satellite manufacturers—is the same as it appears in the footage of the moon landing; still very much like ‘men going forward to plant the flag.’ …[T]he capacity to have a space program is dominated by appearances of military strength, which is the domain of men.

“The IAC was an environment where discussion focused on the possible colonisation of space, the potential to live on other planets, commercial spaceflight and so on. These are missions that are being actively pursued. As an artist and a woman my concern is whether the discussion and the ventures are going to be dominated by the same paradigms that have failed here on Earth. The cultural utilisation of space, and conversation around avoiding the mistakes that we’ve made here on Earth, are particularly areas that the arts and humanities are able to contribute to. This is what Less Remote was about.

“On an artistic level the use of the personal and the poetic in composing the Yelling at Stars transmission was an attempt to give weight to information that has historically been maligned as feminine, and therefore unworthy of dialogue—especially within the scientific community. That’s the interest for me; to try to hold this ‘other’ information, this mode of awareness, and have the scale of importance of different knowledges a little bit readjusted.

“Yelling at Stars is proving the most creatively satisfying project that I’ve undertaken. The outcomes have integrated the research and the artistic elements—made them inseparable. And the ongoing research has been quite a revelation in terms of the way I work. Being ‘part of the conversation’ in Glasgow has brought up half-forgotten ideas about activism and art; about getting involved in the dialogue, not just reflecting.

“In 2009 Nicky Forster and I will take up a three-month Synapse residency at the Swinburne University Centre for Astrophysics. So the project has opened up for me a wider sense of artistic responsibility to start engaging with this kind of institution, to try to find new ways into these places, so we can help translate what they are into the world.”

the drake equation

“Since presenting Yelling at Stars in Glasgow I’ve started to find the question of an ‘ideal listener’ in outer space more and more amusing. I love to imagine that we might burst through some Truman Show-type barrier, and there’s heaven, or that it’s populated by ghosts—which are, of course, very human ideas. I do think that extra-terrestrial life exists, and my thinking’s been buoyed by overhearing an astronomer saying at Less Remote, ‘Oh, life on other planets will be discovered within 50 years.’

“Back in 1960 Dr Frank Drake, one of the pioneers of radio astronomy and a founder of SETI, proposed the following equation: the number of detectable civilisations in space equals the average rate of star formation x the fraction of those stars with planets x the average number of those planets that are habitable x the fraction of those habitable planets where life actually emerges x the fraction of that life that is intelligent x the fraction of that intelligent life that becomes capable of interstellar signalling x the length of time that those signals remain detectible.

…Don’t wait by the phone! But you know, I believe absolutely in the unexpected. JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello [in the novel of the same name] defines herself as ‘a secretary of the invisible.’ Maybe I’ll try for ‘a secretary of the impossible’.”

Yelling at the Stars, project director, writer, performer Willoh S Weiland, research writer, audio documentary Nicky Forster, spoken message introduction Anton Enus, composer, sound designer Pip Norman, video/web Andrew Fraser, Monki Web Design; www.yellingatstars.com; http://www.cca-glasgow.com/; www.seti.org

A SWELTERING FRIDAY MORNING IN SINGAPORE, AT THE WIND-UP OF THE 2008 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ELECTRONIC ART (ISEA, DIRECTED BY GUNALAN NADARAJAN), IS WHEN I CHOOSE TO HEAD TOWARDS COOLER GALLERY SPACES. THIS YEAR, AMONGST DOZENS OF ARTISTS PRESENTATIONS, SEVERAL PERFORMANCES, ROUNDTABLE WORKSHOPS, NIGHT-TIME GIGS AND KEYNOTE SPEECHES, THE SYMPOSIUM PLAYED HOST TO FIVE GALLERY EXHIBITIONS. AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND ARE WELL REPRESENTED BY EXPERIMENTA PLAY++ AND CLOUDLAND: DIGITAL ART FROM AOTEAROA (CURATED BY SU BALLARD, STELLA BRENNAN AND ZITA JOYCE). OTHERS WERE LUCID FIELDS—MEDIA ARTWORKS BY SWISS ARTISTS-IN-LABS, MALAYSIAN DIGITAL ARTS ON DISPLAY IN RELOCATIONS AND THE MAIN ISEA 2008 JURIED EXHIBITION SITUATED INSIDE THE GLARING WHITE EXTERIOR OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SINGAPORE.

video simplicity

On entering Cloudland I’m mesmerised by Alex Monteith’s Composition for farmer, three dogs and 120 sheep (NZ, 2006) for four-channel video installation. The beauty and simplicity of this work are immediately apparent yet, unlike the majority of video works in gallery spaces, it has me sitting on the floor within minutes, and remaining for over half an hour. As I observe the herd of sheep traverse the wide multi-channel projection—which is angled into a gallery corner—I’m aware that only the barking of the dogs and the sound of the farmer’s whistles accompany this imagery. Such sounds repeated at length, have the potential to annoy, instead here they transport the viewer into a zone—perhaps not directly into the landscape of the work itself—but definitely far away from the gallery walls and the humidity of Singapore lurking outside. This is partly achieved by the decision to project in a wedge configuration, allowing the audience to gain an overall perspective and immerse themselves in the work. Ultimately these choices enhance the captivating nature of this video work.

installation exclusion

At the opposite end of the small gallery space is et al.’s the social meaning of things (NZ, 2008). While Monteith’s Composition for farmer… openly offers a viewing experience, et al.’s work is uninviting, and most likely this is intentional. Caged behind two temporary six-foot wire fences is a mundane scene comprising a white plastic garden chair and a desk with laptop displaying a (seemingly hostile) three-dimensional game environment that is also duplicated on the wall behind. What looks boring becomes captivating the closer you shift towards it. It’s a work very much situated in the context of the political and social critique of border issues and inhumane confinement. It has the potential to draw the audience in, while simultaneously distancing them. But without socio-political reference points the installation and the fences could block the experience entirely.

intimate interfaces

In the even cooler depths of the National Museum of Singapore, the 16 works on display in the ISEA juried exhibition—comprising multiple installations and audio-visual projections—demand more than a single day of viewing. The show is the result of the ISEA 2008 Artist in Residence program, where some 20 artists were based in university laboratories and departments around Singapore in the three-month lead-up to the symposium.

Several works remain prominent in my memory, including Gender Strategies for Loitering (Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan, India, 2008) which focuses on gender inequalities in India and Singapore. In both it is socially acceptable for men to loiter in public space without question, yet respectability is stripped from any woman who chooses to do the same. Also appealing were Momoyo Torimitsu’s Smile, Wear it Like a Costume! (Japan/USA, 2008) based on research into the interpretations of the smile carried out in collaboration with the National University of Singapore Face Group, and Clea T Waite’s The Water Book (An Encyclopedia of Water) (USA/Germany, 2008) with its exquisite water touch interface I mistook for a glass tabletop, almost dropping my camera into the depths. In The Water Book, light projected words appear in the water acting as touchable hotspots for triggering video play back.

Kelly Jaclynn Andres’ Finally, We Hear One Another (Canada, 2008) is a wearable sound-oriented work designed for pairs of participants. With hood-like bonnets, each audience member wishing to take part in the experience partners up, hoods up and is then able to wander through the museum. A cone, containing a microphone, positioned at the back of the bonnet, is used to transmit audio to the other participant, permitting the wearer to experience the sound world of their partner. While conceptually poetic, this work breaks down the moment you are handed a mobile phone to hold during your sonic exploration. Finally, We Hear One Another exposes the difficulty of media art attempting (and rightly so) to reach beyond the typical plastic and metal interfaces we’re so accustomed to having mediate our experience. Once the cover comes off or the tech falls out of its custom-designed pocket, the illusion bursts and we’re often left holding some gadget with a mass of cables attached.

Standing back to watch a couple of young girls explore the space with this wearable work rejuvenated my initial attraction. Positioned in different parts of the gallery, but not too far away from each other, they were asking loudly “can you hear me, can you hear me…”. Taking the work at face value, without filtering it through an analytical framework, their genuine playfulness and engagement proves, that while they are probably familiar with the underlying technology, this repositioning brings with it actual intrigue.

controller/performer

The sound of a gamelan orchestra permeates the entire exhibition space, and it’s not until I wander into the dedicated Quartet room, that the full effect is felt. Using what I can only assume is a custom-developed gesture recognition system, Tad Ermitano provides the opportunity to conduct a robotic gamelan orchestra by means of various poses. An instructional video helps you to quickly learn some of these hand and arm gestures before stepping up to the conductor’s platform. While the work blends some seemingly unauthentic components (the notion of a traditional western conductor married with a gamelan orchestra for instance), the fun increased the more you conducted. Other members of the audience often stayed in the space for extended periods, observing the odd gestures of the spotlit individual.

challenges

The works in the ISEA 2008 juried exhibition raised more questions about their effectiveness than the significance of their content and the issues they posed. Despite intensive development periods and the complete dedication of the artists, technology can become a barrier, making the audience’s ability to engage difficult. Perhaps this raises broader issue of art, science and technology collaborations in research environments with restricted time frames. In the catalogue, the majority of these artworks read as exceptional. Yet ‘in the flesh’, despite clean production and presentation, their magic was often broken with problems evident in the underlying (sometimes hacked) technological platform coming to the fore.

While the overall curation and layout of the juried exhibition was magnetic, individual works often appeared as a ‘show and tell’ of research outcomes. One particular downside was the over-reliance on traditional video projection and screen display, diminishing other components. The Water Book interface is astounding in itself, but its triggering of video only disappoints. These days, I want the artwork to capture me on an intimate and personal level. For this reason, less tech-heavy works in the Cloudland exhibition, provided ultimately more engaging and rewarding experiences.

ISEA 2008, International Symposium on Electronic Art, director Gunalan Nadarajan, various venues, Singapore, July 25-Aug 3, 2008, www.isea2008singapore.org

Modal Suspension, Relational Architecture 8, Yamaguchi, Japan, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Lozano-Hemmer is one of the subjects of Media City and will be a keynote speaker at the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival

THE MEDIA CITY PROVIDES A SURPRISINGLY COMPREHENSIVE, BEAUTIFULLY-WRITTEN ACCOUNT OF THE TANDEM DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIA AND CITIES. MORE THAN THIS, HOWEVER, THE MEDIA CITY IS A COMPELLING ACCOUNT OF THE VERY CONSTITUTION OF MODERN EXPERIENCE.

McQuire is quick to dismiss the question of media representations of the city, primarily because this question immediately separates media from the rest of life. He is interested instead in media’s interventions in the midst of life, in the production of forms of living, of material becomings.

The “media-architecture complexes” that are central to these material becomings are an increasingly complex mix of “heterogeneous temporalities” and “relational spaces.” During frequent “transitional phases”, the media city is a kind of ongoing experiment in time, space and living.

It is the often forgotten “medium” of electricity, particularly electric light, that made the media city possible in its full form. McQuire gives a wonderful account of the “electrical sublime.” Electric light transforms architectural forms, which become more fluid at the flick of a switch. Material space is blended with the less obviously material. The city itself becomes performative at the same time as cinematic: a dynamic trade of light and shadows. Eventually, William Gibson’s cyberspace of colour and light are to emerge from this. Electricity is a transformer of experience, not just a simple source of energy.

The rest of the book leads into and out of the electrical sublime. Electric light’s concurrent illumination and deformation of the experience of “home” is prefigured, for example, in photography. Photography plays the role of technological memory (often of home), but in part because of the increasing destruction of actual homes and neighbourhoods, as in Haussmann’s reorganisation of Paris. Both photography and the very concept of city-wide organisation increase the abstraction of experience. This makes the likes of advertising and commodification possible, to what are now generic citizens abstracted from a demolished local culture. Relational space becomes more complex. Objects are subordinated to the more abstract relations in which they find themselves. This in turn allows for the further development of media technologies, and the machinic forms of perception they provide, which are meant to visualise the new abstractions of relational space.

The dynamics between media, urban design and experience begin to pre-figure the cinema in the photographic series. Here the series matters more than individual photographs, because it is the series that responds to the question of how one could possibly get an overall view of the new city. Images now begin to form “an information flow in which relations between images assumed heightened importance.” Social and technical life become increasingly subject to these relations, and not just in some high theoretical way. McQuire convincingly maps out the differential force of relations as they are put to work in the actual material constitution of lived, urban experience.

The increased abstraction and complexity of relational spaces in urban life leads to an entire society which “deals less in truth than probability.” Thus the increasing fascination with detective stories and, later, lived experience based upon statistics, risk management, and population-based performance indicators. What McQuire calls the “territory of images” expands: a series of photographic records; postcards; the electrical sublime’s re-image-ing of urban forms; the cinematic attempt to grapple with mobility in a reproduction of the media city’s ongoing temporal shock; even statistics as an attempt to image an otherwise invisible set of events. Meaning itself “becomes a form of ‘sampling’.”

At a certain point the problem becomes the “the liquid city.” Neither fixed architectural forms nor even relatively fixed media assemblages such as the cinema, were quite able to bring the media city to order. Media, architectural forms, social life, even the “self”, all needed to become “liquid” in order to adapt to each other in increasingly relational spaces. The cinematic edit becomes the more liquid “melt of morphing” and “narrative ordering” is submersed in the “viewing of multiple ‘windows’.” The media city, now conforming to the Futurist dream of a city “composed of different intensities”, is made of events flowing in a sea of shifting currents. The resulting disorientation leads both to new, more hierarchical forms of organisation. It also demands better—whether more or less liquid—participatory forms of social organisation.

Throughout, McQuire is just as informed about architecture and the urban as he is about media, from Boccioni and Sant’Elia, through very extensive discussions of Le Corbusier and Archigram, to Frank Gehry, Nicholas Negroponte and Koolhaas.

The final section of the book delivers a stunning account of the extensive use of glass in architecture. Following this, electronic media are not only seen as an extension of the photographic series’ attempt to give abstract coverage to the new dynamics of urban space. They are also an extension of the new dynamism of glass, of the window as the highly ambivalent opening/barrier between private and public.

The digital home emerges from this ambivalence. This in turn allows the rise of reality TV shows such as Big Brother. Here the ongoing and tactical construction of personal agency, along with the ability to command statistical and pseudo-democratic media attention, become a matter of survival. McQuire elegantly terms this the “the farming of emotions”, which starts with the development of public relations and method acting, and ends with Big Brother. In a similar vein, the famous Jennicam becomes a kind of media-city “transitional object”, because we now suffer from the “fear of not being watched.” McQuire nevertheless sees possible value in these new constitutions of experience, even if this might have to be actualised differently from Big Brother.

Packed with stories, events and ideas, and beautifully argued, The Media City is probably the most lucid discussion of media and the constitution of lived experience around.

Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, Sage, London, 2008

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Lozano-Hemmer is one of the subjects of Media City and will be a keynote speaker at the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival, see preview.

BEFORE PASSING THROUGH THE DOOR TO THE “SENSUAL TOTAL EXPERIENCE” OF DEEPBLUE/HEINE R. AVDAL’S DROP A LINE, I’M INSTRUCTED TO LOOK FOR A MAN IN AN ORANGE SHIRT: HE’LL TELL ME WHAT TO DO. I FOLLOW A RAISED CARDBOARD-COVERED WALKWAY THROUGH AN UNOCCUPIED ROOM, TOWARDS ANOTHER DOOR. BELOW IS A MOSSY TERRAIN, INTERSPERSED WITH SCATTERED PAPER FLAKES AND EARTHY MOUNDS. IN THE NEXT ROOM, A LINGERING, GRATING MONOTONE DRAWN FROM A CELLO SEEPS ACROSS MORE UNEVEN KNOLLS AND ARTIFICIAL SNOW. AMIDST THE GREEN AND WHITE, THREE DANCERS IN BLACK SLOWLY CONTORT TO THE PROTRACTED, SCRATCHY NOTES. THESE BEINGS CRAWL AMBIGUOUSLY THROUGH THEIR HABITAT CREATING INHUMAN SHAPES, OBSERVED FROM THE ELEVATED PATH BY SEVERAL AUDIENCE MEMBERS. BEYOND THE ONLOOKERS, I SEE THE ORANGE SHIRT.

The man quietly points out a black curtain set back into the contours of this subterranean rural landscape: one of three dark openings accessed by a trail of cardboard stepping-stones. Self-consciously I descend into the dancing creatures’ domain then dip out of their sight. Immersed in silence and darkness I reach out and find a second curtain to pull aside. A wind chime tinkles.

I am in a shadowy cave-like chamber, encased in thick black fabric. As my eyes adjust to the gloom, something moves above a waist-high box on the other side of the alcove. Tensely moving closer I realise I am looking at my own reflection, dimly lit by white light emanating from the top of the box. I see it is a horizontal screen, with the base of the mirror rising from its back edge, so I’m looking down at the screen and its mirror image. I put on the headphones dangling from the ceiling, but hear nothing. Then I notice two holes in the side of the box facing me.

Pulse thumping in my ears, I inch my fingers into the space gaping away from me. The box top flickers. A sudden, scary electronic voice pushes mashed up syllables into my ears. Disoriented, I try to make sense of the broken noise and at the same instant a grey, digital image of my hands appears on the screen. “H-H-H. H. A. E. I. O. H. H. Hand.” The automated intonations threaten me less as I focus on the image. Turn thumbs up (thumbs down in the mirror). Spread fingers into W’s (M’s in the mirror).

But some aspect of the picture isn’t right. My mind’s confused about how many fingers there should be. Ten fingers (and ten fingers). But also, slowly, another set of fingers creeps into the screen’s square from the edge of the mirror (and into mirrored-me’s square). A 20-limbed mollusc unfurling from the threshold between reflected and real worlds, awakening as I’ve trespassed into its lair, and transgressed the liminal boundaries between human and electronic territories. These other fingers overlap with mine onscreen in beautiful symmetrical star-shapes: the silent anonymity of this digital connection reminiscent of all virtual encounters in the nowhere holes of internet chatrooms.

I freeze. If my hands are onscreen, and the other hands are onscreen, and my hands are in the box, then…It’s not just me and me in here. Sanitised virtual flirtation with the other is all very well and good but when it comes to the physical reality of actual hands…and some other person on the end of them, skulking facelessly in the dark a metre from me, watching me watch myself… well that takes this sensory-deprived/amplified-communication thing an involvement too far.

The index fingers point at me, as if to tell me it’s my move now. Deep breath. Reticently I allow my hands to waver a little further forward, up, down. The terrified anticipation of undefined frights lurking under the bed, in the darkness of ghost stories, or around the next corner of fairground rides, tumbles through my gut. My finger lands on something solid, warm, hairy. I scream and recoil, then immediately laugh out loud and grin at the mirror, behind which I realise the other person must be standing.

My companion stays still, patiently waiting to gain my trust, as I tentatively pat him under the screen and watch the image of our hands meeting. Once I’m used to his proximity, I let him play with my hands until he is massaging them, pulling along the tendons, applying pressure to the palms, scratching between each finger, interlinking his fingers and mine.

Eventually his hands retreat. The screen goes blank. I duck back into the bright gaze of the audience, joining them to sip green tea. A fresh, damp fragrance drifts upwards from my hands, staying with me for the rest of the day: a souvenir of organically artificial revelations.

deepblue/Heine R Avdal, drop a line, concept, direction, video Heine Røsdal Avdal, choreographic assistant Yukiko Shinozaki, scenography Saori Miyazawa, Arnaud Meuleman, scent artist, performer Maki Ueda, performance Anne-Linn Akselsen, Sayaka Kaiwa, Ugo Dehaes, Peder Horgen, Michiel Reynaert, Yukiko Shinozaki, composer-performer Silvia Platzer, technical director Hans Meijer; Kaaitheater, Brussels, Aug 30-31

EXHAUSTINGLY LONG FILM AND VIDEO WORKS EXHIBITED IN GALLERIES, ART FILMS STRUGGLING TO FIND HOMES IN CINEMAS, VISUAL RECEPTION BLURRED BY SOUND BLEEDS, EQUIPMENT OUT-OF-DATE OR BROKEN DOWN, CURATORS CURATING AND CINEMATHEQUES AND FILM FESTIVALS PROGRAMMING, AS IF NE’ER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET, AND MEANWHILE MEDIA ARE CONVERGING AND ARTISTS AND FILMMAKERS AND THE PUBLIC ARE MULTI-PLATFORMING. IT’S A MESS. THE FUTURE IS HERE. IT’S TIME TO TALK IT THROUGH, WHICH IS JUST WHAT THE 2008 ADELAIDE FILM FESTIVAL AND THE SAMSTAG MUSEUM OF ART WILL DO IN A TWO-DAY SYMPOSIUM WITH SOME MIGHTY PROPONENTS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE DIVIDE AND SOME VERY SPECIAL IN-BETWEEN CREATORS OF NEW TERRAINS.

Curated by Julianne Pierce, the Art & the Moving Image Symposium features one of the world’s leading electronic artists, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (famous for his large scale public works, and his talks, see image p29), Larry Kardish, Senior Curator, Film and Video Department, MoMA, New York, Vasif Kortun, founder Platform Garanti, Instanbul, and Australian artist, Lynette Wallworth whose newly commissioned Duality of Light, and a survey of her work, will be exhibited at Samstag Museum of Art.

An event which offers a very different perspective on projection and the moving image is The Dome Project presented by the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) and the Royal Institution over four nights for small audiences at the Mawson Lakes Planetarium. Works specifically created for domes will be shown, curated by DomeFest founder and director David Bening from Albuquerque. There’s also a seminar.

A survey of 1940s-1970s experimental film curated by Toby Bramwell and Michael Connor (US) will be screened at the Media Resource Centre while in galleries the AFF’s umbrella program includes moving image exhibitions at the Art Gallery of SA, Experimental Art Foundation and the Contemporary Art Centre of SA including work by Dennis Oppenheim (US) Ai Wei Wei (China) and Vasif Kortun (Turkey).

A fascinating program which introduces another dimension—live music and its relationship with the moving image—is Rhythmus 09, silent, avant garde films by Dali, Bunuel, Duchamp, Man Ray and Leger curated by Adele Hann, with live accompaniment performed on grand piano by Stephen Whittington.

The symposium might not bridge the cinema-gallery chasm in the short-term, but the talking and the associated events will doubtless bring together many of the innovations of the last century and the speculative forms of the moment bubbling up from the bottom of the rift in a fecund swirl that knows no divide. RT

Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Museum of Art, Art & Moving Image Symposium, Friday 27 Feb 27, 6pm, keynote address Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Saturday Feb 28 10-5pm speakers, panels; Sunday March 1, 11am-12.30pm, University of South Australia, Hawke Bldg, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide, Recitals Australia Rhythmus 09, Radford Auditorium Art Gallery of SA, Sunday March 1, 3pm, Domefest Project, Feb 24-27, www.domefest.org
www.adelaidefilmfestival.org

THE THING WITH FESTIVALS IS THAT YOU ARE ALWAYS BOUND TO MISS SOMETHING THAT’S PROGRAMMED SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH SOMETHING ELSE. THIS WAS NO DIFFERENT WITH NOTTDANCE08. MAYBE IT WAS EVEN MORE PRONOUNCED, SINCE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ITS 17-YEAR HISTORY AS AN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL FOR EXPERIMENTAL DANCE AND PERFORMANCE EVENTS IT TOOK PLACE NOT ONLY IN NOTTINGHAM BUT ALSO IN LONDON. INTERESTINGLY, THE EXPERIENCE OF HAVING TO CHOOSE BETWEEN WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO SEE AND WHICH CITY YOU WERE GOING TO BE IN AT WHAT TIME, TIED IN NICELY WITH THE FESTIVAL’S CENTRAL PREMISE THIS YEAR—CHOICE.

To fully explore the notion of choice, the festival’s artistic director Nicky Molloy and her team decided to invite groups of audience members, young people and three international artists to each choose some of the work that would be presented in the festival.

artists’ choice

Among the artists asked to curate an evening of work for nottdance08 was Maria La Ribot (Spain), an internationally recognised dancer and choreographer, maybe best known for her cycle of work Distinguished Pieces. She selected Spanish artist Juan Domínguez.

The set up for Domínguez’ solo work All Good Spies Are My Age is deceptively simple. Elegantly dressed in a cream-coloured suit with a brown shirt and brown shoes, Domínguez sits at a table and places small cards in front of a camera which projects their image onto a large screen next to him. The text on the cards describes how the piece has come into being. At first there is the sense that this might be the precursor to something else but gradually we understand that this is all there is: the recreation of the creation process through written text is the actual piece. Reading projected text for an hour and 15-minutes could easily become boring, but surprisingly it doesn’t. This is largely due to Domínguez’ keen understanding of audience expectation and his impeccable sense of composition. He carefully introduces various threads of narratives and meta-narratives, then starts to interconnect them. We read about his own personal situation while making the work—problems with funding bodies, his fascination with coincidences, his obsession with ageing. We are also being fed, bit by bit, information regarding the meaning of the different colours the text is written in and this way acquire clues as to how to interpret what unfolds in front of our eyes. Or are these clues red herrings? Slowly, the description of how the piece was developed gives way to the recounting of daydreams, fantasies and lofty ideas for new works. The mood turns increasingly surreal, until it is not clear any more if what Domínguez tells us is true or not. What is fact, what is fiction? What is life and what is art? And is there, in fact, a difference between the two?

young people’s choice

Two performance events at nottdance08 were chosen by panels of audience members. One of them by was by a group of 16–19 year olds. And it has to be said their choice was excellent. They decided to present a double bill consisting of works by Turkey’s acclaimed Taldans Company and German-born emerging choreographer Gabriele Reuter. Whereas Taldans’ Sek Sek, an investigation of various states of instability, is certainly an engaging and intriguing work, Reuter’s solo piece Inventory/(Räumung) is a true discovery.

Like Domínguez, Reuter uses words to trigger the audience’s imagination. This time it’s spoken text and she blends it with movement. As her piece is about to begin, she tells us, “Before I start, I want to talk a little bit about the spatial arrangements here.” And this is exactly what she goes on to do. Integrating dance with philosophical musings on notions of time and space, Reuter takes us on a tour across the empty stage, imbuing different parts of the space with certain characteristic traits. For example, she introduces us to a spot near centre-stage which, according to her, is a “vague space.” Appropriately, she can’t tell us much about it. Then there is the space in which “to tell something personal.” Reuter comically refuses to go near it, as she feels she doesn’t know the audience well enough yet. There is also the corner for mother tongue. The moment she enters it, she starts speaking German. Reuter is a charismatic performer with considerable charm and a real knack for communicating with an audience. She seduces us with quirkiness and a light touch without ever leaving any doubt about the conceptual rigour and the genuine interest driving her investigation into the complex relationship between dance and space.

nottdance dialogue

Consistent with the overarching premise of nottdance08, choice was also the central focus of its residency initiative, entitled nottdance dialogue. Here, choice was not explored as a curatorial principle but as an integral aspect of artistic practice. Made possible through a partnership between nottdance producer Dance4, Springdance (Utrecht, Netherlands) and National Dance Centre Bucharest (Bucharest, Romania), a week-long residency brought together 12 international emerging artists, four from each country. It took place in Nottingham in the week leading up to the festival and was facilitated by German dancer and choreographer Thomas Lehmen and UK producer Rose Fenton. Its aim was to encourage the exchange of ideas and experiences and a dialogue about how artists present themselves. The event as such was not public but was complemented by four evenings of showings from the participating artists. Among the most interesting offerings were a mesmerising duet for two male dancers by Jack Gallagher (Netherlands) and two works by the all-female dance theatre collective MIKS (UK). They were choreographed by Frauke Requardt and Athina Vahla respectively and form part of MIKS’ triple bill project n+. Performing in works by two different choreographers allowed MIKS to showcase their significant performative range. In Requardt’s piece, n+2 flappers, an irresistible Charleston-inspired reverie, they dazzled with great musicality and comic timing. Vahla’s n+3 Objects of Friction and Fact, exploring the mythological element of the triad and partly based on Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country, was an altogether more sombre affair. It had MIKS exchange their pink Charleston outfits and black flapper wigs for grey suit pants and white blouses, executing complex choreographic phrases in and out of synch with each other, engage in ensemble work consisting of catching and falling, as well as sing and deliver spoken text in both English and French.

nottdance in London

Among the nottdance events taking place in London was the presentation of Thomas Lehmen’s most recent work Heromatik. Inspired by the over the top characterisations of good and evil in Samurai films, Lehmen gets up to all kinds of shenanigans, exploring archetypes of the Hero. In one moment he engages in an epic sword fight with an imaginary enemy, wielding a rattling sword, obviously a theatre prop. He then becomes the victim of an invisible yet unimaginably cruel perpetrator, eliciting from him sobs and whimpers of sheer terror, all the while cowering on the floor, helplessly trying to defend himself. These evocations of imaginary worlds and characters are later contrasted with the real time destruction of much of the set, made up of several styrofoam cut-outs. Lehmen ferociously attacks one of them with a microphone until it is completely obliterated. He then continues his assault on the stage with an electric fan. The result, pieces of styrofoam strewn everywhere, is then topped by his using a smoke machine to “smoke out” the stage, leaving behind a scenario of chaos and devastation. Lehmen’s stage persona resembles that of a little kid, grappling with the complexities of human existence, full of wonder but also capable of great harm, sometimes unknowing, sometimes deliberate.

Widely regarded as one of Europe’s most innovative and forward thinking dance artists of recent years, Lehmen is clearly committed to experimentation and the continuous questioning of his own artistic practice. As he explains in his brief introduction, rather than focusing on showing a finished piece, Lehmen uses a set of fixed parameters as the backbone for Heromatik and rearranges and expands on them for each performance. In a festival dedicated to concepts of choice, this approach is an apt reminder of choice as an essential artistic driving force.

Nottdance08: Juan Domínguez, All Good Spies Are My Age, concept and performance Juan Domínguez; Gabriele Reuter, Inventory/(Räumung), choreography and performance Gabriele Reuter, dramaturgy Michael Pinchbeck, lighting Wassan Ali; Jack Gallagher, Not Yet Dancing, choreography Jack Gallagher, music Mark Poydsen, photography Theo Nikkus, video Bernie van Velzen; Frauke Requardt, n+2 Flappers, choreography Frauke Requardt, performers MIKS (Anais Bouts, Sara Lindström, Ida Uvaas), sound John Zorn; Athina Vahla, n+3 Objects of Friction and Fact, choreography Athina Vahla, performers MIKS, sound Bas Vellekoop, The Third Eye Foundation; Thomas Lehmen, Heromatik, concept and choreography Thomas Lehmen; Nottdance, Nottingham and London, Oct 17-26

OSTENSIBLY, THERE ARE GREAT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DANCERS’ BODIES AND THE FIXED FORMS AND FLAT SURFACES OF ARTWORK IN GALLERIES. A RECENT QUANTUM LEAP YOUTH DANCE PROJECT IN CANBERRA SET OUT TO CHALLENGE JUST THAT SUPPOSITION.

Exhibitionism was a promenade performance presented on-site at the National Gallery of Australia. Recent tertiary dance graduates from around Australia collaborated with Brisbane choreographer/mentor Brian Lucas and NGA staff to create five short, site-specific pieces. A connective framework of enactments drew the audience from site to site.

Tour leader Sarah Kaur relaxes the audience, guiding us where to walk (and what distance to keep from the art) whille succinctly introducing some of the artworks. Her presence is easy, gracious and a good ice-breaker for the audience.

First we view the courtyard Sculpture Garden. From inside we look out through glass walls at figures traversing the space, sometimes playful as children, at other times, strict as surveyors measuring a path; at others, struggling on the threshold between pavement and water, inside and outside. They speak to us but we can’t hear—choreographer Natalie Abbott perhaps reflecting on the struggle of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, on display for the judgment of their citizenry. A dancer mouths at us as we leave—the ultimate tourist proletariat—for the next port-of-call.

Within the Sculpture Gallery, amongst polished and twisted trapezoids and Brancusi’s elegiac Birds in Space, dancers work the negative space between sculptures in this light-flooded area, their costumes white and light against the granite floors and reflective or massive surfaces. Gareth Hart places four small boxes on the floor—gifts for us to open, which each prove to hold a proverb-like quotation and an origami bird.

The dance plays well with proximity and distance, Hart also exploring glimpses of dance/recognitions through tall internal windows. The piece is both delicate and tough—like the gift boxes, unfolding thought and folded air.

We walk up the ramp, beneath a suspended canopy woven out of the bodies of sea stars, to the sound of a piercing, melancholy wail. Around the corner, Warwick Lynch is playing a musical saw. If sound painted air we would see this music as a ribbon floating behind us, while also urging us forward. Like memory, looking, sensing, a silken stretching in multiple directions.

In the Asian Gallery, through a carved Indonesian arch, we view a dancer perched on a white plinth, just not toppling. Her body like Shiva’s, at first, but with hiccups: pushing against its angularities—the struggle of a traveler, an outsider temporarily inside a new culture, flooded with responses, struggling to recompose new experiences within an older identity. Nicholas Ng’s urhu [Chinese ‘violin’] is a beautiful complement in this space, gentle yet also sharp against the jerkiness of this dance .

Chimene Steele Prior has also choreographed our next stop, “Amongst Blue Poles.” For me, this dance is skilled, but the least successful of the works. I am unsure whether the falling and swerving dancer’s movements are meant to reflect Pollock’s mind conceiving the painting, the fall of the paint itself, or the spectator grappling with it. The questions per se are fine, but they seem unintegrated within a feeling structure—as if Steele Prior draws the lines but not the full calibre of breath within and behind them.

The last segment is delightful, in a foyer/workshop space, amongst potted palms; dancers peering, calling attention, moving away, breaking into applause, then shushing themselves quiet. The sequence is attractive, self-conscious, duplicitous, ambiguous. What are we really looking at? How can we ever really know? This company-collaborated piece is a very funny conclusion to the event.

This group achieved much in the month allocated within QL2’s Soft Landing project. Nonetheless, there are some unresolved elements—most notably, the bridging pieces between segments, which Lucas himself performs in a way that heightens his tall, angular quirkiness. They appear, however, as bits of broken textures—like fragments of peanut brittle, odd servings at odd times over the course of a progressive dinner. But what are we in these in-between spaces anyway—perhaps nothing so much as acts of recomposition ourselves.

Quantum Leap, QL2 Cente for Youth Dance, Soft Landing project, Exhibitionism, director Brian Lucas, choreographers Natalie Abbott, Gareth Hart, Chimene Steele-Prior, composers Nicholas Ng, Warwick Lynch, collaborating dancers Rudi Bremer, Alyce Jasmine Farrell, Laura Fishwick, Yahna Fookes, Elanor Jane Webber, Patricia Wood, Ebony Wright, NGA project staff: manager Katie Russell, Youth & Community Programs Officer Adriane Boag; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Sept 26-28

UNCOVER THIS IS THE NAME AND SECRECY IS THE GAME, UNTIL THE NIGHT OF THE SHOW. YOU PICK UP THE TICKETS, THE VENUES ARE REVEALED. IN THE FIRST PART, ON A SUBURBAN STREET, THE AUDIENCE IS SPLIT INTO TWO GROUPS, ONE GOING INSIDE A HOUSE FOR HALF AN HOUR, ONE STAYING OUT, THEN THEY SWAP OVER. A WEEK LATER, YOU’RE SEATED AROUND THE EDGE OF A CUL-DE-SAC IN WHICH THE SECOND PART OF THE WORK IS PERFORMED. THE SECRECY GENERATED A SENSE OF PLAYFULNESS, AND OF LONGING. THE LOOKING INTO THE HOUSE AND PEERING OUT OF IT, AT THE PERFORMERS AND AT EACH OTHER, CREATED THE UNEASINESS AT THE HEART OF UNCOVER THIS BY LAUNCESTON’S STOMPIN.

There were some eight rooms in the house you could enter, six of which were inhabited by one to three dancers. The other two had binoculars with which you could peer into neighboring houses, or at the performance outside. Some of the audience refuse, others relish the opportunity for participation. Each room yields different emotions: you laugh while being fed what looks like baby food; you feel loneliness while lying on a bed by yourself in the middle of a dark room, two figures moving around you.

The two dancers attempting to feed you talk gibberish while you decide whether or not to eat, determining which way the scene will go. At other times you become an intruder, feeling as if you’re inspecting the most personal details of the inhabitants’ lives but with a simultaneous sense of voyeuristic intrigue. You have to keep watching, however uncomfortable you feel, sometimes alone in rooms that will only take one person at a time. In one room two dancers fold laundry and occasionally adjust your clothing—they roll up my sleeves. Some of the audience members don’t enjoy the physical contact. I enter a bedroom to find three girls arguing. One of them screams in my face: it’s fairly confronting and not easy to get out of the room because there are people behind wanting to come in.

Each of the rooms offered a sense of discovery, of something about oneself, or someone else. Sometimes it was simply a desire to get out of the house, but not being able to.

In the second part of Uncover, as you walk into the cul-de-sac cars blast music, people bicycle around you and friendly faces from the week before wave and say hello. Although this time you’re outside, there’s still the same sense of mystery and intrigue but with a new group togetherness—wondering what someone sitting opposite you, looking away, is thinking, in the same way you’re curious about the neighbours—what are they up to?

One image that stood out for me was of all the dancers coming together, forming a square and moving as one, like a crowd crossing at street lights. In the same scene a single beep in the musical score went into a fast continuous beeping, and the dancers, as if at a traffic crossing, broke out into individual moves, each finding their own way, then coming back together again. In another moment the repeated movements of the dancers were sometimes suggestive of slowly peering over the fence to spy on your neighbour, then shying away and reacting as if you were keeping to yourself, on your side of the fence.

Wheelie bins played a key role in Uncover This. In Part 1 a single dancer stood on top of one, moving it around without setting a foot on the ground. In Part 2 the action is repeated but with more dancers, and this time building what looks like a small barricade, and placing people inside some of the bins. We grow curious about what else is in them, wondering ‘Are wheelie bins sacred, surely not, but then why don’t we like people looking in them? Things we don’t want seen, aspects of our identities?’ When we do see the contents there is both a sense of discovery and intrusion. Two dancers tip their wheelie over, spilling out children’s toys. One of the performers pulls off her wig and throws it onto the pile. It was like some kind of personal cleansing I felt I shouldn’t have been witnessing.

The final beautiful image of the show has stayed with me: all of the dancers costumed in small internally lit cardboard houses. Each house was then placed on the ground and the dancers exited the cul-de-sac. Uncover This suggested that everyday life is a performance, everything we do is a dance of some kind.

I was amazed by Uncover This, the risks it took in timing and audience engagement, performing two discrete but related parts, each an entity on its own, and its success in using contemporary dance and movement to express the joy, sadness or inner turmoil that lie beyond words. Talented young choreographer Adam Wheeler uses simple movements and images to entrance his audience, and keeps us on our toes throughout. What’s around the corner? What’s behind this door? And what is in that wheelie bin?

Stompin, Uncover This, choreographer Adam Wheeler, performers 25 Stompin dancers, lighting designer Daniel Zika, composer David Franzke, video Daniel Speed, Sam Thiele, Launceston, Part 1, The House, Sept 30-Oct 4; Part 2, The Cul-de-sac, Oct 10, 11

MARGARET CAMERON’S POETIC MONOLOGUE THE PROSCENIUM HAS BEEN STAGED IN VARIOUS CONFIGURATIONS: AS A DOUBLE WITH HELLEN SKY’S MAKING LIGHT OF GRAVITY, AS AN ENSEMBLE PIECE BY STUDENTS FROM EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY’S PERFORMANCE COURSE, AND NOW TOGETHER WITH DAWN ALBINGER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL HEROIN(E).

Cameron’s text is a dense weft of intertextual references and poetic images, including allusions to Alice In Wonderland, Gulliver’s encounter with the Lilliputians, Munch’s The Scream and others. Although Munch and the dream-like accessing of intense childhood memories and aestheticised traumas evokes Expressionism, Cameron’s realisation owes more to late 19th-century Symbolist theatre, Odilon Redon and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal. Her simple, resonant performative presence is both anchored in and generated by the word itself.

Cameron’s gestures and movements are sparse, tending to shift between archetypal tableaux which she embodies, rather than enacting (even in an abstract fashion) the events or images she enunciates. As Cameron says, the proscenium space within which this recitation occurs is, in a sense, “literal”; the spoken word tumbles to the floor like a thick wet blanket of affect and metaphoric play. Like Redon, Cameron is seeking an ambiguous yet still recognisable world of palpable symbols which lies behind the particularities of her own experience, even as it inhabits her life.

The performance begins with the statement that this universal, aesthetic substrate to our lives rests “embedded within the ancient erotic curve of the imaginary” and “the symbolic.” This might suggest a Surrealist approach, a realm of motifs whose potency stems from sexual desire and our identifications with our parents. A mother—presumably Cameron’s (at least in symbolic terms)—provides a melancholy, much loved but distant centre to many of the childhood events described. This however reflects the kinship between Surrealists, Baudelaire and Redon, rather than an actual focus on sexuality and its opaque meanderings through identity. The key function and force of both Cameron’s text and her performance is simply to symbolise, to translate something—a lost memory, a dream of a drunken father hosed through the window by distraught relations, an idea of Cameron herself as a “child of imaginings prancing barefoot with a stone”—into a recited performance awaiting an audience.

The image of Cameron in a padded coat, dripping water onto the stage while perched, arms outstretched, on a rock, encapsulates and embodies the totality of the performance even as it demands further explication via the various stories, allusions and poetic trails which are projected from this image during the piece. The Proscenium collapses naked minimalism (the relatively few performative images and gestures) into complex linguistic play, demanding attentive listening.

Dawn Albinger’s solo, Heroin(e), is also performative and minimal—indeed, its poor theatre aesthetic at times suggests rough cabaret—while emanating from a fundamentally linguistic centre, here a narrative of a woman who survived both a car crash and living with a heroin-addicted partner. Similarities cease here though, for Albinger’s literalism is distinct from Cameron’s. Albinger is an accomplished and empathetic performer. Heroin(e)’s appeal however is based on the performer’s claim to authenticity over and above aesthetic craft and poetics. The work’s aesthetic politics has its roots in those approaches arising out of 1960s feminism, in which one charts the female protagonist’s struggle towards the final realisation of her true, free self.

Rather than a stone and a drenched coat, Albinger brings onstage a wooden table and a chair. She rocks, climbs over and almost juggles these items in a rude but charming choreography of form and physicality. The specific architecture which she creates here is however largely incidental, animating Albinger’s angst-ridden story rather than expressing it through shape or movement.

Personally neither a great fan of, nor believer in, authenticity within a space so contrived as theatre, I found Heroin(e) most alluring when its dramaturgy reflected a poetic sensibility whose origins did not lie in the exigencies of the narrative. At several points, Albinger’s table became a body, but not simply that of her lover or indeed that of Albinger herself. Rather it at times generated a sense of both presence and absence, of longing and resentment, which folded into each other as Albinger compulsively scratched the table’s inclined surface, attending to a sensual itch s/he could not and did not want to shake, or when the performer lay horizontally across its length stroking its planes, hoping to transform it into her ideal.

Albinger’s narrative clarity made for a more approachable work than Cameron’s, Heroin(e)’s affective transparency contrasting with Cameron’s more ambitious attempt to “substantiate” a wet “viscosity of being” and poetic “ambiguity.” While Albinger uses the theatre as a site to restage and salve personal dramas, Cameron “swallows” whole the “house” of theatre and manifests its structure and poetic placelessness within her speech. The pairing of these artists was as revealing as it was satisfying.

The Proscenium, writer, performer Margaret Cameron, sound David Franzke; Heroin(e), writer/performer Dawn Albinger, direction, scenography Margaret Cameron, music & songs Julie Robson, Grant MacMillan, Randall Mathews; lighting for both works by Andrew Beck; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Sept 25–Oct 5

A WHITE LIMO WITH A MALE CHAPERONE IN A WHITE TUXEDO PICKS UP FIONA WINNING FROM HER HOME. THE CAR GLIDES TO THE OLD PERFORMANCE SPACE ON CLEVELAND STREET. WINNING ENTERS THE EMPTY THEATRE AND IS GUIDED TO THE DISTANT STAGE ON WHICH SITS A GLOWING CARDBOARD BOX WITH CURTAINS WHICH SHE OPENS AND AND PEERS IN. STILL IMAGES (FROM THE REPERTOIRE OF HEIDRUN LÖHR) AND SOUNDS OF PERFORMANCES ACROSS THE NINE YEARS OF HER CARING AND CREATIVE STEWARDSHIP AS PERFORMANCE SPACE DIRECTOR AT CLEVELAND STREET, AND THEN AT CARRIAGEWORKS, FLOW BY.

Winning watches the history she helped realise, so ephemeral, yet so palpable. She leaves by the rear exit and encounters colleague Billy Mac playing didjeridu in the park. At the nearby Bill & George’s artist-run space she’s entertained with a tango, and returned to the park where Martin del Amo dances in his underwear to Nana Mouskouri. And the night is still young.

Winning is driven to the back lane of the party venue, Medium Rare, an upstairs gallery in Redfern, where a red carpet awaits her and, when the carpet runs out, pieces of red cloth are thrown by the crowd to place beneath her feet. Inside she has to burst through a welcoming banner into an evening of more performances as well as laudatory speechmaking. The crowd comprises many members of Australia’s contemporary performance community, dancers, visual and media and sound artists, writers, past and present Performance Space Board members, Performance Space founder Mike Mullins and former director Sarah Miller, funding body colleagues and friends from Winning’s pre-PS days.

Victoria Spence is, as ever the ideal host. Billy Mac recalls Winning’s firmly propelling him into performance as an indolent young man and plays a didjeridu tribute to her. Annette Tesoriero leads a small ensemble in a sweet round of Viel Glück und viel Segen with the crowd joining in. A be-wigged PS associate director Bec Dean astonishes everyone with a wickedly funny, sexy karaoke rendering of “The Wind Beneath My Wings” for Winning. The PS staff dance to a pop tune with precision and abandon. Version 1.0 perform silently to a Jason Sweeney treatment of George Bush’s ‘economic recovery’ speech, sharing chocolate ice-cream, some with larger spoons and appetites than others, good manners verging on the very foul. Speeches from the board chair, Clare Petre, Sarah Miller, board member John Gillies and general manager Julianne Campbell celebrate Fiona Winning’s collaborative leadership and her capacities as nurturer, negotiator, promoter; as a PS director with the instincts of a producer, with a local and a national vision; as a delegator and a downright good boss—firm, fair, good-humoured, and explosive when necessary. She is praised in particular for her management of the transition to CarriageWorks. She’d left her notes at home but Winning makes an excellent speech in reply, vividly recalling the high points and challenges of her PS years and paying particular tribute to the many artists she worked with, to Julianne Campbell, and to Harley Stumm, her partner. This was a fitting farewell to be fondly remembered.

a kind of apotheosis: livework

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The performance community in Sydney has long dreamt of a festival of performance, as had Fiona Winning even since the move to CarriageWorks. She made it a reality in the final months of her directorship if not without a struggle. The inaugural LiveWorks festival in September filled much of CarriageWorks with Winning’s vision: local, national, international, intergenerational and hybrid. Over two days (one with a deterring wintry downpour, the other fine, audiences flooding in) attendees looked to maps to find their way to diverse performances, competing for spaces to enjoy the intimate miracle of Aphids’ Underground (two virtuosic percussionists with us at a long table playing Rosemary Joy’s unlikely and subtly crafted instruments) or Duncan Speakman’s immersive Audio Walk through Redfern or Panther’s This is Not a Playground (we gather at a nearby playground and participate in games with a dark and metaphysical turn—a great idea if needing some serious tightening of text and concept).

In the massive, partly flooded, unrenovated Bay 23 there’s a car roaring away and a tent into which we file, to be fed soup and witness a strange encounter embellished by projections, puppets and other magic in Matthew Prest’s The Tent, an oddly compelling deadpan piece of Australian gothic about male relationships, among other things. Other local productions that impressed were Paul Dwyers’ Bougainville Photoplay Project Bougainville Photoplay Project and PACT Theatre’s The Speech Givers, which revealed a new level of inventiveness and intensity in Regina Heilmann’s direction, working with a cast of five instead of the usual mass of young PACT players. Jane Grimely, Gideon Payten-Griffiths, Jacob Paterson, Caroline Wake and Amity Yore live out the fears and responsibilities of public speaking with a sustained intensity and moments of explosive if temporary release. They function like a neurotic public organism in a dance of death—with chairs, lecterns and speeches on paper that might never make it to the mouth and all to sound artist James Brown’s dynamic score. Elsewhere in the program Linda Luke and Peter Fraser performed Borderlines and Tarkovsky’s Horse, respectively [RT87, p20], while Rosie Dennis in Fraudulent Behaviour and Martin del Amo in Excursion experimented on willing audiences with tantalising works-in-progress.

The LiveWorks’ foyer installations included Roza Ilgen’s (Norway/UK) entrancing In My Shoes, the artist using human hair to mould shoes around the feet of visitors. The small semi-circle of finished shoes grew over the two days yielding a meditation on everything from Hobbitt feet to cultural taboos. High above the foyer, you could visit Makeshift a cozy, lounge-cum-public reading room, browse the artists’ book collection and watch them type memorable passages on a long strip that trailed down to the floor far below to be read by others. 3 x 3 CarriageWorks Under Construction, by a group of University of Wollongong collaborators (led by Bogan Brunt, Matthew Ellis and Catherine Fargher) directed you to radio hot spots where you could listen in on the history of the CarriageWorks and its relationship with the local community.

The Pacitti Company [UK] presented two works, Civil was originally performed by the company’s artistic director, Robert Pacitti, and is built around his 1996 encounter with Quentin Crisp (author of The Naked Civil Servant) in New York, using live performance, film projections and an architectural sense of design. It’s a spare, imagistic work, quite beautiful to look at, not least in the rescalings of the relationship between performer and grainy black and white projections of New York and how the resultant images are memorably sustained. And it’s a typically ceremonial Pacitti work, with its calculated, rhythmic distribution of motifs and a moment of literal ritual with a dead rabbit (that image of blood-letting paralleled with another of self-laceration). Pacitti has passed the work onto a younger performer Richard ‘Dicky’ Eton, who realises Civil with the requisite quiet, graceful intensity of a ritual that celebrates the life of a famous, rebellious outsider and the inner suffering that such disobedience yields. Although the work showed its age stylistically and formally (we live in more talkative times, are more information hungry) I enjoyed its peculiar power.

The second Pacitti Company work was the well-travelled Finale, the framework (and much of the substance too) for a performance that the company carries with it, fleshing it out with local performers, in this case over two weeks prior to the performances. Themes and events from Emile Zola’s novel Therese Raquin provide the raw materials for a wide range of interpretive responses of the performers’ making, with direction and selection by Pacitti. Again the sense of ritual is prominent, from parade entrances to the washing of our hands as we exit. In between, some remarkable images unfold with a pristine and elegant if abject beauty in a flow of blood, water, sweat, milk and food and sometimes words. Bodies naked or richly attired course a long catwalk and a large lawn and perform in small, dangerous groups or execute solo self-punishments. I witness the power of images generated by Kathy Cogill, Teik-Kim Pok and Georgie Read and catch the tail-end of or hear later about those created by Ari Ehrlich, Ana Wojak, Carlos Gomes and Annette Tesoriero. A dinner table scene with Pacitti, Richard Eton, Ana Wojak and Sheilah Ghelani is particularly engaging (and more evidently rooted in the novel) and later transmutes into a pair of mimed, oppressive fuckings realised with the delicacy of a dance.

The overall experience for the audience of Finale was not a particularly coherent one, even if you knew the novel, and the big audience on the final night and the absence of crowd management meant that there was a high degree of luck involved in gaining an overview let alone encountering some of the work’s most potent images. But, I enjoyed what I witnessed, and the freedom to wander and select in a work of such scale was welcome. So too was the opportunity to reflect on the polished viscerality of the overall production—a kind of high church Anglican performance mode when compared with the ‘pagan Catholicism’ (to coin a Fiona McGregor phrase; p40) of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra’s gritty collaborations with Sydney artists in 2001 and 2003.
Finale, The Pacitti Company, Live Works

Nalina Wait’s Dual with collaborator Jane McKernan presented two idiosyncratic dancers at their most formal and abstract. It’s a well-produced work (lighting by Mark Mitchell) but the finely shaped duets and solos don’t add up at first viewing, although the ending, where McKernan confronts Wait with a cascade of furious gestures and moves, suggests a more dramatic reading—a dialogue and then a tussle perhaps between ways of being and dancing.

Helen Cole, Producer of Live Art and Dance at Bristol’s Arnolfini and artistic director of the Inbetween Time festival (collaborating closely with PS and Fiona Winning) sat us in the dark to listen to recordings of intimate recollections of performances of all kinds, from fairs, clubs, theatre, ceremonies and from diverse voices (audiences, curators, directors, performers) while fragments of light (Alex Bradley) appeared, grew and were redistributed around the theatre. Titled We See Fireworks, the work engenders a slightly eerie experience, being a very different kind of archive from the ones we usually expect of the arts, and so removed from the art of reviewing. As Cole writes, “Between the ghost of a memory and the knowledge that you were really there, we think this thing called theatre might just be in your head.”

parting thoughts

I had the pleasure of talking at length with Fiona Winning during her final days at Performance Space. The full transcript. We talked about her role as director and she described how it had changed over the years. Initially there was need to rebuild the confidence of the communities around Performance Space and among audiences after the organisation had been through a difficult period: “I was always interested in connecting dots between the temporary communities that build through making art and how to find more opportunities to build those communities. I think of it as a boiling pot and the bubbles that emerge are this energy that needs to exist and be released but it also needs to be held together. What I began to realise, not terribly long into the job, was that part of my role was to be responsive, but part of it was to be strategic and to really try to make sense of the bigger picture and to build opportunities for artists. So it was a mixture of advocacy, strategic planning and partnering, bringing our own projects as interventions or opportunities, again to build temporary communities that wouldn’t otherwise make themselves.”

As well as an emphasis on community Winning early on saw the need for greater intergenerational contact between artists: “part of that was about exchange but part of it was also about being aware of lineage because I think that’s a powerful and important thing. And it’s probably re-emerging. This is another moment when I think it’s deeply important again.” Another element in building Performance Space was to in turn build its residency program: “It was important to me and it was mostly intergenerational and it was actually really successful. Version 1.0 got one of those early residencies to make The Second Last Supper (2001), along with a number of other interesting groups.” Residencies proved useful for artists to use as leverage to get funding for their fees for what was “really invaluable research and development for which, of course, it’s really difficult to get funding.” Winning sees the residencies “as probably one of the most successful parts of the Performance Space program.”

With no capacity to buy work in itself, to be in fact a producer, Performance Space has for many years presented self-producing artists like Tess de Quincey and The opera Project in its curated performance programs and assisted them in every way possible. Now, Winning tells me, with great pleasure, a new model has been developed. “In the old days artists paid the rental and they got the box office and we created the context around it: the technical support, front of house and all that kind of stuff. We are now co-presenting in the sense that we offer the space, the front of house, a certain amount of tech support and we are partners in a 60/40 split of box office. So the risk is actually shared. But what’s changed most recently has come with the Presenter Program grants that the Theatre Board of the Australia Council has just given out. Performance Space received one of these, as did Arts House in Melbourne, PICA in Perth and a number of other organizations around the country. That’s $50,000 a year for three years just for artists’ fees. So that means that next year for the first time we’re actually completely presenting My Darling Patricia, Version 1.0 and Rosie Dennis. They’ll get their performance fees paid by us. It’s not a commission. It’s simply a presentation, but it means that the artists know what they’re getting paid. They don’t have to try and balance any books or cut any costs post-production. Partly that’s the Australia Council responding to something that I realised very early in my job, how difficult it is for artists to self-produce, self-present and make the work.”

Further on the producing front, Winning is inspired by a generation of younger artists like My Darling Patricia, Spat & Loogie, Brown Council, Janie Gibson, Post, Matthew Prest and others who are “makers first and foremost, but they’re also curators and producers. They’re so interested in the whole picture. And that’s very exciting because I think there are some artists who continue to see Performance Space as their main kind of place and I don’t think anybody can afford to do that, quite frankly. I think it’s important that Performance Space remains a home and hub but everyone needs to think a lot more rhizomatically than that and have relationships with the other partners, producers and presenters…There is a better national network than there ever has been for artists to tap into.” The DIY performance culture is also encouraged through Performance Space’s Night Time series of short works and its support for the Quick & Dirty queer performance seasons.

Winning says that making the most of the new home at CarriageWorks has been a challenge: “When you move to a place like CarriageWorks and you’re learning those physical spaces both technically and artistically and from the audience’s perspective, it takes time. I was fairly naïve…and naiveté is quite useful sometimes…We love those spaces, but there are sets of negotiations around everything.” Large-scale works, Tess De Quincey’s The Stirring and Joey Ruigrok van der Werven’s Volta (both 2007), along with LiveWorks, have been integral to PS’s growing mastery of the space.

Fiona Winning is a collaborative spirit. Initially she felt isolated when programming, but as Performance Space has grown across recent years, the organisation has been able to employ expert programmers across a range of forms. Former associate directors Blair French and Caitlin Newton-Broad initiated strong programs, as their successors Bec Dean and Rebecca Conroy are now doing, along with Rosalind Richards as dance producer. Winning says that “the integration of One Extra and ReelDance into the Performance Space program has also been important. We were very lucky to be able to support ReelDance—and now they’ve got Emerging Triennial funding.”

Despite her optimism about growing producer and presenter networks, the spirit of independence in a new generation of performance makers and the satisfaction entailed in being able to guarantee artists their fees, Winning worries about the future of the small to medium arts sector given challenges facing CarriageWorks and Performance Space. There’s the need “for the commercial side to bring in enough money to support CarriageWorks to (a) be able to run itself and some programs themselves and (b) be able to subsidise the small to medium sector…that’s their challenge and, therefore, our challenge because our destinies are somewhat intertwined.” A shift in Arts NSW policy away from project funding to program funding puts the onus on organisations to support individual artists and small companies, but without the additional funds to do so. Meanwhile, “federally, the Theatre Board has been moving towards putting more resources into presenters and producers but they still need the independent artists to bring the money for their projects with them. So on the one hand we’ve got this new big picture being presented by the Australia Council and it’s just simply not able to be matched at a State level.”

Winning is now moving on to theTime Place Space hybrid arts laboratory no. 6, which she’s co-curating with Sarah Miller and Teresa Crea in January-February 2009 in Brisbane. She feels herself “incredibly lucky” to have been Performance Space director, it’s helped define her vision: “I know what my passion is. I love programming. And I love working with artists through that trajectory of concept development, through to production and touring…So finding another context in which to be able to do that is going to be my greatest challenge.”

Performance Space, LiveWorks, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Aug 29-Sept 7

In Live Art parlance, The Bougainville Photoplay Project falls into the genre of lecture/performance. It’s spun like a casual yarn taking us from family slides retrieved from an attic into performer Paul Dwyer’s relationship with his late father, an orthopaedic surgeon. Via photographs and recollections we journey with the good doctor back to Papua New Guinea in the 1960s to observe the results of his work to fix malformed bones with the radical surgical procedure he developed. We also enter into the deep end of Dwyer’s own academic research into “performative behaviours in various models of restorative justice ‘conferencing’ and his documentation of reconciliation ceremonies on Bougainville in the current period of post-war reconstruction.”

If this sounds like heavy going, it’s not at all. Paul Dwyer is an engaging storyteller (direction David Williams, version 1.0). His performance is part-memorised, part-improvised and interspersed with a careful selection of images in multiple formats (black and white newspaper photographs, Super 8 film, 1960s colour slides, x rays, contemporary colour snaps) skilfully integrated by video artist Sean Bacon. Accompanied onstage by nothing more than a couple of screens, a vintage slide projector and a human spine, Dwyer weaves personal stories, historical documentary and ethnographic academic research into a performance that is never predictable, unfolding intimate reflections that quietly impart their deeper connections.

The Bougainville Photoplay Project, deviser-performer Paul Dwyer, director David Williams, video artist Sean Bacon, technical production Russell Emmerson, producer version 1.0, LiveWorks Festival, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Sept 5-6

WELCOME TO THE UK! WHERE THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS IN LONDON HAS JUST CLOSED ITS LIVE ART AND NEW MEDIA DEPARTMENT, ITS DIRECTOR CITING HIS OPINION THAT THE PRACTICES LACK “DEPTH AND CULTURAL URGENCY.” MEANWHILE, IN BRISTOL: ARNOLFINI’S SECOND LIVE ART WEEKENDER OF 2008 ATTRACTS AUDIENCES AND DIVERSE REACTIONS ON THE SORT OF SCALE YOU’D EXPECT WHEN THE ORGANISERS A) KNOW WHAT THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT AND B) ACTUALLY PROGRAM ANY LIVE ART IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Warped fairy tales and strange symmetries weave their way through the weekend under the apt title Beautifully Twisted. Seven female artists engage with the theme of the “dark landscapes of sexuality and desire.” At the event’s conclusion on a crisp Sunday afternoon, the audience is led through muddy woods on the western outskirts of Bristol, where the artists have re-framed and re-enacted aspects of their work. Drinking wine in the gathering dark, we discuss the things we’ve experienced in the last three days.

First of all, on the Friday night, Folake Shoga emerges from the shadows of Arnolfini’s dark studio. She approaches unassumingly, asking “How’s that for an entrance?” and her work, The Long Dark Path, continues along similarly understated lines, quietly engaging the audience in a series of texts, images and actions themed around her British family and Nigerian heritage. She recreates loud domestic arguments with her daughters in amplified whispers, sending a shiver down my spine with the rejoinder “If you hate me so much, why do you wear my clothes?” She cuts open apples full of maggots, reacting repeatedly with comic yelps. She mocks her own attempts at a Nigerian dialect. It’s all delivered without grandiosity, self-regard or even—at first sight—much of a framework. But framework there is, bookending the performance. At the beginning she asks us to look straight through one wall of the studio, describing a familiar Bristol vista: pastel terraces, industrial cranes on the harbourside. Then she turns her attention to the opposite wall, making it transparent; imagining through it the landscape of Nigeria, and a sunrise that appears over the treetops like (click of the fingers) that. “My task tonight”, she says, pointing from Europe to Africa, “Is to get from here…to there.”

Sure enough, her final action of the evening is to dance from one wall to the other, in a relaxed and confident African shuffle that seems both full of movement and somehow rooted, static. Shoga’s youngest daughter sits centre-stage, hair and shoulders garlanded with strings of plastic multicoloured lights moulded in the shape of flowers, calmly bobbing along to the rhythm…reminding me of Brazilian Candomblé ceremonies (rituals with Nigerian roots of their own) where the mysteries of the universe are decorated using bargain-basement electronics. It’s a beautiful, simple tableau that seems to celebrate the awakening of a confidence with which Shoga has been flirting all evening.

In Sunday’s woodside discussion, I hear Annette Foster’s performance, Destiny, also described as a flirtatious act. But despite all the evidence I don’t personally experience it as such. In this one-on-one encounter, you’re seated in a boudoir atmosphere of muslin and mirrors. Foster stands with her back to you, laced into a bright red crinoline, hair in blonde ringlets. She glimpses you in a mirror and giggles silently, hand to mouth, batting her eyelashes, repeatedly breaking off then returning her gaze, demonstrating the faux-naif attentions of a cultured but subservient woman of the 18th century. But there lies the rub: the trappings make her performance resemble an historical artefact. In this work Foster is addressing “intimate reactions, sexuality and the history of hysteria”, and you can well believe her mannerisms are rooted in an era that diagnosed mental disorders as diseases of the womb. But as such I don’t find her sexual, or predatory, beautiful or even contradictory; there are too many clauses between Foster and I. When the music warps and her smile drops it seems a logical comment on the proceedings, expected and modern. The performer’s repetitive actions, her inevitable return to smiles and giggles, are the back-and-forth pacings of a caged animal in a zoo.

Much more powerful her manifestation in the woods later that weekend, out in the wild. She approaches slowly, zig-zag, through a dark copse of spindly trees, an anachronistic figure in her bustle and curls, becoming less intangible the closer she gets. She reads fragments of folk-tale text from the scrolls concealed beneath her undergarments and then retreats into the crepuscular gloom, skirts swishing across the forest floor. Her presence here is unnerving, half-formed, speaking of the dark violence and strange misogynies of fairy tales.

Earlier this year at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow I sat through over two hours of short films and presentations by Marcia Farquhar. I note the timespan only because it didn’t feel very much like two hours; more like an afternoon idled away in the company of a friend. Farquhar has a warm, disarming presence and slightly scatty way of constructing performances, coupled with a way of delivering anecdotes that is best described as ‘heat-seeking.’ Personal stories duck and curve speedily, striking home at unexpected moments to hilarious effect. Farquhar never fully explains what she’s attempting with her art, never completely illustrates a point—and the work is all the more rewarding for it. Tonight, in Black and White and Red All Over she assesses the weekend’s brief as if more interested in circumnavigating it, ruminating on colour and feminist texts, on the original meaning of the word ‘glamour’, infusing the entire operation with a wonderful and completely intentional edge of “Will this do? Does this do it for you?” She dolls the audience up in the interconnected ‘paper cut-out’ dresses that I’ve seen in Farquhar’s home movies of a decade ago, made for seven people to wear simultaneously: “I don’t know quite what’s going to happen now. I have no ideas”, she says, and we believe her. So, like giddy argumentative kids, our arms connected in outfits that feel sometimes like impromptu straightjackets, we prance around the auditorium aimlessly, happily, before spilling out onto the cold quayside, jumping up and down on a bridge filled with Saturday night revellers, some of whom shout out: “Angels! Christmas angels!” The director of the ICA, I think to myself, would have this as lacking depth and cultural urgency. But how would he truly be able to judge? He’s opted out of wearing the dress.

Live Art Weekender, Beautifully Twisted, artists Folake Shoga, Annette Foster, Marcia Farquhar, Traci Kelly, Francesca Steele, Claire Thornton, Monika Tichacek, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, Oct 24-26

WHAT COMPRISES A PERFORMANCE MISTAKE? FOR 1970S BRITISH GROUP THE THEATRE OF MISTAKES, IT FUNCTIONS TO HIGHLIGHT STRUCTURE, TO PROVE FORM IS BEST READ THROUGH RUPTURE. THIS IS THE CASE WITH GOING, THE FIRST OF THEIR WORKS TO BE WHOLLY REHEARSED, MISTAKES INCORPORATED.

Beneath bare light bulbs, three men and two women (or two men and three women) constantly threaten to leave (“Really, I must go”, “I do think I’d better be going now”) yet never actually do. The repetition of text and gestures drawn from the rituals of saying goodbye becomes increasingly violent. Hands slam on a table, a cigarette packet is tossed, performers square up to one another, detain and push away. Phrases are non-committal, casual, petulant, full of rage. Silences are punctuated by swoons and vocal choruses which lend gravitas to even the tritest pop songs. Going is relentless: a structure with a human metronome and no ending. Our satisfaction comes from figuring out its fugal form, recognising the mistakes and the corrections they trigger, and then watching it play out over the five acts, each performer playing every part.

As director Fiona Templeton says, when Going was conceived in pre-Thatcherite Britain, noone looked like this. Slick-haired and grey-suited, its performers could have belonged to a nameless organisation somewhere on the ‘wrong’ side of the Berlin Wall. They appear locked in a Kafkaesque struggle from which there is no escape, penned in by the audience on four sides, by a formal conceit. Little wonder that when Going was performed in Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary, prisoners adored it; lifers felt it reflected the futility of applications to the parole board. Post 80s, everyone looks like this, like the face of faceless corporations; of commuters caught in the 9 to 5 treadmill.

The story is that when Going toured to New York in 1978, performer Mickey Greenall sat in the audience on his night off and fell asleep. In New York in 2008, this is unlikely. Two acts have been replaced with Coming, a work created by Templeton and her company The Relationship that takes on the task and structure of The Theatre of Mistakes’ earlier Homage to Pietro Longhi. Like the latter, Coming relies heavily on improvisation. A designated performer takes the lead and others copy. The Relationship works very well as an ensemble under Templeton’s direction, performers picking up cues from one another, incorporating elements inspired by the day’s news. They all have presence. There is Katy Brown’s terrifying boot camp leader who screams her way through a gruelling set of physical exercises, drenching herself with bottled water; Stephanie Silver’s leap from a table top in high heels. The audience is co-opted—asked to hold a spool or choose a playing card, to put on lipstick. Structure is less legible. Spatially, Coming leaks beyond the taped borders of Going as a performer exits the intimate theatre to the street. Like boisterous revellers, others clamber over swags of ribbon, toss shreds of paper, skid on a slippery wet floor.

Reviving Going in this context is a bold move. The Theatre of Mistakes was a core of The Ting (a larger, fluid group instigated by Anthony Howell in 1974). Anticipating the current emphasis on participation, they devised from a series of rule-based exercises (The Gymnasium) explored and refined in open workshops. Fiona Templeton’s input was crucial to their conceptual development. Going grew out of process: out of the mannerisms, intonations, formal concerns, dynamics and the collaborative practices of Howell, Templeton, Peter Stickland, Micky Greenall, Glenys Johnson and Miranda Payne. Is this still a Theatre of Mistakes work if none of those performers is in it? Does it matter?

According to Stickland, Going is to The Theatre of Mistakes what Waiting for Godot is to Beckett. It’s the work in which their prolonged enquiries into mutuality cohered and also the last time this core group were united in purpose and investigation (Templeton stayed on in New York to pursue her own projects, the group fragmented, eventually disbanding in 1981). The piece is so exquisitely classical in structure, so elegant, that to intercut it with anything is inevitably to dilute it.

Despite the input of Norwegian Signe Lie Howell, despite Templeton’s Scottish background and her engagement with French literature, despite influences as culturally diverse as Robert Wilson, Noh Theatre, Giorgio Morandi, Sol Le Witt and Gertrude Stein, there was always an Englishness about The Theatre of Mistakes. It adopted Purdies Farm in Hampshire as a rehearsal and performance space. Its work was made on the dole, in fields and barns, on Hartley Witney cricket green, its participants played shove ha’penny down the local pub. In Waterfall, their other seminal work, they dressed in cricket whites and recited koans about the weather. Theirs was an absurdist humour inscribed in the very language of Going; “Don’t be so silly” just doesn’t sound the same with an American accent.

Then again, perhaps these misgivings are pedantic. Instead of ‘beans, beans, beans, beans’, we have Javier Cardona’s lush singing of a Puerto Rican tune; Julie Troost, Adam Collignon and Chris Wendelken bring a different kind of repression to their performances. What Templeton achieves in her revisiting is a destabilisation of the classicism of Going through the romantic chaos of Coming. In that sense, this is a new type of mistake. In place of a minor rip in the fabric of the work, we have a gaping hole.

But paradoxically the fact that Going is still so effective, even in its edited version, even 30 years on, reconfirms its classic status. Templeton calls Going (with Coming) “both a play and a game” and leaves me thinking this high-risk strategy was a smart move.

Going (with Coming), created by The Theatre of Mistakes, performed by The Relationship, director Fiona Templeton, performers Katy Brown, Javier Cardona, Adam Collignon, Stephanie Silver, Julie Troost, Chris Wendelken; Chashama Theater, New York, Sept 3-13, www.fionatempleton.org

TOM WOULD BE THE LONELIEST MAN IN TOWN, WERE IT NOT FOR TOM TO KEEP HIM COMPANY. THESE TWO TOMS ARE NOT ALIKE IN TEMPERAMENT AND THEY’RE NOT EXACTLY MATES. THEY’RE THROWN TOGETHER BY CIRCUMSTANCE, MUCH LIKE THE JUNKED OUT SHED IN WHICH THEY LIVE. STILL THEY SHARE A TASTE FOR DIAL-UP PIZZA EATEN COLD WHILE WATCHING PORN. THEY CHEW IN SILENCE WITH SLACK MOUTHS, AS THE FEMALE PORN STAR COMES TO CLIMAX. THEY’RE NOT AROUSED. WE LAUGH AT THAT. THEY SWITCH HER OFF AND START LAUGHING TOO. THEY’VE NOT BEEN LUCKY IN LOVE.

One Tom—played with earnest, angular distraction by Duncan Luke, a regular with No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability—is nerdy, needy, driven yet frustrated. His fantasy escape hinges on some story about a Russian ice skating champion. He picks up the phone on more than one occasion to call Maureen at the QuitLine. He verbally abuses her with an erotic poem about smoking cigarettes.

Mobile, versatile actor Julian Crotti plays the other Tom. He’s angry too, but less neurotic, at times exuding from his clapped out armchair a certain playful warmth. He shouts heartily at the next door neighbour whose behaviour has pissed him off. In a rough blonde wig, he role-plays Tom’s relationship with Carmel. Ten years too late, he apologises for the violence.

Tom the Loneliest is performed in a shed, off the car park, in Dunstone Grove, a recreation reserve in suburban Adelaide. It was first conceived by Luke and Crotti as a short work for No Strings Attached’s Tempted series in 2007. It’s a simple premise—two men at odds with each other, with women and the world—which is reminiscent of themes in Daniel Keene’s playwriting. Although, if the language in this self-scripted work is less figurative, the emotions are more raw, the gestures more intense.

These are disadvantaged men, disenfranchised from the material acquisitions of masculinity—a job, a wife, a house. But they’ve not lost the power of their passion. Their fulsome anger and irreverent misogyny stand them in good stead. We know that when their passion droops like soggy pizza it’s just a temporary pause.

Director Paulo Castro has successfully developed Tom the Loneliest into an engaging full-length work. It has a materialist, found-object aesthetic. It is lit from the floor with bedroom lamps. And its dramatic arc is charted by Castro and the actors with clarity and care.

We might expect that Tom and Tom should eventually find solace in each other. With all that anger at the outset, a heartfelt hug in some moment of stillness was always on the cards. Unexpected were the feelings evoked at a funeral scene when, burying a ‘For Sale’ sign named Tom, the two Toms eulogise into existence the collapse of the entire real estate market.

Like another moment near the end when Crotti finds romance dancing with an enormous puppet wasp, such material encounters with found objects generate ironies of the inevitable which are both moving and profound.

No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Tom the Loneliest, director Paulo Castro, performers Julian Crotti, Duncan Luke, The Shed, Stepney, Adelaide, Oct 14-18

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE A MORE VIBRANT EXPRESSION OF THE BURGEONING CULTURE OF LIVE ART AND ARTIST-LED PRAXIS OF EVENT CREATION IN AND AROUND BRISBANE THAN EXIST IN 08. OVER THE FESTIVAL’S FIVE DAYS IN BRISBANE AND ONE IN TOOWOOMBA, ARTISTS WORKING OUT OF BOTH LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL TRADITIONS EXPLORED QUESTIONS OF ‘BEING’ AND ‘DOING’ IN A WIDE RANGE OF PERFORMANCES.

Independent, local practice has been connected to international developments since the first visit of local artists Lisa O’Neill and Brian Lucas to the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) in 1998 and 1999, and NRLA’s reciprocal visit to the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2000. Subsequent events have included the Galeri Nasional Indonesia International Performance Art Forum Festival in 2006, the Indonesian Jatiwangi Art Factory event this year, and Michael Mayhew’s visit from Manchester to Metro Arts in 2007. In recent years Brisbane has seen the growth of newer, younger directions in live art in local programming more generally, in art events such as the Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar and in Metro Arts Creative Development Festival.

Exist in 08 was co-curated by Brisbane artists Rebecca Cunningham and Zane Trow. Cunningham explained, “I had the fortune of attending the National Review of Live Art in 2007. There I saw work which I had never experienced before in my life, namely Black Market International (BMI). I said to Zane that we had to bring this work back to Australia.” The pair succeeded in bringing three of the 12 Black Market International artists and a range of other local, national and international artists to perform at the 2008 festival, which transcended its ephemeral, event-based form with, in Cunningham’s words, “the creation of artist-driven, independent performance art networks across borders.”

The scope, actions and material of each performance varied as widely as the distances travelled by participants to Exist in 08. Of the internationals, Michael Mayhew’s work represented the most elaborate effort: from his home in Manchester, Mayhew flew to Perth where he bought a car and drove across the country, collecting materials for his work in Alice Springs, Cairns and remote stops along the way. On the Friday night of Exist in 08, Mayhew showed his hypnotic Road Movie, a minimalist account of the mammoth drive, recorded with a camera taped to the steering wheel and condensing the artist’s six-week Australian outback adventure into 90 minutes. With a stream-of-consciousness audio track, in which the artist muses aloud as he encounters a variety of odd characters and amazing locations, the film is at once road movie, diary film and performance document. Mayhew worked with the great Australian road trip’s inevitable, relentless, reflection effect by questioning his English identity and its meaning in the Australian landscape.

On Saturday night, Mayhew’s performance involved, among other things, actions with jars of collected earth from the many locations encountered on his journey. Softly uttering “this is not my land”, the artist, wielding a wire cake sifter, dusted himself with various hues of red, black, gold, grey and ochre dirt poured from repurposed baked bean tins and soft drink bottles. Each of these receptacles was roughly bundled up with gaffer tape with the name of the earth’s origin—Alice, for example—scrawled rudely in permanent marker on the side. The artist’s boots carved out stark white negative space on the sheets of A3 paper on which he staged these actions, leaving an eerie echo of the performance. These traces spoke not only to Indigenous art practices, but also, on another level, to the abuse of the land by various outside interests. Using himself as a medium, Mayhew’s performance critiqued not just English but also, subtly, American domination, in actions such as his brandishing part of a cow’s skeleton while murmuring words to the effect that “These are not burgers” and “These are not here for you.” Mayhew’s forensic response to the Australian outback treated it as a repository of signs, with each object—kangaroo skulls, cow bones, rocks, sand—brought ritualistically (“sacralised”, as BMI’s manifesto puts it) into the performance. The creative focus on the performative charge emitted by natural materials, for me, also resonates with the practices of the acoustic ecology movement in sound art, and creates a similar audience dynamic of focused contemplation. At the end of Mayhew’s performance, as part of the artist’s “investigation” of materials, the objects were carefully picked out in little pools of light so that curious spectators could inspect them up close.

Jurgen Fritz’s performance couldn’t have made a starker contrast to Mayhew’s highly involved theatrics. With only a single prop—what looked like a town crier’s bell— Fritz created an incredibly controlled, physically extreme performance which emblematised the BMI’s collective interest in the investigation of forms of attention. The simple gesture of ringing the bell with increasing vigour provoked an avalanche of possibilities for reflection on themes ranging from self-expression, futility, isolation and—given the intensity of the artist’s actions—embodiment.

The multiple meanings of the body in space were explored by numerous other artists performing at the festival. Alicia Jones’ searing performance confronted the intersection of body image with identity, with ‘black-washing’ of the artist’s body, flag rituals, blood-curdling screams and the symbolic shearing of the artist’s hair by a relative. Kylie Hicks’ work involved, in part, the artist pinning to her costume the vox populi stories she has collected over a long period of time, making her body a kind of mobile, fleshy archive. In Abject Leader’s film-performance, Sally Golding used her body as a literal screen for the projection of collective anxieties about ancestry, death, decay and the unseen lands beyond conscious recognition. Mexican artist Elvira Santamaria Torres closed the festival with a generous, open-hearted performance using simple materials and huge, free-spirited gestures. In a reminder of the Fluxus precept about the powerful “monostructural qualities” of “a natural, simple event”, the conclusion of Santamaria Torres’ performance with the joyful redistribution of several dozen slightly crushed red roses to audience members evoked the rich colours and glorious iconography of the artist’s homeland, while resonating with play, romance…and fragrance. Connecting audiences in and around Brisbane with contemporary live art practitioners in enthralling encounters, Exist in 08 was a resounding success.

Exist in 08 international live art event, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, Oct 22-26; see www.existin08.com for catalogue

NOVELIST AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST FIONA MCGREGOR’S STRANGE MUSEUMS, A JOURNEY THROUGH POLAND IS NO MERE TRAVEL BOOK WHERE THE LONE ADVENTURER LOSES HERSELF IN A FOREIGN LAND AT OUR LEISURE, FOR OUR PLEASURE IN THE EXOTIC; PERHAPS DISTURBING OUR USUAL SENSE OF SELF, POSSIBLY REVEALING THE TRANSFORMATION OR EMOTIONAL GROWTH OF THE WRITER, MAYBE NOT. STRANGE MUSEUMS IS MORE DRIVEN THAN THAT: A QUEST TO UNDERSTAND AN UNFAMILIAR, OFTEN EVASIVE AND SOMETIMES HOSTILE CULTURE AND AN ATTEMPT TO PLACE THE ENCOUNTER IN THE CONTEXT OF BEING WOMAN, LESBIAN, QUEER, AUSTRALIAN AND ARTIST.

McGregor travelled with co-performer and former lover Ana Wojak as senVoodoo through Poland to festivals and galleries to present their work Arterial in which the performers, dressed in white, walk towards each other on emulsified white photographic paper, veins in their wrists open for the duration. However, Strange Museums is in many ways a lone journey, especially in its final stages. Engagingly constructed by a novelist rather than a documentarist, Strange Museums subtley and gradually unpacks personal history as the journey unfolds, withholding immediate accounts of the performance work, letting it form in the reader’s mind, and later revealing something of its origins and meanings, rooted in the writer’s upbringing, sexual proclivities and health—she suffers Hepatitis-C. It’s rare to be able to appreciate the complex motivation for performance art without having to navigate the obscurantism of poetics or theory (McGregor again feels an outsider, this time for not being part of that art-academic niche).

Fiona McGregor’s journey takes us into the living museums that are bodies, families, cultures, countries and art practices as well as the repositories of history—the architectural constructions of the past manifest as museums, churches, preserved sites (World War II concentration camps) and conserved, history-distorting cities.

There’s much for McGregor to enjoy—the widepsread acceptance of performance art (compared with its narrow ambit in Australia), making sense of the curious personalities of the artists, theatre directors and gallery owners she and Wojak meet; and reflections on the wonderful literature and worlds of Gombrowicz, Witkiewicz, Singer and, too briefly, Bruno Schulz. She even takes to the churches: “I have mellowed since my first sojourn in Europe when visiting the art in churches meant literally holding onto my stomach, such was the intensity of my visceral revolt, legacy of my orthodox Catholic upbringing.” The festivals attended are modest, under-funded, endangered; galleries are often housed in people’s homes; museums range from endangered to lavish, either evading the ugly facts of history or newly embracing them, and everywhere the opening hours are unpredictable. But elsewhere government money, McGregor writes, is thrown at art, and signs of new wealth, side by side with poverty, are evident in urban renewal and shopping centres.

As Strange Museums progresses and McGregor and Wojak travel further, the more the writer demands to understand Poland—the hero worship of Pope John Paul, the mass embrace of his successor Benedict, the right wing homogenising of culture, the widespread homophobia and, often if not always, a refusal, among artists and the intelligentsia to discuss the treatment of Poland’s Jews, not just in World War II under the Nazis, but in the appalling events of 1968.

Wojak is a quiet presence in the book, herself absent from her country of origin for some 20 years, and not always able or willing to answer McGregor’s constant querying of a culture that bewilders with its contradictions: where an apparently dissident artist can be a confirmed homophobe and the oppressiveness of Communism has been replaced not with growing freedoms but with a censorious Catholicism. Faced with a multitude of cultural complexities and not able to speak Polish, the inquisitive McGregor has to question cautiously, but even so is met with silence, with evasion, or with absolutes. To her complaint about homophobia an artist retorts, “This is not intolerance. This is tradition, it is morality.” She writes, “It was my first and last argument in Poland.” In another moment of frustration, “I flee upstairs to the kitchen. I’m fed up with this Polish defensiveness; their silence weighs upon me like guilt…Why can’t you talk about it? I say. You never stop questioning me about the Aborigines. That’s our genocide. That’s what I was born into.”

She discovers it’s not that Poles don’t know about anti-semitism or have forgotten the Holocaust—there are provocative books about it, a leading newspaper takes on the visiting Pope when he visits Auschwitz-Birkenhau and also Jankowski, a right wing Catholic priest when he labels a nativity scene in his church with the text “The Jews killed Jesus and the Prophets. They have also oppressed us.” McGregor arrives at a provisional understanding: “Silence may be denial, or protection, a veil of mourning. It seems to me that nobody in Poland is separable from atrocity, that everyone’s roots must lead back through bloodshed, and nothing is binary, everything is grey, so I tread carefully.” But she still finds herself infuriated: Jewish history is tucked away on the fifth floor of the poorly attended Historical Museum of Warsaw. Then a friend directs her to the huge, multimedia Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, an old power plant refurbished in 2005 that pays homage to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, is open six days a week and is crowded.

McGregor’s own body is a living museum. Celtic Catholicism, she writes, “is surely the most dour and our religion was one of unremitting restraint, punishment, and duty”, which she challenges in performance. “It is fair to say that it took performing The Ninth Station more than twenty years later, with my lips stitched and six ten-gauge hooks in my back, to get over the bad associations with [the Stations of the Cross].” It’s fascinating how McGregor comes to reconcile herself to being Catholic: it was Wojak, from a more vibrant Polish Catholicism, “who brought the visuals, the iconography and rituals of Catholicism into senVoodoo (I never would have dared)….Over the years, through my performance art more than anything, I have reclaimed my cultural heritage, and pagan Catholicism now makes sense to me. As there are secular Jews, I am a secular Catholic, whether I—or they—like it or not. And so I remain attached to the Church, a thorn in its side.” Oddly enough, her parents were tolerant and anti-racist, but also homophobic. McGregor worries at other categories, given her and Wojak’s invisibility as gay or queer in Poland, but at the same time at the restrictiveness of the terms in Australia. Some terms it seems she’d be happily cleansed of, while retaining Catholicism but purging it of its destructiveness.

Arterial, McGregor’s performance and installation created with Wojak, is a cathartic, ritualistic cleansing, involving careful preparation (watching diet, avoiding alcohol), medical assistance (not always reliably available for the pair in Poland) and the risk of collapse. Now that senVoodoo is no more, perhaps that particular cleansing is complete. Strange Museums too is an act of cleansing, if an incomplete one, a search for answers not easily found and the laying bare of a life in words. By the end of the book, ‘cleansing’ is writ large, ambiguously and variously: the Polish government’s flushing out of collaborators from the Communist period, the proposal to eliminate all of the old hammer and sickle icons of Soviet tyranny, the heavily enforced ban on abortion, attempts to ban gay parades, the erasure of the past in urban redevelopment, and the Australian parallels from a decade of oppression where nuance in politics and art has become a dirty word. As it is in Poland, writes McGregor, “where the simplest of differences struggles for a voice, I don’t have the luxury of ambiguity.”

Strange Museums will fascinate readers with McGregor’s vivid accounts of Polish cities and towns, arts subcultures, individual personalities, churches, galleries, artists’ homes, food, the countryside and the lingering detritus of war, revolt and uneven development. For artists it will have special appeal as McGregor and Wojak appear at festivals, grapple with inadequate facilties and the cautious responses to their work, attend art events and struggle to situate themselves personally and artistically in a sometimes fundamentally foreign culture. McGregor’s insights about her practice, about the pain and release involved, and the shaping of a fluid identity make the book an intensely personal one, voiced conversationally, avoiding stylistic excess and with the flow and shape of a very good novel.

Fiona McGregor’s Strange Museums, A Journey Through Poland, University of Western Australia Press, 2008

DELIVERING THE BIENNIAL WAL CHERRY LECTURE ON THE SET OF ARCHITEKTIN, HER PLAY FOR THE STATE THEATRE COMPANY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA, ROBYN ARCHER EXPRESSED ADMIRATION FOR THE FLAT-PACK INGENUITY OF IKEA DESIGN. THE VALUE OF INDUSTRIAL CREATIVITY, ARCHER EXPLAINED, IS WELL-MEASURED BY ITS ECONOMY, EFFICIENCY AND FUNCTIONAL DESIGN. BUT EMPHASIS ON THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SHOULD NOT DISTRACT US FROM THE VALUE OF NURTURING ARTISTIC PRACTICE BEYOND COMMERCIAL IMPERATIVES FOR PROFIT.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000), the Viennese architect and biographical subject of Archer’s play, was an early exponent of functional design. Her ‘Frankfurt Kitchen’ from 1926, inspired by the space-saving constraint of railway dining cars and designed along Taylorist principles for energy-efficient labour, is the precursor to the prefabricated kitchens of today with their activity-based layout and their laminated surfaces of wood, glass and steel.

Two reconstructed pieces from Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen make an appearance in Architektin. A model of the entire kitchen is projected as a three-dimensional animation on a screen above the stage. Archer’s passing reference to Ikea is a reminder that, despite its ubiquity as a global corporation like so many, harnessing Chinese labour to the mass production of western living styles, the impulse to disseminate functional design for the working masses was well-born of socialist ideals.

Architektin celebrates the life and work of Schütte-Lihotzky. Her contributions in designing spaces for communal life—kitchens, homes, kindergartens, schools and community facilities—were only recognised later in her life. Helen Morse, as an elderly Margarete, enjoys enacting the architect’s satisfied exhaustion at rising repeatedly to receive yet another honorary doctorate or award.

There’s an irony in this restrospective gesture of recognition, which Archer recognises as a dramatic device. The younger Margarete is played by Ksenja Logos, although the two appear on stage together several times—the older Margarete offering the advice of hindsight, the younger trying to stay focused on the work at hand.

The plot of Architektin follows the building projects of Schütte-Lihotzky’s working life. The play moves deftly from her work on council housing in Vienna in the 1920s to her invitation to join the architect and urban planner Ernst May (Michael Habib) in Frankfurt, where she met and married fellow architect Wilhelm Schütte (Nick Pelomis). In 1930, Margarete and her husband travelled with May’s team of architects to Russia, where they worked to realise the new cities of Stalin’s five-year plan, even as the regime’s promise began to sour.

Schütte-Lihotsky’s decision to stay on in Russia, long after her colleagues had migrated to the USA, is a pivot to which the play returns. Another pivot—used by Archer to transition her central character from Logos to Morse—is Margarete’s decision, as a member of the Austrian Communist party, to visit Vienna in 1941 on a resistance mission. She is arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned for the duration of the war.

Schütte-Lihotsky’s life story is both epic and episodic. These two pivots provide the impulse to propel the drama through the latter, productive yet relatively peaceful, decades of the architect’s long life. Architectural labour is not inherently dramatic. Rather Archer dramatises the architectural vision—as in Margarete’s stirring speech on women’s work and children’s future, delivered at the 1968 international women’s confederation in Vienna and, here, by Morse with grace and heartfelt wisdom.

The drama in this production is directed with warmth and clarity by Adam Cook. Mary Moore’s design, lit by Geoff Cobham, realises the vision of the work. The play provides an ideal subject for Moore’s design approach. The set demonstrates the designer’s skill in extracting functional significance from dramatic form and realising it with efficient choice of colour, material and form.

An architectural blueprint, painted on the floor, provides a palette for the costumes, hung accessibly on racks. Two long stainless steel tables on castor wheels provide, for most scenes, the necessary furniture. Constructivist principles are realised in a large white beam, which frames the space, and a suspended screen. A stunning white girder descends and then is jaunted at an angle for scenes on a construction site in Russia.

Music has an affinity with architecture, as it does with Archer, but it does not figure prominently in the work. As Margarete’s fellow-prisoner, Antje Guenther sings in German a song of peace at their release, and Craig Behenna plays a composer who cannot sing. And there’s a final note: at the end of the performance, Archer appears in projected video, interviewing Schütte-Lihotsky in preparation for the play. She asks if sung how Margarete’s character should appear—a shrill soprano or a throaty contralto? Margarete answers with a smile.

State Theatre Company of South Australia, Architektin, writer Robyn Archer, director Adam Cook, designer Mary Moore, lighting Geoff Cobham, music Stuart Day, performers Craig Behenna, Duncan Graham, Antje Guenther, Michael Habib, Ksenja Logos, Helen Morse, Nick Pelomis, Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, Aug 29-Sept 20

ONE THING I REALLY HAVE TO REMIND MYSELF WHEN THINKING ABOUT TERRAPIN PUPPET THEATRE’S HELENA AND THE JOURNEY OF THE HELLO IS THAT IT’S FOR CHILDREN. THAT’S REALLY QUITE IMPORTANT, BECAUSE THERE ARE PREJUDICES WE MAY HAVE AS ADULTS, WHO DID NOT GROW UP WITH MOBILE PHONES, TO WHOM TEXT MESSAGING IS SOMEWHAT INCONVENIENT AND WHO ARE POSSIBLY EVEN DISAPPOINTED WITH THE WAY THE FUTURE TURNED OUT. I WAS EXPECTING A JETPACK. I GOT AN IPHONE. NEVER MIND THAT THE IPHONE CAN CARRY MY VOICE FURTHER AND AT GREATER SPEED, I WASN’T EXPECTING IT AND I THINK I AM ALLOWED TO BE SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED. OF COURSE, IF ONE IS ELEVEN, THIS IS NOT A DISAPPOINTING FUTURE, IT IS NOW.

Terrapin’s new show is many things. It’s certainly an investigation of now and it’s certainly aimed at children—older children though, as it all gets a bit dark and does talk about vanishing parents, or them changing somehow. The story is told by talking animals and there are iPhones that have eyes all whirling about in a forest that’s made of metal and light. Helena and the Journey of The Hello is wonderful, in the truest sense of that word—filled with strange and intriguing delight. It’s bursting with images and ideas, sometimes so many that I found it a little hard to keep up with the pace dictated by the slightly threatening trio of story tellers, Wolf, Fox and Hare.

With their distinctive and defined personalities, these characters were a highlight, growling and grimacing and making bad jokes, evoking tiny hints of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things. As narrators, guides and guardians of the story, they’re supposed to draw us in and keep us excited, while still being fairly convincing talking animals. Quite a job. Of course, they managed it well. In fact I found myself rather liking them and their growly, lumbering energy. I particularly liked Ryk Goddard, the Wolf, who displayed vigour and skill as a performer and whom I’d really like to see performing more tales of this dark and feral nature. The other cast members were terrific too, but Goddard exuded charisma here and was certainly the leader of the pack.

The work plays around with a lot of ideas, but the important ones seemed to be about time and distance, which is appropriate for a show exploring what technology means to people and how they can use it, particularly something as small and personal as a mobile phone. Here, the phones are sort of magical, which I suppose they are. We understand how they work, but this story evokes the science as words that fly around the globe, that connect us when we are far apart, and it reminds us that this is actually quite a wonderful thing. Perhaps the future is not such a bad place to live.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Helena and the Journey of the Hello, writer Finegan Kruckemeyer, co-designer, director Frank Newman, devisor-performers Ryk Goddard, Mel King, Sam McMahon, production designer Kate Davis, music Mikelangelo, Fred Showell, lighting Danny Pettingill, puppet maker and design Greg Methe, original artwork Tim Schultz; Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Cente, Oct 8-18, www.terrapin.org.au

OUR WRITERS IN MADRID, MELBOURNE, BRUSSELS, AND TOKYO IN THIS EDITION OF REALTIME REPORT BEING AWESTRUCK BY WORKS OF ART. AS JOHN BAILEY AND JACQUELINE MILLNER WRITE, THAT STATE OF BEING HAS NOT BEEN FASHIONABLE: IN ARTISTIC PRACTICE DISTANCING REMAINS DOMINANT, AN INHERITANCE OF MODERNISM, “A MOVEMENT…OFTEN CHARACTERISED IN TERMS OF THE TERROR OF THE SUBLIME”.

In this article I look at my experience of the Barrie Kosky-Tom Wright adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women. I also share reflections on Complicite’s A Disappearing Number, a visually powerful account of the lives and ecstasies of mathematicians, De Quincey Co’s Triptych, a large scale Body Weather reverie, and The Border Project’s Rock’n’Roll Disaster, a modest, but convincing fantastical foray into the consuming power of popular music.

In his little book, On Ecstasy (Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), Barrie Kosky amiably and vividly traces his emerging sense of ecstasy from the pleasures of his grandmother’s chicken soup to incipient homoerotic compulsion (the wet jeans of a TV character, the smells of the sports changing room), to the touch of fur (Narnia fantasies) and silk (in his father’s fur factory), to the first strange encounter with the soprano voice in Puccini’s Madam Butterfly (on his grandmother’s old records, prior to a first visit to the opera) and his bedroom conducting of Mahler’s First Symphony. He moves on to the realisation of ecstatic states in his early work, The Dybbuk, and recently in Europe with Euripides’ Medea, Ligeti’s Le Grande Macabre (with a flood of excrement: “What has taste to do with the theatre?”) and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.

Ecstasy in Kosky’s book is no simple feeling of elation, of well-being, of blessedness. It’s beyond wonder. It’s all consuming. It takes over the body. He recalls from the changing room of his schoolboy years, “Body odour of every imaginable flavour, sweat, socks, Dencorub, hot water, cheap soap, the wet old wood of the lockers. All clashing in my nostrils, all fighting to get up my nasal cavities. Whirling in my nostrils like a thousand miniature tornadoes. Sometimes it became so overwhelming I really thought that I was going to faint, or vomit or scream.” At 16 he sees Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony, leading the orchestra, but danced by the music it makes, sweat spraying from his face. He is struck, it seems, by this intertwining of creation and possession.

The power of ecstasy, Kosky realises, is in its totality. At 15 he listens to Mahler’s First Symphony and asks, “What sort of composer puts a funeral march to a children’s nursery song and a zippy village klezmer band on the same page of a symphonic score? This music seduced me. It took me, convulsed me and drowned me. It suffocated me. It was gorgeous, repellent, terrifying. It scared the shit out of me. It still does.” He cites Mahler’s own words, “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” It’s not surprising then that Kosky’s productions are singular totalities, possessed and possessing, full of odd but integrated juxtapositions, full of beauty but equally revelling in the abject until it too is bizarrely glorious. He writes, “The theatre seems to me the perfect place for the ecstatic to manifest itself. Theatre is by its very nature an alchemical mix of manipulation, ritual and stimulation.” Ecstatic theatre is therefore beyond taste, self control and reason; it is violent and excessive, and “is best conveyed through phantasmagoria” where there is constant hallucinatory slippage between real and unreal. The worlds Kosky and his collaborators conjure are fantastical, not immediately recognisable as our own, but soon enough tellingly so. They are states to be entered into, endured and embraced, to become one with.

Robyn Nevin, Jennifer Vuletic, Natalie Gamsu, Queenie van de Zandt, Kyle Rowling,; The Women of Troy

The version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women (415 BC) that Kosky and Tom Wright created for the Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse is not a work to which the word ecstatic might easily be ascribed, but the intense, sustained sense of grieving and despair it achieves amidst the horrors of the aftermath of war is relentlessy realised and exhaustingly compelling. And it is beautiful, in the most uncomfortable of ways, because the expression of grief yields great beauty, in and through music and acting—in a play that does not offer conventional character development but immediately demands extreme emotional states. Intensifying the focus on the women, Robyn Nevin (playing the Queen of Troy, Hecuba) and Melita Jurisic (as Cassandra, Andromache and Helen of Troy in turn), Kosky and Wright have removed the gods who open the play, Talthybius (the Greek army’s herald), and the words of the chorus (whom Euripides had cast as fellow victims of the war, singing of their individual and collective plights). Kosky’s battered chorus (Natalie Gamsu, Jenny Vuletic, Queenie van de Zandt) performs arias and laments (by Dowland, Gesualdo, Mozart, Bizet, Slovenian folk songs) sometimes joined by Nevin and Jurisic. The war with Greece lost, the women will become the slaves and spouses of the victors. The Greek King Menelaus (Arthur Dignam) arrives, in a wheelchair, to be seduced again, perhaps, by the wife who left him, triggering the war. Finally, a small boy, Astyanax, son of Andromache and Hector, grandson of Hecuba, and regarded by the Greeks as a potentially dangerous heir of Troy, is taken away, thrown off a cliff and his bloody body returned to the stage, in a small cardboard box, the legs visible only from the knee down, hanging limply from the opening. Euripides’ text is pared back, with brutal effect, but remains true to the intense feeling and musicality of the original if recast as modern music theatre.

This Kosky production is not a phantasmagoria, nor does Euripides’ play offer itself as one. It’s not like his recent The Lost Echo for STC or, earlier, Berg’s opera Wozzeck for Opera Australia. Its kin are the dark, closed worlds of the Ted Hughes/Seneca Oedipus and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra (both for STC), Kosky at his most restrained. And while The Women of Troy contains much of the world—poetry, blood, vomit, violence, song, opera, mobile phones, television (offstage), pianist (effectively onstage)—it’s an ecstatic vision shorn of display, sensuality, revelry and dance. Even the masked workers who beat, threaten and photograph the women against a vast wall of tired lockers (like some last ditch barricade that the tired walls of Troy have become) display none of the participatory glee of their kindred Abu Ghraib torturers. These guards are characterless, bureaucratic, delivering their captives on trolleys, removing the principal women one at a time in large cardboard boxes secured with the screech of packing tape—humans ritually reduced to freight. The drab ordinariness of the place, the loudspeaker announcements, the plodding entrances and exits of the guards suggest the banality of the evils perpetrated, appalling in their tedium and suspense.

And while grieving in word and song is powerful and beautiful and momentarily consoling, there is no way out for these women, however much they implore, challenge or doubt the gods, or attribute blame and pick at the wounds that are their tales, however fair and rational their pleas for compassion. They are trapped in the irrationality of vengeance, where violence is a constant. And so are we, our seats draped in white cloth, as if the theatre has been closed for the duration of the war, random explosions regularly triggered behind and below us. The bruised and bloody women are physically close to us in the small theatre, their fear, panic and despair inescapable as they cringe and cluster defensively, hide in lockers, confront and comfort each other in song.

Robyn Nevin as Hecuba, former queen of Troy, is the production’s anchor, defiant, elegant if battered, a rhetorician, visibly quivering as she keeps emotional and physical collapse barely at bay—her husband has been murdered, her daughters raped or killed and her grandson executed. Melita Jurisic, in her three roles is equally superb, not least as the play’s most frightening figure—the prophetess Cassandra, bedraggled, blind, bloody and vomiting—after spitting out a madly ironic celebration of her betrothal to King Agamemnon—then eerily rational and set on vengeance. Then she’s the sad, pregnant Andromache, and finally, the obtuse, devious Helen. The ‘agon’ of classical Greek tragedy is played out powerfully between Hecuba and Helen, but there can be no winning this argument.

The Women of Troy is deeply horrifying and deeply satisfying theatre. In the short term you are left without words—there’s a kind of numbness as you leave—later they flood out. The Women of Troy is another stage in Barrie Kosky’s making of an ecstastic theatre, there’s a whole world in it, recognisably our own, it goes beyond words, makes barely consoling beauty out of despair, plays out the contradictions of life and of art, tossing you about in the turmoil.

complicité: a disappearing number

Mathematics can yield its ecstasies and eureka moments and there’s much talk of its pleasures in Complicité’s A Disappearing Number. We’re entertained and surprised by some maths magic in the mock lecture opening, later calculations unfold as if by an unseen hand on a blackboard-cum-screen and later again flood the stage like stars in a symbolic universe. There’s a lot of theatre magic in A Disappearing Number, but the effect is less than ecstatic. It’s a play dressed up with effects, the actors belting out their lines as if forgetting they’re wearing head-mikes, playing out the didactic juxtaposition of two sets of lives—two male mathematicians (British and Indian) in the 1910-20s, and a female mathematician and her non-mathematician husband (British and American of Indian descent respectively). The parallels between the pairs are tentatively drawn, not least because writer-director Simon McBurney and his co-devisors have very little to say about the relationship between the two men and too much about the modern fictional relationship; its elaborated tensions seem very slight indeed and then melodramatic.

The set is an immaculately realised modern university lecture theatre: the whiteboard rolls over into a blackboard, becomes a screen backdrop (for mimed Mumbai taxi rides etc), or a screen for an overhead projector, or can fly in and out as desired, as does the whole wall to reveal rooms in England and India using back projections and a little furniture.

Complicité (formerly Theatre de Complicité who impressed Australian audiences on earlier visits with The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol and The Street of Crocodiles over a decade ago) is a British company that combines the poetic and visual attributes of European contemporary performance with a dogged English literalness. Visually A Disappearing Number is a finely wrought, often beautiful spectacle about a brilliant self-taught Indian mathematician, Ramanujan, who overcame the constraints of his Brahmin code so he could visit his mentor GH Hardy in Cambridge. Harding recognised the Indian’s genius, seeing he would revolutionise mathematics. The pair became intimates, possibly in love with each other, although this is only hinted at briefly. Why McBurney couldn’t have at least speculated further is a mystery. There’s little we can learn from comparing the two relationships, save something about the cultural divide between England and India, which is barely evident in the modern male, Paul (raised in the USA), and which is oddly expressed in both he and Harding losing their partners to India—Ruth dies while on a pilgrimage to Ramanujan’s home where he had died shortly after returning, decades before. (She’s doubly punished—with a miscarriage prior to the trip.) When Paul finally goes to the India he’s never visited before, the parallels and synchronicities between couples and eras are then made to add up to a consoling metaphysic based on the continuity between the fictions we call numbers and a corresponding indivisibility between past and future, which means we are never really separated from those we have lost. The effect, with its immersive visual correlatives, was curiously consoling, but sentimental in retrospect. Nitin Sawney’s original score is partly played live and there’s a too brief passage of Indian dance, but these are incidentals in what could have been a greater more embracing dance of notes, bodies and symbols.

de quincey co: triptych

In her own work and with her company, Tess de Quincey, generates for audiences states of being that are hard to label. The performers move with a mix of eloquent grace and involuntary quivering, but are they dancing? They appear to see, to respond, but to what? Things we can’t see—remembered, re-lived, conjured? They don’t speak, but what are they signalling? Somehow, the intensity of their sheer otherness transmits itself to the bodies of the audience who then share a sense of contemplation, of reverie and risk as performers find themselves in positions that consume them but demand balance and then its loss and release before another or the same state again takes them. I’m often utterly at one with de Quincey’s creations, but not with Triptych. Here is a work with all the appearances of an embracing totality: the three large passages of the title, themes of air (projected images of the windswept dance of jacaranda flowers), electricity (a pulsing oscilloscope) and water (a somnolent ocean), four dancers, the uniformity of designer jeans and tops beneath kimonos, the music of Chris Abrahams throughout, and large scale projections in each scene on three mobile screens whose repositioning moves the audience about the performing space (variously opening up or shutting down perspectives).

But appearances are deceptive and although the performers enter their various states with all the commitment and precision you’d expect, the outcome is a collection of solos, occasional duets (Victoria Hunt and Linda Luke working in taut parallels in one passage against Robin Fox’s dancing oscilloscopery and Abrahams Fox-ish score), and all too rare moments of communality. Once I’d made a rational decision not to be distracted by the illusion of totality, the scale of the projections or the volume of the music, or taking too many performers in at once, I could focus on the pleasures and tensions realised in individual performances—Peter Fraser’s querulous self-interrogation, awed, erect, then crawling; Linda Luke’s rough-hewn assertions of and delight in risk; Lizzie Thompson, a fine dancer, here tremulous, unformed as yet in the world of Body Weather; Victoria Hunt’s muscular interiority with its long-held, acutely shaped tensions in the final scene. For me, at its best Triptych provided a kind of un-anchored shamanism, a performance of momentary pleasures and interrupted reveries. For others, it was ecstasy.

the border project: highway rock’n’roll disaster

Highway Rock’n’Roll Disaster is a work of modest scale but one with a potent cumulative impact. It’s concert-like music theatre rooted in the everyday, in the love of popular songs that provide both escape (a loosening of voice and body that is both visceral and aetherial) and reflection (what was I feeling, thinking, doing, when I first heard that song?). The performance moves from mundane introductions to the songs to immersive performances, often against inventive video clips projected on the back wall or onto very mobile screens. The clips have their own integrity, or parody their inspirers, or provide an unexpected dimension: in one, a woman, not singing, stands in front of a screen on which a semi-literal drama is acted out, suggesting the death and perhaps heavenly ascent of one of the participants, like a movie version of a Duane Michaels’ photographic series about death and grieving.

The performers mutate from solo singers and instrumentalists into multi-skilled band members while their roadies turn dancers. And the songs too (Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child of mine aside) are mutant: they are the performers’ own, inspired by the originals that live in their psyches and bodies. It’s an odd alchemy, but the songs work and the performances are idiosyncratic and as the the performance moves towards its conclusion the concert world staging mutates again, into something much stranger: a delirious, dark world of bizarre giant creatures roaming amidst the musicians, a phantasmagoria, beyond words, of course.

Sydney Theatre Company, The Women of Troy, by Euripides, adaptation Barrie Kosky, Tom Wright, performers Robyn Nevin, Melita Jurisic, Natalie Gamsu, Jennifer Vuletic, Queenie van de Zandt, Arthur Dignam, Kyle Rowling, Patricia Cotter, Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke, Narek Armaganian,musical director Barrie Kosky, pianist Daryl Wallis, design Alice Babidge, lighting Damien Cooper, sound design David Gilfillan, Wharf 1, Sydney, opened Sept 20; Complcité, A Disappearing Number, conceived & directed by Simon McBurney with the company, design Michael Levine, lighting Paul Anderson, sound Christopher Shutt, projection Sven Oriel for mesmer, Sydney Theatre, Nov 12-Dec 2; De Quincey Co, Triptych, concept, direction Tess de Quincey, performers Peter Fraser, Victoria Hunt, Linda Luke, Lizzie Thompson, composer Chris Abrahams, audio-visual production Sam James, oscilloscope Robin Fox, lighting Travis Hodgson, Performance Space, Nov 6-15; Sydney Theatre Company, The Border Project, Highway Rock’n’Roll Disaster, performed, conceived, created and composed by the company, Katherine Fyffe, Cameron Goodall, David Heinrich, Jude Henshall, Andrew Howard, Paul Reichstein, Andrew Russ, Alirio Zavarce, roadies Danel Koerner, Tim Kurylowicz, Luca James Lee, Lachlan Mantelll, Kurt Murray, director Sam Haren, lighting Geoff Cobham, animation Jole van der Knaap, Paul Lawrence-Jennings, costumes Area 101, Wharf 2, Sept 19-27

ASIDE FROM AMERICAN AVANT-GARDISM FROM THE 60S, CONTEMPORARY SOUND AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC HAVE GENERALLY BEEN ABSENT FROM MOST MAJOR PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVALS IN AUSTRALIA. MELBOURNE FESTIVAL 2005 DIPPED A TOE IN THE WATER PROGRAMMING THE CYBERZEN MASTER RYOJI IKEDA WHO TURNED SOME ON TO THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPANDED LISTENING AND OTHERS RIGHT OFF. BUT IN HER FINAL FESTIVAL KRISTY EDMUNDS PUSHED A LITTLE FURTHER, PROGRAMMING A HANDFUL OF ACTIVITIES IN WHICH SOUND (OR ITS ABSENCE) WAS THE KEY INVESTIGATION.

21:100:100—the exhibition

The most significant of these events was the exhibition 21:100:100, a festival partnership with Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, ambitiously presenting “100 works by 100 sound artists produced in the 21st century.” (Well almost, there were a few inclusions from the final decade of 20th). It was like the biggest sampler of the ‘cool’ of experimental music you could imagine, curated by notable sound artists Oren Ambarchi and Marco Fusinato, along with the gallery’s Alexie Glass and Emily Cormack.

Management of such a large collection notwithstanding, what was particularly impressive was the design of the exhibition. Taking up both lower galleries each artist/track had its own set of headphones, and a small placard, angled up from the floor, with just the right amount of contextual information. The headphones were tethered to the floor with the remaining length of the leads rising up to the ceiling in splendid fanning looms. Every attention was paid to the elegance of these clusters and their placement within the space, while evocative lighting in the second room created a kind of spiders’ lair. Scattered around were small black gardening stools, a challenge for the larger and less mobile, yet good for keeping you grounded, focused and alert to the listening task at hand. The pieces were arranged in alphabetical order of artists’ names, proving a far more satisfying strategy than the imposition of other curatorial taxonomies. Within one cluster you could hear a range of methodologies from artists of varying ages, eras and countries: for example Pateras/Baxter/Brown next to Pita, next to Francis Plagne, next to Stephen Prina, next to Eliane Radigue.

For those who are already walking discographies perhaps there was nothing to be learned here; and I wondered if for those new to experimental music and sound, the scale of the exhibition might prove daunting. For someone like me, who knows how much she doesn’t know, this exhibition was full of satisfactions and revelations. However, to avoid gallery anxiety attack, you needed time. Going twice I estimate I sampled around 70% of the works, but I couldn’t always listen in entirety, problematic for the 20 minute compositions in which the exposition over time is the point. The inclusion of around 20% Australian artists (with a strong Melbourne contingent) amongst the many acclaimed international artists, was a heartening illustration of the strength of experimental sound and music in this country especially over the last eight years.

21:100:100—the performance

To accompany the exhibition, there was also a one-off concert at the BMW Edge, Federation Square. Performed by Oren Ambarchi, Marco Fusinato and Brendan Walls on guitars and electronics, James Rushford on prepared piano and Robin Fox with his laser light spectacular, it was strangely refreshing to sit through only one 45 minute set without three other performances on the bill as is usual in sound events. The set explored the slow build structure almost inevitable in live sound performance. Starting with some quiet piano torturings by Rushford, subtle layers of guitar were added. Developing in a meditative fashion, full of rich harmonic drone play, the performance was spiced up by occasional feedback shrieks and percussive eruptions, generally instigated by Walls. Some more insistent electronic rumbles indicated the presence of Fox, along with a regular relay of smoke machines letting off into the space, one poorly placed behind Fusinato, enveloping him periodically in clouds of smoke, reminiscent of the misguided grandeur of Spinal Tap. Around three quarters through, the by now wonderfully dense dronescape reached its peak, and slid away leaving Ambarchi playing spare notes. Seemingly an end, but no! Within a beat, the Fox took flight, and the lasers pulsed into action, carving the space into vectors and planes. The seats rumbled with rhythmic bass and the intelligent spectacle wound up the show. Fox’s laser work is difficult to integrate with other works, and as was the case with its inclusion in Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine, the practicalities of the smoke machines, along with the works’ multisensory impact defined it as a separate entity, best saved till last.

echolocation

Alex Stahl’s Echolocation was poetically described as “allowing us to find our voice in the urban cacophony.” Using an impressive array of speakers suspended under the arches of the Princes Bridge, the piece played sounds of flocking birds, recorded on location, mixed with occasional chimes and tones. By calling a phone number and singing or speaking to the nothingness that greeted you, supposedly the sound would be altered. Trying this several times, I felt no empowerment as the ‘conductor’ of this universe. There was too much rhetoric about the work that in reality had the effect of playing back a nicely composed version of sounds from the same location.

evolution of fearlessness

Significantly, Lynette Walworth’s installation Evolution of Fearlessness is silent, as the piece is about the voicelessness of a series of women who have suffered devastating experiences and unimaginable brutalities. An interactive work, you enter a darkened room and are free to mount the steps to approach a screen. A nebulous orange glow around right shoulder height invites touch and as you place your hand on the screen in this exact spot, a woman appears. She walks towards you and places her hand on yours, palm to palm, with the cold screen in between. She remains, looking ahead (in theory at you) until you remove your hand at which point she recedes into the shadows to become a diminishing silhouette. The stories of the women who appear are told in a free booklet available at the exhibition space, and also on display as a folder of notes in the dark space under a reading lamp. While the poetry of the idea is undeniable, there is something that doesn’t quite work technically. Perhaps this is a spatial problem. In order to have your hand on the screen and not fall off the raised platform, you are actually too close to the image. You can’t really fix focus on the subject unless you quickly jump off the platform and stand further back, by which time the woman is disappearing. The intention of intimacy is also diminished by the fact that each viewer will be a different height and so the idea of looking eye to eye is only partly achievable. The stories in the booklet are succinctly and poetically told, a testament to Wallworth’s skill both with people and their stories, though reading in small batches is recommended, as the sad accumulation of misfortunes and terrors eventually becomes unimaginable. The decision to isolate the words from the images is obviously a considered one, separating the work from standard documentary mode, however I can’t help feeling it is not the strongest choice for communicating the stories of these brave women.

the rape of the sabine women

Perhaps one of the most satisfying sound experiences of the festival was found in the soundtrack of Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporations’ film The Rape of Sabine Women. Jonathan Bepler (frequent collaborator with Matthew Barney) has created a sparse soundtrack of tense silences and crisp foley. The material for the final stunning scene is constructed from vocal choral work which we see being workshopped—the mechanisms of the filmmaking bleeding into the action. We see the construction of a tumult, reminiscent of the confusion after the Robert Kennedy assassination as the performers are directed in a series of exercises, walking past each other, grabbing clothes. These ‘exercises’ build until the disconnectedness of the performers is overcome by a rising sense of real panic, and the scene reaches a climax of amazing complexity and power accompanied by a stunning choral cacophony.

Up until now, sound buffs had to wait for their own specialised festivals to get a burst of their favourite art. Perhaps other festival directors should pay heed to the increasing development of soundculture as a truly innovative practice in Australia and think to include and celebrate it.

Melbourne International Arts Festival, 21:100:100 exhibition, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Oct 11-Nov 8; 21:100:100 concert, BMW Edge, Federation Square, Oct 19; Alex Stahl, Echolocation, under the Princes Bridge, Oct 9-25; Lynette Walworth, Evolution of Fearlessness, Murray White Room, Oct 9-25; Eve Sussman & the Rufus Corporation, The Rape of the Sabine Women, ACMI, Oct 17-19

Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces will be presenting 21:100:100 Download Forum and 21:100:100 Book Launch, Dec17, 6pm-7:30pm, www.gertrude.org.au

ONE ARTIST I REALLY WANTED TO MAKE CONTACT WITH WHEN RECENTLY IN JAPAN WAS THE INSPIRATIONAL VOCALIST, PRODUCER AND COMPOSER HACO. IT TURNED OUT THAT SHE WAS IN MELBOURNE AT THE TIME DEVELOPING THE SOUNDTRACK FOR LUCY GUERIN INC’S CORRIDOR BUT ON MY RETURN I JUST MANAGED TO CATCH HER AS SHE WAS BACK IN TOWN FOR THE SHOW’S OPENING. ON OUR WAY TO CHECK OUT 21:100:100 (SEE REVIEW) WE TALKED ABOUT THE BREADTH OF HER PRACTICE AND HER VARIED APPROACHES TO TECHNOLOGY, TECHNIQUES AND COLLABORATION.

Haco first became known through her band After Dinner (1981-91). This early work attracted attention in international experimental music scenes because it combined both Haco’s melodic vocal stylings along with musique concrete techniques. Haco explains: “Nothing digital…we worked with tape splicing. In 1980, I learned recording technology and electronics, music like Stockhausen. I was really interested in tape music. It was really like sampling…We just tried to combine that sort of stuff in a natural balance.”

After Dinner had a shifting line-up of musicians depending on the specifics of the project, and this varied approach to collaboration is perhaps what makes Haco’s practice so interesting. It appears as though each collaboration inspires a particular tangent, or methodology.

On Yesterday’s Heroes,1979 (La Louche, 2004) Haco worked with Terre Thaemlitz to create the new wave band that they wished they had been in back in 1979, recasting their pasts by drawing on their present skills. On the 2000 release Ohayo! Hoahio! (Tzadik, TZ 7230, 2000) she worked with koto player Yagi Michiyo and minimal electronics mistress Sachiko M creating a veritable mixage of genres ranging from pop, to improv and minimalism.

Particularly interesting is her collaboration with cellist Hiromichi Sakamoto. After playing an improvised concert with him, she was listening to his CD and decided that there were hidden melodies in his work. She went on to “redo” his album, remixing and augmenting it to create a new work, Ash in the Rainbow (ReR HACO3, 2003). I asked if he thought this a bit forward of her, but she says that “he was quite happy. He sent new tracks, and we made a tour in Europe together.”

Yet another project sees her working with French Canadian improv artists Martin Tétreault and Dianne Labrosse. After meeting them during a tour in Europe Haco invited them to her studio in Kobe where they ‘cooked’ together. The resulting recording, Lunch in Nishinomiya (Improvised Music from Japan, IMJ-527, 2005), was then mixed and finalised via email.

I asked Haco what she is seeking from these collaborations: is it a pursuit of like-mindedness or difference? She replies: “Maybe a similarity, but not the same. I really love when someone brings me another idea. If I work alone, like on a solo album it’s quite different. But totally different ideas come from [other people]. Even melodic material…”

While her work with others shifts her approaches, Haco’s solo practice also seeks out different directions, technically and conceptually. Parallel to her more pop oriented work she has also pursued more esoteric sound making methodologies. From 2002 to 2005 she was part of View Masters, an environmental sound project that ran annual lectures and performances. During this time she developed her Stereo Bugscope system where she mikes up various devices capturing their electrical oscillations. It was through this work that I first became aware of Haco when she performed a version at Artspace, Sydney during Caleb K’s Typhoon (2005). I’d never imagined that the loading of a blank CD into the hard drive of a computer could be so sonically intriguing. Her explorations of home constructed electronics have continued with creations like the Pencil Organ made from a home electronics kit which allows the human body to become part of the circuitry. Haco is comfortable with diversification in her practice: “My work is quite branched to each project, becoming more conceptual…I enjoy making separate things.”

While the majority of Haco’s collaborations have been with other musicians and sound artists, she is also interested in working across disciplines. Corridor, premiered at this year’s Melbourne Festival, marks Haco’s second collaboration with Lucy Guerin, the first being, Setting, a dance work developed in a Japanese exchange and for the Melbourne Festival in 2006.

To create the soundtrack for Corridor, Haco wandered the streets of Melbourne, sidling up close to people to capture snippets of conversation. “I needed to do secret recordings. Getting close to people looking like I’m listening to a walkman. I went to a lot of places… a university, a hospital, Victoria Market, on the station, on the street, the art centre, the lobby of an office building…” Guerin then chose specific segments which Haco collaged into a 12 speaker soundscape (running under the audience seating) for the introductory scene of the work. An intriguing choice was the inclusion of a complete track from Haco’s latest album Riska—a sensual, jazzy number about the peace of being in the shower. While at first the lyrics create a slight tangent in the proceedings, they also add a level of solitary sensuality to a work that concerns itself more with the awkwardness of collectivity. Overall Haco’s soundtrack is subtle and restrained, present when it needs to be, but then quietly supportive, often adding layers without drawing attention to itself: all the signs of a sensitive collaborator.

Straight after Melbourne, Haco was going on to participate in the inaugural Nam Jun Paik festival in Seoul where she would be working with her latest collaborator Claudia Triozzi, a choreographer turned vocalist. “She is Italian so she [uses] some traditional opera [style], she has quite a wide range. It’s different from voice improvisation but quite experimental.” It seems that Haco’s collaborations will continue to be incredibly varied and feed the artist’s unique approach to music-making for a good while to come.

ELISION RECENTLY GOT TURFED OFF THE ‘GRAVY TRAIN’ OF QUEENSLAND GOVERNMENT ART LARGESSE (NOT MUCH ROOM FOR A SUPPING SPOON IN THAT TINY BOWL) SO THIS CONCERT WAS PROBABLY THEIR LAST IN BRISBANE BEFORE MOVING BASE TO MORE SUPPORTIVE CLIMES. BESIDES NEW PIECES FROM RICHARD BARRETT (UK) AND TIMOTHY MCCORMACK (USA), THE CONCERT WAS AN OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR FROM THE NEW (AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL FUNDED) COLLABORATION WITH LAWRENCE HARVEY’S SOUND GROUP AT RMIT’S EVER INTERESTING SPATIAL INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE LABORATORY (SIAL).

McCormack’s Disfix for bass clarinet, piccolo trumpet and trombone opened the show. The work deconstructs instrumental playing technique into a set of parameters that can work with or against each other. Note from score: “The physical awkwardness and resulting aural distortion of the material implicit in this situation is quite deliberate and intended.” Disfix starts with the three performers standing and facing each other in a close group. Pleasant sounds pop about in a mild, gently hysterical frenzy. Parts break up, jump from one performer to another and then come tightly together in parallel. Phrases are short, silences are brief. Lots of talking and singing through the instruments. Again from the score: “It is of the utmost importance that the performer treats the voice part as an autonomous domain.” That’s while the performer tosses off a few other autonomous virtuosities and keeps time-synched with the others! By the end it all hangs together to give an overall movement from disjunction to cohesion. A difficult work brilliantly played; I could easily listen to it again.

Richard Barrett has been working with Elision for many years and this intimate knowledge of the performers showed in his structured improvisation, Codex IX. A core of the ensemble’s regulars are joined by Joel Stern (and Barrett) on electronics and Jeff Hannam and Michael Hewes, who mix a live feed into speakers set up around and above the audience and performers. The group sits in a wide-ish circle, audience at a tangent on two sides. Sub-bass drones start up with an overlay of light, subtle percussion. Ratchet sounds, more drones, then a burst of tight synchronisation in response to Barrett jabbing out some conducting moves. New section, freeform again, more drones, ululating winds, spatialised percussion. Viola with a string-rubbed roaring. More sections. Loud, soft. Insects and the banging of a screen door. Oboe and clarinet, like a miracle, walk amongst us.

At times electronics or other instruments crack a solo, but overwhelmingly Codex IX is an ensemble piece. Phrases trade across from performer to performer—maybe picking up on the timbre, maybe tracing the pitch movement. The spatialisation is subtle, widening the sound at times, and other-times delaying and shifting a part as though it were echoed by another performer. Similarly the electronics work of Stern and Barrett gives no sense of the tech being bolted on. Notes are picked up, harmonies added in, parts elaborated. So seamless it can be difficult to hear who is playing what. Smooth as can be.

It is ridiculous that a group of this quality had its funding cut by the Minister responsible for the Arts in Queensland. Then again, I can’t find any mention of art or music in the list of personal interests on his Arts Queensland website (www.arts.qld.gov.au/aboutaq/minister.html)

Elision Contemporary Music Ensemble, heliocentric, composers Richard Barrett, Timothy McCormack, performers: oboe Peter Veale, clarinet Richard Haynes, trumpet Tristram Williams, trombone Benjamin Marks, percussion Peter Neville, electric guitar Daryl Buckley, live electronics Richard Barrett, Joel Stern, violin Graeme Jennings, viola Erkki Veltheim, sound spatialisation Jeff Hannam, Michael Hewes, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, Oct 4

ON HIS NEW CD, LET THE DARKNESS AT YOU, JASON SWEENEY (AS PANOPTIQUE ELECTRICAL) DRAWS ON SCORES HE’S CREATED FOR PERFORMANCE, DANCE AND FILM ARTISTS (VERSION 1.0, TANJA LIEDTKE, FIONA SPROTT, CHUNKY MOVE, UNREASONABLE ADULTS, PVI COLLECTIVE AND OTHERS) OVER THE LAST DECADE.

The result is contemplative and dreamy, never soporific. The experience feels like (as much as listening is a kind of associative seeing) being drawn slowly through vast star fields (an image we are so used to from film but are unlikely to ever experience)—the pulse of the journey is comforting, spacious, but there is always the sense of something unseen, out of frame, another layer of sound, a brief thundering, a mechanistic blip series, a too real wave of static, a distant voice, another presence approaching, or the heavens about to empty of stars—a never quite ominous entry into sheer darkness. None of this is literally evoked, the album being 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.

Is Let The Darkness At You a collection of examples of your work that simply co-exist or were you aiming for a higher and enduring unity?

I approached this collection of compositions as if I were beginning a completely new project, a new album and indeed a new musical identity. In many ways the pieces that appear on the album began as extracts or minimalist sketches from works that I had made for various productions since 1998. So it was really a process of starting from scratch and re-composing. None of the material on the album appears in the original form it took in the shows or films they were made for. I really was aiming for a sense of sonic unity, a deliberate attempt to create a total listening experience and to be very conscious of not making something that was a disjointed collection of tracks for the sake of putting them out. It’s kind of my instinctive reaction to compilations that labels or artists put out where generally you can only enjoy one or two tracks, whereas with Let The Darkness At You I wanted to make sure that there was consistency in the track sequencing and an elimination process when pieces didn’t feel right. For example, anything with an obvious beat was the first to go! In this way, it’s very much an album of immersive, melodic pieces with intermissions that flow from one to the other. Because the works on this album were written at various times in various places over a 10 year period, there was a challenge to ensure consistency and find themes or motifs and bring them together. In some cases compositions were even mixed to form a single piece.

Let The Darkness At You was a name that the label owner, Steve Phillips, applied to the final track sequencing I gave him and it really did seem to sum up the feeling of the record and gives an entry point for listeners. Ideally this album is nocturnal listening…to kind of disappear into darkness or sleep or the night. I spent a long time at night with all of the 19 pieces, literally sleeping with the recording every night for about two weeks after days of mixing tracks. I did this because I wanted the album to be a bit like a sleeping pill or a somnabulistic experience for listeners. I was having a particularly bad case of insomnia during the time I was working on it so if it didn’t put me to sleep then the next day I would have to revisit the album as a whole and re-construct or re-work pieces. My intention is for the album to carry you through a unified listening experience for the whole 80 minutes.

How do you compose for a performer or a company, always from a new beginning or do you build on your body of work?

Each time I am approached to work on a score for performer or company it’s a completely new approach. There might be times where I draw upon a piece that has never been used or was a sketch somewhere else that is stored away, knowing that it might work for the ‘sound’ of the production, but generally I start from scratch. There’s always going to be a kind of ‘sound’ that I produce that might be associated with my previous work but I’m conscious never to impose previous ideas into a new project. But I think there’s always a building on from previous works and learning from the last piece or wanting to revisit phrases in the music.

It really varies, and depends a lot on the artists I am working with. With my ongoing association and collaborations with pvi collective there is kind of an unspoken trust, which I love, when they get me started working on a new project. Sometimes Kelli and Steve from pvi might suggest a kind of sound or play me something they’ve been listening to, but more often than not I’m left to my own devices to construct a score. Other artists I’ve worked with have been much more specific about the sounds they want. When I worked with the late and great Tanja Liedtke (to whom I’ve dedicated a track I was working on for her) she was much more specific about the kind of mood, beat or even specific sounds she was after. It was the making of music for structured and very specifically timed choreography where a dip in the sound correlated exactly with a moment where a dancer would fall or something would ‘shift’ in the performance. This was really exciting for me (and I dearly miss her and her approach to working with artists) as it set new challenges, especially for a musician who was used to finding his own way in to a work.

With pvi collective there is often a scoring of ambience, noise or sounds that ‘places’ people (often roaming the streets in headsets) in a given moment of a performance. So, when they hear music with beats they know it’s time for an announcement or that a member of the public is about to be approached by a performer. It’s like making ‘guide music’ which I really like creating, little signatures. But sometimes the scoring is much more subtle, allowing for a live sound operator to integrate or mix up my music with a live feed of the performers. Working on version 1.0 shows has also set specific challenges because their works are very driven by spoken texts from transcripts and therefore the sound scores have to accommodate a kind of dual listening process. The audience has to hear what is being spoken but, of course, I want people to be affected by the sounds too!

Are you an onsite collaborator or do you look at the work, go away, score it and send it in?

Again, it does vary but I prefer to work onsite when a piece is being made as I’m reluctant to just be a provider of background music. I’m involved quite heavily in performance making so the nature of collaboration as a sound artist is imperative for me in the same way it is to be a performer in a work. I’m a total advocate for sound not just being a secondary concern or a last minute thought or addition to works. All the artists I work with feel the same way, thankfully, and are all interested in sound scoring, from desires for total sonic immersion to pure moments of silence. I like engaging in the various languages of performance making and how to communicate ‘sound’ into these devising processes. However, if I can’t physically be in the room during a creative development of a work I usually have a DVD working copy or constant script updates or ongoing phone or email communication with the artists. I like to work pretty quickly and responsively so I tend to provide a lot of material along the way for people to listen to, comment on, discard, use or to work more on. Again, one of the great pleasures of working long-term with pvi collective is knowing their process and sharing a very intimate devising language which means I can often work on scores for them from a distance.

Ideally, I prefer not to do live mixes for other people’s shows these days, mostly from a purely practical point of view in that I can’t generally be there for seasons or touring due to my own practice. I think the live mix thing has to be a conceptual necessity or an imperative part of the work itself, rather than an artist wanting a composer to do it live because, say, it saves having to make final choices. I really now need to be utterly convinced if someone wants me to do a live mix, outside of what a sound operator can do on my behalf. It is also often a case of me wanting to leave the choice of placement of my compositions up to the artist in the end, which I’m totally happy with. I’d prefer to provide a sound palette for someone to play with that feels right for them because sometimes the composer might not always be the best person to make that choice. Having said all that though, with my own performance work with Unreasonable Adults, I’ll always prefer to be live mixing because it is inherent in the work and the concept.

What are your favourite acoustic and electronic tools for composition, and what’s the dynamic of their relationship for you?

Acoustically, pianos always win the day! Preferably old ones that have been neglected in a CWA hall or found in salvage shops. For me, not coming from a classically trained background, a piano is really the only instrument that I feel friends with. They capture the melancholy and sadness that I desire in making scores. But then, once I’ve recorded a phrase on a piano, it goes through electronic processing in Logic software, which is the primary electronic tool I use. It’s only recently that I’ve started using soft instruments and a MIDI keyboard! I have a tendency to want to work with found recordings too and turn them into melodic phrases, such as finding a malfunctioning speaker in an underground carpark, a crowd in a sports stadium, a shortwave signal from Kuwait and then taking this raw material away, turning it into an emotive chord progression through layering, reverbing, tape delay, pitch shifting. It’s about where the intensities and subtleties are in those sounds, even when they are left raw. I like to degrade everything when I work digitally, to the point where anything clean sounding is almost eliminated. The piano, for example, when put through various stages of amplification or re-recorded through guitar amps, can transform into this epic lo-fi orchestral sound from another planet…it’s beautiful.

Why are you titled Panoptique Electrical? It looks steam punkish and evokes surveillance theory…or is it just another playful persona?

Panoptique Electrical has been the name of my recording studio since 1995. The name really just came about because I loved the look of these two words together. It could roughly translate to being an electronic panopticon but I guess, a bit like the music, it’s open, expansive. It just seemed appropriate, when trying to establish an identity for this accumulated sound work, to take on that name because it is where the sounds originated or got made. I’ve never wanted really to use my own name for recording projects because I want to see them as open to other inputs, which is certainly the case with Let The Darkness At You, which I also see as a collaboration with the record label’s owner, Steve Phillips, who came up with a lot of the track names on the album and also created all of the artwork in response to the music. In the future I’ll be working more with multi-instrumentalists Zoë Barry and Jed Palmer on both recordings and live performances. So there’s a sense of something BBC Radiophonic Workshop-ish in the name or a kind of imaginary sound lab or transmission station which allows for both great experiments to happen but also the potential for sonic failure. Perhaps it’s my ideal location for being an artist, looking out over a wide expanse but attempting to stay covert. Who knows.

Panoptique Electrical, Let The Darkness At You, music by Jason Sweeney, Sensory Projects, CD SRP057

The Zombie State, Melbourne Workers Theatre, Student Union, Union House Theatre, Melbourne University

A PRODUCTION TEAM OF SOUND, VIDEO, LIGHTING AND SET DESIGNERS, PROFESSIONAL ACTORS AND A GAGGLE OF EAGER UNIVERSITY DRAMA STUDENTS WAS GATHERED BY MELBOURNE WORKERS THEATRE AND THE UNION THEATRE FOR SIX WEEKS OF REHEARSAL TO MAKE A SHOW BASED ON THE CURRENT FRINGE FESTIVAL ZOMBIE FAD. IT IS RECOGNIZABLE AS A DEGUSTATION OF AESTHETIC MOTIFS FROM AROUND MELBOURNE’S THEATRE OVER THE PAST FIVE TO TEN YEARS, AND A FUN WAY TO INCORPORATE INEXPERIENCED ACTORS.

We are in a waiting room, the set captures a compressed perspective of a hospital corridor, a red horizontal line leading from us through limbo to the red doors of hell. A mix of zombies (ghoul make-up) and ‘ordinary’ humans (human make-up) wait in a room with piped muzak. The apparent humans are Jeff, a sleeves-up politician running for the ‘dream job’ of Prime Minister, and his all-female advisory team. In one of two perspex boxes set neatly on either side of the stage, the would-be PM rehearses a promotional ad for his 2021 campaign. The hackneyed deal goes something like this: the (zombie) people are to love eating meat, which they buy with money from work. The united (zombie) people are to serve, while the new, innovative ideas inside the heads of the brightest, best, boldest brains are to be given to Jeff, who works to secure Australia’s place in a rapidly changing world.

The short man and short skirts of team PM take a vote-canvassing tour of the (zombie) people. We see a young man who can’t afford the insurance have his teeth brutally pulled, his chin caked in blood. A doctor can’t stop his repetitive visions of unstoppable bleeding. A teacher, crazily marking papers, uses the endorphines generated by jogging to inhibit sleep. Two shop-girls go from a pseudoephedrine high to lobotomized low. A vampiric stripper, forces herself endlessly on as a hapless youth breaks down in the corner. A bus driver grimly plays his part in a scam by dumping his abducted passengers at a retail warehouse. A cleaner is invited to rent with a ‘working family’ who, having made necessary adjustments, work holidays and choose one child for university. The (zombie) people are a not-quite-human resource. They are addicted to meat and mesmerized by the flames, which literally light up the walls. “Relieving the worker of their family responsibilities” under a “work is life” mantra’ we know this score.

The Zombie State, Melbourne Workers Theatre, Student Union, Union House Theatre, Melbourne University

The tide turns when a seagull, fried by the flame-stacks of a casino, falls from the sky and attacks the PM candidate. The zombie acting intensifies, the make-up leaches and the movie-sound escalates. By the end, the team PM girls are zombies too, while Jeff admits to being already dead and proposes to “tear (zombie) families apart.” With nothing to lose at all, it seems the seagull/zombie revolt, a bored and desperate violence against others and themselves, is nigh.

For those whose lives have been stripped of meaning in the de-regulated, privatised terror economy of the present, whose meagre savings are evaporating in the sinking mega-banks, who are simply exhausted by the long hours forced on them in the name of global competition, can it be said that class is artificial?

“Just keep dancing in plastic cool. Now I only have to work”, say the zombies, “now I’m free.”

The Zombie State, writer Ben Ellis, director Daniel Schlusser, designer Kate Davis, sound Darrin Verhagen, lighting Niklas Pajanti, Danni Pettingil, video Matthew Gingold, co-producers Melbourne Workers Theatre, Student Union, Union House Theatre, Melbourne University, Sept 16-27

IN RAEWYN HILL’S ONE FOR SORROW, A FACELESS WOMAN IS HIDDEN BENEATH A BLOOD-RED SCARF. THE WARM LIGHT FROM ABOVE CREATES SHADOWS, ACCENTUATING HER FINE FEATURES. MOMENTARILY LIKE A STATUE, THE DANCER WAITS BEFORE MERGING INTO AND OUT OF THE VERTICAL OBLONG OF LIGHT CENTRESTAGE. SHE WALTZES BLITHELY, WITH MORE THAN A SUGGESTION OF POIGNANCY, HER LIMBS EXTENDED AND RELEASED FROM BENEATH A FULLY-FRILLED BLACK LACE DRESS.

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy is an exhilarating, fascinating and entertaining night of multi-faceted, eclectic dance from the dynamic Tasdance ensemble. Six lines from the rhyme One for Sorrow provide the theme for six short works that exhibit a unique array of contemporary dance styles ranging from the robustly physical to the adroitly lyrical and naff, maturely and vigorously performed.

One for Sorrow is a solo taken from Hill’s full-length Mercy: A dance for the forgotten [www.realtimearts.net/feature/search/8457]. Dancer Floeur Adler tells a story of loss, grief and sadness, her lone body speaking of the past as her veiled face holds secrets deeply concealed. Hues of black and red conjure images of death and violence, but these are juxtaposed with the unreservedly graceful innocence and delicacy of Adler’s movement. Her brief solo ends almost as soon as it begins.

Two for Joy, choreographed by Trisha Dunn follows. The box of light shifts horizontally, a trance-like score pounds heavily, two male dancers clad in half silver, half black animate the space with high-energy, acrobatic shoulder-stands and asymmetrical balances. Joyful in their execution, the dancers suggest brotherly bonding as they playfully wrestle, tumble and support one another, tipping and almost toppling over the obstacles each presents the other. Alive, awake, aware, Malcolm McMillan and James Shannon perform with animal instinct and precision. They finish, breathing heavily, shattered.

McMillan, choreographer of Three for a girl, creates a sweet, picturesque tribute to choreographer Trisha Dunn through lyrical movement. The placid articulation of arms, quaint positions of feet and silky motion of the torsos of the three female dancers create a perpetual wave of exquisite detail and fleeting subtleties. The score of piano and harpsichord acts as a catalyst for the fluid sweeping and arching of bodies.

In Anna Smith’s Four for a boy, fingers flex and bend, grotesque in their twists; shoulders rotate like wings and spines torque. Recalled images of ADT’s Devolution flood in as the score creaks mechanically, heavy and frightening. Smith explores physicality and power through both male and female forms. The quartet of dancers are in knee pads. The women are in ultra girlie sunflower-yellow dresses, their faces full of life yet bodies dehumanised, machine-like. Raw and gutsy, they execute the intricate and erratic style of Smith’s choreography, the sounds mirrored in their bodies. With their cleverly structured lifts, spontaneous counter-balances, the risky and fearless dancers are thrilling to watch.

Smith worked with costume designer Greg Clarke to create Five for silver, a visually astounding work. An extravagant, fantastical landscape is formed from bodies amid a sea of silvery-blue, a watery sheath of dreams. This over-sized mass of metallic fabric, with an aperture for each dancer, allows the dancers to intermittently amalgamate and disperse. Detached and concurrently connected by this oceanic costume, torsos sway, coil and undulate in sync amidst the seemingly infinite waves of material.The dancers shift clockwise, a carousel. Legless bodies rotate, fluid and lyrical, creating spirals of shadowed creases, dark velvety crevasses beneath the moon-lit surface. The structure is broken an unexpectedly tender, amorous embrace in a male-female duet.

Six for gold, choreographed by Natalie Cursio and inspired by the television show Solid Gold, parodies the auditions, documentaries and grand finales of outdated TV dance competitions. Daft gold bull masks, numbered leotards and tights along with eisteddfod-style dance moves and exaggerated re-enactments make up this outrageously hilarious work. The hour is up, the night has flown, and the ambiguity of the phrase ‘”Seven for a story never been told” hovers.

Tasdance, One for sorrow, Two for joy, choreographers Natalie Cursio, Trisha Dunn, Raewyn Hill, Malcolm McMillan, Anna Smith, performers Floeur Alder, Carlie Angel, Malcolm McMillan, James Shannon, Trish Wood, design for Five for silver Greg Clarke, lighting Darren Willmott, Parramatta Riverside Theatre, Sydney, Oct 29–Nov 1

KG In your role as director of Performance Space for nine years, you were obviously a nurturer of emerging work through workshops and various schemes and the promoting of new work programmed annually into the venue. You were also a negotiator dealing with funding bodies, government departments and your board of directors, not least in the transition from the old Cleveland Street venue to CarriageWorks. And you’ve been a collaborator in a variety of partnerships on behalf of Performance Space. And above all you’ve been a leader. You had to make things tick. How would you describe your role?

FW I think it changed over the years. Certainly it was all of those things. In the first instance it was about listening to what people’s needs and ideas and grievances (to some extent) were. And making sense of that to try and build a context that was better for artists. I was always interested in connecting dots between the temporary communities that build through making art and how to find more opportunities to build those communities. I think of it as a boiling pot and the bubbles that emerge are this energy that needs to exist and be released but it also needs to be held together. What I began to realise, not terribly long into the job, was that part of my role was to be responsive but part of it was to be strategic and to really try to make sense of the bigger picture and to build opportunities for artists. So it was a mixture of advocacy, strategic planning and partnering, bringing our own projects as interventions or opportunities, again to build temporary communities that wouldn’t otherwise make themselves.

KG On the one hand you were responsive, reading the scene; on the other you were saying we’ve got to lead the way. When you arrived, what sorts of needs were there?

confidence, communities & generations

FW I think there was a real lack of confidence within the community and indeed among the audiences about the organization and, so, it was a matter of rebuilding what we thought we were. I remember doing a lot of talking with artists who had a long history with Performance Space (yourself included and many other artists and arts workers who had been around the space for a long time), to try to get a sense of what its strengths had been. Of course, I had my impressions of that but I didn’t have a long history at Performance Space. I’d had a fairly long history as a punter and I had made a few shows there but I didn’t see myself as being deeply familiar with the history of the organization. So it seemed to me that we needed to create more consistent opportunities for people to make work, to develop work and to discuss it—and to actually be a community together.

KG There had been various periods when we had that sense. And I suppose that it’s almost inevitable that there are times when those things dissolve, when funding patterns change and, for example quite a lot of senior artists in performance pulled out in the mid-90s, which thinned out the living legacy.

FW And certainly one of the things that interested me in those early years—and I’ve never lost interest in it—is actually taking an inter-generational approach to everything. Part of that was about exchange but part of it was also about being aware of the lineage because I think that’s a powerful and important thing. And it’s probably re-emerging. This is another moment when I think it’s deeply important again. Not that it ever lost its importance but all of these things take work and you sometimes have to focus on something else. And obviously we’ve been concentrating on our new context at CarriageWorks most recently, but we need to bring all that stuff back in.

building a residency program

FW Building the residency program into something that was more structured, where people knew what they were getting—space, a little bit of dramaturgical support, a little bit of technical support and a context in which to test the work or show early drafts. Also opening that up to a national call. In the early days what we did with the residency program was to call for “mixed teams” and that could be mixed inter-generationally or mixed inter-culturally. It was important to me and it was mostly inter-generational and it was actually really successful. Version 1.0 got one of those early residencies to make The Second Last Supper (2001), along with a number of other interesting groups. We learned that space was critical and a little bit of support was necessary, though there have never been fees paid to artists in the residency program, People could use the residency then as leverage to get funding for their fees. The work was mostly at the creative development stage. But we also learned that people were really able to use that time and space if they had carved it out for themselves as really invaluable research and development for which, of course, it’s really difficult to get funding. And then they would do the R&D and from that would emerge the clearer idea that they wanted to pursue into creative development.

FW About twelve of several weeks each. And since we’ve moved to CarriageWorks, because we’re now operating in blocks, we’ve established partnerships with Critical Path and UNSW and the University of Sydney so we can do several off-site residencies throughout the year as well. That’s really about creating a space for people to play, to develop work. In the early days, they were mostly performance residencies but they’ve become more and more diverse; they can be media-based like George Khut’s Cardiomorphologies (2004) which was originally partly developed and tested here and, in that same year, Transmute Collective’s Intimate Transactions and Gravity Feed’s Monstrous Body. Occasionally we would cluster works together that had different approaches to, say, this thing called ‘interactivity.’ Again, that was completely responsive in terms of what was around.

programming, presentation & deals

KG Performance Space has always been a venue for hire but then again you rent space and program work that’s relevant to your brief.

FW I had to move very fast. I was appointed late in 1999 and we didn’t really have a program for the next year. So I programmed three-months in advance rather than 12 months in advance, which is what we do now. We took some rentals that weren’t necessarily things I’d normally curate but I think it was important to do that to get a sense of who was out there doing what, because the networks had collapsed a bit. And of course, we also did some of our own projects. In 2000 we did unBecomings, which was a collaboration with PACT Youth Theatre and Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras—a kind of mentoring project for young queer performance-makers. We did a series of these over the years and then moved more into platforms of short works. Meanwhile artists like The opera Project, Nikki Heywood and Tess de Quincey were self-producing their work at Performance Space in our presentation programs. And that was really instructive for me, watching their work. Our role was to create the house around it in logistical terms but also to network the audiences into those projects as well. While people sometimes had publicists, sometimes didn’t, we tried to work to build audiences and connect dots between the works. We continue to do this and it’s a continually shifting set of challenges.

Within the presentation side of things we were working towards having La Pocha Nostra here to do Museum of Fetishized Identities (2001 & 2003) or doing particular shows for Mardi Gras each year. We had no capacity to buy in work whatsoever. It was all about people self-presenting and us either renting them the space (even though they were curated into the program) or doing deals because so many people were only getting funding from either one or other of the funding bodies. In the days before Road to Harmony (although that’s only for triennial clients), there was this incredible schism between State and Federal government, even at project level. So in order to support people to make work, but also have a program ourselves, we would do whatever deals we could to ensure that people could get their work up. So I guess in that sense we became more and more involved not in producing the work but having a hand in the “producing discussions.”

FW It’s co-presentation, but because it’s not an existing work but is being produced for the first time, it was really about having a little bit more hands-on involvement in the producing, but not actually…

KG And has that improved to some extent with the funding situation, or is it still the same that there are certain shows you’ll need to assist and others can look after themselves?

a new model of co-presenting

FW Absolutely, although the way we now work at CarriageWorks we’ve done a complete shift. In the old days artists paid the rental and they got the box office and we created the context around it: the technical support, front of house and all that kind of stuff. We are now co-presenting in the sense that we offer the space, the front of house, a certain amount of tech support and we are partners in a 60/40 split of box office. So the risk is actually shared. But what’s changed most recently has come with the Presenter Program grants that the Theatre Board of the Australia Council has just given out. Performance Space received one of these, as did Arts House in Melbourne, PICA in Perth and a number of other organizations around the country. That’s $50,000 a year for three years just for artists’ fees. So that means that from next year for the first time we’re actually completely presenting My Darling Patricia, Version 1.0 and Rosie Dennis.

FW They’ll get their performance fees paid by us. It’s not a commission. It’s simply a presentation, but it means that the artists know what they’re getting paid. They don’t have to try and balance any books or cut any costs post-production. Partly that’s the Australia Council responding to something that I realised very early in my job, how difficult it is for artists to self-produce, self-present and make the work. And of course it pushes the relationships and dialogue between makers and presenters to another level, which is useful. We also do a lot more auspicing now than we used to do, a lot more management of money and grants, and this of ocurse involves us more in the producing side. It’s something we’ve got a lot better at and it’s a really important service I think, predominantly delivered by Julianne Campbell, our general manager.

dialoguing

FW One of the things we did early on was to collaborate with RealTime on a series of industry forums, sometimes about artform developments and sometimes about industry links or issues. We did a few with other partners. They were really important in bringing people together, again inter-generationally. As we know, some were more successful than others in terms of the content and flow of discussion, but people really did value those events, which is important when you’re trying to cohere ideas and people.

KG They demonstrated a need…I remember the first one we did on Sound at Redfern Town Hall in 2000, there was a great turnout. At none on the series was there ever less than 40 people. For the one on video art IN 2004 there were 100 people. It demonstrated the diverse reach of Performance Space.

FW So as well as presentation, residencies, forums, there were the event-based and platform programs such as unBecomings (2000 & 2001), Eat My Shorts for Carnivale (2001), Antistatic (2002), Pacific Wave Festival (2001 & 2003), Accidents & Alchemies (2004, 2005, 2006), the Lily Shearer-curated Ngal-lo-wah Murrytoola and Nangami Indigenous Performance Events (2007) and, of course, Balir French’s Video Spell, a series of video exhibitions and events over 2003-04. InterSections (2000, 2002 & 2005) was another of these—a series of performances, short works, workshops, forums and we’d do a group lunch together every day for two weeks. They were very modest but really useful events that, again, brought inter-generational and inter-disciplinary practitioners together.

a self-producing new wave

KG We seem to be in one of those interesting periods where there’s a new burst of talent and this one seems stronger than any we’ve had for a while. It includes the likes of My Darling Patricia, Spat & Loogie, Brown Council, Janie Gibson, Matthew Prest, the PACT performers in The Speech Givers and others.

FW Absolutely. PACT has been instrumental in nurturing and continuing to support that group. And the other thing that’s exciting about them—and Spat & Loogie are a great example of this—they’re makers first and foremost, but they’re also curators and producers. They’re so interested in the whole picture. And that’s very exciting because I think there are some artists who continue to see Performance Space as their main kind of place and I don’t think anybody can afford to do that, quite frankly. I think it’s important that Performance Space remains a home and hub but everyone needs to think a lot more rhizomatically than that and have multiple relationships with other partners, producers and presenters out there—and of course with Arts House in Melbourne and Brisbane Powerhouse as well as the Casula. Blacktown and Campbelltown contemporary arts centres now flourishing. There is a better network than there has ever been for artists to tap into.

FW The people who are doing that are the people who have thrived. It’s the Version 1.0s, The Fondue Sets and My Darling Patricias, to name a few. And it’s this generation including groups like Post who are at Next Wave in Melbourne one minute, at This Is Not Art in Newcastle the next, in then Brisbane at Under the Radar and at Performance Space, even though their home is perhaps somewhere between PACT and Performance Space. We also have Lara Thoms co-curating the NightTime performance series for Performance Space and she and her peers have set up Quarter Bred at PACT. I think that sort of approach is so exciting.

do it yourself culture

We started Accidents & Alchemies in the last few years we were at Cleveland Street. Then associate director Caitlin Newton-Broad developed NightTime as a series distributed across the year at CarriageWorks. She brought in Rosie Dennis, Trevor Brown and Lara to co-curate each one. It’s worked out on a very simple basis. We pay for the infrastructure and the artists’ fees are based on a door split. It maintains the open call for platforming short works, which is important to bring in people we’ve never heard of, or people you mightn’t think of if you were curating a program in your own head. What NightTime does that’s different is that we decided to work in the public spaces [of CarriageWorks] and to work in the cracks between the program because we want it to be a fast in, fast out. You know, JUST DO IT!” NightTime maintains a DIY culture which has been part of our struggle at CarriageWorks, of course, when you go into that scale of building with a very different infrastructure. NightTime brings different parts of the community together and people either have to bring their own technical apparatus or they’re given a very small technical palette. It takes artists back to a very stripped back set of practices, which is good—fast and furious.

Quick & Dirty is another venture that I think is really fantastic and it’s on at least a three-year pathway. It’s a series of queer performance events working with people who have, since the demise of the funded Mardi Gras festival, struggled to create alternative venues to show that work. A lot of performers have been moving into burlesque but also into self-producing, including Gurlesque, Man Jam AND 34B. So, last year we brought them together. Victoria Spence was a key driver and we did two nights of Queer Performance. Next year, there’ll be three nights and it will morph into something else in the third year. But it’s really about collaboration with those artists and producers. It’s not a Performance Space project as such but it’s a really collaborative one into which we’re hoping to build in an element of sustainability over time. I think that’s an exciting development.

carriageworks: working the building

KG You’ve also hosted some big shows, which have used the foyer space and other parts of the building very successfully. Tess De Quincey’s The Stirring and Joey Ruigrok van der Werven’s Volta, both in 2007. They also offered that sense of occasion, which takes you beyond the normal spaces at the venue.

FW Volta was a project that Joey brought to us, which we produced. It was very specifically about sharing his vision of making work and bringing people who are normally servicing other people’s visions (the lighting and design people) to come in and be the co-creators. It was a great skill-sharing and art-making project. I think when you move to a place like CarriageWorks and you’re learning those physical spaces both technically and artistically and from the audience’s perspective, it takes time. I was fairly naïve…and naivete is quite useful sometimes. I thought that we would be a little bit more progressed into our settling into CarriageWorks than perhaps we are. And I don’t mean to say we’re not settled. It’s fantastic and we love those spaces. But there are sets of negotiations around everything. The foyer is a classic example of that because it’s shared space. So doing the Volta project involved a whole lot of learning curves—as well as being a great project in itself.

FW It was designed as a performance space but if people are flowing in and out of the other performance spaces in the building, it’s really problematic. So you either have to take over the entire building, which was the idea of LiveWorks (though we didn’t quite manage to include Bay 17) or you have to work in between the other programs. That’s essentially why we work in a block structure there, so that we at least know what’s coming in and out of all the other spaces. And, of course, Bay 17 is the thing because it holds up to 800 people who could be walking out into your performance. But I think both CarriageWorks and Performance Space are getting much clearer about how to deal with those issues.

memorable bodies of work

KG What do you see across those years as some of the important works that stayed with you? Obviously Guillermo Gomez-Pena had an impact with Museum of Fetishized Identities (2001 & 2003)

FW Absolutely. Everyone still talks about that. And I guess I’d talk about the emergence of companies like De Quincey Co and version 1.0 with their incredibly dynamic bodies of work. One of the things we do is to take an interest in artists across a trajectory of practice or time. It’s hard to think of specific shows as much as the bodies of work. Watching The Fondue Set grow over the years has been fantastic, and Martin Del Amo—to see his work unfold over the years with key collaborators, Gail Priest in particular, creating those beautiful works very regularly. Tess De Quincey, Julie-Anne Long, Nikki Heywood and Sue Healey are all artists who not only create their own work but also are offering an enormous amount to the younger artists in the community. Then there’s The opera Project, with a new work in the pipeline for 2009, My Darling Patricia, who kicked off at PACT and Branch Nebula—whose Paradise City was developed as part of a residency and to see that commissioned by the Opera House and tour to Brazil and then around Australia was very gratifying.

One of the exciting moments most recently, coming out of a body of work, was Alan Schacher’s The Bland Project. Alan and Jeff Stein and Denis Beaubois, formerly members of Gravity Feed, are all making their own work. Alan’s decision to direct and produce The Bland Project was just one of those moments when I went “Aaah!” It was exciting to see a really lucid set of collaborations between languages: I loved the filmic, the broader visual, the performative and the musical aspects of the production. And, of course, there have been the commissionings of artists like Sussie Porsborg, Sean Cordiero & Claire Healy, and Ruark Lewis & Jonathan Jones that have created both social spaces and great installations for the foyer at CarriageWorks.

live works

KG In a way the LiveWorks festival in September looked like the apotheosis of your career with Performance Space. I don’t know if it was your biggest moment but it seemed like a timely celebration and paralleled the moment of leaving very nicely. We’ve long been desperate for a contemporary performance festival. There hasn’t been one here since the Contemporary Performance Weeks that Don Mamouney used to run out at Sidetrack. How long were you harbouring the plans for Live Works?

FW Ever since we knew we were moving to CarriageWorks, we wanted to do a festival. We didn’t raise the money we wanted. We’d wanted to take over the whole building and use Bay 17, not so much as one huge venue, but as a space you’d walk through to encounter something tiny. When we did Volta at the end of the first year at CarriageWorks, I remember saying we couldn’t have actually done it any earlier. We didn’t know enough about the spaces, we didn’t have the relationships to test some of the things that that show tested. I feel the same about Live Works.

For LiveWorks we turned two of the tracks [large rooms usually used only for rehearsals, residencies and workshops] into theatre spaces which is not what I would normally want to do with them but that’s what the cultural need was. I love the Bay 20 theatre space but it’s big, it takes a long time to rig, so it’s expensive to put work in there. This means it suits highly produced works (or bigger works with more resources). So for emerging companies like Team Mess and artists like Georgie Read whose work we want to feature but we want to show in a quick and dirty or fast and furious way we need to use the tracks. So the POPE (Places of Public Entertainment) licensing of those spaces is really important. For LiveWorks, to get that through, to increase the capacity and use those spaces for performance work that didn’t need as much infrastructure, was really important. And, of course, artistically, it was crucial for us to bring together a whole lot of new work and some existing work, some works that had been tried but not seen in Sydney—Matt Prest’s The Tent being a good example and Paul Dwyer’s Bougainville Photoplay project. And it was really good to bring Panther and Aphids up from Melbourne and PVI from Perth, because it’s very easy to only read about them in RealTime. It’s also about the wider performance community being able to talk to each other in a context that allows the space for that.

KG LiveWorks had that nice inter-generational feel as well—Martin Del Amo and Rosie Dennis and a lot of younger people. And it had a sense of occasion. And you had Pacitti Company from London.

FW Yes. It was great to have them in residence. Finale was a little bit controversial; some people from our community felt that the Australians had not been used well in that work. But actually the people who made the work and collaborated with Robert Pacitti, while they were very clear about some things they did and didn’t love about the process, actually did not necessarily feel badly framed.

KG I thought it was variable. Some people were very visible, others barely there, but that depended in part on where you found yourself in a big space amidst a mobile performance, and a mobile audience.

FW And it was a two-week process. I think one of the problems, and this was logistical for us, was that we had to put Finale in the theatre and we needed to do it over three nights. It was a big work, so it looked like the centrepiece of the festival which, in turn, put a lot of pressure on it, It was a collaboration running alongside the other things that were happening during the week—a peer-to-peer exchange and local artists who had never worked together got the opportunity to play together in a process driven by Pacitti Company. Again, this seeded new relationships and created another temporary community exposed to Robert’s particular way of working.

KG It was certainly worth doing, having that UK presence: the two Pacitti shows (Civil and Finale), Duncan Speakman working on his audio walks, Helen Cole’s collection of performance memories, along with Rosa Ilgen [Norway/UK] making her shoes of hair.

FW Yes, I loved those works too. It was partly the closing chapter of the Breathing Space collaboration with Arnolfini in Bristol. And when I say “closing chapter” I don’t mean there aren’t more things to do, it’s just that Breathing Space has run a cycle. There are Australian artists whom Helen Cole has programmed regularly and her interest in and knowledge of Australian work is really astute. So there is a flow-on for people who weren’t part of the Breathing Space project itself but could have been. I think she has a really strong commitment, wherever she will be as a programmer in the next year or in ten years. It’s the same with me. That’s partly what those collaborations are about. I now have a much clearer picture of a whole lot of UK practice that I didn’t have before.

live art and other beasts

KG The term Live Art is starting to be used in Australia. We know there’s contemporary performance and performance art and there’s this other thing called live art, which has aspects of both. It can be more informal, or theatrical. It can involve works where the artist doesn’t appear but sets puzzles for the audience to solve. It’s fast becoming a blanket term. When you think of My Darling Patricia and shows like The Tent, they’re pretty sophisticated shows of a certain scale and do require money. But then there are the shorter, more mobile works. An artist like Rosie Dennis has found it difficult to find a niche in Australia but she can find it in the UK and Europe. Do you see it happening here, that Live Art dimension?

FW I think it does happen but mostly in galleries, though we are co-commissioning Rosie Dennis’ new work with Arnolfini. One of the things we’re hoping to do for Mobile States is to tour a module of four or five shorter works. One work might be durational, one might be 20 minutes, one might be full length, one might be more installation-based. We always wanted to do that and we didn’t get around to it, we always ended up making a choice to tour works that belonged in a theatre, started at 8pm and finished at 9.15 and might have been dance or hybrid performance or contemporary performance or theatre…And I’m really proud of that body of work that we toured over the last five or six years because I think it is a really interesting survey of work. But, of course, what’s left out is the work that’s not made for a theatre that starts at 8 and finishes at 9.15. That could be short work, the kind we showed at LiveWorks. And that was another reason for doing the festival, to capitalise on those fantastic spaces and try to find intimate moments within that massive architecture. It was also to create a context for beautiful work that sits outside either the theatre or gallery. As presenters we have to create the context for that work and LiveWorks was about doing that.

The Australia Council have opened Mobile States to tender and we’ve pitched a tour around a module or cluster of work so that the spectrum of work that can be presented is wider. It actually comes from understanding the dilemmas of people like Rosie and from me having seen some of those UK festivals like InbetweenTime and the National Review of Live Art. I think that work exists in Australia but it doesn’t prosper. So it’s a matter of us creating special contexts for it. Events like NightTime and indeed EXIST 08 in Brisbane have provided a context for that work. And, of course, Daniel Brine (the new Performance Space director) has a deep knowledge and understanding of live art so that will be a bonus to the contemporary arts community in Australia.

indigilab

KG As well as the Time_Place_Space hybrid arts laboratory [see below] Performance Space ran Indigilab.

FW We piloted this laboratory last year in partnership with Bundanon and next year hope to do it there again. Performance Space initiated the project. That was really about bringing what we had learned from Time_Place_Space [TPS] as a structure to create a black space because we’d always found it quite difficult to attract Indigenous artists into TPS. When we did, we got very clear feedback as to why it was not quite what people needed. So we created Indigilab. Wesley Enoch, Lily Shearer and I brainstormed the way it might work. We didn’t get the money to do the laboratory for the two weeks but we did it for one week with eight indigenous artists from around the country and it was really great. Djon Mundine, Wesley Enoch and Genevieve Grieves were the three facilitators and we’re very keen on seeing a future for that project but, again, we need to build some self-sustainability into it. Sandy Saxon, our Giving Manager is doing some philanthropic work around trying to get that supported.

a collaborative programming team

KG As well as performance, the visual arts and new media arts, dance and dance on screen are strongly represented in Performance Space programming.

FW I would say that one of the most exciting developments in my time at Performance Space has been about the growth that we’ve been able to negotiate and that means that we can officially have expert programmers across a range of forms. I remember talking to Stephen Armstrong at one stage about feeling really isolated in programming and didn’t know what to do. He suggested thinking about the associate director model. So we created that position and Blair French was the first person in that position and then appointed another associate director around performance and media-based work, Caitlin Newton-Broad. And then, the dance producer, Rosalind Richards, is effectively another associate director, but we needed for political reasons to put dance into the title. IN 2006-7 we also, too briefly, had Lily Shearer as our Indigenous Performance Broker, which brought another important dimension to the program. So for me that’s the most exciting development professionally: that we were able to create a truly collaborative programming team that was interdisciplinary, that had great expertise in different areas. We sit down and we talk about the work and what’s driving it and everyone has a desire to understand more about the other art languages that are around the table. For me, that’s been the most fantastic thing.

FW Rosalind Richards is dance producer. Bec Dean is associate director looking after the installation program specifically but, of course, Bec has an extraordinary background in performance and the performative and an interest in media arts. Rebecca Conroy is also an associate director. She’s a theatre and performance person with very strong inter-cultural connections and experience in running artist-run spaces and public space events. She co-created the Gang Festival [in 2005, a creative exchange with Indonesian artist run spaces].

In the job description for each of these positions is the requirement they bring in new communities of artists and audiences to extend the current world of performance space at any one moment. It’s a fantastic team and a great model because it actually means you have expertise in a range of areas. Where we don’t have expertise, we try to bring people in. So our collaboration with Liquid Architecture is very specifically about that, or getting Gail Priest to curate the What Survives: sonic residues in breathing buildings at Cleveland Street (2006) before we left there. It opens up the possibility of having different people in the program at the same time. Blair French as our first associate director successfully rebuilt our visual arts profile and carved out a particularity within the visual arts culture of Sydney. He was very strategic and I believe led us to secure Visual Arts & Craft Strategy [VACS] funding. We couldn’t do the visual arts program that we’re doing at CarriageWorks without that support. Of course, the integration of One Extra and ReelDance into the Performance Space program has also been important. We were very lucky to be able to support ReelDance—and now they’ve got their Emerging Triennial funding. The funds for dance and ReelDance are separately accounted for from other Performance Space programs.

challenges

KG Integrating Performance Space into the CarriageWorks structure must have very particular challenges—for both organisations.

FW I think the biggest challenge for both our organizations really is the successful realisation of the business model which is for the commercial side to bring in enough money to support CarriageWorks to (a) be able to run itself and some programs themselves and (b) be able to subsidise the small to medium sector. This is the big challenge and it is still very early days.

FW That’s right. It’s extraordinary that we’ve got CarriageWorks at all really. So now the challenge is what is actually happening to the nine hectare site it is part of and what is happening to the commercial bays. Anna Schwartz Gallery is there and that’s fantastic. But, with things like the building’s roof having to be fixed it’s been really difficult for CarriageWorks. I don’t know the exact details but there were funds to subsidise the first three years of activity, which runs out half-way through next year and that’s their challenge and, therefore, our challenge because our destinies are somewhat intertwined.

The other thing I wanted to say is that one of the main constraints is the situation in NSW. On the one hand we’ve got this beautiful building that Arts NSW invested in and created five years ago. On the other hand Arts NSW is pulling away from supporting independent artists through project funding and encouraging them to work as organisations or through existing organisations, but with no extra money. If the government was flush with money and there was more being invested, this might possibly be a good set of moves policy wise. But in this context, it feels really tricky. I think that’s going to be a major issue. Federally the Theatre Board has been moving towards putting more resources into presenters and producers but they still need the independent artists to bring the money for their projects with them. So on the one hand we’ve got this new big picture being presented by the Australia Council and it’s just simply not able to be matched at a State level. So I think over the next 5 years, this is going to create a big tricky world for us all.

the next stage

KG Most artistic directors leave not only a long term legacy but often programming for the coming year. Presumably with your program managers you’ve set up things for the new director, Daniel Brine, to work with?

FW The program is predominantly in place for next year, which gives Daniel the opportunity to concentrate on public programs, an area of particular interest for him. Our first 18 months at CarriageWorks was a major learning curve involving a major re-thinking about ourselves, about getting the work in, about how to support artists in the CarriageWorks spaces, about our presentation model and about our technical realisation in those big spaces. The second 18 months has been more around profile and marketing and audience development. And the public programs are really about that. So that’s the next focus. Daniel, of course, also has to write a business plan by the middle of next year, so we agreed that it would be a good thing for us to do most of the programming for next year so he could concentrate on the public program, the orientation and the business plan, which is big enough really.

what’s next & time_place_space asia

FW I actually don’t know. We’re doing Time_Place_Space no. 6 which I’m co-curating with Sarah Miller, Teresa Crea and with Margie Breen as project manager. That will happen in January-February next year in Brisbane. Time_Place_Space [TPS] is something that I’m very proud of. I was talking earlier about the importance of building temporary communities. There have been really substantial collaborations that were seeded at TPS. It’s so necessary because so many artists still feel quite isolated, particularly if they think of themselves as a hybrid performance maker or new media artist in Townsville or Perth, or even Sydney sometimes. So one of the strategic things we were doing with TPS was to work with the Australia Council and with Asialink to do an inter-cultural, interdisciplinary lab call TPS Asia. (That’s just the working title.) This TPS is inviting a number of delegates—curators, artists, producers and funding people—from various Asian countries to see the model in action in the hope that we can then create partnerships to do TPS in a number of Asian countries.

KG You’re probably not suffering separation anxiety yet, about leaving Performance Space.

FW No, but I do feel incredibly lucky to have had that job. Now I’d like to do some writing. And I know what my passion is. I love programming. And I love working with artists through that trajectory of concept development, through to production and touring. Performance Space does all those things, not with each work all the way through, but dipping in and out of different parts of that process. So finding another context in which to be able to do that is going to be my greatest challenge.

The Heart Library Project, George Khut with Caitlin Newton-Broad, Greg Turner and David Morris-Oliveros

Audiences are increasingly becoming the subjects of artworks, participants in them, even co-makers. Our cover image is from Simon Terrill’s epic photographic series Crowd Theory (page 49); this time the artist invited a community to collaboratively respond to the Port of Melbourne. In The Heart Library Project (p34), George Khut invited his audience to have their heartbeats translated into seductive, manipulable digital imagery, but also, with his collaborators, offered the opportunity to reflect on and share the experience through drawing and dialogue. Jordana Maisie’s The Real Thing (p33) is a giant kaleidoscope in which the viewer is magically fragmented and gloriously rearranged. Babel Swarm (p36) invites the public into Second Life, providing an avatar and the opportunity to convert spoken or texted words into the tumbling letters of a strange ecosystem. The beauty of Keith Armstrong’s Shifting Intimacies (p33) is only realised when the actions of audience members manipulate a digitised dancer. And, for a different kind of engagement, Pool, the ABC’s new online site for the sharing and re-use of digital art (p37), abounds with opportunities for artists and public to engage. Meanwhile in Hobart, in a work about labour and contemplation, and free of digital transmutation, Philippa Steele advertised free clothes washing for gallery-goers (p54), a quieter form of participation, but without which… RT

Image note: An example of an experience-map created by exhibition participants (Hope Lover, Ruby Jones and Scarlet Jones) in response to their experience in The Heart Library – Biofeedback Mirror, April 2008, UTS Gallery, NSW, and subsequently exhibited as part of Mirror States exhibition, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2008 (curated by Lizzie Muller and Kathy Cleland) see page 34-35.

VIDEO ARTIST EVE SUSSMAN BRINGS HER LATEST WORK, THE RAPE OF THE SABINE WOMEN, TO THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL THIS MONTH. BASED ON AN 18TH CENTURY PAINTING BY JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, IT IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE ARTIST’S ONGOING USE OF CANONICAL PAINTINGS AS SOURCES OF INSPIRATION.

Sussman was born in London in 1961 to American parents. Her mother was an interior designer with a talent for historic restoration, while her father, a chemical engineering professor, took travelling sabbaticals, which allowed Sussman to grow up not only in Massachusetts but also in Turkey, India, Israel and New Zealand. Having studied photography and printmaking, Sussman moved into sculpture and installations in 1989, but maintained an interest in the reflective qualities of materials as much as in their spatial dynamics. On the phone from her studio in Brooklyn, Sussman explained to me how she had played with surveillance cameras since high school and that her interest in sculpture had always been closely related to this fascination with observation, reflection and projection. An effortless consequence of this fascination was Sussman’s move into video art.

However, the categorisations that one inevitably falls into in succinctly verbalising an artist’s career can too easily elide the details. Sussman’s apparent departure from photography towards the moving image is not so clear-cut. She herself is adamant that her work and her interests cannot be pinned down to one mode of communication or representation. She is as likely to create a sculpture next as she is a photograph, as she is a video. Moreover, the very attaching of the nomenclature ‘video’ immediately differentiates and establishes a tension between Sussman’s work and that of ‘filmmakers.’ This is clearly no small matter. Much of the history of video art has seen it deliberately drive itself in opposition to the film industry. That is not to say that there haven’t been many exceptions, but the subject is clearly important to Sussman, who distances herself from this culture of video art by affirming her cinematic influences.

In The Rape of the Sabine Women, Sussman’s attention to her cinematic and artistic predecessors is abundantly clear. The initial catalyst for the work came haphazardly when Sussman was flicking through an art book and chanced upon Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women from 1799. She had been looking for a reason to work with choreographer Claudia de Serpa Soares again and the painting provided the perfect starting point, with its vividly populated battle scene lending itself to Soares’ abilities. Based on a Roman myth, The Intervention depicts the efforts of the Sabine women to make peace between their fathers, the Sabines, and their husbands, the Romans, who had kidnapped the women for wives. In the end, Sussman and her team of regular collaborators, known as Rufus Corporation, decided to work more from the original myth than from the painting. They 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.

The work of Cassavetes is an important touchstone here because of his legendary use of improvisation in the creative process. Sussman and her team rehearse thoroughly, but within the framework of rehearsal there is scope for creative licence. In a method developed during the filming of 89 Seconds at Alcázar, Sussman’s reimagining of the Velázquez painting Las Meninas, certain rules or necessary points of action might be established and then it is left to the actors to realise the scene. The nature of the work is always non-verbal, so the improvisation is in the languages of gesture and proxemics. Yet for someone who speaks freely of an “organic” process of improvisation and collaboration, Sussman seems to hold the authorial reins much tighter with the rest of the crew. Though some reports suggest that Rufus Corporation is a democratic body with Sussman as a benevolent mediator, the tone she adopts in speaking about working with her director of photography implies that the vision of the work—the eye of the camera—remains very much hers. However, in discussing the music, by composer Jonathan Bepler, it is clear that the collaborative democracy of the process does sometimes lead the piece in directions that Sussman might not have chosen herself. Indeed, the sheer pluralistic scale of the work is something that Sussman was evidently happy to leave behind when it came to the editing, which she did herself with the help of Kevin Messman, the editor on Todd Solondz’s Palindromes.

Trawling through almost 200 hours of footage, Sussman cut the final film down to 83 minutes, but she makes use of the discarded footage on side projects, or “postcards”, that form a sort of halo of works around the main feature. Along with these shorter sequences of film are still photographs taken on set that are distinct from the film and not to be mistaken for film stills. The effect is a collection of works that feels much more like a gallery exhibition than a movie.

Nevertheless, The Rape of the Sabine Women is just that, a movie. The shorter works, in their use of vérité time and brief, looping gestures, allow the viewer to engage with them in the way one might with a painting or photograph—Sussman also likens them to fish tanks and has called one of the pieces Aquarium. But the film, in its traditional feature length, its narrative structure and its dramatic aspirations, is a work of cinema with all the corresponding audience expectations and, in this regard, Sussman is breaking new ground for herself as an artist as well as opening herself up to a whole new array of viewers, fans and critics.

AS PART OF HIS COLLABORATIVE WORKING PROCESS FOR LIPSYNCH—IMPROVISATION, ACTORS AS CO-CREATORS, MULTIPLE AUTHORS, AN ABSENCE OF SCRIPTS—DIRECTOR ROBERT LEPAGE ASKED PARTICIPANTS TO BRING A TEXT OR OBJECT TO REHEARSALS. DRAMATURGY CONSULTANT MARIE GIGNAC’S CONTRIBUTION WAS AN 8MM SILENT FILM OF HER FATHER WHO DIED WHEN SHE WAS THIRTEEN. THIS DEVELOPED INTO “MARIE” WHERE A CHARACTER’S ASPHASIA RESULTS IN HER FORGETTING THE SOUND OF HER FATHER’S VOICE. MARIE (FRÉDÉRIKE BÉDARD) THINKS IF SHE CAN JUST DISCOVER WHAT HE SAID, SHE’LL RECOVER HIM.

But when she hires a woman to lip-read old film reels, she’s disappointed by the meaningless exchanges. “It’s pretty banal”, she says; “That’s life”, the woman shrugs. Persisting, Marie asks an actor to dub her father. After three hilarious attempts (he sounds like a dalek, “a Martian in Bugs Bunny”, a drunk) she tries it herself. A voice comes from nowhere; her father’s voice. “The voice is inside you”, her sister says.

This is just one of the stories from nine characters unfolding over nine hours. The first concerns opera singer Ada (Rebecca Blankenship) who witnesses the death of a young mother on a plane and goes on to adopt the orphan she calls Jeremy. Another shows Jeremy’s (Rick Miller) quest to make a film about his dead mother; another Detective Inspector Jackson (John Cobb) investigating a suspicious death and trying to find a tango partner to replace his wife; yet another a raucous funeral. As with all Lepage’s epics, Lipsynch is more an event than a show. The Barbican theatre is packed, there’s a sense audience members are fans happy to share chocolate and opinions while they watch an increasingly layered narrative explore voice, language and speech as discrete entities.

In order to concentrate on the notion that voice is genetic (almost part of the fabric of the soul, whereas language or speech is encultured) Lepage courageously eschews the stunning visuals for which he is known. So, sets are witty and efficient—the side of a plane morphing into a train—but not spectacular. Instead, there is a glut of sound from singing to speeches, to a baby’s cries, to advertisements, to canned laughter. In a Los Angeles restaurant, conversation is punctuated with simultaneous translation and ringing telephones. Characters switch languages as do actors—text is in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian. On occasion, where surtitles are unclear, we are immersed in pure sound and sometimes, as Jeremy tells us, music transcends failing language. As her son departs for California, Ada sings from Górecki’s Symphony no. 3 the lament in which the Virgin Mary asks Jesus dying on the cross to “Share your wounds with your mother.” In other episodes we learn: we can speak without saying anything (President Bush is quoted); the content of speech—however plaintive or important—can be reduced to an analysis of harmonics and frequency; by recording permutations for British Rail announcements, you could read your own obituary. And death does not mean your body stops farting.

To its immense credit, Lipsynch is often very funny, moving, insightful and never boring. It deserves multiple viewings to appreciate all of its references and nuances, the motifs of loss, of absent fathers, biblical characters, dualism; the incredible performers who take us on journeys as their multi-faceted roles age, change context or gain knowledge. Yet for all that, and for its previous incarnation in Newcastle as a five and a half hour work-in-progress, it doesn’t quite cohere. Perhaps it’s because the narrative’s emotional treatment of prostitution, its insistence on victims, is overbearing even in the context of nine hours. Despite Sarah Kemp’s faultless acting, her role is such a cliché it’s almost parodic (she’s a street prostitute, formerly drug-addicted, sexually abused, raped, self-harming victim of incest, but too honest to steal).

Later, in Nicaragua, we witness the fate of Lupe (Nuria Garcia), Jeremy’s birth mother, who is just 15 when her uncle sells her to sex traffickers for $600. The two stories are subtly linked (Sarah is from Manchester, Lupe is in a German brothel dancing to Manchester band Joy Division; there’s the possibility that punter “Tony” who demands Lupe’s services is the same Tony who raped his sister Sarah as a child). Even accepting the premise of their inclusion (giving a voice to those who do not have one), this begins to feel like a cross between harrowing documentary and bad soap opera. Only when the tone, rather than content, of speech is emphasised (as in the comic scene where the middle class presenter of a radio show asks Sarah and male escort AJ inane, prurient questions) are we reminded of Lepage’s intention to emphasise the difference between internal voice and language as learned behaviour. The other ideas in those episodes—reinventing oneself through voice; the impact of accents; how the car, voicemail and microwave speak but humans fail to communicate—appear incidental.

Conversely, the parts that resonate most are those where narrative is secondary and where the interplay between voice and image is explored (which is, after all, what lip synching is). When Jeremy turns filmmaker, sound and image are divorced and remarried. Foley artists recreate every effect; dialogue is dubbed into French. At neurosurgeon Thomas’ (Hans Piesbergen) request, Marie tries to give names to child-like chalk drawings and says “arab” rather than “arbre”, noting the difference one letter can make to signification. Head bandaged post-operation, Marie sings Gregorian chant into a machine. The patterns made by her voice are projected onto the screen behind in a series of vertical lines on graph paper. They accumulate into thicker marks as echoes increase; lines like bundles of sticks across the page. In disturbed sister Michelle’s story (Lise Castonguay), shapes press against transparent clinic walls as she hears voices; later snow falls against a bookstore where poetry readings are held and a girl in an orange dress hopscotches along the pavement to the sound of traffic.

Lipsynch is truly magical for its metaphysical enquiries. Where do lost and forgotten memories go? Do men stammer more because they are more vulnerable? Is God just the human brain’s best creation? These moments make us want to keep listening.

Ex Machina/Théâtre Sans Frontières, Lipsynch, direction/text Robert Lepage, performance/text Frédérike Bédard, Carlos Belda, Rebecca Blankenship, Lise Castonguay, John Cobb, Nuria Garcia, Sarah Kemp, Rick Miller, Hans Piesbergen, dramaturgical consultant/text Marie Gignac, design Jean Hazel, lighting Etienne Boucher, sound Jean-Sébastien Côté, costume Yasmina Giguère; Barbican Theatre, London, Sept 6-14

PURGATORY IS A TEMPORAL NOUN. THERE ARE NO CLOCKS IN THE INFERNO OR IN PARADISE—THERE IS NO TIME IN ETERNITY. BUT PURGATORY IS IMMANENTLY EPHEMERAL. AT LEAST, THAT’S HOW DANTE WOULD HAVE IT. PURGATORY IS ALSO THEATRE. IT IS A MORALITY PLAY WRIT LARGE, WHERE THE ACTORS ARE SINNERS AND THE CURTAIN CALL IS THE EXPURGATION OF SIN.

Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Purgatorio [the second part of his trilogy inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy], commissioned by the Festival d’Avignon, begins with a quotidian scene of bourgeois domesticity. The set is an expansive, hyperrealist snapshot of refined 1970s living—dark wood, muted tones, recessed lighting. In it, a boy dangles his feet at a table and a woman washes dishes. It is, by every appearance, a literal kitchen sink drama we are witnessing. But Castellucci establishes these references, these codes of theatrical familiarity only to derail our expectations. Like Michael Haneke in his film The Seventh Continent, Castellucci begins by feeding us these images of habit without the anchors of narrative or character. The mundane actions and props of life are thereby removed from their context and float in front of us as anonymous signifiers, suggesting the illusiveness of this existence. Purgatory is, after all, theatre—the replaying, in real time, of a misjudged life.

The woman, a screen tells us, is called “First Star”; the boy is called “Second Star.” When they speak to each other, we see their words just before the actors vocalise them and the dialogue is drawn out by silences, as though the characters were not so much conversing as simply passing the time. And time does pass. The first act of Purgatorio is a blatant invocation of time as punishment—weary festival-goers would have been forgiven for resting their eyes a little. The discrepancy in timing between the surtitles and the text is no technical hitch, but rather a deliberate ploy to disrupt the action by anticipating it with text. Castellucci thereby de-energises the dramatic tension, distances the characters from one another and asserts a painterly torpor on the space. This inertia has strange effects, particularly on time, the measurement of which is always a measure of movement. With no reference points of action, the audience’s sense of time is dislodged and what might have been only 20 minutes feels instead like an hour.

With all this inaction, what does the audience desire at this point, what does it expect? It wants a change and it expects action. Castellucci delivers. Having apparently returned from a day at the office, a man (“Third Star”) has entered the domestic scene. He does not touch the food his wife presents him with, but dons a cowboy hat and takes his young son upstairs. The stage is emptied of actors but slowly, discomfortingly one hears the brute grunts of the father and the weeping pain of the son from offstage. The audience has been given the drama and action they craved in the form of a tortuous and prolonged rape. So, the initial stretching of the audience’s patience is not done merely to punish but also to disturb. Just as sinners would pass through the seven stages of Purgatory to be cleansed, Castellucci puts us through these early tests of our own theatrical sins of expectation.

Having, at first, exasperated the audience and having then slapped them in the face with their own hand, Castellucci changes gears once more. The father eventually returns to the stage in a somewhat dishevelled state and is joined soon after by the boy, who bears no discernible sign of mistreatment. Strangely, the boy consoles the man with the words, “Ne t’inquiète pas, tout est fini” (“Don’t worry, it’s all over”). It acts as a pardoning and, thus, an inversion of the power structure we expect.

This inversion is echoed in the final act, when two different actors come on in the costumes of the father and son. The father is now a shorter, slighter man and played by an actor (Juri Roverato) who suffers from severe spastic tetraplegia. On the other hand, the boy is now a towering two metres tall. The father begins a sort of fitful dance that the son echoes until his body is totally at the mercy of the convulsions. In front of this action, a clear glass circle hangs spinning as black paint is squirted onto its surface by automated jets. The resulting web of interweaving spirals on the glass is beautiful to the point of distraction, but beneath the blackened circle that hovers in the space, the son continues to jar his body unceasingly against the floor. A realisation soon dawns: it’s not all over after all.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Purgatorio, inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy, mise en scène, design, lighting, costumes Romeo Castellucci, original music Scott Gibbons, choreography Cindy Van Acker, Romeo Castellucci, performers Irena Radmanovic, Pier Paolo Zimmermann, Sergio Scarlatella, Juri Roverato, Davide Savorani; Châteaublanc Parc Des Expositions, Avignon, France, July 9-19

A MAN IN A GREY SUIT IS TELLING US ABOUT OUR BRAINS. DESCRIBING THE PERCEPTION OF COLOUR, THE EFFECTS OF CAFFEINE AND NICOTINE AND THE BODY’S REACTION TO SURPRISE, HE SPEAKS IN PRECISE, CLIPPED TONES, DISPASSIONATELY EXPLAINING THE GAP BETWEEN OUR INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL REALITIES. AS HE SPEAKS, HE CIRCLES ANOTHER MAN, WHO IS RE-LIVING THE EXPERIENCES HE DESCRIBES. BEHIND THEM PROJECTED KEY WORDS ARE LINKED WITH MONOCHROMATIC PRECISION, LIKE A DATA-VISUALISATION OF PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA. “AS THE ZIGOMATICUS MUSCLES CONTRACT THE MOUTH OPENS HORIZONTALLY”, HE TELLS US, INDIFFERENTLY CONTROLLING THE OTHER’S MOVEMENTS. “AND THE EYES ARE PULLED DOWN TO MAKE A SMILE.” THIS IS DUMB TYPE’S TRUE.

Exploring the “relationship between the brain and the reality we face”, true is an extraordinary collaboration between Yamaguchi Centre for Art and Media, Kanazawa 21st Century Art Museum, Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse and 10 artists from new media, technology, dance and theatre companies, including Dumb Type, rhizomatiks, AbsT/baneto and Softpad. In exploring the interface between reality and the processes that mediate our experience, the makers of true have incorporated as many new media technologies in this production as would seem humanly possible. Their tech rider is staggering.

Though the set is minimal, it becomes apparent during the show that it is deceptively simple. White vinyl covers the floor, and there is a thick wooden table littered with everyday objects. Above, is an 8m wide circular truss of LED lighting especially developed for the show by director and lighting designer Takayuki Fujimoto of Dumb Type. The back wall is a translucent PVC screen, which allows for both front projection and later, a performer to appear, lit from behind. The stage area is sandwiched on both sides by three storey high scaffolds, reminding us that this is a site of construction, where reality is constantly mediated by perception.

The show is divided into nine scenes, reading like the curriculum of some unspecified high school course: Introduction, Science, Music, Physical Education, Verbal Skills, Social Studies, Drafting, Maths and Survival. The Introduction borrows more from silent-movie slapstick than contemporary dance, with Tsuyoshi Shirai (of AbsT/baneto) establishing the naive nature of his character. He seems bewildered, as though awakening, and becomes innocently pre-occupied with the objects on the table—gazing at a picture, bouncing a ball, rearranging a tea cup and kettle. Perfectly synchronized sound effects match Shirai’s manipulation of the objects, some appropriate, and some completely estranged from the motions he makes. Prefiguring the stage craft yet to come, the tea cup moves across the table seemingly of its own volition, and then a large circular section of the table, with tea-cup still atop, drops neatly to the floor.

As we move from the Introduction to Music we meet our second character. Appearing stage-left, clad in a brilliant red PVC hooded robe reminiscent of a boxer’s cloak, this quite ominous character climbs slowly up the scaffold. He observes the action, while occupying the periphery of audience vision. As Shirai executes some bedroom-style air guitar action on the stage below, the red robe is removed and tossed down emulating an MTV video clip.

Unrobed, Dumb Type’s Takao Kawaguchi reveals himself as a stylishly, grey suited character, at once menacing, impish and manipulative. As the relationship between these two characters unfolds, the choreography shifts between formal paradigms, changing from movement-with-intention to contemporary dance through to physical theatre. This relationship begins with one of true’s most breathtaking moments, when the LED lighting executes a dazzling circular strobe, and the dancers spin in opposite directions, their shadows on the white floor appearing to stalk them. Kawaguchi and Shirai continue to perform a series of duets, in which Kawaguchi’s suited character appears to manipulate Shirai’s naive disposition, culminating with Kawaguchi literally controlling Shirai’s face, presenting us with both comedy and pathos, as the face contorts through smile, sadness and scream.

The nature of the relationship between these two characters is ambiguous. Any mention of it is noticeably absent from the program notes, leaving audiences to deduce it for themselves. For me Kawaguchi’s character comes to represent social norms, maturity, expectations and generally the constrictions of the older self, written upon and set in its nature. Shirai represents youth, play, wonder and the promise and possibility of the blank slate. In the wonderfully executed spoken word poetry-dance of Verbal Skills, true speaks of the relationship between the mechanics of perceiving reality and the individual processing of this data into meaning, memory and emotion. In this context Shirai and Kawaguchi perform a kind of coming of age, in which our perceptions and apprehensions shift over time—we are afraid of getting old and then nostalgic for our youth, yet the nature of the stimulus we receive and the way in which we receive it remains unchanged. Why does a colour, a smell or a sound come to mean so much to us?

True is full of those rare moments when you feel the audience collectively take a breath, when technical wizardry, stage-craft and performance combine to effectively convey emotionally charged imagery. The table and its objects come to life without human touch. The lighting separates and recombines colours, fading and strobing light in a way that traditional theatre lighting simply cannot. Sounds emanate from objects, including the scaffolding, which at one point hums a tune when oscillators vibrate the aluminium structures. The video component, left in reserve until Verbal Skills, is wonderfully simple, and offers surprises, particularly when a tiny projection of a dancing man appears from within the table to light up the spinning globe of an atlas. And all of this is completely synchronous with stage action through the use of myoelectric sensors attached to the performers’ bodies, providing real-time triggers for sound, mechatronics, lights and video. With so much ‘trickery’, true could easily have overplayed its hand, distracting us from the relationship between Shirai and Kawaguchi. Instead the technology serves and enhances the performances in ways rarely seen in new media dance collaborations.

If good contemporary dance goes beyond metaphor, or even aphorism, and provides a series of images for audiences to superimpose possible meanings, then great dance is where those images dive into our desire through all our senses, providing a narrative beyond words, leaving audiences in a state of bodily wonder, alive with altered perceptions. Dumb Type’s true is truly great dance.

International Symposium of Electronic Arts 2008: Dumb Type, true, direction, lighting design Takayuki Fujimoto, choreography, dance Tsuyoshi Shirai, choreography, text, dance Takao Kawaguchi, sound, video, visual design Takuya Minami, sound, oscillation, programming Daito Manabe, video, programming Satoshi Horii, table design, mechanics Seiichi Saito, Motoi Ishibashi, producers Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse, Hi Wood; Esplanade Theatre Studio, Singapore, July 24-26, www.true.gr.jp

IF I SAY THAT LYNDON TERRACINI’S BRISBANE FESTIVAL 2008 WAS ALL OVER THE PLACE, I MEAN THIS TOPOGRAPHICALLY. THERE WERE ALL SORTS OF FREE EVENTS OCCURRING ROUND THE SUBURBS, WITH PERHAPS A LESSENING OF THE TRANSGRESSIVE SENSE OF CARNIVAL ON THE CITY STREETS. NEVERTHELESS, FOR THEATREGOERS TERRACINI’S CHOICES PROVIDED MANY MOMENTS TO SAVOUR.

three sisters

Declan Donnellan’s luminous production of Three Sisters showed us how to look at Chekhov afresh. There was so much sheer brio in this saddest of plays—about three sisters from pre-revolutionary Russia who can contemplate happiness in the past, the future, but never the present. When I went, there were a bunch of Russians occupying a half empty theatre. They understood. It’s life. The doll’s house brought out at the beginning for Irena’s name day eerily evoked associations with Ibsen’s play, especially for Brisbane audiences who recalled Mabou Mines’ magnificent festival production of A Doll’s House in 2006.

In contrast to Ibsen’s pejorative take on role playing and childishness, however, an interlude in the first act that focused on the name day celebrants—mesmerised by a spinning top—conveyed not only the spontaneity and self-abandon pervading the moment, but the centrifugal force of Donnellan’s direction. His production turned on a seductive balance, highlighting these exuberant and positive qualities with a delicacy that only compounded the social tragedy. The superb ensemble likewise created an electric field, a dynamic gestalt rather than the solipsism of individual characters sometimes critically attributed to Chekhov as a precursor to Becket.

Designer Nick Ormerod’s non-naturalistic deployment of chairs and tables seemed swept up in the swirling force of this production. Deftly rearranged by the cast for the scene changes, they coalesced as if by magic, until, jumbled together, they came to represent a larger metaphor for things falling apart. We gained a belief from this production in the strength that the sisters summoned from each other at the end, however bereft they were, and despite all the implicit ironies for our own times.

the kingdom of desire

The Kingdom of Desire was a lavishly mounted production, a superb blend of Beijing Opera with Western theatre in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, set in feudal China and performed in Mandarin with English surtitles. In any language, this was stimulating and accessible theatre. The Contemporary Legend Theatre of Taiwan has moved away from traditional minimalism and subject matter to explore the freedoms of the contemporary stage. Exotic from a Western point of view were the expressive forms of singing, chanting, hand gestures, face painting, elaborate costuming, acrobatics and martial arts. The interesting result, however, was a heightened realism that easily translated across cultural barriers. This admixture included delightful elements of clowning that bracketed even the lead actors in a Brechtian way. The company might be seen as restoring to Western audiences an enjoyment of lost elements of their own traditions—the popular forms of vaudeville, pantomime and melodrama. Fifty year old actor/director Wu Hsing-kuo as Macbeth received rapturous applause when he somersaulted backwards from a huge height in a death scene reminiscent of Kurosawa’s 1957 film, Throne of Blood. Beat that.

the grand inquisitor

From total theatre to Peter Brook’s empty space—a brightly lit, bare stage. Brook directed long-time collaborator Bruce Myers as raconteur/performer of Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Christ has returned to Earth at the time of the Spanish Inquisition and has been condemned to death as a heretic. If Marx denied that he was a Marxist, then Christ would have to deny he was a Christian. Interrogating the still and silent figure of Christ (Joachim Zuber, seated downstage on a stool), Myers’ Grand Inquisitor has a measured intensity that never flags as he paces, advances and retreats while pursuing his labyrinthine argument.

The Inquisitor, ideological policeman for any totalitarian regime, argues that Christ has cursed mankind with the intolerable burden of free-thinking, pre-figuring TS Eliot’s remark “mankind cannot bear too much reality.” Brook, by presenting Dostoevsky’s parable in the theatre, made me aware of a dimension I hadn’t grasped reading it. That is, it is the intensity and authenticity of Christ’s (Zuber’s) listening rather than his silence that causes the Inquisitor’s inner unravelling, and his bidding that Christ go free on pain of never returning. The Inquisitor argues with unassailable logic (after all, he has history on his side), but Brook subtly demonstrates that, while philosophy demands our entire mind, listening demands our totality. This was the revelation of Christ’s kiss of peace, and the chill implication in Myers’ last line: “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man sticks to his idea.”

theatre, community, constituency

Queensland Theatre Company’s The August Moon and Eugene Gilfedder’s The Fiveways had mirroring concerns, but differed widely in approach. The August Moon had as its subject matter the effects of cyclone Larry on the far north Queensland community of Innisfail, while Gilfedder’s piece took on a different kind of natural disaster—the storm of development engulfing local communities, landmarks and history in the inner suburbs of Brisbane. Writer/ directors Adam Grosetti and Jean Marc-Russ reported the community they visited verbatim, for sensitive reasons, while writer/director/composer/pianist Gilfedder was on home ground, speaking to, and on behalf of, his own constituency. He could speak as he liked. Both productions interestingly turned round this question: Who is speaking? And on whose behalf?

the august moon

This was more fraught for the QTC production. Looking for the story behind the one reported death of a man at the August Moon Caravan Park, the writers found there was no story, and the whole thing was a beat-up by the press. As self-styled ‘Gonzo journalists’, they interviewed the brother and sister owners of the caravan park who felt unfairly put upon, another elderly resident and the barmaid who looked out for the deceased man. So far, so forensic, but aware that in a postmodern world narratives are suspect, they proffered themselves up as contaminated evidence. They inserted themselves as characters into the ‘script’, the ‘script’ became a ‘score’ to be manipulated along with other media, and actors could only ‘stand in’ for real life people. Or sit down. The actors were seated on a revolve stage reading transcripts of the interviews in the metaphorical eye of the storm, but the exciting possiblities of the reconfiguration of the Billie Brown Studio as a panoramic theatre in the round were not realised. This production became confused in its own metatheatrics, and in the end spoke for no-one. A pity, because underlying I suspect was a compassionate motive, not an exploitative one.

the fiveways

Presented as a free event in a car park in West End, surrounded by developers’ cranes, and close to one of Brisbane’s historic fiveway intersections, The Fiveways, a Brisbane Festival commission, was brilliantly located with its scaffolding and street party atmosphere—kids, cushions and lots of meet and greet—within the totality of inner-city West End as mise en scene. The set design was classic Footrot Flats; a figure of progress out of control, Harlequin as a patchwork jockey somersaults through randomly and literally brings the house down at the end. Madam Butterfly (Li, the Chinese Takeaway Lady) meets Mo McCackie (three inebriated punters from the TAB) meets the devil (Wright, the developer), who of course had all the catchiest tunes. The uncanny figure of the The Goldfish Girl, a soulful soprano, loosely defines as the spirit of place. Two tuxedoed piano players completed the ensemble and played as if themselves possessed by the ghosts of silent film accompanists sent back to save their old stamping ground.

The political message was perfectly clear but, like Peter Brook, Gilfedder is interested in a Theatre of Myths, where the audience might draw many different layers of meaning. Gilfedder’s plangent, Sondheim-like score was likewise hauntingly evocative, especially in the interludes. He has said that he tries to give expression in his work to the “semi-ecstatic stillness in Australia.” But there were also European influences here. The absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco confides that his plays have their origins in two basic states of consciousness, “an awareness of evanescence and of solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence.” This seems to speak to Gilfedder’s deceptively populist Gotterdammerung. And in the figure of the Goldfish Girl, it was truly as if the beauty of the objects of Surrealist desire had become convulsively alive through dreams. Gilfedder is possessed by his amour fou, and speaks for the angels.

2008 Brisbane Festival: Chekhov International Theatre/Cheek by Jowl, Three Sisters, writer Anton Chekhov, director Declan Donnellan, design Nick Ormerod, Playhouse, QPAC, 29 July-Aug 3; The Kingdom of Desire, director Wu Hsing- Kuo, QPAQ, July 23-26; The Grand Inquisitor, from Fiodor Dostoyevsky, director Peter Brook, adaptation Marie-Hélène Estienne, Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, July19 – 26 July; Queensland Theatre Company, The August Moon, writers Adam Grossetti, Jean-Marc Russ, director Jean-Marc Russ, designer Bruce Mckinven, lighting David Walters, composer/sound design Brett Collery, cinematic theatre design Brad Jennings, Steven Maxwell, Billie Brown Studio, July 17-Aug 9; Fiveways, director, composer, writer Eugene Gilfedder, design Jonathon Oxlade, lighting, David Murray, choreographer Neridah Waters; West End, July 31–Aug 2

THE NAVIGATOR IS PARTLY INSPIRED BY WAGNER’S OPERA ABOUT ILLICIT DESIRE, TRISTAN AND ISOLDE. COMPOSER LIZA LIM AND LIBRETTIST PATRICIA SYKES HAVE CREATED WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY AN ERSATZ MYTH TO TRACK THE PERMUTATIONS OF DESIRE IN THE MODERN WORLD. IN ORDER TO RESIST THE MAGNETIC PULL OF WELL-KNOWN MYTHS, “YOU MUST GO BEYOND THE SOURCE INTO NEW TERRITORY VERY QUICKLY”, SYKES SAYS. RATHER THAN A NARRATIVE JOURNEY ON A MASCULINE MODEL, THEY HAVE TAKEN PAINS, AS LIM SAYS, TO “RADIATE EXPRESSION AND EMOTION, STATES OF BEING.” I SUGGEST THAT THE WORK ATTEMPTS TO CONVEY THE HIDDEN, THE UNSPOKEN, ESPECIALLY ON THE OUTER FRINGES (SUCH AS THE NON-SPACE OF THE ‘FEMININE’ IMAGINARY). THUS THE OPERA BEGINS IN TIMES OF WAR IN WHICH THE BELOVED HAS BEEN GAMBLED AND LOST (LIKE DRAUPADI IN THE MAHABHARATA). SHE ENTERS A RIVER OF TRANSFORMATION IN WHICH SHE UNWINDS INTO HER SHADOW TWIN, THE NAVIGATOR. IN THE WORDS OF THE BELOVED, “I TWIN MYSELF, BECOME THE HE WHO IS ME AND NOT ME, DISGUISED, STRANGER, TRAVELER, EXILE …”.

Other archetypal characters intersecting with her journey are the Fool, The Angel of History and the Crone. Baritone Omar Ebrahim as The Fool—a minotaur like figure, huge horns, huge male genitalia—courses from male polarity to female, producing ‘reality’ in the world as we know it, according to the system of the Tarot. Similarly, Philip Larson, as The Crone questions essentialist myths of gender. The Angel of History is graphically, irruptively enacted by baroque alto Deborah Kayser in a full-skirted ball gown, gnashing and growling in an aphasic, deep masculine register as ‘he’ sees “one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet” (Walter Benjamin). As the program notes, “The Angel’s gaze takes in landscapes of tidal blood, unwinding rivers, glaciers, a comet, the ocean, the desert, and finally—in a vision of rebirth during which a cicada is placed on the eye of a foetus—the submarine amniotic world of the womb.”

As director and designer Barrie Kosky, far from being ‘iconoclastic’, handled the mythic dimension of this work with great precision and astuteness in his decision making. As a backdrop to his painterly tableaux a series of confined urban spaces are represented as a flat, continuous and uncluttered collage. A shallow stage and intense and clever lighting contributed to create stage pictures of extreme visual potency: a Tiresias-like old man/woman, sorrowful and strong; roses above a doorway become a brothel’s red light; Max Ernst-like creatures shuffle in and out of the brothel. An array of symbolic costume changes added to the surreal effect.

The Beloved, soprano Talise Trevigne, nightclub svelte in a simple purple silk shift sings like a siren. She is the essence of longing and loss. The Navigator, her other, is the potently beautiful counter-tenor, Andrew Watts, sometimes also in a purple silk shift. Cross-dressing is not fortuitous, however, but an artful play of signs. In this context, it’s interesting that Virginia Woolf considered it was “fatal” for an artist to be simply a man or a woman. Following on from Woolf, Hélène Cixous maintains “that there is no invention possible…without there being in the inventing subject an abundance of the other, of variety.” Tristan and Isolde’s mythical love affair, at least from Wagner’s revisionist perspective, was all in the mind, more intimate, more profound than sex. Their deeper reality was riven through by the same cosmic forces of creation and destruction, of Eros and Thanatos, that course through Lim’s and Syke’s imaginative world. Indeed, simply as an artist, Lim appears to be enthralled by the infinite musical possibilities of alterity and otherness.

Genevieve Lacey, as a young girl in an animal mask, pouring her soul into a Ganassi recorder is our overture. This instrument with its lamenting tonality speaks of an otherworldly eroticism and is urgently counterpointed by the incessant cicada sounds that signal “a high pitch of desire” for the other. The sheer carnality of the embodied voices of the singers, pitched to the many tensions of desire expressed in this work paradoxically raised them to a mythic level. Conductor, Manuel Lawri, draws forth too, from the superb Elision Ensemble, complex aural landscapes that illuminate and interpenetrate the cosmos-encompassing stage action, completing what Kosky promised, “a fugue of the senses.”

Kosky’s triumphant and sumptuous final stage picture reunites The Beloved and The Navigator in a sonorous affirmation that a cycle has been completed. The sound of the Sirens falls away, their final invocation of the cicada placed on the eye of a foetus a promise of “infinity’s dark longing to perfect its own.” They sing of “desire’s timeless valve opening…closing…opening.”

The Navigator can be seen in the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 9-12. www.melbournefestival.com.au

Brisbane Festival 2008, The Navigator, composer Liza Lim, librettist Patricia Sykes, director Barrie Kosky, performers Talise Trevigne, Andrew Watts, Omar Ebrahim, Deborah Kayser, Philip Larson,conductor Manuel Lawri, recorder Genevieve Lacey, Elision Ensemble, design Barrie Kosky, costumes Alice Babbidge, lighting Damien Cooper, sound Michael Hughes, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, July 30-Aug 2

THE BOX IS A POTENT ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE IN RICHARD MURPHET’S THEATRE. CUBES, WHOSE INTERSTICES FORM AN AMBIGUOUS ENCLOSURE AROUND A CHARGED SPACE OF EMOTION, LIGHT AND SET, FREQUENTLY REPLACE METAPHORS AS JUNCTURES BETWEEN FORM AND MEANING, BETWEEN WHAT IS REPRESENTED BY THE PROJECTED FILMS AND WORDS WHICH MOVE ACROSS AND WITHIN THESE REALMS, AND WHAT THEY MIGHT ALLUDE TO WITHIN THE PIECE ITSELF OR IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD. THE BOX IMPLODES SPACE AND AFFECT INWARDS, AND EXPLODES THEM OUTWARDS, PRODUCING HERE AND IN PREVIOUS SHOWS A KIND OF NESTED, OVERDETERMINED PSYCHIC “HABITATION.”

Reviewer Alison Croggon, more concerned with textual cohesion than myself, found the dramaturgical links within Inhabited Man difficult to read or to relate to specific positions on war, terror or Vietnam. It seems to me though that it is this model of the theatre as a series of inhabited boxes which provides the logic for Murphet’s oeuvre. Inhabited Man revolves around the psyche, memories, fantasies, desires and fears of Vietnam-veteran-turned-security-guard, Leo (Merfyn Owen)—himself a composite of mechanism (cane, artificial leg), flesh (his painful stomach and bowels) and voice (song, groan and a gargling, sing-song monologue). Although the text is rich in political and psychoanalytic readings of the battle scarred psyche, it is this motif of disturbing habitation that organises the piece. Just as Owen’s songs, his increasingly straining, operatic monologues inhabit a stage construct wrought from two adjacent cubes—the almost Bauhaus looking architectural frame which serves as the motel room number 7 Leo observes, and the cube of white light within which he rests—so the warrior subject is figured here as inhabited, disjointed, a kind of haunted house of memories and horrors. These habitations trace their way through his ghastly visions of Vietnam (notably a key traumatic memory of pulling the head from a boy’s body caught in mud) to those of childhood (a twinned memory of the mother pulling tapeworms from Leo’s anus).

The point is that, as historians of the psyche like Klaus Theweleit have asserted, although specific psychological defence mechanisms and their disordered, traumatised forms arise within specific conflicts—Vietnam, World War II, the “War on Terror”—they are not unique to these, nor can they be attributed to these conflicts alone. Vietnam was a novel battlefront in terms of how closely white Australians had to deal with an Asian population which included allies and enemies. This confusion of friend and foe, and the unconscious racial fears and horrors which they could unleash, finds its origins in the very constitution of the Western human subject, and not in the wars themselves. Like Theweleit, Murphet sees this figure’s status today as the product of a failure of paternalism (Leo’s own father is significantly absent, while his own inability to father is writ large) and of maternalism (mothering becomes associated with horror, muck and self-mutilation). The inhabitants of room 7 seem to offer a transcendence of this state through technology—to become cyborg—but here too the masculine habitant ends by using technology to blow his body into abject, fleshy remnants which recall Leo’s own missing leg.

Leo’s subjectivity has only apparent boundaries, its spaces, lights and sounds (including a wonderful, bassy score) exceeding and layering the boxes which inhabit the stage. In the same way the problems of how to heal individuals and society, of how to construct a human who would not be subject to these horrific urges and patterns, lies beyond Leo and indeed the theatre itself. Inhabited Man is a dense, beautiful yet traumatising dramaturgical essay.

Rear Window Ensemble, The Inhabited Man, text, co-direction Richard Murphet, co-direction, performers Leisa Shelton, Merfyn Owen, design Ryan Russell, sound Jethro Woodward, lighting Jen Hector, performers: Merfyn Owen, Adam Pierzchalski; Arts Centre Melbourne, Full Tilt, July 15-26

Crossing Roper Bar, Australian Art Orchestra, Wagilak Gujarra and Nyilapapidgi musicians of Ngukurr

A BRIEF VISIT TO DARWIN ALLOWED US TO ENJOY A SMALL PART OF MALCOLM BLAYLOCK’S FINAL DARWIN FESTIVAL PROGRAM. IT INCLUDED THE 25TH TELSTRA NATIONAL ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER ART AWARDS EXHIBITION AT THE MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY OF THE NORTHERN TERRITORY, A SHOW OF ASTONISHING ARTISTRY AND DIVERSITY, AND CROSSING ROPER BAR, A POWERFUL COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE AUSTRALIAN ART ORCHESTRA AND WAGILAK GUJARRA AND NYILAPAPIDGI MUSICIANS OF NGUKURR IN ARNHEM LAND ON THE ROPER RIVER.

When not isolated for several months by the flooded river during the wet season, the small town of Ngukurr can be reached by crossing Roper Bar. As the program note suggests, “the crossing over seems not only a poetic but a fitting metaphor for the collaboration…” A substantial part of AAO’s history and reputation has been built on cross-cultural collaborations—with classical Balinese artists in The Theft of Sita (1999-2002) and Indian musicians in Into the Fire (1999), both creations managing the difficult balancing act of maintaining cultural and aesthetic integrity for each of the partners but yielding something new.

The performance is staged informally on the open-air Star Shell stage in the Darwin Botanic Gardens which also provide an ideal festival venue for eating inexpensive, quality food and taking in adjoining art exhibitions, one in an old timber church (Ta Teut Amarasi/Awakening: delicate West Timor textile and print works from an Asialink sponsored workshop visit of Darwin artists to the village of Baun), the other on the whitened trunks of a grove of palm trees. The four Art Orchestra musicians (keyboards Paul Grabowksy, bass Chris Bekker, saxophones, flutes, clarinet Tony Hicks, drums Rajiv Jayaweera, guitars Stephen Magnusson) are spread wide across the stage. Centrestage are the four ceremonially attired Ngukurr men (songman Roy Wilfred, didjeridu man David Wilfred, songman Benjamin Wilfred, dancer Johnston Hall, although their roles sometimes interchange, while only one does most of the dancing).

rossing Roper Bar, Australian Art Orchestra, Wagilak Gujarra and Nyilapapidgi musicians of Ngukurr

The first part of Crossing Roper Bar emerges from a slowly escalating, disjointed sonic field generated by the band and joined by Aboriginal singing, screaming sax, raw electric guitar and didjeridu. It’s hard to pick the shape until a sudden pause after which the clap sticks palpably set the rhythm and the cultural disparity of the nervy opening—hardcore jazz and traditional Indigenous song—suddenly dissolves and the musics roll together and inexorably on, ending with a plangent sax line.

Between the collaborative pieces Ruby Hunter joins the band, her rich mezzo duetting with the warbling sax of Tony Hicks who plays with the ease and fluency of Wayne Shorter’s dialogues with Joni Mitchell. Hunter chats with the audience about her songs—one about basket weaving and spirit fish, the other about her empathy for her Aboriginal sisters in prison (“each day it’s real/ I know how you feel”). Less certain are the sources of the Ngukurr men’s songs—we learn about them later.

The second Crossing Roper Bar improvisation delivers the beautiful entwining of the two songman voices, one a higher tenor than the other, and another busy collaborative amalgam riding on a wave of rise and fall to which is added a big, surprising collective cry from all the Ngukurr men, a soaring sax solo and the first of the dances from Johnston Hall, executed dextrously within the space of a few steps.

Hunter returns to sing of a childhood living on the streets in Adelaide. Here she abandons her trademark vibrato for long held notes (juxtaposed with a supple quickfire saxophone) and a soaring, emotional chorus.

Prior to the final improvisations, Benjamin Wilfred tells us about the death of a man he greatly admired and learned much from, his grandfather, Sambo Barra Barra, a noted visual artist, “a pioneer.” Of the collaboration with the Australian Art Orchestra, he says, “We mix and I like it.” This time the pulse and the drive of the piece seems to come primarily from the Ngukurr men, with the two voices rising over dense instrumental textures and dramatically, and effectively, in and out of synch. Benjamin Wilfred takes over the didjeridu and David Wilfred joins the dancing. No one seems quite sure when the music is going to stop as each apparent close becomes just a pause before the return to a collective powering on, carrying us with it as one.

The confidence of the final stages of the performance contrasts with the tentativeness of the earlier pieces where the complexities of the collaboration seemed more apparent in the careful watching and subtle signalling between all the musicians, not least in the large number of eyes trained on Grabowsky who kept his gestures minimal. The music seemed to flow more easily when the Art Orchestra took its cue from the Indigenous artists. There was something less comfortable about the Ngukurr men waiting to place themselves in the flux of the jazz idiom. But, then again, why not, it’s a two-way street and there’s more to this than meets my naive ear. Later, at a public forum, Grabowksy tells us that “(the Indigenous artists) are in the driver’s seat.” I long for the CD if there is to be one. Certainly I might have better assimilated the meeting of two complex musical systems had Hunter performed her songs first with the Crossing Roper Bar pieces then presented consecutively. But this was a wonderful cultural event, ecstatically received by its fully engaged audience.

At the Northern Territory State Library, Genevieve Campbell (who organised a project with Tiwi women of Bathurst Island called We Sing Songs performed at last year’s Darwin Festival and more recently at the Sydney Opera House Studio) facilitated a conversation with the AAO’s Paul Grabowsky and producer Tos Mahoney of Perth’s Tura New Music. TNM arranged the tour of Crossing Roper Bar from Darwin to Perth via eight towns in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Grabowsky spoke about the idea of setting his orchestra apart from others by deciding it would be a group of improvising musicians as opposed to interpreters of composed music. Written music, says Grabowsky, is “like a street directory. It’s not the music. Music happens when people play music.” The interest for the orchestra was to be in process, what instruments can do, how to make them work in the moment and (as in all good improvisation) how to evolve structures. He said the same applies to good storytelling and he’s interested in that relationship too, aptly for a collaboration with a culture where the distinction between music and telling does not exist. Of The Theft of Sita, Grabowsky said that working with classical Balinese musicians the tuning was the opposite of Western instruments. “We were working with a clangorous resonance as opposed to a euphonious paradigm.” As a result, the AAO musicians came to love “out of tune-ness.” Working with master musicians of Southern India, he said, they were challenged by the complex rhythmic structures of the music, but took those on too to great effect.

When he first met the Ngukurr musicians, Grabowksy thought he would try to make a connection by telling them how he’d just come from working with black musicians in New York. “Oh, I’ve been to New York”, said the youngest of the songmen. He was amazed at the songmen’s pitch control—”they sing in microtones.” He thinks the lead songman, Roy Wilfred, “one of the best singers in the country.’

Grabowsky explained that Crossing Roper Bar comprises a cycle of songs that includes welcomes and farewells, songs pertaining to certain birds, to the wind, and one concerning a wild man walking through his land, singing the land. He described the songs as powerful, adding that working with Indigenous musicians involves trying to grasp complex cultural notions such as “singing into being”, “singing of ancestors”, “singing of place”, like multiple parallel universes. The songmen insisted that the AAO musicians learn some of their language, study and learn the traditional song cycle, and “be ready to be told off if out of line.”

Speaking of the challenges of the collaboration, Grabowsky said that the 2007 version of Crossing Roper Bar for the Queensland Music Festival involved female dancers but proved unwieldy. It was felt that clarity was important: “The project is both strong and fragile. It could easily go off the rails. It has to be treated like a newborn baby. Right now, it’s keeping us up late.”

Paul Grabowsky is passionate about the need for white Australians to connect with and learn from Indigenous Australians: “Engage in whatever ways you can. Indigenous people carry the solution to all the problems we’re experiencing with the land right now, what to do about the water and so on. Music is just a metaphor for this conversation.”

incident at mutpi, 1975

Amidst the various winners in the 25th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory was Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, sister of painter Gulumbu and musician and leader Galarrwuy, for her work Incident at Mutpi, 1975. She won the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award. It’s an intimate work in a corner in a gallery room otherwise populated with epic visions of the land. The work is in two parts. A bark painting narrating the artist’s goring by a buffalo in 1975 hangs above a video screen on which Yunupingu speaks in vivid detail about the experience to a local gathering whom we can’t see and to whom she sometimes cantankerously takes exception: “It’s not funny.” At the end we hear one of the listeners exhort her to “Tell the story shorter.”

The video is engagingly and amusingly frank and the beautiful, contemplative painting is purportedly the first from north-east Arnhem Land to use a bark to tell a private story. The video is titled Gatapangawuy Dhawu—Buffalo Story, and was shot by The Mulka Project, Yirrkala’s new multimedia studio (Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre). The effect of the juxtaposition of traditional art and modern media for the Incident at Mutpi, 1975 is at once simple and complex, like Crossing Roper Bar, vividly accessible at one level, rich in suggestion and cultural possibilities at another.

Darwin Festival: Tura New Music, Crossing Roper Bar, Australian Art Orchestra, Wagilak Gujarra and Nyilapapidgi musicians of Ngukurr, Darwin Festival, Star Shell, Botanic Gardens, Aug 17; 25th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, Aug 15-Oct 26

NIGEL JAMIESON’S GALLIPOLI BEGINS, APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, WITH A DRILL. THE MASSED COMPANY, 35 ACTORS STRONG, ENTER IN KHAKI AND STAND CRISPLY BEFORE US. A SERGEANT SHOUTS THEM THROUGH THEIR FORMAL PACES—STANDING AT ATTENTION, BRINGING RIFLES TO BEAR, PRESENTING ARMS. LIKE ALL OF THE PHYSICAL SEQUENCES THROUGHOUT GALLIPOLI (MOVEMENT DIRECTOR GAVIN ROBBINS), THIS IS A WELL-EXECUTED PERFORMANCE, A FINE DEMONSTRATION OF THE SKILLS AND COMMITMENT OF THE STC ACTORS COMPANY AUGMENTED BY THE THIRD-YEAR ACTORS FROM NIDA. THEY BEGIN TO MARCH OFFSTAGE, AND IMMEDIATELY THE DYING BEGINS.

Gallipoli has many highlights, including a history lesson about the start of World War I that plays the complex configuring of alliances as an ever-escalating comic vaudeville. The company powerfully outlines the War Precautions Act (1914), which outlawed any negative reportage of Australia’s role in the conflict. A nurse recounts the visceral horror of the woefully inadequate hospital ship, struggling and failing to treat 8,000 wounded with only 350 beds. In moments like these, Gallipoli excels.

As a whole however, the work struggles for focus. Attempting, in a seemingly endless succession of short scenes, to offer multiple perspectives on the conflict and draw attention to the complexity of the story and its mythologising, the effect over its almost three-hour duration is numbing rather than illuminating. Spreading the narrative web extremely widely, Gallipoli fails to follow any perspective closely enough to effectively shape the work’s drama. The sole exception to this is the story of General Sir Ian Hamilton, engagingly portrayed by John Gaden, whose journey is traced from a recall from retirement to commanding the assault, to being removed from command as the primary scapegoat for the failure of the campaign. Despite initial misgivings, especially about the resources allocated him, Hamilton becomes increasingly excited by the challenge of the campaign, convincing himself and his staff that despite all of their limited resources, untested tactics, adverse circumstances and non-existent battlefield intelligence, the battle will be a glorious endeavour. “Before us lies an adventure, an adventure unparalleled in modern war”, he declares to a general staff briefing on the eve of the landing. It’s a clearly self-deluded position, but nonetheless Gaden’s Hamilton is a remarkably sympathetic figure, and Gallipoli feels stronger whenever he appears.

Thankless in comparison is the role of war correspondent and later war official historian Charles Bean, effectively portrayed by Luke Mullins. Initially instructed to produce reportage that was in fact propaganda, to help sell the war at home by delivering good stories of heroic Australian forces in action, Bean wrestles at various moments with the stupidities and horrors he witnesses, and the compromises he is forced to make in order to sanitise the slaughter for domestic consumption. At times it feels as if Bean is supposed to be the primary narrator, but his frequent absences from the stage make this untenable.

Strangely, the hero of the piece arrives in the last half hour in the form of Sir Keith Murdoch (Eden Falk), the man who, according to his son, “may not have always told the truth, but changed the course of history.” The narrative white knight Murdoch bursts onto the stage in a beige suit, a dynamic figure cutting through the official secrecy around the campaign and publicly naming the disaster for what it is. His letter to both the Australian and British Prime Ministers has immediate impact, with General Hamilton recalled and the surviving forces evacuated from the peninsula. After a couple of hours witnessing Charles Bean reluctantly self-censoring his reportage to comply with the will of the State, Murdoch’s demonstration of the power of the radically independent press is striking.

The technical skills of the creative team are aptly displayed throughout Gallipoli, especially the evocative video (Antonia Fredman), highly adaptive design (Brad Clark, Alexandra Sommer and Nigel Jamieson), and daring aerial work (rigger Finton Mahony). Nevertheless, it feels like most of the content of this Gallipoli has been told too many times, demonstrating what former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld once described as “the known knowns.” In approaching this complex, multi-faceted national story, Jamieson has tried to tell too much, and the sheer mass of material precludes deep analysis. If perhaps an hour of material were stripped away, including many of the music hall interludes and frequently repeated songs scattered throughout the performance, Gallipoli would be a thrillingly visceral experience. As it stands however, it’s a meandering, yet artfully realised spectacle, the first draft of a significant theatrical work.

Sydney Theatre Company, Gallipoli, writer, director, co-designer Nigel Jamieson, performers STC Actors Company, Third Year NIDA Acting Students, designers Brad Clarke, Alexandra Sommer, lightingTrudy Dalgleish, composer, musical director Alan John, sound designer Steve Francis, video Artist Antonia Fredman, movement director Gavin Robbins; Sydney Theatre, 30 July-23

CYCLONE TRACY WAS AUSTRALIA’S WORST NATURAL DISASTER, A NATIONAL SHOCK THAT HAS NEVER BEEN FORGOTTEN. IT VIRTUALLY ERADICATED AN ENTIRE CITY AND DESTROYED MANY LIVES. WOVEN FROM THREADS OF STORYTELLING, MOVEMENT, MUSIC, EXQUISITE PUPPETRY AND MASK, SARAH CATHCART AND NICOLA FEARN’S TRACY IS AN INTRICATE TAPESTRY IN WHICH EACH PANEL REVEALS A NEW EPISODE IN THE INTERTWINING LIVES OF TWO VERY DIFFERENT WOMEN. FOR REASONS AS CONTRASTING AS IT IS POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE, BOTH FIND THEMSELVES IN DARWIN ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1974, CELEBRATING WITH THEIR FAMILIES IN THEIR HOMES AND CHURCHES AS, OUT ON THE DARK SEA, A SMALL BUT INTENSE CYCLONE TURNS TO RIP THE HEART OUT OF THEIR CITY.

Based on research amongst cyclone survivors and some autobiographical detail, Tracy focusses more on the personal than the apocalyptic. The cyclone gets its moment, the drama eloquently and elegantly relayed through lyrical movement, text and the manipulation of a model house. However, it is the human stories that give this intimate presentation its power.

The story of Yanyuwa woman, Aunty Hilda Muir, a respected Territory writer, provides half the play’s material. Related by her granddaughter, dynamic actor and dancer Samantha Chalmers, Hilda’s story begins near the Gulf community of Borroloola where she is born to a Yanyuwa woman and an unknown white father. When there’s a murder on Vanderlin Island, the authorities take the opportunity to remove Hilda from her community and send her to Darwin. The journey is described with a sense of wonder and ironic humour—the horse ride to Mataranka, the 500km train ride to Darwin in cattle trucks and finally being left, lonely and starving, in the Kahlin Compound, a dormitory for Stolen Generation children.

This quintessentially Australian story is juxtaposed with that of Nicola Fearn, Tracy’s co- writer and the co-performer in this two-hander. Born in England and raised in a country mansion, Fearn flees England with her mother after her family is declared bankrupt. At the age of 15, she finds herself in Australia where “grown men wear shorts!” and it is here, after a stint in Tennant Creek, that she too takes her place in Darwin as the cyclone nears.

The contrasting of these two stories is undoubtedly the most successful dramaturgical element of this work, possibly best demonstrated when Samantha’s story of her grandmother’s epic horse ride through Arnhem Land (led by a policeman towards captivity) is set against Fearn’s exhilarating first experience of leaping her pony over fields and hedgerows in an English county hunt. That these two people should a short time later share the destructive violence of a Darwin cyclone is both a marvellous example of life’s inconsistencies and a stirring theatrical moment.

The arrival of Cyclone Tracy and the devastation that ensues provides an extremely moving sequence of scenes. Given the power of this central narrative, the subplot involving a more recent cyclone, Monica, is a distracting addition, throwing up one of the challenges of drawing material from one’s own life—what to keep; what to discard.

The complementary skills and energies of the two actors make for compelling viewing. Under the precise, creative direction of Sarah Cathcart, Chalmers and Fearn have developed a synergy that tangibly fills the stage. The earthy humour and perceptiveness of Fearn’s narration perfectly balances the lyricism of Chalmer’s almost danced style of delivery.

While a more thoughtful and perhaps poetic approach to the text would have been welcome, this is finely crafted and textured theatre. This is obvious from the very first moments of the play where puppetry and maskwork alternate—both exquisitely precise, both filled with artistry. The one puppet in Tracy represents the child Hilda in moments of silent anguish, often manipulated by both performers at once and with such delicacy that it becomes truly life-like.

Designed simply and with touring in mind by Louise McCarthy and sensitively lit by Brad Voss, the production is supported by an evocative soundtrack composed by Kim Baston. This production has already successfully toured, as part of the innovative Theatre to the Edge program, to Cairns, Townsville and Mackay, as well as to Alice Springs and country venues throughout the Northern Territory. The show is accessible and humorous; it’s heartfelt but reinforced with the narrative strength of human experience. Cyclone Tracy has passed into the national psyche. This show, which tells the story behind the tragedy, will have resonances for Australians everywhere.

Business Unusual Theatre/Darwin Theatre Company, Tracy, writers Sarah Cathcart, Nicola Fearn with stories by Yanyuwa woman, Hilda Muir, director Sarah Cathcart, performers Nicola Fearn, Samantha Chalmers, design Louise McCarthy, dramaturg Hannie Rayson, composer Kim Baston, puppet direction Nicola Fearn, lighting Brad Voss; Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, May 28-June 8

THE MURDERS COMMITTED BY EDDIE LEONSKI—A US SERVICEMAN STATIONED IN MELBOURNE DURING WWII—INSPIRED THE MOVIE DEATH OF A SOLDIER (1985). WHILE THE ANTIPODEAN EXPRESSIONISTS’ SEXUAL PECADILLOS (ALBERT TUCKER, JOY HESTER, ET AL) HAVE RECEIVED BIOGRAPHICAL TREATMENTS,THEIR LIVES AT HEIDE FARM WITH PATRONS JOHN AND SUNDAY REED HAVE NOT PREVIOUSLY BEEN FICTIONALISED. ROBERT REID’S PLAY INVENTS AN ENCOUNTER BETWEEN LEONSKI, TUCKER AND THE LATTER’S THEN-WIFE HESTER (WHO SOON AFTER LEFT HIM AND THEIR CHILD) TO EXPLORE TUCKER’S FAMOUS IMAGES OF MODERN EVIL SERIES (1943-47).

As biographers like Janine Burke have found, the lives of Tucker and his circle were so melodramatic and widely commented upon (Tucker too abandoned his son to the Reeds, the hapless Sweeney later taking his own life) that the ego and psyche of these larger than life characters threatens to eclipse their output—especially given that Tucker and Hester described their paintings as expressions of their individualised perspectives on the world and society.

The fervid energies of wartime Melbourne were so intense, so overdetermined, so overwhelming and dynamically seductive that one empathises with Tucker for being agog in the face of such social and sexual turbulence, attracted by shafts of vivid green light shearing through a wartime metropolis alive with sojourning American soldiers desperate for a last touch of flesh; by the sight of local women partying with them as if their mortality depended on it; staring at those clawed, groping hands and rounded buttocks, and wondering if Tucker and his emasculated compatriots were right and that the whole city was engulfed by whoring. Or did everyone—Tucker included—simply crave the warmth of another body before youth, modernity or conflict ended it all?

The playwright faces a similar conundrum, veering between offering a thriller, an analysis of Tucker’s scarred, often misogynist psyche, or an abstract musing on war, sex, and the attraction of a world where everything has become, like Tucker’s paint, ‘stuff,’ meat, flesh, contact and ultimately deathly. The closing scene in which Leonski is about to escort an unconscious Tucker and a vulnerable Hester through the darkened streets draws the play into the realm of thriller, only to conclude there. Similarly the detail, taken from court records, that Leonski wanted to steal the voices of those he killed, is a false lead since the murderer’s psyche is only touched upon.

Given these narrative inconsistencies, the production is most effective when Tucker and the murdered women act as a poetic chorus. The language is especially apt here. Materials, objects, smells and perceptions are enumerated, yet their significance or what brings them together in terms of meaning or morality is left unspoken. Reid perhaps draws on other wartime commentators like Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Georges Bataille who render a world view aflame with the richness of base materials, colours, objects, forms and furs, but which sees in this meaningless litany of gorgeous “muck” (Céline’s preferred term) a terrifying loss of social cohesion, meaning and ethics; of a world reduced to one damn thing after another in which humans are no more important than the stuff of the soil or of the city. From reading Céline—an anti-Semite and sometime fascist collaborator—we know where this perspective can lead.

Reid offers his own critique in the penultimate scene where the deranged, provoked Tucker spews forth repressed vituperations against women and their sexuality for becoming complicit with this social condition, and eventually contemplates murder himself. As Janine Burke recently suggested to me, Tucker’s strength is as much in how explicit he is about his intense ambivalence towards women and sex, as it is in the formal qualities of his paintings. Like Céline, Tucker rarely hid behind social graces, his oeuvre making clear his love and lust for women, as well as his rages against them.

Director Adam Mitchell’s decision to project details from Tucker’s paintings onto the flanking corridors down which the chorus languidly strolls is particularly astute. The piece is as much about the texture of things as it is about the overblown lives of the Heide circle. Details like the rough, red bricks, the stained corrugated iron, and the frosted back window evoke that sensorial experience of a bleeding, partying city—Tucker’s greatest achievement. Reid and Mitchell combine this with more dramatic content than to my taste. The scene in which Tucker describes the wounds he painted during his brief military service in Mildura is a compelling moment in which these two strands—the dramaturgical and the sensorial—meld. With polishing, this production deserves to tour.

Black Swan HotBed Ensemble, Portraits Of Modern Evil, writer Robert Reid, director Adam Mitchell, performers Brendan Ewing, Ben Russell, Anita Erceg, Thomas Papathanassiou, Amanda Woodhams, Jo Morris, designer Brad Reid, lighting Andrew Earle, sound Kingsley Reeve, projection Sohan Hayes; PICA, Perth, Sept 4-20

THE INVITATION TO CHECKPOINT ZERO SOUNDS PROMISING. SIDETRACK’S LATEST PLAY TELLS THE “STORY OF THE EFFECTS OF CONFLICT ON CURRENT GENERATIONS AND THE DILEMMAS INVOLVED IN INHERITING THE WOUNDS FROM THE PAST.” THIS LATTER PHRASE IS PARTICULARLY SUGGESTIVE—HOW DOES ONE INHERIT A WOUND?—AND IT REMINDS ME OF FILM THEORIST AND HISTORIAN KAJA SILVERMAN’S CLAIM THAT “TO REMEMBER OTHER PEOPLE’S MEMORIES IS TO BE WOUNDED BY THEIR WOUNDS…IT IS TO LET THEIR STRUGGLES, THEIR PASSIONS, THEIR PASTS, RESONATE WITHIN ONE’S OWN PAST AND PRESENT, AND DESTABILISE THEM.”

Checkpoint Zero, then, promises to create a sort of Silvermanian space, where we can remember other people’s memories, be wounded by their wounds and be destabilised by the past. More specifically, the play invites us into the Palestinian past and present and in doing so promises to “shatter the perceptions of one of the world’s longest lasting conflicts.”

The play begins with two Israeli soldiers, Yoram (Dritan Arbana) and Benny (Eddie Khalil), standing behind a vast wire screen, manning their checkpoint. They boast about gang raping a 13-year-old Palestinian girl for a week. They also enjoy a good curfew, which they consider “a licence to terrorise the terrorists”, and enforce it with the attitude of “zero tolerance, maximum security, maximum fun.” While this opening scene works to make the play’s sympathies abundantly clear, it also risks immediately alienating the audience because these characters seem to have no redeeming features whatsoever.

Working at the same checkpoint is another, more reluctant soldier, Sivan (Cassandra Swaby). The monotony and brutality of the checkpoint routine are effectively portrayed as the Palestinians circle around and around, displaying their hands as their identity cards. When the overzealous Yoram pulls Hani (Charles Billeh) aside and interrogates him for several hours, Sivan takes pity and gives him a Mars Bar. Something sparks and the next time Hani comes through the checkpoint there is some rather laboured flirting—“They don’t call me the Mars Bar princess for nothing,” she breathes—numbers are exchanged and a star-crossed love story ensues. Many of these scenes are played to the front, presumably in an effort to position the audience as confidante. Unfortunately this undermines the intense connection the lovers are supposed to share. Two interactions at the checkpoint and a brief encounter on the dance floor are apparently enough for Hani to declare love. Inevitably, Sivan finds it all too much and the two separate.

Thankfully, the story is more interesting and the staging more inventive away from the romance. The idiocy of bureaucracy is nicely conveyed when a Palestinian mother confronts an officious Israeli secretary only to be winched above the stage in order to literally “hang in there” while waiting. There is another striking moment when all three women scale the fence to frame their faces in the wire squares and Assad Abdi’s giddy video projections work to evoke a world off balance and out of kilter. The performances of Siliva Entcheva and Olivia Stambouliah are particularly strong in these scenes: the former plays a slightly tarty singer (delivering some soaring songs), an Israeli Lieutenant, and Hani’s mother while the latter portrays a Palestinian girl, an Israeli mother, and Hani’s grandmother. This last character is later revealed to have been Jewish before marrying her husband and converting to Islam. This revelation prompts the previously hesitant Sivan to see the humanity in Hani, the possibility of a future together, and the two are reunited.

In this way, Hani’s alterity is easily recovered and the play reveals itself as deeply conservative, despite its claims to the contrary. Far from “shatter[ing] the perceptions of the world’s longest lasting conflict”, Checkpoint Zero risks reinforcing them because neither the narrative nor the characters within it are sufficiently nuanced. None of the characters emerge as complicated, conflicted human beings and the Israeli soldiers come close to caricature. Moreover, the story depends on the female soldier to mobilise compassion and imagines a heterosexual couple and their future family unit as a metonym for the single-state solution. Even within its own limited terms, the play cannot in fact imagine a future for them and ends Hamlet-style with bodies strewn about the stage.

While part of the problem lies with the romantic storyline (the rest of the play has potential), another part lies with the expectations encouraged by the publicity. In vowing to investigate inherited wounds and to shatter perceptions, Checkpoint Zero simply promises more than it, or any other play for that matter, could possibly deliver.

Checkpoint Zero, conceived by Assad Abdi and Don Mamouney, writer and director Don Mamouney, cast Dritan Arbana, Charles Billeh, Silvia Entcheva, Eddie Khalil, Olivia Stambouliah, Cassandra Swaby, lighting design Jocelyn Speight, video projection design Assad Abdi, costume design Sue Liolio, set and sound design Don Mamouney; Sidetrack, July 28-Aug 24

THE NOTION OF ‘CHARACTER’ IS LIKE A PROPERTY TITLE HANDED DOWN OVER HUNDREDS OF GENERATIONS, THE ORIGINAL DEED NOW LOST AND ITS BOUNDARIES, DIMENSIONS, OWNERSHIP RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CARE TANGLED AND UNCLEAR. EVERY PERFORMANCE MAKER MUST FACE THIS MONUMENTAL INHERITANCE AT SOME POINT, AND ASK “HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO SORT THIS MESS OUT?”

Postmodern performance often negotiates this tricky terrain in intriguing ways. Three recent Melbourne premieres exemplify the range of responses—and their attendant problems—that can be found in the wider artistic shifts of the past few decades. In one, irony and excess are used to push character over the brink of significance; in another, the concept of the consistent, ‘closed’ character is replaced by the character as a process of becoming; and in the third, the distinction between character, performer and audience becomes a pivotal dynamic.

The character as ‘type’ has a long history, from Greek comedy through commedia dell’arte to French satire to modernist drama. The individual may represent a social, psychological or cultural type—but it is this notion of character as representation, as an instance of an essential class, that is called into question in Meow Meow’s Vamp. In her first full-length work the already legendary cabaret artiste has sought to problematise the character of the titular vamp, the femme fatale, the lethal seductress, the desirable, threatening woman. This questioning, however, is accomplished not through an explicit distance but through a perilous closeness—Meow Meow becomes the vamp so perfectly, in all of her historical forms, that the figure is drained of substance, rendered a hollow goddess.

vamp

As a performer, Meow Meow is undoubtedly a star, with an astonishing vocal range and a powerful command over her audience. But Vamp is all masquerade—Meow Meow tries on characters like costumes, from Salome to Louise Brooks’ Lulu, borrowing songs along the way, snippets of text stolen from all over, the gestures of generations of chanteuses. This magpie approach is, itself, a pilfered costume, and the form of Vamp as well as its content is recognisable from both drag acts and the most hallowed of pomo pastiche. Meow Meow pushes it to the limit, though, and the density of allusion here gradually begins to suggest that Meow Meow herself is nothing more than her disguises—remove the mask and there would be no face underneath. This is reinforced by the mannequins and doll parts which appear throughout the performance, and her final number—a melancholy, quiet version of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees”—brings it all home. Meow Meow is the copy that destroys the original.

the antechamber

The characters of Tony Reck’s The Antechamber are less immediately recognisable. They inhabit a kind of uncannily rendered Aussie noir netherworld with a distinctly David Lynch ambience, in which interior psychology and exterior reality are hopelessly indistinguishable. There’s a narrative of sorts—a flower-shop assistant and part-time drug dealer is visited by an old (yet strangely young) flame; the domineering shop proprietor seems to control him while also being under his control; the ex’s sinister new beau later brings the threat of violence into an already charged atmosphere. At no point can we trust any of these characters—not simply in the sense of ascertaining motive, but of even expecting a temporal consistency. They occasionally slip into types, but only just. Most of the time they are foggy, amorphous identities whose only definition is found in their interactions with each other and given the constantly shifting relationships, this too becomes untenable.

The performers here don’t seem to have fully realised the ambition of this open-ended work, either over- or underplaying things throughout. This is, of course, a difficult assertion to make, since the notion of getting it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is undermined by the very piece itself. In fact, to get it right—in a conventional, realist way—would perhaps render it obsolete. But as it stands, this difficult, somewhat dissatisfying production is as much in the process of becoming as its subjects.

Clem Baad, Jay Kimber, The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest, Rawcus Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre

the heart of another is a dark forest

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest explicitly takes on the issue of whether we can truly know another—at every level, it raises fascinating and provocative questions regarding performance, character and spectatorship. It’s the first collaboration between Melbourne’s Rawcus Theatre and Adelaide’s Restless Dance Theatre, both companies working with performers with and without disabilities.

As the title suggests, this is a work that tackles otherness—familiarity and difference, the space of encounter, the revelation and secrecy. It’s an abstracted, physically oriented piece with no discernible narrative arc, though there are frequent shifts of pacing and mood.

I’ve not experienced works by Restless before, but Rawcus’ previous productions have always struck me immensely with an intense, almost unique experience of presence. ‘Acting’ and ‘character’ depend on a kind of absence, a sense of an identity which is not the performer’s—hence the getting-it-right-or-wrong argument. Restless and Rawcus performers occupy a different space. Confronted by the physical liveness of a performer with disability, one is made more aware of the presence of the moving, sometimes speaking person rather than the more transcendent elsewhere of a character. There may be a sense of voyeurism at work, but this is something both companies play with, and nowhere more so than in this new collaboration.

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest is a largely solemn, moody piece, as opposed to the lush playfulness of Rawcus’ last two works. Where Hunger (2007, see RT82, p8) and Not Dead Yet (2005) were revelatory in the way they allowed access into the interior worlds and experiences of their performers, this new work more consciously teases its audience by withholding information. What we choose not to reveal to others is as important as what we do: thus, we here find secret thoughts spoken anonymously, dancers turning their backs to the audience, text spoken in ways that are difficult to understand. This is a challenging, but thought provoking process: while I found the spontaneity and exuberance of Hunger, for instance, to be far more enjoyable, this work is an important reminder of the right of the performer—disabled or otherwise—to be something more than an exhibit for our curiosity.

There are some beautifully accomplished dance sequences: one especially in which partners provide arms for each other in a scene of massed duets that produces a wonderful sense of bodily communication. The power dynamics shift between each dancer and these shifts become the sequence’s expression. In another scene, a whisper passed down through a line of performers creates a real sense of hilarity as they react with genuine surprise to the phrase they hear. Whether, of course, this is just acting, is precisely the point. One walks away from this work wondering if we can ever know another’s truth, or if our ‘real’ self is in fact produced through the searching.

Malthouse, Vamp, by Meow Meow and Iain Grandage, performer Meow Meow with the Orchestra of Wild Dogs, director Michael Kantor, musical director Iain Grandage, designer Anna Tregloan, lighting design Paul Jackson, dramaturgy Maryanne Lynch, choreography Shaun Parker, CUB Malthouse Theatre, Sept 6-20; The Antechamber, writer, director Tony Reck, performers Phil Motherwell, Nada Cordasic, Wilfred Last, Jane Lundmark, sound Hugo Race, lighting Andre Conate, La Mama Theatre, Sept 17-Oct 5; Melbourne Fringe Festival: Rawcus Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre, The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest, directors Kate Sulan, Ingrid Voorendt, design Emily Barrie, costume Esther Hayes, lighting Richard Vabre, composition/sound design Zoe Barry, Jethro Woodward, performers Steven Ajzenberg, Clement Baade, Ray Drew, Rachel Edward, Nilgun Guven, Valerie Hawkes, Paul Mately, Mike McEvoy, Kerryn Poke, Louise Riisik, John Tonso, James Bull, Jianna Georgiou, Lorcan Hopper, Alice Kearvall, Jay Kimber, Kyra Kimpton, Dana Nance, Andrew Pandos, Anastasia Retallack, Stuart Scott, Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart, Bonnie Williams, Dancehouse, Melbourne, September 24-27