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Trish Adam, HOST (video still), original cinematography Carla Evangelista

FOR CHILDREN, BEES ARE THE SUMMER TERROR OF THE CLOVER LAWN. OUT THE CAR, ACROSS THE PARK TO THE BEACH, PRICKLES ARE BAD BUT BEES ARE WORSE. (I’VE JUST CONDUCTED A SURVEY OF ALL THE PEOPLE I CAN IMMEDIATELY FIND WITHIN 20 METRES OF WHERE I’M SITTING AND THEY ALL REMEMBER THEIR FIRST BEE STING.) SO BEES ARE THREATENING, YET HERE BEES ARE, IN TRISH ADAMS’ HOST, GLIDING ABOVE AND GENTLY SETTLING ON HER UNPROTECTED HAND.

Trish Adams has previously collaborated with scientists at the University of Queensland where she worked with Associate Professor Victor Nurcombe on the transformation of her own stem cells into cardiac cells (machina carnis, www.realtimearts.net/article/issue68/7937). This time she worked with Professor Mandyam Srinivasan’s Visual and Sensory Neuroscience group at the Queensland Brain Institute. Srinivasan is famous for his work on bee vision and navigation.

[Three interesting facts about bees: 1. Bees can be trained to detect camouflaged objects. 2. Bees navigate by using the speed at which images move across their eyes—they fly down the middle of a tunnel by keeping the image speed the same at both eyes; they land by adjusting their descent speed so that the image speed at the eye remains constant. 3. Bees are lateralised in their learning, just like people are right and left handed. ]

Into the Bee House goes Adams and finds no protective suits, just your normal everyday science types, thousands of bees and an uncomfortable feeling of vulnerability. A couple of researchers, Dr Peter Kraft and Carla Evangelista, help out by filming the feeding sessions (high speed at 250fps) and providing the skills and patience needed to train the bees to feed from Adams’ hand. Film is edited, a soundscape designed (by roundhouse, www.roundhouse.tv), and the installation set up at the UQ Art Museum—a bland corporate box of a building refurbed into a gallery.

Enter through the glass doors, straight ahead to the far corner and down the stairs. Step off the stairs and a waft of honey rises up, faint, but clear. Small room, low ceiling, padded lowset bench. Sit and face the end wall/screen. Glass panel walls to the right and left shine in the darkness, recursively reflecting the far end projection. This is the installation space, quiet, intimate. Maybe two or three people can get in there without violating personal space rules. The screen shows a video laterally split between two images. One third is honey, dripping in real time, close up, luminous and golden. Two thirds are a cropped detail of hands. The hands are crossed lightly, one nestling in the other. Inside the cupped palm of the uppermost hand is the honey the bees were trained to seek. The hands are still, incredibly so, one slight thumb movement the only action. Around the hand float soft, purposeful bees, huge and close-upped, paced slow by the high speed video. They glide about, land to feed, take off, land on a finger, wait, take off again. They make no sound. It is as if the bees hover weightless above a familiar surface, collecting samples before returning to base.

And throughout are the hands and an unconditional offering of food. The bees too act without conditions, offering their labour to the continuity of the hive. The food they collect is not only for themselves but for others, just as the glistening honey in the palm is not for the palm itself and the outstretched hands are for the bees and not for the hands themselves. The artist feeds the bees, the scientists film the artist. We watch the bees, the honey and the hands. An exchange between systems. Biology.

HOST, artist Trish Adams, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, March 6-April 6

RealTime issue #84 April-May 2008 pg. 31

THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL’S INTER-ARTS OFFICE NOT ONLY FUNDS PROJECTS THAT CAN’T FIND TRADITIONAL ARTFORM HOMES BUT IT ALSO ENCOURAGES VERY DIFFERENT ARTISTS TO TEAM UP AND VENTURE WHERE NONE HAVE TROD.

Artlab funding criteria require not tried collaborations but new ones; experimental, research-based and risk-taking approaches; and, if the project involves creating technologies, they must be new. It’s a tough brief requiring a strong sense of vision, teamwork and, not least, pragmatism: significant cash or in-kind contributions have to be found beyond the Australia Council’s $75,000 funding of each project in 2008. Twenty two applications sought a total of $1.5m; two succeeded for a total of $150,000.

Thinking Through the Body comprises the artists Jonathan Duckworth (artist and architectural designer specialising in the development of real time graphical environments), George Khut (artist working in the area of sound and immersive installation environments), Somaya Langley (sound and media artist), Lizzie Muller (curator and writer working at the intersection of art, technology and science), Garth Paine (sound designer, installation artist, interactive system designer) and Catherine Truman (contemporary jeweller and object-maker). The collaborators intend “investigating the use and potential of touch and movement in body-focused interactive art. The group will use a variety of body-sensing technologies to explore the possibilities of interactive art that links technical experimentation and artistic expression.”

The Transmission Project: Wheel, Water, Wind brings together Rod Cooper (hybrid instrument maker), Robin Fox (sound artist working with live digital media), Jon Rose (violinist, composer, writer and installation artist), Jim Sosnin (a specialist in acoustics, audio electronics, sound recording and computer music) and German artist Frieder Weiss [see interview] to develop “a wireless data technologies platform for designing human/machine interfaces. The team will investigate the compositional, installation and performance possibilities of the design, presenting works in progress on the themes of Wheel, Wind and Water during the testing stage of development.”

Andrew Donovan, Director of the Inter-Arts Office of the Australia Council, is pleased with the 2008 Artlab funding results. In his report he writes, “The panel was particularly responsive to projects that detailed a concise and logical research methodology, whilst clearly articulating potential artistic outcomes for the project. The panel was also responsive to applications that were genuinely collaborative in nature, reflecting the objective of the ArtLab program to nurture and support new interdisciplinary, artistic collaborations that offered the best opportunity for the development of new knowledge, artistic innovation and creative risk-taking.”

Donovan told RealTime that he welcomes the diversity of arts practitioners in each project, the range of age and experience and the geographical spread. He’s especially impressed with the number of experienced artists willing to place themselves in very new collaborative circumstances. The assessment panel, he says, were particularly taken with the research and development process embodied in the projects. “This can develop a platform—with innovations in software and hardware—to push hybridity forward, making it easy for other artists in the future to break through technical barriers.” RT

RealTime issue #84 April-May 2008 pg. 31

Akram Khan, Sylvie Guillem, Sacred Monsters

photo Nigel Norrington

Akram Khan, Sylvie Guillem, Sacred Monsters

TIME STANDS STILL IN THE MOST INTERESTING WAYS IN EMBRACE: GUILT FRAME. BECAUSE THE PERFORMANCE BALANCES ON A PIVOT OF STILLNESS AND EXTREMELY SLOW MOVEMENT, THERE’S INEVITABLY A PICTURE-LIKE QUALITY TO THE WORK ENHANCED BY THE ACTION BEING RESTRICTED TO A SMALL GILT FRAME THAT LIMITS OUR VIEW TO THE HEADS AND UPPER TORSOS OF TESS DE QUINCEY AND PETER SNOW. IT’S THE TIME OF THE ART GALLERY, EXCEPT THAT YOU CAN’T MOVE ON AFTER A FEW MINUTES OF VIEWING. YOU STAY STILL; THE PICTURE KEEPS CHANGING FOR SOME 50 MINUTES.

What we see pictured remains peristently enigmatic, always suggestive, of individual emotional and physical states, possible relationships, the history of painting even—such is lighting designer Travis Hodgson’s subtle texturing and profiling, his shifts in depth of field, evoking Carravagio, Vermeer, Rembrandt and more.

De Quincey and Snow work their way through a set of states common to The Natyashastra (an ancient Indian text) and Body Weather (the contemporary Japanese movement discipline; see RealTime 83, page 45 for an interview with De Quincey) but never literalise them. A smile is a smile, a grimace a grimace beneath which might be ecstasy or anger. But it’s the slow unfolding of these states that compels one to look for complexities, tensions, shared pleasures, changes in mood. Humans enjoy peering at portraits, painted or photographed, as if endlessly rehearsing primordial encounters with strangers in our evolutionary development. Embrace: guilt frame allows us to read faces with a rare intensity, registering tiny details, forming impressions, re-evaluating, never resolving. It’s a peculiar pleasure made palpable by disciplined performers who ease themselves into a temporal state slower than our own and invite us in.

But there’s more to embrace: guilt frame than faces—radical if slow changes in perspective, supple tonal shifts and endless evocations. There are moments when the performers lean out of the frame towards us, or recede into its deep dark interior; a moment when de Quincey turns ever so slowly, low in the frame, only her head, its back to us, providing support—it looks simple but must require great strength. There are moments that appear Gothic—the prolonged shudder in the residue of a laugh, Snow’s shaded face appearing to fatten with anger. There’s the suggestion of a grim puppet show—de Quincey’s head lolling like a fallen Punch. There’s a rare moment of touch, electric when it happens, other moments of apparent adoration or deep suspicion that suggest a relationship dancing in and out of sync.

Composer Michael Toisuta’s score operates at another level, a reminder with its persistent pulse of time manufactured and multiplied. Inspired by Ligeti’s Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes (1962) this surround sound creation is enveloping and some of its more dramatic changes in pace sharply re-shape the mood of the performance. There’s no sense, however, that de Quincey and Snow perform to it; it’s simply there with them; its time is not theirs.

Embrace: guilt frame is a small, intense work by skilled performers in a tiny theatrical frame that enlarges both our sense of time and of how driven we are by our visual curiosity.

The Akram Khan-Sylvie Guillem duet, Sacred Monsters, is a very different experience, but it also has its roots in ancient Hindu culture and it too suspends our sense of time, if speed is more often its means than stillness. The work is very much framed by Khan’s story about himself as a young man wanting to play the god Krishna, but disappointed that he was too short and already losing his hair. He would find his way, he said, by finding the monster in himself, and that monster may well have been his meeting with modern western dance. By the end of Sacred Monsters he appears to have achieved the release and transcendance he has desired, but in a remarkable duet, not just his agonised solo—the god in many, not one.

There is therefore a very strong sense of release in this work. The initial image is of a still, chained Guillem, whom Khan soon frees. He then removes the long chains wrapped around his calves, hidden beneath his trousers, but heard jangling musically in the dance. Towards the work’s end, Guillem gently touches Khan’s bowed head as if investing him with godliness. Although Sacred Monsters largely comprises duets, each performer, while sitting, sipping water, wiping away sweat with a towel, intently watches the other’s solo. There’s a potent sense of mutual support and release.

There’s also a great sense of playfulness, of gentle mockery and brattishness in the dialogue. But the dancing expresses darker tensions between these divas (‘sacred monsters’ is the translation of the 19th century French term for ‘stars’) as they strike at each other, reeling from the impact before being actually hit, as if the work they had created together has been a battle. At separate points in Sacred Monsters, one falls prey to the other, flattened, left limp…ready to airily chat with us and move on. The informality is heightened by the musicians (providing another East-West dynamic) sitting on stage with the performers and the female singer moving around the dancers.

A critical point occurs when Khan sits upstage quietly uttering, “Is this right?”, “Just an experiment!”, as if querying and asserting his melding of ancient and modern traditions. Moving forward on his knees, torso low to the floor, almost abject, his delivery becomes more urgent. His right arm shoots out and withdraws. Suddenly he thrusts his body up, almost erect, suspended, before falling to the floor and moving even more urgently forward again reporting the action. It’s an astonishing and painful dance. And crucially it’s followed by the pivotal duet of Sacred Monsters where Guillem straddles Khan, hip to hip, face to face. She leans back and they become one, an eight-limbed god in a dance of astonishing strength, sensuality and passion, their hands flickering their own finely articulated dance. Krishna.

Khan and Guillem languidly mop the floor with their towels (it’s your sweat, she mocks), preparing for a final, very earthed celebratory dance. Sacred Monsters is a wonderful collaboration, a fine conjuction of styles, traditions and personalities. Guillem’s stories are less elemental than Khan’s, less revealing, but wry and witty, reinforcing the embracing casualness of the show’s chatty framework (audible, if not always, in a concert hall bedecked with extra curtaining to damp the resonance). Her dancing, however, is almost beyond description, long lined and fluent, capable of breathtaking moves, like the reverse flip where her feet seem to barely leave the ground one after the other, and the ease with which she meets the speed and weight of Khan’s lower-placed centre of gravity. Sacred Monsters is a work of reflection and cross-cultural kinship, movingly and bracingly performed with great passion and remarkable skill.

–

Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf2Loud, embrace: Guilt Frame, created and performed by Tess de Quincey and Peter Snow, original concept Tess de Quincey, set designers Russell Emerson, Steve Howarth, construction by erth, lighting designer Travis Hodgson, sound designer Michael Toisuta; Richard Wherrett Studio, Sydney Theatre, Feb 27-March 9

Sacred Monsters, artistic director, choreographer Akram Khan, dancers Akram Khan, additional chorography Lin Hwai Min for Guillem, Gauri Sharam Tripathi for Khan, composer Philip Shephard, lighting Mikki Kunttu, set design Shizuka Hariu, costumes Kei Ho; Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House

RealTime issue #84 April-May 2008 pg. 32

Dance Theatre ON, Ah Q

photo Choi YoungMo

Dance Theatre ON, Ah Q

THE DANCE PROGRAM OF THE 2008 SINGAPORE ARTS FESTIVAL IS PARTICULARLY STRONG, NOT LEAST IN THE WAY IT MORPHS INTO THE THEATRE PROGRAM WITH SOME FASCINATING HYBRID CREATIONS.

In Amjad, choreographer Édouard Lock and Canada’s La La La Human Steps challenge romantic ballet in the shape of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. Lock was born in Morocco where Amjad, a name for children both male and female, means “greater glory”—the choice of title suggestive perhaps of Lock’s desire to transcend the inherent violence of gender divisions, not least in classical ballet. He requires of his company both ballet skills and hard-edged, fast contemporary dance.The multimedia set is by French-Canadian sculptor Armand Vaillancourt and the music mix comprises works by Gavin Bryars, David Lang, noise artist Blake Hargreaves and, of course, Tchaikovsky.

Romanian Edward Clug is the house choreographer and head of ballet at the Slovene National Theatre in Maribor, Slovenia’s second largest city. His Radio and Juliet is Romeo & Juliet performed to the music of Radiohead and tells the tragic tale in reverse. In another major work, The Architecture of Silence, Clug choreographs his company as fish-like dancers in virtual waters to contrasting requiems by Mozart and contemporary Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner (who scored films for director Krzystof Kieslowski). This epic production features 45 dancers, 80 singers and the Singapore Festival Orchestra.

In Japanese artist Nibroll’s No Direction, an exercise in miscommunication and an argument against homogenisation, eight performance artists “haphazardly inhabit a grid on stage, absorbing each other’s idiosyncracies and sporadic urges in a continuous interplay of music, movement, and visual images.” What began as an installation for Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography has become a major performance work with the multimedia collective formed in 1997 by Yanaihara Mikuni. No Direction is dance and much more.

In Ah Q, South Korea’s Dance Theatre ON employs the Quixotic character from Luxun’s novel The True Story of Ah Q to explore the effects of ignorance and foolishness. Choreographer Hong Songyop’s productions are well known for their rich symbolism and surreal effects in their ventures into the psychological interior.

In the festival’s theatre program dance makes some intriguing appearances. In For all the Wrong Reasons, a collaboration between Belgium’s Victoria and the UK’s Manchester-based Contact, leading experimental theatre director Lies Pauwels addresses stupidity. The setting is a faded end-of-the-pier revue, the performace a set of dances, songs and confessional monologues replete with sheer silliness and moments of profundity (you can enjoy a delicate if bizarre dance segment on the festival website).

In Nine Hills One Valley, dancer-director-designer Ratan Thiyam and the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur celebrate the traditional dance, theatre and other cultural forms of the remote regions of Manipur in eastern India, but they also lament the passing of these ancient and often interdisciplinary arts. Although not dance-based, Awaking, a new interdisciplinary work from Ong Keng Sen and TheatreWorks with contemporary Chinese composer Qu Xiao Song, looks to the literature, theatre and music of the past in very different cultures. Awaking addresses love through the works of Shakespeare and Ming Dynasty poet and playwright Tang Xian Zu, of Peony Pavilion fame. Both writers died in 1616. The performance features the Singapore Chinese Orchestra; the Musicians of the Globe led by Philip Pickett; and the kunqu opera actress Wei Chun Rong and her musicians from the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre in Beijing.

The festival also includes Forward Moves, commissioned works from three female Singaporean choreographers: Ebelle Chong, Neo Hong Chin and Joavien Ng. Continuum from the Singapore Dance Theatre presents the Asian premieres of Evening by Graham Lustig (USA), The Grey Area by David Dawson (UK) and Glow-Stop by Jorma Elo (Finland).

On the experimental theatre front, Singaporean visual artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen [RT80, p54] and co-director Fran Borgia have been commissioned by the Singapore Arts Festival and Brussel’s Kunstenfestivaldesarts to create The King Lear Project: A Trilogy. The three productions, played over three days, work from well known critical essays on Shakespeare’s tragedy, realising them as audition, rehearsal and post-show discussion, worrying at the right way to stage the great work.

As for Australian content, in the 2008 Singapore Festival Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre continue on their quiet path to world domination with the remarkable Small Metal Objects. RT

The 2008 Singapore Arts Festival. May 23-June 22, www.singaporeartsfest.com

RealTime issue #84 April-May 2008 pg. 33

IN A 2005 ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORKER ON WHAT SHE SAW AS A SURREALIST REVIVAL IN DANCE IN DOWNTOWN NEW YORK, CRITIC JOAN ACOCELLA IDENTIFIED PILOBOLUS AS ONE OF THE PIONEERS OF THE MOVEMENT WHICH MORE RECENTLY HAD BEEN TAKEN UP BY CHOREOGRAPHERS LIKE TERE O’CONNOR AND FORMER MEMBERS OF HIS COMPANY INCLUDING UP AND COMING CHOREOGRAPHER/PUPPETEER CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS. SHE EXAMINED CHUNKY MOVE’S TENSE DAVE, TOURING NEW YORK AT THE TIME, IN THE SAME SURREALIST LIGHT.

Taking its name from a sun-loving fungus, Pilobolus emerged in 1971 when a group of dance students at Dartmouth College interested in “a collaborative choreographic model and a unique weight-sharing attitude to partnering” decided to form a company. Pilobolus is still a deeply collaborative entity with three artistic directors and the company’s seven dancers all contributing to the repertoire. Merging dance and biology into an inventive and eloquent physical vocabulary, this is also a company with a mission “to use their organization and creative methodology to stimulate, educate and expand the audience for dance through innovation, collaboration and public service.”

Pilobolus is visiting Australia for the very first time in May, performing a five-work show in the hotbed of Adelaide Festival Centre’s variegated dance program, Pivot(al), including Day 2, set to the music of Brian Eno and Talking Heads which “captures the awe of evolution and the wonder of existence.” Let’s hope there’ll be time while they’re here for a little cross-pollination of ideas on artistic sustainability.

Speaking of survival, Dean Walsh is a highly accomplished Australian dancer/choreographer who has been evolving his own idiosyncratic body of work over a decade and, at the same time, performing with companies such as Australian Dance Theatre, DV8 Physical Theatre in the UK and No Apology Company in Amsterdam.

Walsh’s new work, Back From Front premiering at Performance Space in May, draws on stories from veterans of World War 2 through to the Iraq conflict. Walsh defines this as “a piece about the lingering impact of wartime experience on soldiers and their families—from the immediate challenges of re-adjusting to post-war life, to the continuing cycles of violence that can penetrate families for generations to come.”

Clearly referencing the territory of some of Walsh’s earlier, intimate solos, Back From Front is his first large-scale group work. With a strong cast and a team of production collaborators (including John Levey, Rolando Ramos, Simon Wise, Nikki Heywood) the work combines video imagery with lighting and movement.

Elizabeth Ryan, Jane McKernan, Emma Saunders, The Fondue Set, No Success Like Failure

Adaptation is what it’s all about for The Fondue Set (Elizabeth Ryan, Jane McKernan, Emma Saunders) and if their new work sounds a bit ‘under’ as they say on So You Think You Can Dance, it’s intentional. For a while now this talented trio has been performing serious experiments—taking dance apart and trying to put it back together in some semblance of order—while simultaneously masquerading as good time girls. In No Success Like Failure, their collaboration with the idiosyncratic UK choreographer Wendy Houstoun, they have distilled hours of serious experiment into an intriguing evening of performance in which they’ll be “lying, dying, singing, trying and trying again.” And as if that weren’t enough they also promise “motivational dancing, negative cheering, successful snoring, hypnotism, word bingo and more!”

The highly adaptive hybridiser Chunky Move, working across dance, film and interactive media, is currently thriving with the international suucess of Glow and now an invitation to stage their Mortal Engine at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival. In works like Singularity and I Want to Dance Better at Parties, the company has also been evolving a repertoire of choreographic works that intersect with everyday movement. In the film Dance Like Your Old Man, Gideon Obarzanek and Edwina Throsby’s joyous and thoughtful 10-minute dance documentary, six women do just that, proving once and for all the power of body memory. As they recall their moves, the women also remember the men who made them (in more ways than one). With this film the company has collected a couple more trophies, namely the 2008 ReelDance Award for Best Dance Documentary and Best Documentary at this year’s Flickerfest Short Film Festival. RT

Pivot(al), Pilobolus, Her Majesty’s Theatre, May 6-10, www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au; Dean Walsh, Back From Front, Performance Space at CarriageWorks. May 1-10, www.performancespace.com.au; Fondue Set, No Success Like Failure, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 4-8, www.sydneyoperahouse.com; Campbelltown Arts Centre, June 12-14 June; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, August; Chunky Move, Dance Like Your Old Man, Reeldance 2008, www.reeldance.org.au; Chunky Move, Mortal Engine, Edinburgh Playhouse, 2008 Edinburgh International Festival, Aug 17-19

Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Margaret Mills, Kelton Pell, Tony Briggs, Jimi Bani, Jandamarra

AFTER A ROCKY PREMIERE, JANDAMARRA BECAME A SUPERB WORK OF EPIC THEATRE, AKIN TO NEIL ARMFIELD’S CHEERY SOUL (1993) OR CLOUDSTREET (1998). DIRECTOR TOM GUTTERIDGE ECHOED ARMFIELD BY FILLING THE WINGS WITH PARTIALLY VISIBLE INSTRUMENTS, WIND-MAKERS, AND OTHER THEATRICAL MACHINERY WITH WHICH THE OFFSTAGE ACTORS VOICED THE ACTION. WITH ELDERLY INDIGENOUS SINGER GEORGE BROOKING SEATED BEFORE A MICROPHONE, THIS GAVE A SENSE OF MEMORY, BREATH AND RITUAL TO THE WORK, BRINGING THE ACTORS, FORMS AND HISTORIES TO LIFE.

Zoe Atkinson’s design for Jandamarra consisted of cliff panels—parting to reveal a vulva crease into which the protagonist stalked—bounded below by a sandpit from which set elements emerged or into which they were planted (fires, trees, graves). Platforms atop enabled split level performance, languid Indigenous scenes floating above tense European exchanges. Also remarkable was how Atkinson’s crinkled surfaces, projections of translations and Indigenous animations turned the space into a worn chapbook onto which histories and dreams were screened.

Jandamarra tells the story of the eponymous Aboriginal resistance leader in the Kimberley region in the 1870s, focusing on his complicated standing with whites and his own people. Never formally initiated into his clan, Jandamarra was befriended by the sporadically ruthless Constable Richardson before killing him and leading the Bunuba people against the graziers. The Bunuba attributed Jandamarra’s prowess to his magical skills, redefining him from tribal outcast to a key figure in their mythos.

Steve Hawke’s script was compiled with the traditional owners and Jandamarra’s story is portrayed in environmental terms above those of race or war. Jandamarra becomes one who, even without initiation, could read the land’s pain and recognise those waterholes which neither Bunuba nor white should disturb. Eventually, Jandamarra claims he fought not to defend his people per se, but the land itself. Although subplots involve black-white relations—notably the awkward reconciliation between the placeless station-owner’s widow and Jandamarra’s mother—the play comes across as somehow apolitical, being more about issues of the natural rather than racial oppression and armed resistance. It’s hard to imagine depicting the Irish resistance to English farming after 1600 in similar terms, despite the significance of Indigenous land use to both.

This recasting of identity in spiritual terms also characterised Tero Saarinen’s Borrowed Light. The Finnish choreographer drew on that American modernist archetype the Puritan sect, the Shakers. Together with the Amish, the Shakers’ austerity in their much collected furniture and quilts was central to 20th century American aesthetics, influencing architects (Frank Lloyd Wright’s furnishings), composers (Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, written for Martha Graham) and dancers (Doris Humphrey, Twyla Tharp and Graham all produced Shaker pieces). The dialectic between Protestant restraint and the ecstatic seizures of devotees to such 19th century US ‘campfire meetings’ fascinated choreographers from Mary Wigman to Ruth Saint-Denis. Despite the hostility of these sects to modernism (the Amish do not drive) and social norms (the Shakers are celibate), they were central to post-WWII America’s self-definition as a streamlined, modern, yet lyrical, nation.

Saarinen sets aside these national references but embraces a nostalgia for disciplines of physical and emotional frugality and the tragedy of their loss. Borrowed Light is a hymn for a lost idea of what modern art was. Amidst the sustained simplicity of a choir (the Boston Camerata) singing Shaker hymns, Saarinen’s dancers twist and sway in unison (recalling Wigman’s “choric dancing”) before succumbing to individual contortions and an emptying out of the body via tension and release.

Bodies begin as trapezoids, with wide stompy legs (emphasised by the men’s black robes and the women’s dresses) rising to a dynamic torso. This alternates with expansion of the chest outward with arms not just flung back but curled into neurotic filigrees. Saarinen’s work is dramatically classical in its precision and sculptural form, yet its grotesque details recall butoh. The design also echoes Euro-American modernists, notably Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, who advocated tides of directional white light between rising stairs to create a hierarchical space for the individual to strive for his or her spiritual ascent. Bounding the space, these flights and levels (differentially tinted black, grey and white by Mikki Kunttu) become a parable for the dancers’ terrestrial embodiment and their eternal striving, through and of the body, to free themselves. As dancers collapse and drag themselves across the space, the insufficiency of modernist ecstasy—as well as its joy—is performed.

A different sensibility is found in the work of Chrissie Parrott and Jonathan Mustard. Each piece in their trilogy, Metadance in Resonant Light, includes projection: animated figures in Recording Angel and Metadance, computer code in Metadance, and noirish Expressionism alongside the black-bobbed women of Split. Film noir is the dominant style in the latter, a duet supported by video showing dancers silhouetted in doorways. Head shots also feature, with hair swirling about visages, obscuring personalities even as they are suggested. Split evokes a house of memory and angst, affectively placing it in a predigital realm. This is further enhanced through haunting, aged-sounding music by Set Fire To The Flames. Split is animated by doppelgangers—the women’s other selves, and their struggle against their own otherness; femme fatales of their own desire. While similar to In Absentia (1997) by Sandra Parker and Margie Medlin—another work evoking uneasy memories through projection—Parrott’s work is more dramatic, with suggestions of specific (if opaque) characters.

Metadance has four dancers within a sea of floating and spinning text which codes music and avatars. As with Merce Cunningham’s Biped (1999), Parrott uses the X-Y-Z coordinates so generated to devise the choreography. Nevertheless, the movement remains recognisably hers. Hidden amongst translucent screens bearing rows of letters and grids, dancers under spotlights mark a constrained area with taught precision and line. Full limb extensions are common. Although each body often crouches low with one leg moving out at 30 degrees under the hips while the other bears the weight, aggressive twists or bends are rare. The dance retains Parrott’s sense of lyric control and clarity. Mustard’s music is less characteristic, departing from his 1980s MIDI palette to create a weft of ringing metallic strikes echoing away eternally, radiophonic quotations (a French vaudeville song for the juggling interlude, complete with projected balls), shuddering percussive fields and whining tones.

Recording Angel is the most impressive of the trilogy, simplifying and extending Metadance. Dancer Joshua Mu perches, birdlike, head down, arms spread, barely visible under tints of blue, posed beside his virtual double. The separation between live performer and avatar is blurred, both defined by slight glows within an ill-defined space. The measured choreography also imparts a sculptural feel, challenging not only distinctions between body and projection but dance and installation. It is often hard to see the movement. This is combined with Martin Tellinga’s music, recorded so well that, even in stereo, it sounds like its windy sheets and angry shimmering textures are charging behind us. Beyond narrative, meaning, or choreographic or dramaturgical evolution, Angel is a durational, experiential piece, affectively holding spectators in a profoundly sensual yet indeterminate fashion. As such, it avoids clichés of oscillating between technological visions of Frankensteinian disaster or naïvely utopian transcendence, to suggest a state neither liberating nor oppressive, yet intensely affective.

Perth International Arts Festival 2008: Black Swan Theatre Company with Bunuba Films, Jandamarra, writer Steve Hawke, director Tom Gutteridge, associate director, performer Ningali Lawford-Wolf, musical director Paul Kelly, designer Zoe Atkinson, lighting Andrew Lake, projected animations Kaylene Marr, Clancie Shorter, performers: Margaret Mills, Jimi Bani, Geoff Kelso, Emmanuel Brown, Tony Briggs, George Brooking, Simon Clarke, Peter Docker, Danny Marr, Kelton Pell, Dennis Simmons, Kevin Spratt, Sandra Umbagai-Clarke, Perth Convention Centre, February 9–23; Tero Saarinen Company and the Boston Camerata, Borrowed Light, choreographer, performer Tero Saarinen, musical director Joel Cohen, design & lighting Mikki Kunttu, costumes Erika Turunen, sound Heikki Iso-Ahola, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 27–Mar 1; Metadance In Resonant Light, choreography Chrissie Parrott, lighting/projection Jonathan Mustard, performers Joshua Mu, Sharlene Campbell, Sally Blatchford, Jacqui Claus. PICA, February 14–21

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE, TO HIJACK HAROLD BLOOM’S TERM, IS PROBABLY MOST EVIDENT WHEN IT BESETS AN EMERGING DIRECTOR. YOU KNOW THE SORT—THE YOUNG TURK WHO WANTS TO REINVENT THEATRE, BREAK THE MOULD, SHAKE OFF THE SHACKLES OF AN ARTFORM OSSIFIED INTO RIGID PREDICTABILITY. OFTEN THE RESULT IS A LAMENTABLE MESS THAT MERELY ENDS UP IMITATING OTHER REBELLIOUS THEATREMAKERS WITHOUT BEING CONSCIOUS OF THE TRADITION BEING FOLLOWED. SOMETIMES, THOUGH, THE DELICATE BALANCE BETWEEN AN ORIGINAL VISION AND AN AWARENESS OF HISTORICAL TRADITION MAKES FOR SOMETHING GENUINELY NEW AND EXCITING.

Matthew Lutton and Simon Stone are both 23-year-old directors who have arrived on the stage from different directions. Lutton studied in a now defunct cross-disciplinary program at WAAPA before going on to establish his own theatre company and working as an associate director with Black Swan. Stone, on the other hand, comes from an acting background—the VCA grad’s self-formed company The Hayloft Project features many of his old classmates. And though they evince very contrasting aesthetics, both directors are proving capable of rubbing shoulders with theatre veterans twice their years.

malthouse’s tartuffe

Lutton stepped in to direct Malthouse Theatre’s first 2008 production, Tartuffe, at (quite literally) the last minute. The assistant director was informed on the first day of rehearsals that Michael Kantor was handing over the reins in order to undergo medical treatment for a coronary irregularity. It’s testament enough to a certain amount of sheer gumption, I suppose, that Lutton didn’t baulk at the announcement but set to work. And though Kantor’s own artistic imprint is still visible in the final work, Lutton brings enough creative license to the piece to finally make it his own.

Tartuffe is freely adapted by Louise Fox after the Molière play of the same name. Where the original was a satirical swipe at the hypocrisy of organised religion and the greed of the aristocracy, Fox’s version is a bawdy, carnivalesque skewering of contemporary Australian mores and misdemeanours. Marcus Graham plays the titular holy roller who infiltrates a wealthy, soulless Toorak family and profits from their moral bankruptcy and desire for the kind of spiritual satisfaction only money can buy. Barry Otto and Alison Whyte are the heads of the vacuous clan, and this trio makes up the central dynamic of the piece.

Lutton’s version pushes the comedy to suitably manic extremes. Like any good sit-com there’s rarely a line that isn’t some kind of gag or a moment without some physical foolery. He makes the most of a lavish set, complete with a long lap-pool, three-level balcony edifice and numerous trapdoors. But where a lesser work would simply devolve into zany clowning and frothy farce, this Tartuffe outdoes itself in a final directorial choice near the work’s end. In Molière’s original, the sudden, improbable intervention of the King neatly resolves the tale. Translating this into a more interesting contemporary parallel was always going to be difficult, but Lutton’s decision is a stroke of brilliance. Where much of the production is an hysterically amplified take on the real world of today, Lutton’s Tartuffe climaxes with the hilarious entrance of Jesus in robes and beard, arriving to set all aright. Rather than undoing the cop-out of Molière’s deus ex machina ending, Lutton turns it up a notch to go beyond satire into something approaching meta-theatre, exposing its own internal cracks as much as those of the flawed characters it has so far ridiculed.

hayloft’s platonov

Simon Stone’s Chekhov Re-cut: Platonov takes the early work by the canonical playwright and treats it with the irreverence one would expect from an emerging talent. This is only Stone’s second production—the first, Spring Awakening (to be seen in June at Belvoir Street in Sydney), was an equally riveting work, and Platonov continues his trajectory. It cuts and shuffles Chekhov’s sprawling five-hour play to less than half that. It updates the setting, to a point, to lend it both a contemporary relevancy and a generous respect for its source. And, visually, it’s a beautiful gift to its audience.

Platonov is a liberal misanthrope, an existentially despairing tragic who turns his bleak desolation on the humans around him. Numerous affairs and betrayals seem to entertain his love of power games, but when the precarious house of cards he gradually builds brings about his ruin the audience must ask whether this self-destruction was in some way willed. He’s certainly not a sympathetic figure at any turn, but he is a fascinating one.

In Stone’s hands Platonov, like Spring Awakening, is very much an actor’s piece. The performers are given full rein to explore and embellish characters with gusto, and each proves more than capable. There’s plenty of stage business making full use of the space, but this adds a tactile dynamism and energy to the work rather than appearing contrived or unnecessary. With the exception of a superfluous second-half opening in which the feverish Platonov is beset by a ghostly chorus of his peers, the production aims for heightened realism instead of heavy-handed symbolism or obvious directorial intrusion. Most encouraging of all, it’s a realism that meshes perfectly with theatricality, too often seen as exclusive opposites.

Evan Grainger’s set is a sure contender for a swag of accolades. The entire playing space is flooded with black, rippling water fringed by shattered and burnt walls; piles of mouldy books and decaying antique furniture jut from the water like lilies. A subtle lighting design creates a warm and cloying sense of brooding intimacy which shimmers as the performers wade, splash or retreat from the pool.

Simon Stone, like Matthew Lutton, displays a powerful ability to reinvent an old work, making that reinvention the point of the exercise. Both bring an understanding of and respect toward their respective sources while remaining unafraid to depart from them in order to produce a superior work. Are you paying attention, class?

Malthouse Theatre, Tartuffe, writer Molière, adaptation Louise Fox, director Matthew Lutton, performers Laura Brent, Marcus Graham, Francis Greenslade, Peter Houghton, Rebecca Massey, Barry Otto, Ezekiel Ox, Luke Ryan, Alison Whyte, designer Anna Tregloan, lighting designer Paul Jackson, composer Peter Farnan; CUB Malthouse, Feb 15-Mar 8; The Hayloft Project, Chekhov Re-cut: Platonov, writer Anton Chekhov, adaptation, direction Simon Stone, performers Jessamy Dyer, Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Adrian Mulraney, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Meredith Penman, Chris Ryan, Simon Stone, designer Evan Granger, lighting design Danny Pettingill, sound Jared Lewis; The Hayloft, Footscray, Melbourne Feb 27-Mar 16

JANIE GIBSON’S THE WHALE CHORUS IS MYSTERIOUS AND CHAOTIC, A DREAM MUTATING INTO NIGHTMARE AMBIGUOUSLY HOSTED BY A YOUNG WOMAN (GIBSON) IN DARK WEIMAR CABARET PERSONA, ACCENT AND ALL, A SET OF TRULY EERIE TALES AND, IN THE CLIMAX, SPECTACULARLY STAGED SUPERNATURAL POWERS OUT OF THE MATRIX AND THE RING CYCLE.

Two competitive young men (Matthew Prest, Alex Grady) prance about like centaurs, revealing their love-lorn inner states via intensely delivered pop songs; two women (Phoebe Torzillo, XX) engage in more gnomic behaviour, sometimes gratingly cute but also tinged with dark prophecy.

Like the vigorous, ambitious ensemble dancing, the production constantly threatens to fall apart. Save for Gibson’s disturbing, blackly comic tales the writing is thin, the other female roles limited and the production’s grand symbolism opaque.

As a director Gibson is courageous, her vision reminiscent of Melbourne playwright Lally Katz’s anarchic theatrical magic but, unfortunately, there’s little sense of The Whale Chorus being through-written. Nevertheless the production proved oddly memorable. Alex Grady is a subtle presence, Gibson has a magnetic, quiet intensity, and Prest a vibrant nervous energy. Above all it was exhilarating to see a young ensemble performing with total commitment.

The Whale Chorus, director Janie Gibson, performers Alex Grady, Matthew Prest, Phoebe Torzillo, XX, Janie Gibson, sound James Brown, costumes Lucy Thornett, magic maker Michaela Gleave, lighting designer Frank Malnoo; PACT Youth Theatre, Sydney, Feb 28-March 9

REACH INTO YOUR POCKET AND BRING OUT YOUR WALLET. YOU DON’T RECOGNISE THIS WALLET. REACH INTO YOUR BAG AND BRING OUT YOUR MOBILE PHONE. YOU DON’T RECOGNISE THIS MOBILE PHONE. LOOK AT THE NAME ON THE PIECE OF PAPER YOU’RE HOLDING. YOU DON’T RECOGNISE THIS NAME. IS THIS A NIGHTMARE OF LOSS OR A FANTASY OF FREEDOM? EITHER WAY, IT WAS THE EXPERIENCE OF PARTICIPANTS IN LIFE EXCHANGE, A PROJECT ORCHESTRATED BY BERLIN-BASED ARTISTS WOOLOO PRODUCTIONS.

Between October 31 and November 6, 2007, 10 people were sent blinking into the streets of New York with just a stranger’s possessions to guide them. Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen, of Wooloo Productions, interviewed participants who were each willing to swap lives with a stranger and matched them into pairs. The longest exchange took one week; the shortest was 24 hours.

Surely you’d have to be crazy to trust a stranger with your house keys, your credit card, your job, your relationships? Participants didn’t just swap material possessions but also met each other’s lovers, worked in each other’s jobs and (although not in all cases) lived in each other’s homes.

For some, this demand for trust might seem like a nightmarish risk, but Rosengaard says it is one of the project’s strengths. Particularly in America, he says, there is a “performance of distrust” carried out by the state, which encourages people to be suspicious of each other’s motives and exploits an inherent conservatism of fear. In contrast, Life Exchange invited a very un-public display of trust and openness.

In fact, the relationship between two strangers was not the central experience of Life Exchange—after all, they didn’t really meet. One participant, occupying the life of Guilio d’Agostino for a day, found himself flirting with a woman on the subway. Twenty-four hours later he had returned to his identity of Ektoras Binikos, who is gay. Obviously, Life Exchange did not affect Ektoras’ sexuality, but it did encourage him to do something outside his normal experience. Crucially, this change in behaviour was not because Ektoras stole Guilio’s identity, but because for a time he was bereft of his own.

Participants in Life Exchange knew nothing about their ‘new life’ until the moment they inhabited it; and for each piece of someone else’s persona they acquired they lost the corresponding accoutrement of their own—their own mobile phone, their own best friend, their own routine. The process must have seemed more like a loss than an acquisition. In this light, the man who flirted with a woman on that November morning was not Guilio d’Agostino (who knows if he flirts with women on the subway?) or even a performance of ‘Guilio d’Agostino’ (having never met him, how could Ektoras know how to perform?). Instead, it was an anti-performance of Ektoras Binikos—a man whose codes and imperatives of behaviour had suddenly been stripped away.

In a city that was playing host, at the same time, to the dead-eyed ‘re-enactments’ of Alan Kaprow’s Happenings [RT 83, p17] , this seemed like a breath of fresh air. Kaprow wrote scores to encourage people to meditate on the experience of living and to blur the definitions of art and life. But, a year after Kaprow’s death, these re-enactments, watched in a packed warehouse in Long Island, were like the hammy cousins of an art historical moment that was never meant to be played to an audience. In contrast, Life Exchange seemed to promise a very real experience—the “sensory becoming” that Deleuze and Guattari describe as the true effect of a work of art.

But while Binikos found the experience of Life Exchange liberating, the project encouraged self-reflection in a very controlled way. The precedent for Wooloo Productions’ 2007 Life Exchange is Nancy Weber’s Life Swap (1974, written up in a book published by Dial Press in the same year), in which Weber changed lives with another woman. Her swap was precipitated by months of discussion, note-taking and written instructions between the women, but it ended badly with each accusing the other of dishonesty and misrepresentation. Life Exchange, however, removed the possibility of any such accusations, because it took responsibility for the project away from the people taking part.

It was Wooloo Productions (rather than any of the people whose lives were exchanged) who provided legal documents and disclaimers; Wooloo Productions who carried out interviews and made matches; and Wooloo Productions who conducted a Life Exchange Ritual at the beginning of each swap. This meant that ‘exchangers’ were free to concentrate on their personal experiences. And, unlike the earlier project, they could never accuse each other of sabotage, because they didn’t own the processes that governed their behaviour. These processes were owned and issued, instead, by Wooloo Productions.

In other words, Wooloo Productions institutionalised Weber’s model. If Weber’s Life Swap was carried out like two women bartering in a market, then Wooloo’s exchange was more like people ticking ‘yes’ to the terms and conditions on a website. This overt mediation concentrated the experience on each participating individual, but it also rendered them strangely passive in the process. Even when exchanges ended badly—as did one between Jane Harris and ‘Joanna’, cut short after just a few hours—the participants did not blame each other but the institution that had led them there. “Just be forewarned”, says Harris about Wooloo Productions, “they don’t seem to know what they’re doing” (www.artnet.com).

It is this relationship of trust between individual and institution that lies at the centre of Life Exchange. Harris’ disappointment with the project reveals her desire to trust the institution—if ‘they’ don’t know what they’re doing, then who does?

In fact, during Life Exchange Wooloo Productions acted just like the big cultural institutions that govern our lives—what Althusser calls institutional state apparatuses. This similarity even extends to the “performance of distrust” Wooloo’s Rosengaard identified in US federal policy. Like the government’s performance, Life Exchange relied on an entity whose power is hinted at but never explained; participants were even blindfolded during the Life Exchange Ritual that began each swap to reinforce this sense of mysterious power. And, like government performance, Life Exchange demanded casual complicity from its public.

Was Jane Harris right to have doubts about Wooloo Productions? The institutional façade that the organisation erected was flimsy at best. The Life Exchange Ritual, for example, which featured candles and New Age music, was an empty, generic scene such as might appear, Rosengaard says, if you googled the world ‘ritual.’ And unlike US government policy, Life Exchange did not exploit conservatism. Instead, it centred on unpredictability, stripping individuals of their symbols and then leaving them to their own devices.

Life Exchange created a dream of freedom and a nightmare of loss at the same time. It gave its participants liberty from identity, agency and expectations. But in return it enacted a loss of identity, freedom and agency. Creating a mask that borrowed from the familiar processes of big cultural institutions, Wooloo Productions suggested that liberty can only come from the comforting arms of an institution. The question, then, is which institution do you choose? And which liberty?

Erth dinosaur, designers Steve Howarth, Bryony Anderson , Chris Covich, Phil Downing, Clalre Milledge, Ferdinand Mana

TWO DINOSAURS ROAMED THE VAST FOYER FOR THE JOINT LAUNCH OF THE 2008 CARRIAGEWORKS AND PERFORMANCE SPACE PROGRAMS, A PALPABLY EXCITING MOMENT AFTER THE 2007 SETTLING IN FOR BOTH ORGANISATIONS. THE AMIABLE BEASTS ARE UTTERLY CONVINCING CREATIONS BY ERTH PHYSICAL & VISUAL THEATRE INC, ONE OF THE COMPANIES RESIDENT AT CARRIAGEWORKS.

Like big, slow puppies, the dinosaurs mingled with the large, if surprised crowd, making a brief appearance before leaving for Los Angeles—they were commissioned by the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. A proud Scott Wright from Erth declares that the creatures are anatomically correct but is at pains to point out, because they’re often asked about it, that the company has nothing to do with the multi-million dollar Walking with Dinosaurs show. Wright is emphatic, these are human-driven body puppets; look, no animatronics!

Festivals at CarriageWorks in 2008 include Platform 1 Hip Hop Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival, the return of Underbelly public arts lab + festival (after its successful celebration of underground and emerging artists in 2007), the Sydney Children’s Festival and the second Destination Film Festival, curated by Megan Spencer. Synergy Percussion will present two concerts (one of Reich and Xenakis compositions, the other with Swiss drummer Fritz Hauser and sound designer Bob Scott) across the year, and Sydney Dance Company three productions with new works by Meryl Tankard, London based choreographer Rafael Bonachela and New York-based Aszure Barton. The year’s program also includes young experimental theatre company The Rabble in Salome and newly resident company Force Majeure in a return season of their Sydney and Adelaide Festival hit, The Age I’m in.

The Performance Space program is well under way. Soon the space presents Experimenta Playground [RT 81, p34], the biennial of media art, ReelDance Festival 2008 [see page 22], Back from Front, a major new dance work from Dean Walsh [p33] and Branch Nebula’s Paradise City [on its Mobile States national tour after its trip to South America]. In the winter program there’s a new dance work, Ground Up, from Bernadette Walong, inspired by the Rainbow Serpent, the Live Festival of works in development with the special appearance of London’s Pacitti Company, and a life-sized house created by a Matthieu Gallois as part of an installation program titled Makeshift, Suspended House, and Habits & Habitat.

Visual and sound artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding will present their large-scale sculptural installation, Anechoic Chamber, in the Performance Space’s Spring program. The chamber will be properly anechoic—totally sound-proof and devoid of resonance. Townsville’s Dance North, after their successful collaboration with Splinter Group on the acclaimed Road Kill, will perform Underground (set on a subway in rush hour and slipping into a dream world) and Tess de Quincey [p32] her new work, Triptych, focusing on air, electricity and water and using large projections wrapped around the audience.

It’s a big year for CarriageWorks and Performance Space, offering programs which will maintain continuity, sustain innovation and make the future. The venue will be busier than ever, the new Anna Schwartz Gallery (to open with a major Mike Parr exhibition later in the year) will add yet another dimension to this new home to the contemporary arts. RT

THE NEST’S A MOUTHFUL OF PINS ATTEMPTS TO WRING ENDURING BEAUTY FROM THE TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE OF MELANCHOLIA OR DEPRESSION. KOKO (LEAH MERCER), AS OUR CONTEMPORARY, CARRIES “THE TORN PAGES OF HER STORY UP THE STAIRS OF AN OLD VICTORIAN APARTMENT BUILDING IN BRISBANE.” HERE SHE MEETS, OR IMAGINES SHE MEETS, TWO DIFFERENT HISTORICAL CHARACTERS, ONE AN EXTRAORDINARY REGENCY PERSONAGE BASED ON THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN (AOLE T MILLER), AND THE OTHER A 50S HITCHCOCK BLONDE/HOUSEWIFE (SCOTIA MONKIVITCH). THERE IS A SETTEE AND A COLLECTION OF BIRD-LIKE COMMEDIA MASKS SUGGESTING THAT THEY ARE KOKO’S ADOPTED PERSONAS.

Madness is in the air. Nature is outside (flitting bird images) and projected titles record the remorseless succession of days in a series of cryptic notes and quotes: “‘There isn’t a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.’ Anton Chekhov.” Live music (piano and violin), song, visual images, the dislocation of narrative units along with highly suggestive symbolic actions invest the piece with deliberate ambiguity. These strands came together most movingly in an extended piece played by a violinist over the recumbent, temporarily enervated and silent figures on stage. At this point it became evident, looking at it from a Lacanian perspective, that “The things we are dealing with…are things in so far as they are silent. And silent things are not quite the same as things that have no connection with words.” At the very beginning, in order to define the space, words on paper are laid out in a circular pattern blank side up so that they are ritually obscured from sight. We are not dealing with a clinical case. What is of primary importance is, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, the rhythms and alliterations of semiotic processes which, combined with the polyvalence of sign and symbol, “unsettles naming.” In the best sense, The Nest’s project is grandiose: attempting to capture the sublime in art.

As a writer, Leah Mercer is obviously conversant with psychoanalytical concerns but (rightly) stops short of fully articulating them: “Sadness is a memory of something long ago, can you call it a memory if you can’t remember it? A memory of something I cannot quite recall, the unremembered, the unrememberable sitting there high in my chest.” Her adoption of a depressed person’s monotonous and rhythmically repetitive delivery stems from this sadness lodged in her chest, sentences that, as Kristeva describes them, “come to a standstill.” I admired what amounted to a sustained virtuosic performance of its kind, but questioned whether Mercer’s affects contributed to theatrical efficacy. At times it seemed that the beating heart of the production had also come to a standstill, and surely the beautiful words of her last song—“Singing is breathing, is thinking, is speaking…”—demanded soaring to the heights? The depth of Koko’s situation is encountered through an act of fellatio which, on the surface, seemed to imply for some in the audience a history of sexual abuse. I read it, to the contrary, as a rupture of Koko’s hermetic world. Abruptly propelled into a different space, she finds resources of compassion and forgiveness that lead her to intervene in the ritual self-harm perpetrated by the Monkivitch character.

The choice of a male to play the Jane Austen part had pluses and minuses. It allowed for Koko’s repudiation of the phallic mother in the fellatio scene but didn’t necessarily enable her to resist the circuits of patriarchal exchange within which they function as objects. But I’m afraid that Miller’s drag queen performance militated against any elaboration of this idea. This was a pity, though this richly written role has sent me off in search of Jane Austen’s letters.

Scotia Monkivitch’s hard boiled but vulnerable Hollywood diva displayed symptoms of hysteria rather than melancholia. She points this out herself when she expresses the view that Freud would have labeled all three characters hysterics. In this respect, she also appeared to be less passive than the others—the literal metaphor for her character being that the shoe doesn’t seem to fit. Monkivitch is also the most engaging performer, combining a clown’s panache with acid one-liners that cut (!) through Koko’s unremitting gravitas and the high-handed style of Miller’s Jane Austen. Her eruptive dancing with the latter evokes the sheer possibility of jouissance, of an active resistance. She is a fusion of acting and acting out. Unable to utter the void, she too is “growing a book/ tending slender pages of skin/ to replace you” (her ex-lover). Her brashness only renders her self-laceration more painful to the audience; attacking her own thighs with a knife in semi-seductive fashion negates all concepts of desire. Her most gorgeous and revealing theatrical moment occurs, however, when she comically stuffs her mouth with marshmallows. This action was prefigured when she insouciantly demanded her share of opium drops medically prescribed for her Regency counterpart.

Monkivitch’s excessively mimed bulimia is likewise prescriptive but also contains the idea of a not wholly successful attempt at self-determination. Thus there is unresolved irony as the lights fade after Koko’s apparently triumphal song. Monkivitch crouches like a cornered animal confronting the audience with her steely determination to remain hard boiled (thus untamable), at any price, unless the future manifests the kind of social revolution that legitimately grants women autonomy as subjects. There was much to admire about this brave and ambitious piece of contemporary performance despite a demonstrable need for reworking.

A Mouthful of Pins, writer Leah Mercer; director Margi Brown Ash, performers, Aole T Miller, Leah Mercer, Scotia Monkivitch, visual artist Jaqui Vial, production designer Bev Jensen, lighting designer Simon Johnson, music composed & performed by George Valenti and Moslo, songs & soundscape by Reilly Smethurst; Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 14-16

THE FIRST DETAILS I NOTICE UPON ENTERING THE PERFORMANCE SPACE AT 45 DOWNSTAIRS ARE LABELS CONTAINING KIDS’ NAMES ON CARDBOARD BOXES STACKED 10 DEEP THAT TOTTER TOWARD THE CEILING. IN PLATFORM YOUTH THEATRE’S DEPICTION OF THE COLLISION BETWEEN ADOLESCENT DREAMS, HORMONE PUMPED DESIRE AND THE DULL THROB OF ADULT LIFE, GOOD KIDS EXPECTED TO REACH GREAT HEIGHTS WILL SPIN OUT, AND COME CRASHING TO THE GROUND.

Tenderness, created from reseach with young people from Melbourne’s northern suburbs, consists of two plays residing at opposing ends of the gender equation, but both tell a similar tale. In Ugly by Christos Tsiolkas, Slim drops out of school, realising it has no place for him, nor he for it, in his dream of becoming a prizefighter. In this righteous rush of blood he fails to realise that the relationships formed in the schoolyard will continue to permeate his young life. In Slut by Patricia Cornelius, free thinking Lolita fucks everything that moves, instinctively responding to a diffuse sexuality that is at once admirable in its honest expression of unconditional love, but will be judged by her schoolyard peers as the immoral behaviour of a nymphomaniac.

Slim loves his girlfriend Sil with a vengeance. But his recently acquired lifestyle of dropping eccies and planting the porpoise no longer adheres to Sil’s father’s career-directed intentions for his daughter. Frustrated, Slim fractures the skull of a taxi driver and is set to suffer the consequences. Conversely, Lolita is pack-raped at a party by a conga line of quivering phalluses, and is only ever capable of maintaining destructive relationships characterised by violence and self-abuse. Like the theatre itself, it is during moments of transition between two worlds that Slim and Lolita experience the helplessness derived from standing up for your beliefs in a world that couldn’t care less. This irony synthesises the two plays, Slut and Ugly, into the one performance, Tenderness.

The grand finale is a striking suggestion of the possibilities of theatre as installation, and an underlining of this show’s curious moral code. Cardboard boxes are bustled away, revealing a split level glass case. Slim, naked and sexually shamed, sits crouched in what might be a prison cell. Above, Lolita’s suspended form is frozen in a sustained and terrified scream. Combined, this iconography presents as an image of the Crucifixion, and even though such a compelling visual statement must have proved irresistible to its creators, it struck me as an affirmation of the same Christian morality which has prompted Slim and Lolita’s sad decline. That is, until my sight is drawn towards blind performer Maysa Abouzeid and the collapsible cane she has carried throughout her performance, reminding me of a line from a Judith Wright poem, of a “Blind head butting in the dark…” Abouzeid’s presence suggests a less sanctimonious metaphor for the invisible terror arising out of adolescence, and a curt reminder of what the theatre is really about. Acts of courage in the face of enormous adversity, performed by communities not crying out for God, just simple moments of tenderness.

Platform Youth Theatre, Tenderness: Ugly, writer Christos Tsiolkas, Slut, writer Patricia Cornelius, director Nadja Kostich, performers Luke Fraser, Camille Lopez, Anastasia Babboussouras, Chloe Boreham, Maysa Abouzeid, designer Marg Horwell, lighting, Richard Vabre, sound Kelly Ryal, choreography Tony Yap; 45 downstairs, Melbourne, March 7-15

OUR HOST CANDY (VICTORIA SPENCE) DESCENDS THE STEEP AISLE, GREETED BY GREAT APPLAUSE. SHE’S “EMERGING FROM 12 LONG YEARS” THAT HAS INVOLVED SOME “DEEP UNDERCOVER WORK CALLED MOTHERHOOD.” BUT NOW SHE’S BACK. IT’S BEEN NINE YEARS SINCE TABOO PARLOUR, ITSELF A SUCCESSOR TO THE LEGENDARY CLUB BENT, APPEARED DURING MARDI GRAS AT PERFORMANCE SPACE, AND FINALLY QUICK AND DIRTY HAS ARRIVED TO FILL THE VOID.

With public acknowledgment of the collective responsibility of Australians for the past now firmly embedded in the national zeitgeist, Spence fittingly acknowledges the traditional Indigenous owners of the land on which tonight’s performance takes place. As she does so, she points also to the struggles for recognition of queer identities, thus framing Quick and Dirty as a gathering of disparate tribes who “continue to weave stories of love, respect, and resilience.” Her opening address received an enthusiastic cheer from the capacity crowd, and established the event as part remembrance, part celebration and part community affirmation all wrapped up within two sprawling nights of performance from a truly diverse range of queer-identified artists.

Each night’s program began with the amiably anarchic foyer carnival of Biffo’s Blow Up Bonanza, featuring an inflatable peepshow and various sideshow acts competing with loud audience chatter. More contemplative in tone were the concurrent durational performances. On Friday, Fiona McGregor’s Borne saw the artist laid out in a coffin, her naked body covered by layers of small gifts that the audience was invited to take. The quiet reverence of the installation was a welcome contrast to the chaos outside, but the effect was somewhat ruined by front of house staff persistently reminding audience members who chose to linger that this was a “durational piece”, and that once we’d taken our gift (a neatly wrapped packet of seeds), we should take our (quiet) conversations back outside. Saturday saw the exquisite intimacy of Sarah-Jane Norman’s Songs of Rapture and Torture (#1: Surabaya Johnny). After a long wait to be singly admitted, I entered to find Norman sitting naked, blindfolded and elaborately bound to a chair, singing huskily in German into a microphone dangling from the ceiling. Clearly, I’d arrived in the middle of some ordeal. After about five mesmerising and strangely anxious minutes, the door opened and I was politely ushered out. Norman continued to sing, lost in a private world of loss, pain and resignation. Despite the brief encounter, the powerful image lingered.

Friday’s in-theatre acts included Trash Vaudeville’s restaging of his 1999 one-off Fool’s Gold using his original video animations. As the images progress he tries to remember what the piece was about, throwing himself from one pose to another, never seeming to recall what happens next. It’s an amusing, if rambling, exercise in media and memory, pointing clearly to the failures of both, but still managing to maintain its sense of humour even as the performance falls apart. This followed the amazing, crimson Chewbacca-esque creature and giant lolly-strewn stage of Buzz’s A Cavity Calamity, which unfortunately failed to provide much interest beyond its extravagant costuming. In The Invisible Woman from Outer Space, Glitta Supernova and Sex Intents presented a cosmic, ultraviolet strip tease, with the performer’s body disappearing as her fluorescent clothes flew away, seemingly of their own accord, culminating in a tiny rocket ship blasting off from her arse. Topping this, the highlight of the night was Gwenda and Guido’s White Heading, an outrageously bizarre Elvis-themed, whip cracking, cream-spraying, cake-eating, candle-inserting romp—sexy, funny and just plain wrong.

Saturday’s program was equally eclectic but far stronger overall. Wife’s Untitled began with a literally unravelling striptease, as a cunningly designed garment fell away forming a single thread. The piece ended with the viscerally discomforting removal of another thread, this time one stitched into the performer’s chest and examined in extreme close-up on video. Matt Hornby, Matt Stegh and Tristan Coumbe’s The Axis of Evil spectacularly queered the War on Iraq with production values to die for—breathtaking costume changes complete with decorated erect rocket penises, thrilling deathly dance routines, and satanic cameos. But the night belonged to The King Pins, whose Mystic Rehab was surely the ultimate in lip-syncing drag performance—performed with dazzling skill and energy, imaginative musical montage and stunningly excessive costumes that combined to produce a jaw-droppingly hilarious spectacle to send us all home wanting much much more. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait another nine years for Quick and Dirty 2!

Performance Space, Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras 2008: Quick and Dirty, coordinator Victoria Spence, lighting designer Clytie Smith, producer Fiona Winning, CarriageWorks; Sydney, Feb 22-23

A LARGE SCREEN UPSTAGE DISPLAYS A SILENT SKY, CLOUDS SKIMMING BELOW, THE COLOUR LIKE THE “BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH” THAT COMPUTERS DISPLAY BEFORE CRASHING. AS CHIKA HONDA: A DOCUMENTARY PERFORMANCE UNFOLDS IT BECOMES INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT THIS COLOUR IS UNCANNILY APT, FOR THE ARREST, PROSECUTION AND INCARCERATION OF HONDA IS THE STORY OF A SYSTEM MALFUNCTIONING AND A LIFE CRASHING AS A RESULT.

The eponymous Chika, a Japanese tourist who was jailed for over a decade for allegedly importing heroin into Australia, emerges through a collage of images and interviews, live music and movement. Most of the images are stills taken by the show’s producer, photographer and narrator Mayu Kanamori, who regularly visited Honda during her imprisonment and who sits on a stool in front of a microphone for the duration of the performance. Other images include archival footage of the initial police interview and media coverage of the court case. Supplementing Kanamori’s verbal and visual narration are the recorded voices of Honda herself as well as her various supporters. When words fail, Tom Fitzgerald’s evocative music and Yumi Umiumare’s dramatic movement take over; together they gesture towards an angst that lies beyond language.

The storytelling is simple and effective, though perhaps not as self-revealing or self-reflexive as it might be. Unlike, say, William Yang, another documentary photographer who tells personal stories with a wide social significance, Kanamori does not include herself. Even when she admits that she crossed a line from photographer to friend, she does not pause to reflect about why this might have happened, what it might mean, and how it might impact upon the performance. Indeed, between her modest storytelling and Malcolm Blaylock’s minimalist staging, the show seems to shy away from the possibilities of performance. Umiumare aside, the stage is strangely static and the aesthetic more televisual than theatrical. It is as if by minimising its theatricality, the show seeks to legitimate its veracity but in doing so it displays a paradoxical ambivalence towards performance. Even as the creators seem to trust the medium of theatre to convey the truth, they distrust, and even discard, theatre’s more inventive and imaginative methods.

Whatever its implied attitude to performance, the work is rightly adamant about the injustice done to Chika Honda. Throughout the play, the performers are positioned around the edges of the stage, leaving a black hole at the centre, symbolic perhaps of the hole in Honda’s life, her heart, our hearts and, most of all, our justice system. The show ends with Honda’s enigmatic refrain: “Mum is Mum. I am I. I am Chika Honda.” Even though she has returned to Japan, the injustice done to Chika Honda still haunts us and, the show implies, will continue to do so until our legal system produces another type of documentary performance altogether, the one that clears her name.

Chika: A documentary performance, creator, narrator Mayu Kanamori, director Malcolm Blaylock, musical director, composer Tom Fitzgerald, documentary sound Nick Franklin, shakuhachi Anne Norman, koto Satsuki Odamura, lighting design Keith Tucker, dancer, choreographer Yumi Umiumare, taiko drums Toshinori Sakamoto, sound design Andrei Shabunov, Performance Space at CarriageWorks, Mar 5-8

A POSSIBLY OBSCURE THEME GIVES WAY TO FUN AND FRIVOLOUS THEATRICAL FARE IN THEATRE KANTANKA’S LATEST PRODUCTION, FEARLESS N. BASED ON FEARLESS NADIA, THE ALTER-EGO OF AUSTRALIAN-BORN MARY EVANS, WHOSE UNCONVENTIONALLY STRONG FIGHTING PROWESS AND STURDY PHYSIQUE TRANSFORMED THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE BOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY C1950, FEARLESS N TRACKS A REMARKABLY HIDDEN HISTORY—BEGINNING, INTERESTINGLY, ON A DISPLACED BOLLYWOOD FILM SET PLONKED IN THE MIDDLE OF HOMEBUSH BAY.

Enter to tabla drumming and a warm waft of heady incense. Ahead is a shrine-cum-props table, replete with all manner of East Indian paraphernalia. To the right is the pathway for us ‘extras’ to be herded—a role the audience will play to delightful effect throughout the performance. Above the stage sits a film director (Georgina Naidu) who calls the clamouring set to order with humorously intoned requests for singing extras, soldier extras, cowboy extras and dying extras, who should—if asked to die—“please do so without making a fuss.” Naidu’s timbre establishes the self-referential tone that is to underpin our journey: an interpretation of Nadia’s rise to fame through the theatrical contrivance of documenting the story as a Bollywood film. The production hence draws on the tropes of a film genre that is possibly more at home in the theatre itself—using melodrama as the key, farcical connection between the two forms. At the same time, it dips into the politically incorrect giving Fearless N a self-knowing wryness amidst its busy east/west references and marking a “postcolonial field” that even the director admits is “getting pretty crowded.” (Director Carlos Gomes himself appears comically from time to time in a sari as a prostrate beggar with a baby pram).

The production’s most amusing contrivance is its employment of voiceover and live camera work to conjoin disparate stage sequences into the semblance of a ‘real’ cinematic image, projected above the stage action in appropriate sepia tones. Nadia (Chris Murphy) strangles pin-stripe suited villains on top of a moving train (read: Nadia stands above a projection of a moving train and wobbles appropriately); Nadia beats up lazy cowboys who are comically instructed to end their death-fight in the ‘much better’ formation of a human pyramid; Nadia launches into the fight by swinging tarzan-like from a rope, and later, we see her emerge bedecked for a true Bollywood dance-style wedding. At times, the effects are especially revealing, as in a car ride sequence that is generated by a cardboard chassis jiggled in front of a projected moving street scene. Similarly, ‘extras’ dressed as female colonials are given iced tea to sip while their actions are overwritten by suitably plummy voiceovers and a palm-leaf fanning boy behind them.

The text, written by Noelle Janaczewska, offers the potentially awkward theatrical device of an onstage director as narrator, but this actually works well to get a jam-packed story out with ease. At times, there are glimpses of Janaczewska’s signature writing style—a spare prose with tightly spun metaphors that evoke internal character states. This kind of craft is almost out of place in the overall spectacle of Fearless N, but gives it grit and hints at the underbelly of a life that this biography didn’t reveal. The lightness of the production sometimes pushed the narrative into pure parody, and yet the darker textual moments and the question of historical reference hovered temptingly over the work. My desire for real footage of Nadia amidst all of the fakery suggests that Kantanka’s version might just be the first take on a story with more riches to reveal.

Theatre Kantanka, Fearless N, writer Noelle Janaczewska, director, designer Carlos Gomes, performers Rakini Devi, Annette Madden, Chris Murphy, Georgina Naidu, Parth Nanavati, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Rajan Thangavelu, Bruno Xavier, Carlos Gomes, vocalists Ankita Sachdev, Sarangan Sriranganathan, composers Bobby Singh, Ben Walsh, video Andrew Wholley; Sydney Olympic Park, March 7-23

TAKING THE OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANGE AND RENEWAL, THE ORGANISERS OF THE 2008 NOW NOW FESTIVAL CHOSE TO MOVE THE EVENT FROM “THE POLLUTED, CONFINED SPACES OF SYDNEY’S EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC GHETTOES”, AS THE ANNOUNCEMENT PUT IT, AND “TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND RELOCATE TO WENTWORTH FALLS IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS.” THIS WASN’T ENTIRELY SURPRISING GIVEN THAT THE AREA IS HOME TO MANY ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS, INCLUDING SEVERAL NOW NOW REGULARS.

The NOW now festival began in 2002 as the brainchild of Sydney improvising musicians Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas and steadily built a reputation as Australia’s key improvised music event, attracting increasing numbers of local and international musicians and audience members each year. With the founders’ relocation to Berlin last year, the festival’s future might have been in doubt, however the NOW now has always been a community as much as an event, with various members involved in its organisation. This year the three-day festival was run by Jim Denley, Peter Farrar, Monika Brooks, Alex Masso and Dale Gorfinkel.

Booked to perform with the Splinter Orchestra, I arrived at the Wentworth Falls School of Arts on the Saturday afternoon in time for the instrument building workshop for kids and found a hall full of children making a joyful cacophony with a huge collection of bizarre devices. Facilitated by mechanical masterminds Rod Cooper, Dale Gorfinkel and Robbie Avenaim, this was no Wiggles concert!

Clearly this festival was going to be different. Instead of focusing only on evening concerts, there was a packed program of activities, day and night. Alongside the familiar faces were hippies, parents with children, and the elderly. The local community was curious and keen.

Saturday’s events included an all-too-rare appearance by extraordinary vocalist Jo Truman, as well as entertaining interventions by sound poet Emmanuelle Pellegrini on a howling telephone and Brendan Walls in the carpark with his sound art meets Mad Max routine.

On Sunday, after a late night of hanging out and listening to experimental jams at the crowded artist-run space Akemi, a former shop in Medlow Bath which served as the festival club, I returned to the School of Arts at midday for Ross Bolleter’s presentation on ruined pianos. While similar in sound to John Cage’s prepared pianos, ruined pianos are in a sense extremely unprepared, in that they have been neglected to the point of disrepair. Bolleter, who had performed the previous night with Jon Rose, provided fascinating insights into these peculiar instruments. He explained how many of them had washed up on the West Australian coast after being discarded from ships, and he demonstrated performance techniques while sitting on the floor, pointing out how the faulty keys, or ‘non workers’, provided important negative space for the music. He concluded by inviting children from the audience to join him in playing two ruined pianos.

Anthony Magen’s sound walk to Wentworth Falls was squeezed into the program, having been postponed from the previous day due to rain. I tagged along for a while before dropping back to make some recordings of the river and insects, then headed back to the venue in time to see an odd performance by Sam Dobson (double bass), Peter Farrar (saxophone), Alex Masso (percussion), Simon Ferenci (trumpet) and Yusuke Akai (guitar). Commencing with extremely loud bursts of noise that had small children running from the room, the volume control was finally located and the group began to find its way. The players eventually left the room to explore different parts of the building. A ritualistic sound developed, with repetitive drumming and strumming on a single chord augmented by winding saxophone. The performance ended with most of the musicians at the bottom of a stairwell, with the audience watching from above.

Next up was the Melbourne duo of Carolyn Connors and Rosalind Hall whose theme seemed to be the use of different materials to modify sound. Hall plays saxophone with custom reeds. Connors, known for her extended vocal techniques, sang with her face pressed against sheets of aluminium foil and plastic wrap, in a manner that was both humorous and disturbing. The duo produced a range of small, breathy, buzzing, yelping and squeaking sounds, while working their way through the selection of objects on the table behind them.

After a dinner break, the evening’s music began with Metalog, a new group comprising Amanda Stewart (voice), Jim Denley (flute and sax), Ben Byrne (laptop), Natasha Anderson (recorder and laptop), Dale Gorfinkle (vibraphone) and Robbie Avenaim (percussion). There was some suggestion that the group might be a successor to Machine for Making Sense, but apart from sharing two members (Denley and Stewart) there was little similarity in sound. A better comparison would be the Splinter Orchestra (with which it also shares members) albeit with less complex textures, but greater definition.

Beginning with portentous rumbling, the sound from Metalog eventually exploded into electrical hissing and sparks. The musicians moved in shifting combinations and layers, sometimes merging, sometimes distinctive. After nearly an hour of sustained concentration the performance ended with what I can only describe as an ambient techno coda. Overall it was a successful debut, and it will be interesting to see how the group develops. Hopefully there will be a greater role for the usually brilliant Stewart, who was barely audible on this occasion.

French performers Mathieu Werchowski (violin) and Xavier Charles (clarinet) stood either side of local laptopper Daniel Whiting for a dense and often melodic set. Whiting’s echoing sample manipulations of strings and voices were well matched by the sliding tones and trills of Werchowski and Charles. After building to a climax the music finished abruptly.

Local hero Joyce Hinterding delivered her trademark crackles, buzzes and whines, sourced from the electromagnetic spectrum. Moving her large hoop antennae through the air to find new sounds, Hinterding delicately layered them into a subtle and gorgeous soundscape. Glitching rhythmic loops emerged and finally faded back into the atmosphere.

Another local group followed. Ora(ra) consists of Matt Earle (electronics), Adam Sussman (guitar, electronics), Rory Brown (double bass) and Rivka Schembri (cello). Their music was quiet and gently ominous, with throbbing sub bass and cello embellished by microtonal drones. The sounds of the doors opening and closing became audible and interesting. I almost fell asleep, exhausted by the festival so far, but hung on to hear the performance conclude with lovely descending bass tones.

There was no question of sleeping through the final act of the festival. Taste of Teeth from Brisbane are like a 1960s/70s freak rock cult—lots of members sporting afros and over-sized sunglasses, men in dresses, and an enthusiastic entourage who dance to anything. The frontman gave a long, rambling introduction as the band prepared behind him, then threw himself across the room repeatedly, doing cartwheels and backflips. The band started up, eventually settling into a propulsive rhythm, with several percussionists pounding away. As I left to catch the last train back to Sydney, I had the feeling that they might keep playing forever.

The NOW now, curators Jim Denley, Peter Farrar, Monika Brooks, Alex Masso and Dale Gorfinkel; Wentworth Falls School of Arts, Jan 18-20, www.thenownow.net

LIKE MANY SOUND ARTISTS I WAS GLAD TO HEAR THAT THE AUSTRALIAN NETWORK FOR ART & TECHNOLOGY [ANAT] HAD ESTABLISHED THE EMBRACING SOUND PROGRAM [ESP], BUT ITS OFFICIAL LAUNCH IN DECEMBER AT THE CHAUVEL CINEMA RAISED A FEW CONCERNS.

While I very much appreciated the level of artistry in the live performances by Ian Andrews, Peter Newman and Robin Fox, it was somewhat surprising that a “sound program” could be launched with such an arguably audio-visually dominated program. Nowhere during the launch was mention made of the artists who produce purely acousmatic works.

I found myself looking away from the projected images in order to fully appreciate the intricate textures of the soundtracks of the audio-visual works. Even with eyes closed it was almost impossible not to be dominated by the rhythms of the projected light. While these works would have been perfect for the launch of a new media audio-visual venture, it seemed ironic that ANAT was actually launching a sound program. Does this indicate a lack of understanding of the aural arts?

The difference between sound works and audio-visual ones is clear. Gary Ferrington has written about “creating multi-sensory images for the mind” which allow individuals to become directors of the ‘movie’ in the mind, where no two people have the same imaginary experience (Journal of Visual Literacy, 1993). Sound theorist Douglas Kahn has commented that, historically, “too many matters of concern for artists interested in a more central role for sound were left untreated…it was left to the film and media studies to provide examples of how sound and signification could be approached” (Noise, Water, Meat, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2001).

Problems with the launch aside, ESP is an important addition to the cultural landscape, providing a much needed virtual meeting space for sound artists. By being truly representative of all sound practices and expanding its vision, ESP could make dramatic and lasting changes to the sound art scene.

I’d suggest one way ESP could assist the scene would be to highlight the need for an ongoing sound arts time slot on ABC Radio. To achieve long term outcomes there is a need for continuity. A dedicated time slot for both broadcasting and commissioning new works would make the ABC more directly accountable for its ongoing commitment to the art form. In 1997, 27 new, innovative sound compositions (roughly 600 minutes) were commissioned by the ABC’s Acoustic Arts Unit. Perhaps this could be used as a benchmark for an initial quota.

Currently, the most noticeable absence on the ABC is of commissioned long-form sound works. This is in contrast to many European public broadcasters and signifies to the international arts community that Australians generally don’t value their acoustic artists. It also sends a strong message to the broader Australian community that sound arts, especially extended pieces, are not a legitimate art form within the broadcasting landscape. It denies Australians the opportunity to experience, explore and engage in this artform’s imaginative acoustic spaces.

To date, one response to the limited space for broadcast sound art has been the ABC’s online initiative, Pool, “an experimental collaborative media creation web space…” similar to You Tube but developed by the ABC and partner universities.

While this is a great way to make publicly available works that the ABC has commissioned and now owns but has no way of or interest in broadcasting, two immediate concerns come to mind. Who finances the creation of new works? Is it left to the artist to raise the capital and if so, does this mean that our national broadcaster no longer feels the need to commission the same quantity of new works? It seems to me that Pool could be a great way to publicly archive experimental works that have been commissioned by the ABC, but it does little to address the issue of new commissions.

Secondly, as Pool operates under Creative Commons (CC) licensing and has no budget to pay artists for the use of their works, the whole project could be seen as merely a marketing opportunity for the ABC where artists give works away for free. As APRA’s Online & Mobile Licensing Manager, Frank Rodi, pointed out in a recent speech, CC licensing limits the artist’s potential income and gives away control over the context in which the artist’s work is used.

Leaving Pool aside and returning to the possibility of a dedicated sound art program on ABC radio, I’d suggest that it be overseen by an independent panel of arts producers and journalists. They would select a series of sound artists to curate the program so that there would be little chance of the same people always getting the commissions and airplay. We would then have an artist-run space reaching a national audience. This approach is similar to that of the Austrian public broadcaster, Kunstradio. I asked the head of Kunstradio if she had ever pulled the reins on a curating artist. She was surprised by the question, “We must represent everyone on our public station…some works I like and some I don’t.”

I’d also suggest that the program presents artists from across the artistic community and not be limited to practitioners with academic backgrounds at a time when universities are influential in the arts. The 2000 Ars Electronica Jury has argued that universities may not be the new cutting edge for innovation in digital music “because the leading edges of 21st century digital music are elsewhere” (Kodwo Eshun, “Forward to the World”, Ars Electronica, http://www.aec.at/en/archives/prix_archive/prixJuryStatement.asp?iProjectID=2603). Guidelines would need to be set to allow for transparency and for equality of airtime distributed among the artistic community.

An ABC dedicated time slot for both broadcasting and commissioning new works would be a step forward for Australia, evolving with the country’s rapidly growing pool of sound artists. So come on ESP, help realise the potential for a thriving sonic arts ecology.

AUTUMN IT SEEMS IS THE TIME FOR MUSICAL EXPLORATIONS WITH MARCH TO JUNE OFFERING AN IMPRESSIVE AND DIVERSE COLLECTION OF FESTIVALS.

The first Melbourne International Biennale of Exploratory Music 2008 (MIBEM March 28-April 2) has just wrapped up after six days of ‘boundary-expanding’ music made by over 50 Australian and international artists. Curated by the irrepressible duo of Anthony Pateras and Robin Fox the fare ranged from the ‘erotic killcore’ of Passenger of Shit to Stephen Whittington’s interpretation of Triadic Memories by Morton Feldman.

Following hard on the heels of the Adelaide Festival was the inaugural Adelaide Contemporary Music Festival (April 4-8) directed by Gabriella Smart of the Soundstream Contemporary Music Ensemble. The program included compositions by Andrew Ford, Roger Smalley, Tristram Cary, Sofia Gubaidalina, Alfred Schnittke and others as well as the world premiere of a work by Constantine Koukias for the Dutch ensemble Telesto Duo. The Korean Trio d’anche Suave, also made their Australian debut. Smart is already planning her 2009 festival.

Also biennial is the 2008 Aurora festival (April 11- 20) concentrated in Western Sydney with concerts at Campbelltown and Blacktown Arts Centres, Parramatta Riverside, UWS Parramatta Campus and The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith. Directed by Matthew Hindson, Aurora concentrates on living composers, and this year’s focus is on the work of Chinary Ung and Michael Atherton. Ung is Cambodian-born but US-based coming to Western classical music in his late teens. His work Aura, exploring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will be performed by the soprano duo Halcyon. The same concert will feature Sydney-based Michael Atherton’s Songs of Stone and Silence based on poems by WWII prisoners of War. Atherton’s UtiLity HoRn GrOove, for five utes, DJ, saxophone, double bass, dancers and a gamelan of mag wheels promises to be a highlight. The program also includes concerts by The Grainger String Quartet, percussionist Claire Edwardes with pianist Bernadette Balkus, and the Austrailian premieres of Michael Smetanin’s Micrographia and Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations (also previewing at the Sydney Conservatorium).

After a break in 2007, Whatismusic? returns with a mini one-day extravaganza at CarriageWorks Sydney (April 11). The marathon evening features Dale Gorfinkel, Marco Fusinato, Chris Abrahams and Cor Fuhler, Maxximal Patterrorist (Anthony Pateras and Max Kohane), festival director Robbie Avenaim and a rare Sydney performance by former festival director Oren Ambarchi. Along with leading Italian electroacoustic composer and improviser Valerio Tricoli, highlights will include the full scale laser show from Robin Fox and Miles and Zai van Dorssen’s Feuerwasser — a monumental clash of the elements of fire and water which must be seen to be heard! There’s a Melbourne leg with a concert at the Toff of the Town (April 14 with artists still to be announced) and Noisemaze, a free outdoor public jam at Grace Park, Hawthorn (April 15).

In May it’s the ACT’s turn with the Canberra International Contemporary Music Festival (May 7-18). Under the directorship of Nicole Canham, tango is set to feature with the French ensemble Tango Futur and Elena Kats-Chernin’s Keating Tangos. Other international guests include Iva Bittova from the Czech Republic, Crash Ensemble from Ireland, So Percussion, The Don Byron Ivey Divey Trio, and purportedly the world’s best theremin player Rob Schwimmer, all from the USA. Combined with the Australian talents of Lisa Moore, Jouissance, Topology, Ensemble Offspring, Robyn Archer, Paul Grabowsky, The Sculthorpe Quartet and William Barton, Canberra might just be the place to be.

Once we hit winter Liquid Architecture will tour nationally and the Australasian Computer Music Conference will be held in Sydney. Along with the first round of successful tours supported through the new Sound Travellers initiative, exploratory music would appear to be alive and well. RT

JAZZ CRITIC IRA GITLER COINED THE TERM “SHEETS OF SOUND” IN DESCRIBING JOHN COLTRANE’S SAXOPHONE TECHNIQUE OF LONG, CASCADING, RAPID-FIRE LEGATO SOLOS. ULRICH KREIGER’S OPENING PERFORMANCE AT ACTIVATING THE MEDIUM, AN ANNUAL SOUND ART AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC FESTIVAL BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO, BORE LITTLE RESEMBLANCE TO COLTRANE’S FAMOUS TECHNIQUES –THIS WAS ANOTHER TYPE OF “SHEETS OF SOUND” ALTOGETHER.

Krieger’s set was not about harmonic sophistication, melodic filigree, soulful lyricism or any of the traditional saxophone signifiers—this was a punishingly loud and unrelenting barrage of noise. Kreiger achieved this critical mass through an effects set-up which might more conventionally be employed by noise guitarists—primarily heavy distortion and long delay. He shaped the sound by layering clouds of sustained blowing into a dense mass of sound. By moving as he played he was able to generate squalls of microphonic feedback which further added to the dissonant mix. The set was short, extremely intense, and all the more powerful for its 15-minute concision.

Now in its eleventh year, ATM is hosted by the 23five organisation and curated by local sound artists Randy Yau and Jim Haynes. Each year it focuses upon a particular aspect of sound art, with past themes investigating field recording, sound and architecture, sound and simulation, sound and performance, the acousmatics of sound with film/video, and the Californian noise scene. This year’s festival theme was “The Instrument”, focussing on “the parallel strategies that [sound artist and experimental musicians] employ in using conventional musical instruments alongside refined conceptual agendas and technological applications.”

I was glad to have picked up a set of the earplugs given away in the foyer. Francisco Meirino (aka Phroq) was up next and he was also very loud. Meirino used a harmonica to generate samples on his laptop and further processing these: looping, regenerating and pitch shifting his harmonica until its sound was vast and organ-like in its breadth. Occasionally he would gesture in mid-air with the contact-miked harmonica, setting off plumes of feedback or fusillades of harsh digital glitching. For those in the audience interested in the performative aspects of the show there was more to see than your average laptop performance—Meirino was busy at work with harmonica playing, feedback controlling, expressive gesturing and hands-on signal processing. Most, however, were content to simply sit, eyes closed, letting the massive waves of sound wash over them.

Jason Kahn is one of an increasing range of percussionists who utilise electronics in their live performances. His drum set is amplified by a number of microphones, which allows him to create and control feedback, using both percussion and the resonant frequencies of the space. Kahn also uses a synthesiser to further enhance and process these resonant feedback loops. In fact, his primary instrument is not percussion, but the room itself. His set began slowly with a swirl of white noise. This seemed static for a time until it became obvious that the surging white noise was in constant but muted flux, gradually modulating in density and timbre. At various points in the performance Kahn could be seen brandishing a cymbal above the drumhead. Controlling feedback with it, he gradually introduced a range of controlled frequencies until he’d generated a layer of sub-bass submerged beneath the white noise with which he’d begun. After a while these deep bassy tones became the dominant sound, filling the theatre with their sonorous resonance before being slowly faded out. Kahn told me, “I want to create an immersive sound experience for the listener; to hear the sound from inside and to feel the sound with one’s whole body.” At this performance he definitely achieved his aim.

Zbigniew Karkowski’s piece began with three wind players seemingly free-blowing as fast and as loud as they could. Acoustically this was like a free jazz freakout, however both saxophone and flute were running through loud distortion pedals giving them the dynamic range and attack of hard rock soloists. This distortion emphasised the instruments’ upper harmonics, giving them a rasping, brittle tone. Xopher Davidson was further processing the ensemble as they played, adding sine waves, ring-modulation and a deep low-end bass tone. All of the musicians were playing hard and fast, evidenced by the accompanying range of grimacing, facial tics and bodily contortions. However, all of the instrumental articulations and gesturings were barely liminal—ghostly artefacts, subsumed within the body of massive noise. There was a strange disconnection between the frenetic physicality and the mostly monolithic mass of sound being produced.

The performance gradually ascended in pitch and density before coming to a sudden stop, revealing a low volume bed of white noise percolating underneath. This layer of sibilance was being slowly modulated and filtered by Davidson. At least that’s what it seemed like—the overall effect could have been the sort of hyperacuity common after prolonged exposure to very loud sounds. Think of the hiss and ringing in your ears after a rock show without earplugs. After a few more minutes of white noise the piece ended with a short coda reprising the harsh noise of the first section. Simple in form and precise in its execution, Karkowski’s piece left many noise fans in the audience shouting for more. I would have preferred more subtlety, timbral variety and instrumental interplay, but it seems that would have been missing the point.

The remit of this Activating the Medium festival was pitched more towards the noise/drone axis of contemporary experimental music. Even so, many of the familiar techniques, technologies and methodologies common to other sub-genres of experimental instrumentation were present: extended technique, electronic processing, instrument preparation, live sampling, use of feedback and room sound, found objects, computer processing, mechanical playing devices and so on. A comprehensive overview of “The Instrument in Experimental Music” would be well nigh impossible for a small festival, nevertheless ATM signposted many of these current instrumental tendencies in a provocative, entertaining and dynamic presentation.

Activating the Medium, Eleventh Annual Festival of Sound Art : The Instrument, Feb 2: performers Ulrich Krieger, Francisco Meirino, Tim Catlin, Zbigniew Karkowski with Suzanne Thorpe, Andy Strain, Ulrich Krieger, Xopher Davidson, Feb 23: performers Phill Niblock, Thomas Ankersmit; San Francisco Art Institute, www.23five.org/activating/atm2008info.html

Gail Hastings, Sculptural Situations, 2008, installation view at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

TWO KEY TERMS IN GAIL HASTINGS’ VOCABULARY ARE ‘SCULPTURAL SITUATIONS’ AND ‘ENCYCLOPAEDIA.’ HER INSTALLATION AT PICA, TITLED SCULPTURAL SITUATIONS, CONSISTS OF WOODEN PANELS, SHELVES AND CHAIRS (OR LACQUERED CHAIR-LIKE OBJECTS) ARRANGED IN A FIRM BUT UNBALANCED GRID. UNDRESSED TIMBER AND COMPOSITE BOARD ALTERNATES WITH BLOCKS OF PRIMARY COLOURS AND GLOSS BLACKS AND WHITES, AS WELL AS LEATHER OVERLAYS.

There are strong allusions to furniture—chairs, tables, and especially bookcases for shelving encyclopaedias, or other modular information housings—but also deformations of these. Cubic masses rise to horizontals for a seat, before rectilinear overhangs vex such potentials. At points, these taut minimal forms and surfaces are interlaid with glass panels over text and sketched plans.

Entitled “Encyclopaedias”, these texts cite (possibly apocryphal) conversations between the designers of Canberra—high modernist architects, and sometime Anthroposophists, Marion and Walter Burley Griffin—and their clients. Characterised by clipped dialogue and debates about where art should hang on the library walls, or if a block of colour presented to the viewer is art, the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’ writings on the inaccessible labyrinth of the totalising library is notable. Like the sculptural forms which surround these panels, the texts circle around an absence at the centre of knowledge, art and modernism; a utopian impossibility which nevertheless appeals today.

It is here that Hastings’ art historical references come into play. A pair of leather covered boxes displaying mono-colored squares-within-squares recapitulate the style of Kazimir Malevich (who concluded the square was the ultimate iconic sign of God and purified spiritual essence), while the tonality of red grids alternating with black borders or glistening blocks of red, white and blue incarnates Constructivism and the aesthetic of Piet Mondrian. Like the Griffins, these artists envisaged their work as part of a spiritual and political revolution reshaping society around a purified aesthetic. That the Griffins’ plan for a library on Canberra’s hill was unrealised (the largely hidden structure of new Parliament House occupies the space where it was to be) highlights this failure at the heart of modernism. The Soviet Revolution—which the Constructivists rallied around—proved a nightmare, while the esoteric spiritual concerns of Malevich and the Griffins became the subject of ridicule and absurd conspiracies. Hastings’ work replays the attraction of these radical ideals, yet also their incomplete and impossible conceits.

In place of revolution, Hastings offers “the haptic”—also championed by modernists like Albert Tucker—a profoundly sensorial approach to art which transcends meaning (or at least rational meaning). It is particularly here that Hastings’ model of “the sculptural situation” comes to the fore. Viewers inhabit the same space as the work, while its gorgeous, partially-finished, yet allusive and attractive surfaces encourage one to run one’s hands across them. However it is precisely this which the “sculptural situation” under consideration denies one the ability to satisfy such impulses—the fact that this is “Art!”, as one tetchy museum curator reminded me, not mundane furnishings. Here too is an absence, or a denial. The desire to touch is elicited but prohibited. However one reads Sculptural Situations, this is an installation within whose interstices one imaginatively luxuriates.

Alwin Reamillo’s installation at the Fremantle Arts Centre is more welcoming, with Reamillo acting as congenial host during much of the exhibition. It is the product of a residency conducted at the decrepit Manila piano factory of his father, Decimo, which bore the suitably hybrid name of Javincello and Company, and which produced instruments post-WWII under the brand name Wittemberg—a corruption of Martin Luther’s hometown in Germany. Reamillo collaborated with local craftsmen and family to produce two pianos—an upright and a grand—the latter displayed in the gallery. As Ros Bolleter has demonstrated, Australia had a particularly high uptake of German and Philippine pianos as signs of civilisation within the nation’s “empty heart”, while Reamillo discovered that the only remaining caster of piano frames is Watanabe in Japan. With Reamillo’s own transit to Australia, the project traces a history of exchanges which explode simple dichotomies of east versus west, centre versus periphery, Wittemberg pianos having been internationally prized in their day.

The grand itself is an exquisite object, its handcrafted qualities displayed in rich detailing. The panels are a treasure trove of hidden inlays and references. The whale, for example, is a potent symbol in Reamillo’s iconography, its oceanic voyages echoing his own movement between the Philippines and West Australia, while a Pinocchio theme—the wooden automaton animated through his filiation to a paternal Geppetto—also resonates. Appliquéd engravings of these graceful beasts spume and flow across the richly varnished surfaces, as do elusive images of Decimo, that other oceanic visitor to the coastlines of Australia and the Philippines, Captain Cook, matches—which the young Alwin dangerously played with in the old factory—and maps and compasses.

The walls of the gallery document the piano’s construction. The curious mix of industry—the modern piano is a product of sophisticated metallurgy and standardised tuning—and handicrafts appears repeatedly. Reamillo explains that the tuning was particularly vexatious; the grand now adheres to international standards, but given that many of the skills involved in building the Wittemberg design have been lost, the precise coordination of string lengths and pedal actions was devised partly through laborious trial and error. Also on display is an incredible bench turned into a marvellous tangle of tubes and fused matter by years of termites; a testament to the chaotic conditions which Reamillo initially confronted, and which, indeed, attracted him. If one has any doubts regarding the technological sophistication of Philippine craftsmen, Alwin Reamillo also displays Decimo’s patent and mechanism for the Wittemberg “harpitone”, which could be played both as a piano (strings are struck) and harpsichord (strings are plucked).

It is this mass of detailing, allusion, repetition and miniaturisation—both in the illustrations on the grand, as well as within the venue as a whole—that truly enchants. Toy pianos and car-like trolleys with stamped and burned piano-string designs across their backs, small piles of screws, dislocated hammers, keys and dampers, boxed advertising pamphlets and other exquisite cameos of the re-imagining of this world, disperse and multiply throughout the space in associated mini-displays. Even in the absence of live performance (represented by a recording in one corner and a one-off improvisation event), the detritus of the ages sings across the oceans like a whale’s evocative, water-borne cries.

Sculptural Situations, Gail Hastings, PICA, Perth, Feb 7-March 30; Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project by Alwin Reamillo with craftsmen Jaime Pastorfide, Tranquilino Tosio Jr, Sabas Rabino Jr, Fremantle Arts Centre, Dec 8, 2007–Jan 27, 2008

AN EAGER HOST AND GUIDE WAIT FOR ME WHERE THE SOGGY DIRT ROAD ENDS. I HAVE DRIVEN HALF WAY UP TASMANIA’S EAST COAST THROUGH STORMY WEATHER TO REACH THE FREYCINET PENINSULA THEN FOLLOWED DIRECTIONS DEEP INTO BUSHLAND AT THE BACK OF A WILD STRETCH OF COAST CALLED FRIENDLY BEACHES. THERE ARE NO SIGNS, LITERAL NOR FIGURATIVE, TO INDICATE ANYTHING REMARKABLE RESIDES WITHIN THIS SEEMINGLY RANDOM PATCH OF COASTAL HEATHLAND, BUT AS I’M TRANSFERRED INTO A BATTERED PEOPLE MOVER—THE ONLY VEHICLE PERMITTED ACCESS PAST THIS POINT—THE EFFUSIVE COMMENTARY OF THE HOST IMPLIES I’M ABOUT TO BE INDUCTED INTO SOMETHING VERY RARE AND SPECIAL INDEED.

Curiosity compelled me to accept the invitation to view this unusual event called Ephemeral Art at the Invisible Lodge. It’s sponsored by Sydney-based owners Joan and George Masterman, whose eco-tourism venture Freycinet Experience Walk (offering guided trekking holidays combined with luxury accommodation) co-presents Ephemeral Art with the Sculpture by the Sea organisation. The site is 130 hectares of land protected by a strict environmental covenant, which means that there is a legally enforceable obligation to prevent adverse impact on the land.

Two Sculpture by the Sea trails, modelled on Sydney’s Bronte to Bondi walk, were held on the Tasman Peninsula property of sculptor Peter Adams back in 1998 and 2001. As anyone familiar with Adams’ art and politics will know, he is a dedicated environmentalist. Consequently, the very popularity of Sculpture by the Sea was a factor in its downfall: the damage sustained to Adams’ land included litter, the impact of vehicles, the accidental ‘assassination’ of a tree by a well-meaning artist, and a view that the event was not financially feasible in the long term, put an end to hopes it had become a regular feature of the local arts calendar. Many of those organisers are now behind the rather different initiative, Ephemeral Art, which had its debut in 2006.

This year’s selection of site-specific installations was curated by a formidable panel comprising Dick Bett of Hobart’s Bett Gallery, the visual arts writer Peter Timms and the founding director of Sculpture by the Sea, David Handley. There was no call for applications, the nine exhibiting artists—Peter Adams, Dean Chatwin, Julie Gough, Colin Langridge, Anne Mestitz, Sasha Reid, Ron Robertson-Swann, Marcus Tatton, Catherine Woo—were preselected and propositioned in “a generous act of patronage”, as Timms puts it in the exhibition catalogue. The works were on display for a month, but there was a catch: the works were seen only by 40 holidaymakers at the price of $1,350 each, and a similar sized group of invited art critics and administrators attending a special viewing and gourmet lunch.

I was a member of neither of the groups above, but the recipient of an informal invitation offered to postgraduate students at the Tasmanian School of Art. My viewing was a heavily mediated one, the attentive hosts not only leading me to each work by foot or vehicle, but also stepping me through the interpretation too—determining the angle of approach, recommending the best vantage points and providing anecdotes about the artists’ aims and processes. All this was done with the best intentions, and perhaps reflects the level of assistance required by regular lodge guests. As a self-sufficient art viewer however this was so like receiving an owner’s tour of a private collection that it became near impossible to engage critically with it as an exhibition of new contemporary art.

For example, standing with the others in front of Adams’ elegant mandala composed of white sand peaks and the seed pods of surrounding casuarinas, I was overwhelmed by a desire to be completely alone with this work. I heard the mantra of breaking waves across the dune and felt sure Adams had intended to create here a place for meditation. But under the circumstances of my guided tour, I found myself resorting instead to a formal appreciation of the spiral form and the tonal quality of the rain-dimpled sand instead—a superficial intersection with what I can only suspect was potentially a deeply spiritual piece.

The catalogue must have gone to print early in the project’s development, for it states: “the work should be made primarily of materials found on-site and…be impermanent. It must be left where it is to fall apart in its own good time.” In fact, very few of the works here reflected any real attempt to meet such ideals. A creative process guided by a leave-no-trace-behind environmental ethic is precisely the expectation the title raises, but works like Robertson-Swann’s tree-aiding apparatuses of steel cables, glass and even a plumb bob, and Anne Mestitz’s delicate intervention into the remnants of a bushfire with reflective plastic tape, were clearly not driven by a concern for using sustainable materials. More pertinent was the fact the artists came and removed their works at the end of the month.

Catherine Woo’s piece was the only unequivocally ephemeral work here. Processing Plant was a collection of natural materials from the ground at the base of a large sand dune, categorised into discrete piles of various sizes. Between mounds of dry fern fronds, charcoal, wombat droppings and banksia flowers wove interlocking pathways of white sand that beckoned the viewer through this little city. Footprints showed an array of native animals had taken up Woo’s invitation, but I was asked to view from the edges to avoid degrading the work. My understanding was that by their very essence, ephemeral art works embrace the disorderly processes of environmental change but it seemed the concern for the work’s preservation was as much about the perceived aesthetic appeal of a ‘pristine’ state, as it was for its physical integrity.

The stewards of Friendly Beaches necessarily treat their environment with a certain preciousness that justifies the exertion of a high degree of control over who is allowed to visit, and the conditions under which they do so. It seemed to me, however, this attitude posed significant problems when applied to the viewing of the artwork they temporarily hosted. A certain degree of freedom is prerequisite to forge the relationship that makes an encounter with art meaningful and moving.

When the tour was complete, I was promptly delivered back to my car by the side of the dirt road feeling amused and bamboozled by the unlikely conglomerate of seemingly conflicting objectives, limitations, aspirations, attitudes and individuals represented in this extraordinary exhibition. One of the major questions the event raised for me was: what is the value in writing a review of an event from which the vast majority (you readers) have been consciously, not just incidentally, excluded?

I am more than happy to state for the record my opinion that the installations themselves were, on the whole, excellent—particularly in dealing with a breadth of stimulating ideas pertinent to a particular landscape. I was also impressed by the elegance and integrity of their all-weather execution. Julie Gough’s dramatic Some Words for Change and Dean Chatwin’s opportunistic inverse doormat, were two of the highlights. Ultimately however, I suspect some reflection on the workings behind this mysterious, highly exclusive art event itself might be of greater relevance to a community of artists and art viewers who will never have the opportunity to view an Ephemeral Art at the Invisible Lodge show for themselves.

Bec Tudor was a day guest of Friendly Beaches Lodge. She drove herself the five hour return journey and brought her own packed lunch. She is a Hobart-based writer, a PhD candidate at the Tasmanian School of Art and was one of the RealTime review-writing workshop team for the 2007 Ten Days on the Island festival.

THE IDEA OF STAGING A BON SCOTT EXHIBITION, SAYS CURATOR JASMIN STEPHENS, CAME FROM THE FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE’S DIRECTOR JIM CATHCART, A PASSIONATE BON SCOTT FAN. FOR STEPHENS, THE FAC’S CURATOR/EXHIBITIONS MANAGER, THE STATUE OF THE LEAD SINGER AND CO-LYRICIST OF AC/DC (SCULPTED BY FREMANTLE ARTIST GREG JAMES WITH FUNDS RAISED BY THE WA BON SCOTT FAN CLUB AND UNVEILED FEBRUARY 24 THIS YEAR) WAS A FINE TRIBUTE. BUT THERE WAS INEVITABLY SOMETHING STATIC ABOUT THE RESULT, ESPECIALLY GIVEN THE SINGER’S LARRIKIN AND OUTSIDER STATUS. THE FAC THOUGHT THAT THE CELEBRATION OF A LIFE COULD BECOME, SAYS STEPHENS, “AN OPPORTUNITY TO STRIKE UP A CONVERSATION ABOUT PUBLIC ART AND HERITAGE.”

One strand of that conversation has been realised in artist Lucas Ihlein’s popular Bon Scott Blog. Ihlein writes in his introduction, “Lucas was not a fan of AC/DC. You can read about his process of immersion! He is meeting fans, visiting cemeteries, chasing up Bon’s old friends and lovers, attending concerts, and listening to a lot of heavy rock.” It’s a fascinating read. A good starting point is Ihlein’s account of his visit to the Fremantle Cemetery where there’s a humble memorial plaque for Scott, a missing heritage plaque and a steady flow of intriguing pilgrims, including Ben Scott, the alleged love child of the singer. The responses to this entry reveal the wide range of people The Bon Scott Project is engaging.

Jasmin Stephens sees Ihlein’s blog “as a public art work”, playing a much more significant role than the internet’s usually illustrative and educational functions in galleries: “The web is often an afterthought, developed after the conceptualisation of the show.” However, “Fremantle Arts Centre was prepared to make a substantial investment in Lucas for six months of working on the blog and travelling.” A “blogging-as-art project”, as Ihlein describes it, it aims to develop a conversation around the exhibition and be one of a number of dialogues (a fashion show, a tribute band performance, a Bon Scott letters exhibit) with the FAC audience beyond the central exhibition of art works—an opportunity too for substantial audience building.

Another public front is the Ihlein-curated Bon Scott Electronic Sign Project, an LCD screen visible near the old bridge into Fremantle made available by the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce during the exhibition. Ihlein will post messages from fans from all around the world during the course of the exhibition.

How were the participating artists selected for the exhibition at FAC? They had to be interested in the Bon Scott phenomenon but, says Stephens, didn’t have to be fans: “Scott’s fans have shared codes and vocabularies. We wanted artists who are not necessarily fans to break open some of these with a range of responses.” She comments that there are more Scott fans today than when the singer was alive, and they’re often quite young. Themes that have emerged are remembrance, masculinity and rebellion, and a nostalgia for the 70s (as opposed to the 60s lauded by one generation of parents and, says Stephens, her university lecturers). Curious pieces of information emerge from such investigations: there are more AC/DC fans in the northern hemisphere than in the south; many people don’t know that the band is Australian—some think it’s German!

Victorian artist Richard Lewer, who draws, paints and makes video installations, was raised a strict Catholic in a family that saw Scott as satanic. Sydney’s Adam Cullen, who enjoys his own bad boy status, has long been intrigued with how working class male culture expresses itself. Perhaps, says Stephens, “we need a class analysis to understand Bon.” Alex Gawronski, also from Sydney, continues his research into the globalisation of the art world, addressing how being a bad boy can be a career strategy. Western Australian artist Rebecca Dagnall looks at how fans celebrate Scott, photographing them in their homes and documenting the shrines they maintain. Melbourne’s Ian Haig, 11 years old in 1975, recreates the world of the Ringwood Shopping Centre where he saw the band perform. Local artist Bevan Honey is creating an apparition of Bon Scott, sometimes visible, sometimes not, beneath the bridge on the way into Fremantle. Western Australian artist Ryan Nazzari’s suite of paintings evoke the singer’s dark side and are, says Stephens, “very painful to look at, very dark, very black, like imploding stars. What brings a man to the point where he dies alone?”

The sex and death connection is inevitable when dealing with Bon Scott who, although not conventionally handsome, was amazingly promiscuous. Stephens says that the singer was “a prolific letter writer, keeping in touch with the many women he’d met on his travels, often trying out in the letters the lyrics composed and rehearsed on his lonely touring schedules.” Katie Dyer has curated the first ever exhibition of the Bon Scott letters.

As well as the exhibition of artworks in response to the Scott phenomenon and the showing of the letters, there’s a Bon & Fashion night (coincidentally artist Scott Redford’s work will focus on the tightness of the singer’s jeans) and a Perth AC/DC tribute band titled FAC/DC. Stephens reports that once word got out about the exhibition, FAC was swamped with offers from AC/DC cover bands from around the world to come to Perth at their own cost. FAC thought this through and felt happier about putting together a band from strong local talent. It includes two female members, one of them the lead singer, a wry comment on changing times but, asserts Stephens, no less a powerful recreation of the band.

Stephens herself feels that “she’s come to know Bon Scott quite well. Entering his world I’ve met so many men who are his fans and supporters of this project.” That includes Fremantle Mayor, Peter Tagliaferri, but there’s also no shortage of female followers, like Alannah McTiernan, WA Minister for Planning and Infrastructure who turned out to be a huge fan.

The Bon Scott Project is innovative on a number of fronts, providing art with a more public face than is usual, not just because of its subject, a major popular figure, but because it connects with its potential audience through the internet, autobiographically through Scott’s correspondence, and via fashion, live music and intriguing responses from a largely younger generation of Australia’s visual artists. It’s a big conversation, doubtless with a lot of singing along. RT

The Bon Scott Project, curator Jasmin Stephens, artists Stuart Bailey, Guy Benfield, Adam Cullen, Rebecca Dagnall, Cecilia Fogelberg, Alex Gawronski, Ian Haig, Bevan Honey, Matthew Hunt, Lucas Ihlein, Richard Lewer, Michael Moran, Ryan Nazzari, Vanila Netto, Nat Paton, Scott Redford, Eli Smith, Martin Smith, Tanja Visosevic; Fremantle Arts Centre, May 17-June 30; www.fac.org.au/bon_scott_project.php; www.bonscottblog.com

Alasdair Foster is Director of the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) in Sydney and Editor of Photofile. A long-standing publication of the ACP, and the only art photomedia-dedicated publication in Australia, Photofile combines quality reproductions, essays, surveys and reviews. Each edition has a different theme and often a different guest editor.

Strong ideas, clearly expressed. That’s the underlying philosophy. And this is a national magazine, the only one dealing exclusively with photomedia art, so it is important that it reflects what is happening nationwide, not just in the southeast and not just in the metropolitan centres. Although there has been some increase in the physical size and number of pages in the new format, there is considerably greater increase in the amount of content. And that increased content is more diverse, both in opinion and in the method of presentation. There are more voices, more ways of showing and telling.

Will future issues be themed? What are the forthcoming themes and how do you hope to explore them?

At this stage I want to stay with themed issues, it helps give each edition a focus and allows each guest editor to play to their strengths. This is balanced by the expanded review and preview sections, which allow for a reflection of what is happening more generally. In this way, there can be a balance between thematic focus and currency.

The re-launch issue explores the short and medium term future in the light of exponential technological growth. It looks to a world of the transhuman, when photomedia may not so much be a reflection of the world around us as the perceptual world in itself.

Photofile 69, out in August, looks at Australian suburbia. Australia must be one of the most suburban populations on earth, and this suburbia is by no means the dully conformist mire that received prejudice might lead us to believe. It is a place of contentment and pathos, comfort and irony, fierce individualism and nagging doubt.

In issue 70, Photofile will explore money and power, not simply in terms of its representation in photomedia, but in terms of the fiscal frameworks and patronage which sustain the Australian art world and particularly those who arbitrate the cultural value to photomedia. Like the ‘Futures’ issue, it will reflect not only the ideas articulated through photography, but the framework in which the photographic image reaches us and is valued.

What are the key aspects of photography that you see Photofile debating, showcasing or responding to?

Certainly where things are going. Because we are headed there very fast, faster by the year. As a technological artform, photography is both subject to and well reflects upon the rapid technological changes we are witnessing today. The advent of video, DVD, mobile phone cameras, internet porn…is changing the way we engage with photomedia and the more cultural and artistic practices can hardly remain untouched.

I think it is useful to look at art photomedia from outside the rhetoric of art. To consider what is happening in our ever-changing art world from the perspective of psychology, neurophysiology, physics, economics, history, sociology, consilience theory and so on. To try to understand where art fits into the world at large.

Is the new format Photofile a response to broader changes in the production and reception of contemporary photography in Australia?

Yes. I think this is true in a number of ways. There is definitely a greater plurality of approach to both making and showing photomedia in Australia (and internationally) these days. Things are less dogmatic. There is a wider range of what is shown and that allows for and interesting exploration of the interface between these diverse areas. On the one hand institutions like the Photographers Gallery in London or the Netherlands FotoInstitut in Rotterdam are showing a much wider variety of work–conceptual, documentary, historical, snapshot–and on the other magazines like doingbird, Purple and Big bring together a really diverse range of photographers from international big names to eccentric one-offs and emerging practitioners.

I’m not looking to copy those magazines, but they inform the way in which a readership responds to printed images, and the visual fluency and expectations they might have. So it is important to me that we span a range of work, but work which is of real contemporary interest, whether or not it itself is contemporarily produced.

How do you see your role as curator at the ACP in relation to the direction and content of Photofile? How do the 2 responsibilities inform each other?

They inform each other, particularly during this transitionary period when I am also editing Photofile. Information that comes in for consideration by ACP for exhibition automatically becomes known to Photofile and vice versa. It is important given the national scope of the magazine that it draws its information from a wide and diverse range of sources, and this two-way information flow certainly helps that.

That said, I try hard not to overly influence what is contained in Photofile when another person edits it. I do have strong feelings about how things are expressed, but what is expressed is, I believe, up to the editors concerned. I do passionately believe it is not simply unfortunate but unethical to end up limiting the appreciation of contemporary art through ‘mandarin’ language. It’s very difficult to find ways to express complex and evolving ideas and translate them from the visual world to the written. But no one said it was easy. It is difficult. Let’s start there and get on with the job…

Palace Grand ends with an image that would make an effective gallery installation. We look into the interior of a wood cabin where a man, wrapped tightly in a sleeping bag, lies stretched out on the floor like a corpse. Through a window above the body, we sense the desolate, killing beauty of the North. This wooden cabin is the Palace Grand—or, more correctly—the Palace Grand exists inside the man, the central character of this piece.

I don’t think Jonathan Young, the creator of the work and its sole performer, or his colleagues at Electric Company would mind too much that I gave away the ending. If Palace Grand were a murder mystery—a genre it evokes—it would fall into the how-he-done-it rather than who-done-it category. It is clear early on that the two central characters, Walker and Tracker, are really one and the same person and that the driving force of the piece is seeing how the two halves will come together, what will happen when they finally meet at the Palace Grand.

Of course they never formally meet but are brought together for that final, haunting image. The majority of the production details the individual but inter-connected journeys of the two. First is Walker who in the late 19th century travels to the far north of Canada, to Lousetown with intentions of taking over an abandoned mining claim. I think this is the back-story although the fractured manner of the storytelling means that it is sometimes difficult to follow. The key thing to know about Walker is that he’s trapped in a cabin in winter and seeking solace in writing, the only way left for him to impose order on the world while suffering the worst case of cabin fever—ever. The second narrative strand follows Tracker, who has taken on a commission from an anonymous source to hunt down Walker. Tracker carries with him an old fashioned recording device and also relays his findings to a third character, an operator at a remote exchange who forms a sort of analogue to audience.

Associations to do with writing and transmission are central to Palace Grand. Walker never speaks; instead we see his writing projected across a black scrim that frames the playing spaces. This writing is accompanied by the sound of a scratching pen. Except for one pivotal sequence when he arrives at the Palace Grand, Tracker also never speaks; instead Young mimes to a pre-recorded voiceover. Young is a tremendous physical performer and realises the full comic potential of this conceit while—on the other side of the narrative coin—wordlessly evoking the madness and loneliness that grips Walker. My sense is that neither Walker or Tracker—nor the operator for that matter—are ‘real’ but instead are creations of the body we see at the end of the work. In this way, Palace Grand is about the unreliable narrator. Is the body at the end meant to be Walker or is it a third (really a fourth) character? Is this ‘narrator’ from the 19th century or is the whole set up merely a fabrication—a 21st century imagining of a 19th century story? As Walker’s words keep reminding us, don’t trust what you read.

Who, then, is the ‘story’ about? I suspect it is about Young himself. Palace Grand seems a meditation on the dual and inter-related processes of creation (Walker) and performance (Tracker) that go into producing theatre. In a very postmodern conceit, the work is really about the work itself. In previous productions, Brilliant and Studies in Motion, the Electric Company explored the relationship between eccentric geniuses and technology, Nikola Tesla and Eadweard Muybridge respectively. In its own way, Palace Grand is a companion piece to those works. Instead of electricity or photography, it is about Young’s relationship to the creation and use of the machinery and artifice of theatre. This sense of theatrical artifice informs the production in the rigorous and beautiful manner that we have come to expect from the Electric Company.

The playing space is divided into a series of cramped boxes that look as if they’ve been carved out of the darkness. The square playing spaces echo not only the stage of theatre but also the cabin window we see at the end. The boxes are connected by a rabbit warren of tunnels that Young moves through deftly. There are also wonderfully inventive moments, including a rocking chair that turns into a sled pulled by a stuffed dog and a small steamer ship with a puff of cotton wool coming out of the smoke-stack. As in all Electric Company productions, this low tech stage-magic is offset by high-tech projections.

When Tracker finally arrives at the cabin in Lousetown, he doesn’t discover Walker but instead finds himself—or is it Young—on the stage of the Palace Grand, a vaudeville theatre, the kind you might find in a Gold Rush town. For the first time, the performer speaks instead of miming to his own voice and there is a moment of vulnerable confusion as Tracker tries to understand what is happening to him. As the curtain behind him draws back he finds not the expected audience but a pair of mechanical hands clapping eerily. His hunt for Walker is not over. He descends into another box, below the main playing space. This is perhaps the abandoned mine shaft that exists below the cabin itself. We are then treated to a series of images of struggle, the most effective being Walker/Tracker/Young climbing up a ladder towards the audience as if emerging from a mine-shaft. I wish the production had ended with this image. It had a powerful sense of a real person emerging from darkness—from the depths of insanity. However, like a Hollywood movie there are a couple of false endings, including finding the pages of Walker’s manuscript stuffed in a sleeping bag, before we get to the final image of the body lying on the cabin floor.

Electric Company, Palace Grand, writer, performer, set designer Jonathan Young, director Kevin Kerr, lighting and set designer John Webber, video designer David Hudgins, additional video Jamie Nesbitt, properties design Rick Holloway, additional properties Stephan Bircher, sound design Kevin Kerr, Meg Roe, Allessandro Juliani, movement Serge Bennathan, costume design Kirsten McGhie, scenic painter Marianne Otterstom, technical director Harry Vanderschee; Waterfront Theatre, Vancouver, Jan 30-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

Glow by Chunky Move explores of the most basic definition of physical existence: that we are simply organisms powered by electricity. Not unlike a television documentary, Glow follows the life cycle of an organism from emergence into an environment through to its death. The focus of this exploration is the energy that drives the organism and the impact this energy has on its environment.

The environment itself is simple: a glowing, white floor that the dancer moves across. Much of the work is floor-based and the key relationship is between the performer and the white space that darkens below us during the performance. Using a video tracking system developed by German computer artist Frieder Weiss, a form of digital landscape is created on the floor-screen that responds to the movements of the performer. These are not pre-programmed effects but rather respond in real time to the performer’s movements as choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek, director of Australia’s Chunky Move dance company.

For the most part, these are stripped down and stark lighting effects, dominated by white lines and shapes that move across the floor. When the performer first arrives, she crawls across the darkened floor like some an ancient, crab-like creature emerging from the seas. Her body is at the point where a horizontal and a vertical line intersect, giving a sense that the performer is somehow targeted in the scope of a sharp-shooter. On other occasions, the dancer’s body is outlined by a white line that the performer moves and shapes as if pushing from within an electric womb. In a particularly striking sequence, the performer lies in a foetal position, as if asleep, while white lines of varying thickness radiate from her body and race across the floor. It is as if we are seeing the energy seeping out of her into the environment. Although her body is at rest a sense of movement is created. This moment and others where an electric field is created around the performer’s body put me in mind of the aura that an electrically charged creature must give off.

The production is more than a light show and the sheer physical presence of the performer is vital. There are passages where she sensually crawls across the space, making eye contact with the audience and momentarily taking the experience out of the abstract where most of the production resides. These moments of focused attention on the performer’s body are accentuated by a decrease in the volume of the scoundscape and we are able to hear her movements on the floor. There are also moments where the performer vocalizes. While these are less successful, they do remind us of the organic, living creature that is, after all, the subject of this ‘documentary.’

By tracking the performer through light, we are able to see the impact her body has on time and space. There are sequences where the projections are delayed slightly, giving the impression that the floor is holding the memory of the dancer’s movements. This is used to greatest effect towards the end of the show, when the movements are held as black, organically rounded shapes. These shadows move of their own accord across the floor—the first time that the images take on a life of their own. Like strange cancers, the shapes move towards the performer who remains standing and perfectly still. The music builds, a touch melodramatically but effectively, and ends with a loud discordant sound as the shapes seem to re-enter the dancer’s body. The organism is entering the last cycle of life.

Glow ends with the dancer again lying on the floor with what looks like an electrical charge pulsing around her body. Although death is clearly implied, it is a strangely energetic moment. It is as if her energy were being released from her body back out into the universe—or more correctly being absorbed back into the ground where it originated. The dancer then stands in one corner of the space. In the centre of the floor, a grey dot flares, reminiscent of an old television being turned off, a lovely touch evoking an earlier form of technology while giving a sense of the life cycle ‘documentary’ coming to a close. Finally, a last charge of grey crosses the surface of the floor: the screen is dead, the energy gone.

Chunky Move, Glow, concept, choreography Gideon Obarzanek, performers Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, concept, interactive system design Fried Weiss, music & sound design Luke Smiles (motion laboratories), additional music Ben Frost, costume designer Paula Levis; Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver, Jan 31-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

Andrew Templeton is Vancouver-based writer and playwright who’s had plays produced in Vancouver and London.

Small Metal Objects is about a drug-deal that goes wrong. Like any good gangster flick, it’s really about shifting power dynamics. What sets Australia’s Back to Back Theatre production apart from any gangster movie you’ve ever seen is that the drug-dealers are “mentally-challenged”, putting them even further outside the mainstream than your stereotypical dealer.

Thinking about it, a mentally challenged dealer, being largely invisible to the public would have a huge advantage over his competitors. The notion of visibility/invisibility is a key theme in Small Metal Objects. Ironically, when you eventually see the dealers, Gary and Steve, it is hard to think of two less invisible individuals. Gary is large with bleached hair and, to top it off, is played by a woman (Sonia Teuben); Steve (Simon Laherty) is small and thin. Seen from a distance, they make an intriguing odd couple with Gary providing protective gravity for Steve who looks as if a strong gust of wind might carry him away.

If Gary and Steve are outsiders, their customers couldn’t be further on the inside. Attractive and power-dressed Alan [Jim Russell is a lawyer, while Carolyn [Caroline Lee] is a corporate consultant of bundled sexuality. Their striding sense of command is unmistakable and highly visible. Alan is trying to score drugs for a large function scheduled for that evening. When the deal starts to unravel because of an ‘existential’ crisis being experienced by Steve, Alan calls in Carolyn, an expert in change management, to negotiate with the dealers and try to get through to Steve. At the core of this scenario is a delicious irony. The in-control insiders are looking to alter their mental state in order to enjoy some form of escape or even loss of control. The key to realising this altered state rests with two individuals who must confront mental issues dictated not by manufactured chemicals but by nature, something not lost on the observer of this performance.

I use the term observer advisedly. For the impact of Small Metal Objects is directly related to how the audience experiences the show. In a very special form of invisible theatre, the performance takes place in a public space—in this case, the vast atrium of Vancouver’s iconic Central Library. The actors wear small head microphones and move freely through the crowds who are generally oblivious to what’s going on. If the public notice anything, it’s the audience sitting on a raised platform, wearing headphones—so they can listen in on the performers. By these means the production neatly and effectively plays with notions of visibility and invisibility. One couldn’t help noticing the general obliviousness of the majority of people passing directly through the ‘performance space.’ Or how many in our city look like they should either be on the heath with Lear or in Waiting for Godot.

The show commence with a discussion heard through our headphones. The voices are disconnected from the setting; we have no idea who in the milling crowds is actually speaking. It’s interesting to watch the audience as they scan the atrium, looking for the performers. At first I surrender to the idea that we are meant to experience the voices this way, like an overheard conversation between unseen diners in a restaurant. But still the impulse to locate the performers is too strong and finally I spot two men sitting at a table outside a pizza place and focus my attention on them. The voices seem to match up with the movements of their heads. Suddenly my attention shifts. There, moving slowly into the centre of the space, are Gary and Steve. It’s as if they’ve come out of nowhere. The invisible made visible.

A slow, melodic piano score punctuates the dialogue. We gradually gather information about the speakers from the unusual directness and candour of their exchange. Gary, is married and has a family that he would protect at all costs, while Steve is single and worries that he might be gay because he hasn’t got a girlfriend. By the time I finally spot the performers, their exchange has built to a dialogue about dependency. Gary is going into hospital and is worried that Steve is going to be left alone, claiming his friend relies on him for everything.

Then the phone rings and Gary answers. It’s Alan speaking the international code of drug-speak, wanting to set up a deal. Gary’s response to Alan has such a fantastic, child-like blankness that you’re sure there’s been a mistake. Gary even calls out to Steve, “Do we know an Alan?” Long pause. “No”, answers Steve. But there hasn’t been a mistake and Gary finally agrees to meet Alan. The deal goes wrong when Steve, frozen with panic by Gary’s impending hospitalisation and other anxieties, refuses to accompany them to where the gear is kept. If Steve won’t go, neither will Gary. The deal is off. Steve refuses to move because he is deep in thought; he needs to understand something profound. The impact of his conversation with Gary is still resonating. In a performance of remarkable stillness, Laherty remains rooted to one spot for almost the balance of the show, while Gary, Alan and eventually Carolyn circle around him.

Nothing will persuade Steve to give in. Not more money or Carolyn’s offer to improve him or even the promise of a sucked dick. This is when the shift of the power-dynamic is most apparent. Steve considers Carolyn’s offer but still refuses. The phrase “small metal objects” refers to money and the production explores where and how we put value on things and people. Alan and Carolyn’s impatience with the dealers is palpable and their ability to quickly increase their offers through terms that they understand—money, social acceptance and ultimately sex—do not work with Steve or, because of his undying loyalty to his friend, Gary. However, Small Metal Objects is far more subtle and beautiful than this simple decoding can possibly express. It is also more than the cathartic experience of watching loveable outsiders triumphing over the powerful. Many times during the show Gary and Steve express a simple, beautiful logic that reminded me of the questions that children might ask. Questions which show a profound understanding of basic truths but which do not take into account the perceived difficulties that society imposes upon us. Just as we are often unable to answer the questions of children, Alan and Carolyn cannot fathom the dealers they have been forced to deal with.

The show is also about control and a sense of self set against the swirling demands and expectations of our world. I actually went to the library during a subsequent performance. After dropping off my overdue books, I looked back and saw Laherty perfectly framed in the wide rectangular doorway to the library: a vision of perfect, thoughtful stillness set against the oblivious and unseeing crowds. It was a striking image that will remain with me forever.

There’s something sub-human about her. There’s a woman down there on the floor below us, but genetically altered, injected with the genes of a tadpole. Or maybe the DNA of a newborn lizard. Yes, she’s just coming into being. She’s seems to be trying to figure out how to use her limbs. She’s shaking, reaching, rolling and then suffering spasmodic contractions. She can’t get off the floor. The floor, in this case is a pale, bluish-white rectangle set in the middle of the black box of the Scotiabank Dance Centre stage.

With every twist of the lizard-woman’s body, an outline of shadow-light traces her figure and changes shape with her. It seems to be a projection coming from above, but a projection activated by her movement. It’s very responsive: she rolls—it rolls, she reaches—it changes shape. It’s like an LCD halo conferred on the woman by the god-mind of a computer program whose eye is a surveillance camera. Wherever this twitching, spasmodic, humanoid moves within its elastic halo, it is always kept at the point of two bisecting lines of light, which have the ominous look of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.

This is a new kind of dance partnering. I’ve seen other attempts to fuse dance and technology in ways that allow human body movement to automatically generate audio-visual response, but Glow takes it to a higher level. The software developed by Frieder Weiss allows the tracking system to respond instantaneously to dancer (Kristy Ayre and Sara Black in alternate performances) with sophisticated video imagery that superimposes itself on the dancer and floor in black and white geometrical, or amoeba-like, patterns. In one of my favourite sequences, the dancer makes extended sweeps with her limbs that generate spyrographs across the floor. Moving in another direction, a new graph overwrites the previous one, which is fading, creating a beautiful overlay of fan-like blooms.

There is an attempt here by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek to explore the theme of human versus software or, to put it more precisely, to investigate the dehumanizing threat of over-technologized environments. In this sense Glow is both pushing the limits of human-technological interaction, while cautioning against its potential abuses. The woman herself seems to be struggling either to control the technology, or to free herself from the metal-white projections that delimit her movements by putting grids or ropes of light around her. Sometimes her face contorts and she lets out little screeches that might have issued from the beak of a half-strangled tropical bird or a chattering monkey. Or maybe this is the sound an insect would make if its clicking apparatus was enlarged to human scale.

I’m feeling these possibilities stronger now than when I saw the show. To be honest, for all its technological brilliance, I found it hard to connect to Glow. The vocabulary of the floor choreography exhausted itself pretty early on. Maybe this is due to a limitation imposed by the technology. But even though the dancer generates the video display, she seems almost incidental to it, to a demo for the software. Prior to the show, Obarzanek told us that this was a first attempt at integrating his choreography with a new technology. So, fair enough, it may be that this is just stage one—an experiment to see if the technology is responsive. What’s missing is a genuine choreographic investigation, a developed theme or movement idea. Hopefully we’ll get that next time. At the moment the partners in this duet don’t have much to say to each other. Well maybe that’s because one partner is a software program and the other is a subhuman creature wondering what kind of world she’s been birthed into.

Chunky Move, Glow, concept, choreography Gideon Obarzanek, performers Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, concept, interactive system design Frieder Weiss, music & sound design Luke Smiles (motion laboratories), additional music Ben Frost, costume designer Paula Levis; Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver, Jan 31-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

Alex Lazaridis Ferguson is a theatre artist based in Vancouver. He writes plays, acts, and occasionally directs. He’s also a founding member of the performing poetry ensembles, AWOL Love-Vibe and VERBOMOTORHEAD. His writings on theatre have appeared in publications such as Canadian Theatre Review, The Boards, Transmissions.

A tall shifty man in a white shirt and long black jacket approaches a passerby in the covered area of Vancouver Public Library’s central promenade. “Gary?” “Er, no.” “Oh, sorry.” He crosses the promenade and approaches another man sitting alone outside one of the coffee shops by the paved walkway. “Are you Gary?” A bemused no. “Oh right, thanks.” The tall man looks around frantically. He spots another man alone, leaning on the balcony overlooking the glass-fronted library. He crosses the busy promenade. People bustle by with shopping bags and plastic coffee cups. Hesitantly, he asks again, “Are you Gary?” “Yeh.” Although we’re looking from quite a distance, I’m certain that I see a barely perceptible flash of surprise cross the tall man’s face.

On a bank of seats to one side of the promenade, the audience had earlier witnessed the opening conversation in Back to Back Theatre’s Small Metal Objects between Gary (Sonia Teuben) and his friend, Steve (Simon Laherty). Their caring and honest discussion of love, relationships and loneliness reaches each of us us through the isolated intimacy of headphones linked to the performers’ wireless mikes as they amble towards us down the length of the promenade, somehow in a world apart from the crowd rushing by. Initially, we had scoured the crowd to find these two speakers amongst the couples chatting at coffee shop tables and the curious shoppers who look up at us.

Steve’s dependency on Gary is evident, but Gary is a loyal friend. He explains to Steve that he has to go into hospital for a knee reconstruction: “You’ll be alone. I know you rely on me.” The accompanying intermittent chords lend an almost filmic character to the performance, pacing out the seemingly simple dialogue. Later, jagged discords build suspense. Although the reality of this pair seems out of synch with the public around them, their friendship is much more tangible than anything else in this space.

Alan (Jim Russell), the tall man, wants to buy drugs for the participants of some kind of corporate event he is organising. We wonder if Gary knows what Alan, with his mumbled euphemisms, is seeking, since Gary refuses to give direct answers or confirm his complicity in the deal. The fleeting expression I think I see on Alan’s face indicates his surprise, founded in a common socially instilled prejudice, that a drug dealer could be someone with a intellectual disability.

As Alan tries to seal the deal, Gary's role is confirmed: “I only serve top shelf,” he says, silencing Alan with an index finger pointed right into the taller man’s face. But Steve is having a crisis, and doesn’t want to move from the spot to which he has been stiffly fixed since Gary and Alan’s telephone exchange. And Gary won’t leave him to get the gear from a locker nearby, so the deal’s off. Increasingly panicked, having failed to buy Steve’s co-operation or to intimidate him into moving, Alan calls in Caroline (Caroline Lee), his sharply dressed associate. She arrives at the library within seconds. It emerges that she is a change management consultant, a corporate psychologist, who tries to bribe Steve out of his crisis with the promise of private sessions in which he can discuss his problems, with the suggestion that she can arrange for a woman to make him less lonely, and finally, losing any remnant of integrity, an offer of a blow job.

But Alan and Caroline don’t have anything that Steve needs; their brisk, manipulative, corporate approach seems like a ridiculous pantomime next to his genuine expression of feeling and lack of pretension. His struggle is the need to be seen, to be a “full human being.” In frustration Caroline shakes his small frame violently: “You’re a fucking useless piece of shit!” The suited couple storm out. The exchange has empowered and liberated Steve. His sense of dependency reduced, he simply says, “I feel a lot better now, thanks.”

Set apart on the raised bank of seating and in our headphones we provide a spectacle for the passing crowd. But the stares that scan us are just curious. They don’t convey the misunderstanding or prejudice Steve and Gary have to bear. We have consented to our difference and we are protected by being a part of a collective, and by the distance the headphones afford. The experience is powerful in its simplicity, and we realise that what at first seems to be a “conventional drama of two invisible men” as the program note suggests, is also a profound and intelligent exploration of power, expectation and dependency, once we have worked past our snap judgments and fixation on the superficial.

You're driving home alone, late at night in your own city, but the light is strangely green so it feels like another place. A place where you know no one, and everything’s deserted. The empty spaces in this place are bigger and emptier than you remember spaces being. It’s cold outside. The lights that gleam on your car dashboard are a comfort, and you reach over to click on the radio because it feels better to hear a voice in the night.

Duncan Sarkies late night voice is speculative and gentle. Nic McGowan provides the quiet, looping soundscape, which keeps you floating in the strange space of your own city. Together, they may take you away—to the loneliness of outer space, even—but it feels the same as the loneliness you already know. Here: in the static light of a television without programming; here: outside a cottage in the country, glowing with light, that you will never enter.

New Zealand’s Instructions for Modern Living gives us a few minutes with the late night talk radio host who defines the work’s zeitgeist. It also gives us the manager of a fast-food joint, seducing and abandoning a young employee, a couple who have nothing to talk about, and a woman named Wendy who doesn’t know a ghost is following her everywhere. Each discrete scene is created with Sarkies’ storytelling, and McGowan’s accompaniment with voice, piano, theremin, and glockenspiel, and his old-fashioned whistling to punctuate the dark. Shaky, slow-moving video projections light the back wall. We have all the time in the world, and dawn is hours away. The reverb in the music is the sound of time crawling, through the vast empty space between me and you.

Instructions for Modern Living contains few instructions. Drink gin and tonic. Don’t commit adultery. Have friends. There are no guarantees, even for friendships. Words on the screen inform us that, with friendships, “results may vary.” There are few insights among the instructions. In fact, the script deliberately avoids opportunities for insight, highlighting that sense of something missing that is the core of loneliness. “What does the earth look like?”, an earth-bound radio controller asks an astronaut in orbit at three o’clock in the morning. “You know the picture of the earth from space, on the cover of an atlas? It kinda looks like that,” the astronaut replies, missing the chance to pass on something meaningful through the night.

There are things worth staying up for. Love or danger. A great dance or a fine book. A moment of connection. None of the sketches show us any of these moments worth a loss of sleep—with one exception. A man lies awake because his beloved is stretched out on the bed, leaving him only a tiny triangle in the corner. “I can’t sleep like this”, he tells himself. But because he has waited so long for this person, because he doesn’t understand why his luck has changed at last, instead of waking his lover he writes himself notes in the dark: “you lucky bugger, you.”

Without love or danger to propel us, we clock the midnight hours with instructions, hoping for the kind of insight that sometimes comes in the middle of the night, and which we always forget to write down. The moment seems to come near. All those children who are told that the story ends happily ever after, what happens to them when they grow up and find out it isn’t true? Is that the beginning of loneliness? Does loneliness come because there is a separation between who we are and who we used to be? The insight drifts away, the critic was taking notes but didn’t catch it anyway, and the insubstantial night fades. If we really want instructions, we’ll have to invent them ourselves, in the morning.

Instructions for Modern Living, created and performed by Duncan Sarkies and Nic McGowan, technical director and operator Natasha James, lighting designer Martyn Roberts, video Duncan Sarkies; Vancouver East Cultural Center, Vancouver, Jan 30-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

Clark and I Somewhere In Connecticut has to be about images, because it’s based on the contents of five family photo albums writer/actor James Long found in the alley behind his home, plus the events that unfolded when his fascination with those snapshots linked him to some of the people pictured there.

The faces in the photographs projected constantly onto screens beside or behind the bunny-suited narrator (in part James Long as himself) are blurred because he is legally restricted from revealing the identities of the family. Without seeing these strangers’ eyes, it’s hard to connect. However, the impact of the visual images is gradually displaced by the power of a few key anecdotes that are told several times, each time with subtle alterations. And, because names can’t be used, the narrator gives each person a voice-gesture nickname, such as grandpa Superman (swoops arms to one side, kicks foot up behind) or Sad Green (strokes L-shaped hand along cheek) or “Sschcrrh” (swings fists briefly beside hips)—“whose name is not fun to say.” A lighthearted dance, in a way, gradually underlies the storytelling and is partly what leads us from image to word.

Family photographs are intimate in some ways and illusory in others. The narrator—simultaneously Long and a fictional character—is somewhat lonely, wishing to join his lawyer friend and his family on their trip to Disneyland, or pretending to be the person in an album who has a job as a bunny actor for children’s events. He sometimes uses the photos to put himself to sleep, he says, imagining happy events at the family’s summer cabin; later, he meets the widow and learns those were weekends where the disintegrated family put up with each other for a few painful hours.

The narrator also loves dogs. He was walking his dog in a heavy rain when he found the suitcase full of photos, and he treasures the fifth album because it’s devoted to a toy pomeranian named Mandy. But even that love may be a fiction. One of the repeated anecdotes is about a kid working at a kennel who feels for a sickly, runt puppy abandoned by its mother and drowning in its phlegm. The kid decides to kill it by throwing the poor thing against the building. The owner of this story isn’t clear—the narrator tells it first, but eventually three others tell it with varying detail on video—but all like to agree that the puppy’s last thought was probably “wheee!” The way this anecdote morphs through repetition, and the way it’s impossible to know who “owns” the story, embodies the issues of ownership connected to the photo albums.

Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut tells an entire family history through photographs. But what sticks is the visceral image (spoken not shown) of a Japanese man cannibalizing a young woman (the other most repeated, and true, anecdote) and the quadrupled experience of hearing how the puppy dies. It’s a fascinating reversal of how we usually give our eyes top authority when it comes to looking at pictures. If we’re willing to make that shift, maybe we’re also willing to consider whether story ownership is determined by who cares about it most—who digests it, who makes it theirs emotionally and physically. Or maybe we’re not willing, because we feel protective of our photo albums. Either way, the layered storytelling co-created by Long, onstage video artist and co-performer Cande Andrade and six offstage members of Rumble Productions is superb. The bunny suit always carries a sheen of sadness, and the nice-guy narrator—willing to help an old lady on a bus—is someone we trust. The unusual disempowerment of the photographs creates an open channel for us to linger in the narrator’s emotional world, and he tells us about it so well.

Rumble Productions & Theatre Replacement, Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, created by James Long, Cande Andrade, Owen Belton, Camille Gingras, Craig Hall, Anita Rochon, Jonathan Ryder, Maiko Bae Yamamoto; Performance Works, Vancouver, Jan 30-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

The sharp beams of light pulsing off her body are clearly digital, so a simple harmony is established when dancer Sara Black shuffles forward or swirls half-moons backwards in synch with the pulse of highly digitized music. The light often forms outlines that make the dancer’s movements seem liquid, erasing the stutter of a shuffle or a small leap. Other times Black looks like part of a video game, light shattering wherever it touches her edges. Glow takes place in a digital world created by Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek and German software designer Frieder Weiss. Highly sensitive video tracking software projects shapes in real time in response to movements below the lens. The images created this way are, in turn, read by the lens as well, allowing the dancer to manipulate the video world.

We are at the edges of dance technology and the challenge is to blend the fascination with tech and the meaning that choreography must provide. Fascination with sensors and the capacity for motion to generate real time sound and image thrives in gaming, new music and installation art. Audiences want to see what this new tool can, maybe can’t, produce. Glow satisfies that need but takes care, smartly, to create more than a software demonstration, partly by allowing the body be a familiar analog passion-maker as well as digital driver.

When a dancer shifts, rolls or twists inside Glow’s video environment, there are restrictions to work against. The tracking technology is most responsive to horizontal movements—to the points and edges the dancer’s body makes across the flat surface of the floor—and the technology creates shapes that are much more blunt than a body’s articulate arcs, angles or tremors. The choreography seems pushed towards horizontality because of these particulars.

A few times the work does feel like a demonstration, showing how many kinds of tracking this admirably sensitive technology can produce. Dark lines follow the performer’s outermost edges (finger, foot, elbow) as she dances on the white floor; there are dark shadows that only trace the dense core of her body; white lines that outline her silhouette like chalk against pure black. These effects are immediate and compelling, as if the light is magnetically attached to her. Most times the lines look about an inch and a half thick. In one passage they become very fine and the choreography is more focused on the floor, so when the dancer’s hands or feet land and the lines “stick” to them, it seems like Black is dancing inside an extremely stretchy elastic band. In other sections, the tracking produces smudged or delayed images. One passage becomes quite figurative: the dancer lies prone on the pure white floor and when she moves her arms up to meet above her head, soft grey blurs follow, slightly delayed. She looks like a child making angel shapes in snow.

This is where the choreography takes over from the machine. The dancer seems to roll over in shadowy snow, but then her body leaves dark tracks instead of gentle blurs and they, in turn, seem to rise and stalk her. Just when it appears that the show will be an intelligent but mostly pretty examination of software—just when Obarzanek has the audience used to this new “viscosity,” so to speak, of the air-and-light medium the dancer is immersed in—the dance suddenly moves into a struggle. It may be human against technology, or some struggle we’re not privy to, but Black breathes heavily, roars, hisses, screams: the analog body working with its own, ancient strengths. She returns to calm but the emotional arc is what brings Glow from tech study to art.

Clean, bright digital lines can create noise and tension but they can’t communicate this kind of visceral grit alone. In Glow, bodies shine and also decay. The contrast invigorates.

Chunky Move, Glow, concept, choreography Gideon Obarzanek, performers Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, concept, interactive System Design Frieder Weiß, music & sound design Luke Smiles (motion laboratories), additional music Ben Frost, costume designer Paula Levis; Scotiabank Dance Centre, Vancouver, Jan 31-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

The fourth wall is covered with a taut opaque material. In the centre is a square hole: we look into a small cube. Against the painted backdrop of this floating box—a snowy, mountainous Canadian landscape, in turn-of-the-19th century picturesque style—a thin man with a bushy beard, the Tracker (Jonathan Young), opens a suitcase. In black boots, overcoat, black goggles and fedora, his deliberate and exaggerated in movement, stooped yet graceful, is part silent film comedian, part film noir private detective. He is a showman, a performer. The case is his recording device; he sets spools rolling within. He mimes to a voiceover of his own voice piped into the auditorium, as though speaking live. The voiceover mumbles as the Tracker pushes fur onto a can attached to the end of a tripod slung over his shoulder. Aha! A boom microphone! He creeps around the miniature stage, picking up the sound of mosquitoes, wind, the crunching of snow. Soundtrack and live action occur simultaneously, neither leading the other. “Cut that!”, the voiceover snaps. “And that.” “Leave that.” And, we are told, a distant roar (what is it?) contaminates Walker’s recordings.

A white curtain drops to cover the miniature stage. An even smaller hole in the wall, on the left, is dimly lit. The same bearded man, now stripped down to thermal underwear, has cans over his ears: vintage headphones. His movement more subtle than before, he pulls plugs from a switchboard. No longer performer, he is now facilitator. Techie. Operator. Silent listener. We hear the same voiceover: “Cut that.” He pulls out a plug and the buzzing of mosquitoes disappears. “And that.” Another pin removed and the whistling of the wind is gone. The Operator dismantles the recording until all that is left is the previously imperceptible, ominous rumbling of the distant roar, somehow evocative of the emptiness of this northern territory. The voice tells us that there is an operator out there, receiving these signals and messages. The Operator snaps upright, as if his personal space has been invaded. The voice continues: there is nothing between man and outpost apart from the signal of the message. “I’m just letting him know that he still means something to somebody”. The voice begins to chuckle, and the Operator laughs too, happy with this acknowledgment, perhaps relieved at the human connection in this vast wilderness. But the recorded laugh becomes warped and manic. The terrified Operator frantically pulls out all the plugs but the laughter won’t stop.

Earlier on in Palace Grand, by Vancouver’s Electric Company, we have been introduced to Walker the Writer-Explorer, the first facet of Young’s tripartite character, and his expedition to reclaim a mining shaft abandoned after the Klondike Gold Rush. Having dressed himself—top hat, waistcoat, spats, monocle, pencil—in a slapstick routine accompanied by stylised captions projected onto the screen wall that fills the stage (“Tonight only at the Palace Grand…”), he sits on a stool, scribbling onto a stack of paper. A projection of scrawled handwriting tells us that this man can’t be trusted. Has he written it himself? It’s not only this man, and his fragmented personality, that we shouldn’t trust. The world around him (or his perception of it) plays games with him, shifting the goalposts at the blink of an eye, the raising of a curtain. And the whole production plays games with us, throwing meaning over our heads to its miniature alter ego while we jump up trying to intercept the baffling game of catch.

Sophisticated technology in the structure and form of the show (alarming electronic sound interspersed with upbeat country jigs; projections of text, photographs and static onto the beautiful rabbit warren of caverns in the fourth wall; the perfectly timed uncovering and recovering of these holes) contrasts with rudimentary representations of technology within the show’s world (tin cans, a rocking chair sleigh, cotton wool puffs of smoke pulled by hand from a picture of a steam ship). As Tracker’s journey to the desolate north to try to find Walker, or what remains of him, is played out—bounty hunting and performance as metaphor for our existential search for self and meaning—theatre, writing, record-keeping are questioned as methods of investigating or representing life. We hear this man’s recordings, we see his scribblings, and there is a continuous and anxious ambiguity about which element of his personality is communicating to whom and when. This is the “Portrait of the Prospector writing a Self-Portrait of the Prospector.” This is Krapp’s Last Tape set against the fallout of the Gold Rush and the decline of vaudeville theatre. Its postmodern paradoxes will drive you mad chewing on your tail, if not chasing it round in a circle. Once you enter the fun fair hall of mirrors you might well get lost in your own eternal reflection.

In a classic postmodern sequence, the Tracker (or Walker, or the Operator: it’s getting harder to distinguish) has entered the empty cabin he believes to be Walker’s hideaway, only to find no trace of a body. He’s in a vaudeville theatre, we can hear the canned laughter and applause of an excitable audience. But as the red safety curtains open the sound cuts out. All we see are two electrically powered, sculpted hands rising up from a plinth, clapping mechanically. Later he finds a camera, some kind of simple projector: a small black box. He inserts two sticks into the edges of the camera, and two giant sticks simultaneously enter at either side of the floating box stage, threatening to knock him and camera to the ground. Confused, he stops. He decides to signal from the window of the cabin. He faces upstage and flashes the projector on and off blinding the audience. Are we looking in at him from the other side of the window? We lose track of time, of place, of where our position is in this relay. We see a body curled up in the cabin, its face a skeletal mask. We read handwriting that steadily becomes shakier: “It’s you who discovers the body. No-one else is watching but you.” He has run out of supplies. “These words are the only thing keeping me alive.”

And now, as I write, the impact of the visual and technological accomplishment of the show long past, these words are the only thing keeping me awake. From the opaque material of Palace Grand and the many interpretations I’m on the brink of unearthing from its postmodern mine, the resonating idea with which I am left is the danger of trying to read too much into it. Like the Tracker and his distant roar, I’m trying to hear too much. In the same way he doesn’t recognise his own voice or scrawl, I’m not recognising that which is right in front of me: the need to stop searching for answers, truth and gold.

WE’VE BEEN DRIVEN TO A QUASI-INDUSTRIAL ESTATE IN BANKSTOWN, A DISTANCE ALONG CANTERBURY ROAD AND INTO A BACK STREET OF ANONYMOUS WAREHOUSES. URBAN THEATRE PROJECTS’ THE LAST HIGHWAY IS SET IN A MAKESHIFT URBAN SERVO: THRUMMING CRICKETS AND YELLOW STRIP LIGHTS MAKE THE NIGHT SCENE HERE PALPABLY DESOLATE. MIRABELLE WOUTERS’ DESIGN, A PETROL STATION FRAME FLANKED BY A KEBAB STAND, SITS ON THE EDGE BETWEEN THEATRE AND STREET, FILTERING THE SMOG OF OUTSIDE DARKNESS INTO THE INTERNAL AUDIENCE SPACE. BEHIND IT, CARS—BOTH ACCIDENTAL AND PRE-ARRANGED— SHADOWILY PERUSE THE NIGHT.

The Last Highway is a rendition of the kind of night inhabited by people who experience it as bleak and unrelenting routine. Using UTP’s well-established community consultation process, director Alicia Talbot and seven performers have tapped into the lives of society’s invisibles: the taxi drivers, service station attendants, sex workers and kebab sellers who make up Sydney’s nocturnal tribes.

The gender line in this piece is noticeably drawn. Female sex workers (Yana Taylor, Suzannah Bayes-Morton, Kathy Cogill) haunt the servo waiting for a job. The men (George Kanaan, Rajan Thangavelu, Adam Hatzimanolis) are their varyingly antagonistic, sympathetic, violent or disinterested counterparts. The women pace out a slow and despairing process. They are picked up by clients and return (pelted with eggs, often bruised, shaken); the men (fixing an engine, making a kebab) reveal their sorry life stories: migration, a child who suicided, depression, humiliation, racism, contest, defeat. The dramaturgical logic of the piece stems from the internal logic of the characters. The only way to make yourself feel better, it seems, is to make someone else feel worse.

Spats that begin as jokes escalate into violence or disarray. A blow job in the gutter hints at the tortuous depravity to come—a sordid scene of quiet rape for one character who is on the nod between jobs and drugs. Before this, a joyously sick Bollywood-style love dance dedicated to “Pussy” from the service station attendant (Thangavelu) is both comic and crude, and when he ends with a sober “I love you” we somehow believe him. The play with cultural stereotypes is possibly thorny, but brave. Service station attendants come from “Sri Lanka? Pakistan?” “Nah mate…Quakers Hill”, he winks.

What is striking about The Last Highway is its studied depiction of inaction. Everything happens in the corner of one’s eye. Talbot’s blocking is important in this way—it makes a point of physically shaping the stillness and emptiness in the characters’ lives. As an audience we are lulled into accepting this version of ‘normality’—partly because it is a little too familiar, partly because it is a little too strange. The rigour with which the performers sustain this tension is commendable. For all that didn’t happen across the arch of the night, my eyes were wide open.

Urban Theatre Projects, The Last Highway, director Alicia Talbot, performers/devisors Suzannah Bayes-Morton, Kathy Cogill, Adam Hatzimanolis, George Kanaan, Yana Taylor, Rajan Thangavelu, performer Ahilan Ratnamohan, design Mirabelle Wouters, lighting: Mirabelle Wouters, Neil Simpson, sound Carl Polke, dramaturg Deborah Pollard, consultant Lee Wilson, community liason Iina Katsoumis; Bankstown, Jan 16-19, 22-26

IN LUCY GUERIN’S AETHER THE NOTION OF “HYPERIMMEDIACY” (GETTING IT ALL AT THE SAME TIME) IS FOREGROUNDED IN HER INTERROGATION OF CONTEMPORARY COMMUNICATION. TO BEGIN, THE DANCERS SIT AND TEAR NEWSPAPER INTO SMALL PIECES, LAYING OUT PATTERNS ON THE FLOOR WITHIN A DECORATIVE TOPOGRAPHY. ONCE THE AUDIENCE IS SETTLED, THE ARTFULLY POSITIONED PAPER IS DISREGARDED—THE DANCERS KICK THESE THOUGHTFUL ARRANGEMENTS ACROSS THE STAGE. PERMANENCE PLAYS NO ROLE HERE. MY ATTENTION PASSES QUICKLY TO SCREEN IMAGES AND DANCER ARTICULATIONS BUILDING AND OSCILLATING WITH VARYING INTENSITIES, DIRECTIONS, VELOCITIES AND TEXTURES.

The first section of Aether plunges us into a world of odd kinesis. The five dancers, both male and female wearing A-line mini dresses but without otherwise marking gender, merge in and out of solos, duets, trios and a final folk-like quartet of hand holding and lifts. Strange eddying connections present a new language system. The performers displace and frame each other in a moving picture of dissonant images and attuned movement motifs, but it is not machine-like. The angular, jerky intricacies of finger movement, weight shifting stutters and straight limbed rocking are elements organic to the environment they disclose. Fingertips flutter and clench with deep sea resonances; forearms emerge from arms folded across faces like sniffing proboscises; small faltering steps frolic, forming little dances never quite the same. I feel privy to the opening of a beautiful music box, a tireless frenzied wonderland where—despite the entrancement—I think it safer to close the lid.

A rectangular band of light replaces the former video frieze of a vintage bather, duplicated, scratched and rubbed. The dancers perform in front of the screen, changing levels and positions, creating a three-tiered tableau of silhouettes, unlit bodies and illuminated gestures, transforming fluidly to create a volumetric prism of body, light and screen.

The final half of Aether draws on improvisation with some playfully intricate moments between Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton beneath the paper, and a pinching investigation of the outer crease of Hamilton’s knee joint by Kirstie McCracken. Gerald Mair’s score is replaced by the sounding of performers, who vocalise communication between these twitching creatures of the aether, now with personalities and emotions. Small vignettes take on commedia like traits: newspaper as mask, hat and cane. The show ends with Hamilton framed between two audiences, ourselves and the other dancers. He moves smoothly, demanding attention, with a pulsing reminiscent of break dancing and popping.

Against the chaotic, endlessly satiating mass media and battles for personal attention, Aether resolutely offers the spontaneous responses of the moving, sounding body.

Lucy Guerin Inc, choreography Lucy Guerin, performers Antony Hamilton, Kyle Kremerskothen, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Lee Serle, motion graphic design Michaela French, composer Gerald Mair, costume design Paula Levis, lighting design Keith Tucker; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Jan 23-26

AT THE CORE OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE OF SCOTLAND’S BLACK WATCH IS A SERIES OF RECONSTRUCTED PUB CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN WRITER GREGORY BURKE AND FORMER MEMBERS OF THE ICONIC SCOTTISH REGIMENT THE BLACK WATCH, ALL VETERANS OF THE IRAQ WAR. IT’S RICH MATERIAL, LIBERALLY PEPPERED WITH EXPLETIVES AND FILLED WITH EVOCATIVE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE EVERYDAY SOLDIER’S LIFE, EQUAL PARTS DANGER AND EXTREME BOREDOM.

The play is at its strongest when it focuses directly upon the rituals of soldiering, the physical and rhetorical means by which the regiment maintains an intimate connection to its martial history. Their existence as soldiers of the Black Watch is a source of immense personal pride for our protagonists, the continued embodiment of a proud history of Scottish masculine identity, an identity undiminished by their function as the footsoldiers of Empire. In one dazzling sequence, our narrator Cammy is dressed and re-dressed in the constantly updating uniforms of the Black Watch’s three centuries as he explains its history, his body tossed casually about by the other performers. The most fascinating betrayal within the narrative is not the deployment to Iraq, but rather the forced amalgamation of the regiment while still deployed, spitting in the face of history.

Unfortunately, the strength of these scenes is diluted by the regular return to a mode of spectacle that poorly serves the dramaturgy. The clearest example comes about three-quarters of the way through the two-hour running time. Crammed in the back of a damaged vehicle for many hours, the soldiers fill the time with verbal games, lists of what to eat back home at particular restaurants. Despite the ethnicity of each restaurant, one soldier only wants cheese on toast. His refusal to play the game leads to the palpable threat of violence, and the sergeant duly drags the would be combatants out of the vehicle. “You fucking two. Ten fucking seconds.” The rest of the company surround our duellists, waiting hungrily. The ritualised release of pent up aggression, forcibly channelled into a ten-second window after which life must return to normal, is thrilling and confronting, a moment rich in potential. Instead of an intense outburst of violence however, what is presented onstage is a massed fight choreography, in which each cast member fights each other cast member as the video screens count pointlessly from ten to one over and over. The performers are highly adept at this stage combat, but the scene became just another well-drilled but hollow spectacle.

Ultimately, Black Watch makes ordinary citizens, Australian as much as Scottish, feel good about the fact that while they might not support the war, they love ‘our boys’ who wage this war on our behalf. The politics of the work are pretty safe, with familiar messages about the false premises of the Iraq War threaded into the soldiers’ narrative. In one scene, the company watches while US forces undertake airstrikes upon an insurgent stronghold for four hours. “This is nay fucking fighting”, one states, “This is just plain old-fashioned bullying.” The sentiment resonated with the audience, most of whom seemed to have forgotten the opening monologue with its provocative declaration that “Bullying’s the fucking job. That’s what you have a fucking army for.” Whilst the contradiction is deeply fascinating, the production seems to want to play to the supposed soft-left bias of the audience, for whom it seems safe to blame the Americans. If the Iraqis can’t really be the bad guys (“what have the fucking Iraqis got to do with anything?” one soldier demands of writer Gregory Burke), then the Americans seem an obvious substitute.

These kinds of ideological simplifications were disappointing, and conspired with the poorly executed video design and the extended but largely underwhelming physical routines to suppress the raw power of the frequently remarkable writing. There’s a great work buried within Black Watch, but unfortunately John Tiffany’s production, despite its fantastic cast and enthusiastic reception, was not it.

National Theatre of Scotland Black Watch, writer Gregory Burke, director John Tiffany, movement director Steven Hoggett, composer Davey Anderson, designer Laura Hopkins, sound designer Gareth Fry, lighting designer Colin Grenfell, costume designer Jessica Brettle, video designer Leo Warner, Mark Grimmer; Sydney Festival, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Jan 10-26

AS THE AUDIENCE SETTLES AND QUIETENS, THE ORIGINAL OWNERS OF THIS STOLEN LAND ARE ACKNOWLEDGED. THE STAGE IS A BLACK CURTAINED CUBE AND SLOWLY, IN A CRUCIFIX OF LIGHT, AN AMORPHOUS SHAPE BECOMES APPARENT. IT IS A DARK FIGURE, MUTELY LIT. SONOROUS MUSIC PLAYS AS A STARKLY WHITE ARM EMERGES AND DANCES ON ITS OWN, DISEMBODIED AND THIN.

Kathryn Dunn will dance solos from choreographers Frances Rings and Narelle Benjamin. First is Belonging by Rings, which moves from its austere beginning to more expansive movements that softly rock into opening and closure. Dunn’s sinuous wrists turn themselves inside out and she becomes creature-like, fleetingly a lizard, then a bird. But the pointed feet of the ballerina break the shape shifting. Her white skin is luminous in the now grey light and her pert bottom points at us in disclosure of the private body. She swims suspended in thick air, rippling with small muscular movements. She unravels her limbs and folds them in as she dances around her own centre, stroking herself like a loved one. In this intimate room I can hear her move and my innards empathetically dance with her in this intricate and delicate choreography.

Dunn is highly trained in western dance forms and while she is supremely sure footed, she is light more than grounded, more virtuosic than idiosyncratic. Her feet do not the have poetry of an Indigenous dancer. I wondered why she had commissioned an Indigenous choreographer to create a work for her and why an Indigenous chreographer would choose a skinny white woman to dance her dance. Maybe I should tread lightly here, but throughout Belonging it unnerved me to watch this dancer with pointed feet move to David Page’s score in an unmistakably Aboriginal landscape of choreography. Once, and only once, I attempted the dances of Arnhem Land and I knew, in every part of me, that this was not my dance and that maybe this was one of the few things we could not take from them. But after the performance the choreographer smiled broadly as she took her bow, willing and happy.

After an interval too short to drink a glass of wine, we re-entered the cube to a very altered atmosphere. Hung as a fourth wall was a sheer curtain that suspended images in space. Its intrusive thrust into space flung me back in my seat. With a screechingly harsh soundscape Figment developed into an overloaded ride into madness. The sadness of the lone dancer iterates the isolation of insanity and its medical interventions. Layers of reality exist on top of one another in a miasma of sound, vision and movement. The contorted motions of Dunn are swamped by the matrix of production elements, like the schizophrenic drowning under the weight of a noisy and harsh world. Narelle Benjamin bravely and honestly tells the story of her sister and this truth left me completely smashed. The violence of schizophrenia and a sibling’s intense sadness had been imparted.

Into, performer Kathryn Dunn, Belonging, choreography Francis Rings, composer David Page, costume/design Jacob Nash; Figment, choreography Narelle Benjamin, composer Huey Benjamin, video/design Sam James, lighting Glenn Hughes; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 8-12, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 15–20

AALST PRESENTS A SIMILAR PICTURE OF SOCIAL DESTITUTION TO URBAN THEATRE PROJECT’S THE LAST HIGHWAY [P12] BUT IN THE VERY DIFFERENT CLOSE-UP MODE OF INTERROGATION. CATHY AND MICHAEL DELANEY (KATE DICKEY AND DAVID MCKAY) ARE NOT MERELY THE SOCIALLY EXCLUDED, THEY ARE SPECIMENS OF THE SOCIALLY DESPISED: DOLE-BLUDGERS AND NO HOPERS AND—SENSATIONALLY—MURDERERS OF THEIR OWN CHILDREN. OUR ROLE IN HEARING THEIR TESTIMONY IS AMBIGUOUS. WE ARE FIRST POSITIONED AS THEIR JURY AND THEN LATER, AS THEIR CO-CONSPIRATORS AS WE UNCOMFORTABLY REALISE THAT THE TRIAL WE HAVE BEEN STEADILY WATCHING HAS BEEN A DUMMY RUN, A PREP-GO TO GET THE TEARS FLOWING FOR AN EVENTUAL DAY IN COURT.

The Delaneys are fictional representations of an actual Belgian couple who murdered their two children while living in the industrial town of Aalst. Scottish playwright Duncan Mclean translated the original Belgian play (which was based on film access to the couple’s trial) into English with the help of director Pol Heyvaert. The result is a theatricalised verbatim-style piece that plays with our trust of both the speakers and the form. This makes for a compelling audience journey: as watchers our moral incredulity is often overtaken by a more aesthetic necessity to suspend disbelief, to trust that what we are receiving is from a dependable confessional source.

Aalst is less interested in moral sensationalism than in a more earnest exploration of the psyches of two child-killers. We hence traverse the complex social circumstances that might produce the rare event of infanticide. Being reared in orphanages and foster care, and enduring sexual abuse and violence within their own relationship are just some of the histories driving the actions the couple take. Less explicable—although pointed—is the candid and perfunctory dismissal of ‘normal’ living structures the couple demonstrates: “Why weren’t the debts paid?” they are asked. “Possibly we didn’t feel like it”, comes the steady reply.

Performers Kate Dickey and David McKay are exceptional in striking the subtle chord that keeps the audience hovering between empathy and disgust. Dickey’s whole physique and the the quizzical tone of her reasoning embody the mindspace of a character who is possibly beyond comprehension. “What we did was horrific”, Cathy explains knowingly. Her logic makes excruciating sense—somehow. Are we convinced? We don’t know what to think.

Aalst’s provocation rests less in the horrific details of what is played out and more in the way we respond as an audience, eager to condemn the wicked. When this ambiguity is articulated, the piece is strong, and when it wavers, a less dynamic sense of omnipotent judgement frames the pair.

Both Aalst and The Last Highway push the question of whose stories we tell through theatre and why and how we watch those stories play out. Each work, too, drifts into and out of a quiet kind of terror—an almost seething terror, not of horrendous crimes, but of the very bathos of existence, the torpor that sometimes drives people to the edge of something that is mostly kept comfortably at bay.

National Theatre of Scotland, Aalst, writer Duncan Maclean from original texts by Pol Heyvaert and Dimitri Verhulst, director/designer Pol Heyvaert, performers Kate Dickey, David McKay, Gary Lewis, lighting Paul Claydon, sound Matthew Padden; Carriageworks, Sydney, Jan 18-23

OUR DIVA ARRIVES WITH A BANG, KNOCKING A PANEL OFF THE WALL THAT COMES CRASHING DOWN ON THE OBLIGATORY BABY GRAND. SHE DUSTS HERSELF OFF, GETS THE DANCE ROUTINE OUT OF THE WAY, CLAIMING IT’S A SYDNEY FESTIVAL FUNDING REQUIREMENT THAT EVERY WORK CONTAIN DANCE (TONGUE FIRMLY IN CHEEK AND PRESSED AGAINST HER FAKE CIGARETTE), CHANGES COSTUME, VEERS ALARMINGLY AROUND THE STAGE AND ENLISTS AUDIENCE MEMBERS TO OPERATE PLASMA SCREENS SO WE CAN WATCH PRE-RECORDED PERFORMANCES WHILE SHE HAS ANOTHER DRINK. “THE FESTIVAL SAID THAT I COULD DO ANYTHING I WANTED. THAT WAS THEIR FIRST MISTAKE.”

With the preliminaries out of the way, Meow Meow approaches the burning question animating the evening’s entertainment: “How long does it take to fall in love?” Tonight’s performance, she declares, will examine a range of evidence from scientific experts on the subject—anthropologists, psychologists, and neurologists —and include an examination of how the onset of love can be measured. Sure enough, as she sets up her first song, she finds herself unable to sing and after some time manages to cough up an alarmingly long measuring tape—the technology of measurement an obstacle to the form of cabaret, producing a gag reflex.

Mid-song, our host spins suddenly. My seat is declared to be reserved, and I am led charmingly yet forcefully to another chair, right at the end of the catwalk that divides the audience in two, becoming in the process another part of the spectacle, and later a somewhat inept translator for a song. With her curiously engaging mode of aggressive vulnerability, Meow Meow is highly adept at coopting and compelling audience members to perform—to hold her microphone, bring her coffee, caress her as she sings, play the bugle, suck lollipops while blindfolded, and even submit to banishment to a cupboard. With our help she is never left alone, but it’s always clear who’s in charge. Somehow she makes us love embarrassing ourselves for her, ably assisted of course by some of the most gloriously convincing audience plants I have ever witnessed.

Insert the Name of the Person You Love is a cabaret performance driven by distraction as much as by its purported focus on the science of love. In her quest for knowledge, Meow Meow never manages to complete any of her songs, interrupting herself by escalating her demands for audience involvement, swigging more wine and constantly seeking updates about the status of the missing expert, a ‘love doctor’ whose scientific lecture demonstration will enlighten everyone about the science of falling in love. He’s stuck at customs apparently, an insurmountable problem with his visa. The cabaret is just something to fill in the time.

The show continues to wend its way crazily towards an end, encompassing stunning vocal work, an unexpectedly beautiful en pointe dance sequence, and a grand finale to die for. Quite simply, Meow Meow’s constantly unravelling, glamorously shambolic and seemingly out-of-control performance is constantly surprising and always entertaining: a masterful, delicious and delirious ride.

Meow Meow, Insert the Name of the Person You Love, performer-deviser Meow Meow, piano Lance Horne, director Rodney Fisher, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, sound supervisor Max Lyandvert, The Pilgrim Theatre, Sydney, Jan 22-26

FORCE MAJEURE’S LATEST CREATION IS A KALEIDOSCOPIC REVERIE THAT EMBODIES A HOST OF ATTITUDES ABOUT AGE AND AGEING—OF THE PERFORMERS AND THOSE
INTERVIEWED FOR THE PROJECT. BUT RATHER THAN ADOPTING A LITERAL, DOCUMENTARY APPROACH, FORCE MAJEURE GOES FOR TELLINGLY MAGICAL JUXTAPOSITIONS AND
DISJUNCTIONS.

A key part of the theatrical technique of The Age I’m In is the mismatching of attitudes, ages, genders and bodies. In the beginning the massed performers effectively mime to voices belonging to persons often very different from themselves. Late in the work, Byron Perry and Kirsty McKracken excel in mouthing the words of children while exquisitely evoking the out of synch body movements that come with their restless energy and distracted attentiveness—it’s a beautiful dance.

Performers mask their faces with the portraits of others on small and very robust, portable digital screens released from wires above. Elsewhere, these screens are moved up or down clothed bodies, revealing naked selves beneath and the subtleties and sometimes pathos of their ageing. Shared with and tugged from one dancer to another the screens conjure jokey, surreal images evocative of the lateral creativity of youth. Elsewhere, the performers mime their own voiceovers. Daniel Daw, in a richly idiosyncratic dance declares that he never saw himself as disabled and reveals the power of differently-abled performance.

In another strain, centre-stage dramatic vignettes portray gaps generated by the closed world of the iPod listener, or the closed ears of the elderly indifferent to the young (which becomes a squirming mini-dance). Another series, this time of apparently domestic scenes around table and chairs upstage, is less compelling, opaque even.

The Age I’m In concludes with dark intimations of mortality: a slide into dementia, a funeral procession (with a darkened New Orleans pulse), a touching, finely moved pieta (Daw and actor Vincent Crowley) and the fall of fine rain onto the performers gathered downstage—an image both melancholy and suggestive of regeneration, like a sunshower, although oddly inconsistent with the show’s other imagery.

What I liked about The Age I’m In was the way that bodies of one age could engage with those of others in a grand ‘what if’ scenario—“What if I was 80? What if I was four?” And even though the large number and brevity of most of the recorded utterances limited the possibility of any far-reaching empathy, The Age I’m In was always richly suggestive, and, as ever with the direction of Kate Champion, the collaborations across media and theatrical devices was as fascinating as the age and skills mix of her cast.

Force Majeure, The Age I’m In, director Kate Champion, performers Marlo Benjamin, Maggie Blinco/Annie Byron, Samuel Brent, Tilda Cobham Hervey, Vincent Crowley, Daniel Daw, Brian Harrison, Roz Hervey, Kirstie McCracken, Veronica Neave, Byron Perry, set & lighting designer Geoff Cobham, costumes Bruce McKniven, sound designer Mark Blackwell, visual artist William Yang, audiovisual producer Tony Melov; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, January 8-12

IN HIS NOTES ABOUT THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS SHOW IS ABOUT PEOPLE, CHOREOGRAPHER SHAUN PARKER TALKS ABOUT A TIME HE SPENT WITH HIS MOTHER IN THE WAITING ROOM OF AN ONCOLOGIST’S SURGERY. ALONG WITH ISSUES OF LIFE AND DEATH, WHICH THE EXPERIENCE BROUGHT SHARPLY TO MIND, THE PLACE OF PARKER’S DARK REVERIE CLEARLY SEEPED INTO THE WORK HE WAS DEVELOPING AT THE TIME.

Theatrically, this space is rendered as a waiting room of another kind, the nondescript transport terminus beloved of many contemporary performance practitioners. Here, Parker joins Benedict Andrews, Christof Marthaler, Alain Platel and designers such as Anna Viebrock and Mirabelle Wouters, artists who dwell on the desultory spaces of contemporary urban life—the mall, the rooftop, life-sapping bureaucratic and indeterminate domestic spaces, the anonymous late night servo. It seems the little hells that haunt our dreams are the places where our most talented do some of their best creative thinking. These spaces also demand a certain scale, a sense of vista. Wings are abandoned in favour of a wide-open horizontal stage, which automatically gives the works a cinematic feel.

In This Show… a line of plastic seats houses a random assembly of night dwellers, who appear to have little in common save their temporary cohabitation of this transit zone. At one end of the space there’s a wall phone, at the other, a vending machine. Stage right a couple of musicians casually blend into the scene. Behind the seats a glass wall divides the people who gaze distractedly out at us from the space beyond, a kind of platform for a train to nowhere that never comes. From time to time, people stand and depart through the doors unexplained, to return later unannounced. This sense of stasis interrupted by arrivals, departures and time-killing ritual provides the rhythm of the work.

Here we’re less concerned with the strict arc of theatrical narrative than with a loose, musical structure that allows for lateral connections, the possibilities of the passing parade, the sweep of vision in which casual details catch our eye. We’re aware of others in the audience pointing out something that might have escaped another’s attention—the entrance of two new characters via the vending machine, a woman miraculously manifesting an identical twin. In conventional theatre, these would be pivotal moments; here they form part of an unfolding world, the slow unpacking of a state of being.

Of the nine people onstage, only four are ‘real’ dancers. From them there are spectacular leaps and head-spins and strobing (I wanted more of this) and the full dance vocabulary from contemporary to ballet to popular movement/dance forms. But everyone in this work dances in his/her own way. Some of the best choreography links spontaneous gestural phrases into sequences based on the ordinary inventiveness of boredom. There’s a one-man mouth orchestra of violent plosives; a battle scene beginning with finger ‘puppets’ and ending with the stage strewn with bodies, all to the accompaniment of a beautiful lament from the singers. The choreography reminded me of Tanja Liedtke or Alain Platel’s C de la B though Shaun Parker has a way to go yet to match their sustained inventiveness. But This Show… inhabits that same world of odd pairings not to mention musical minglings and eclectic movement scenarios. The versatile Anton playing the aggro nerd with the ghetto blaster has no trouble executing a pretty pirouette. Matthew Cornell impressively switches from the gestural musings of a philosopher to the masculine bravura of highly gymnastic street dance. The sad, lilting songs of the female ensemble led by Mara Kiek dance on air as the singers drift through the space. The troubled looking man by the phone (Tobias Cole), who moves only in extreme slow motion throughout the piece, suddenly bursts into sublime countertenor to sing “Beauty has come like an angel to earth…”

As was bound to happen in a work that claims as its territory “the very nature of life and death” the work is less effective when it gets too close to the deep and meaningful. In some of the spoken sections in which thoughts are ventured on the circle of existence, or an extended dramatic section where one pleads for another to return to the real world, the work falters. I could also have done without the mood shattering readouts on the LED in favour of more translations of some of the lyrics of the beautiful Bulgarian and mediaeval songs which simultaneously wove the spell of this work. A telephone conversation constructed from a string of platitudes was an artless waste of time

What gives This Show… its considerable power is the evocation of a place of understated communion. Shaun Parker has assembled an impressive blend of creative minds and conjured a bright world from the endless distractions of the everyday that interrupt and subvert our darkest thoughts. An assembly of strangers spontaneously synchronises into collective patterns of movement and thought, knowing all the while that just as suddenly any of them may up and leave for the silent world of the platform beyond the automatic doors.

This Show is About People, director, choreographer Shaun Parker, musical directors Mara & Llew Kiek, designer Robert Cousins, original sound design Peter Kennard, collaborative performers Anton, Matt Cornell, Marnie Palomares, Guy Ryan, collaborative musicians Jamie Birmingham, Tobias Cole, Silvia Entcheva, Llew Kiek, Mara Kiek, Nick Wales, dramaturg Veronica Neave; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House January 23-26

ALAS (WINGS) TAKES ITS INSPIRATION FROM WIM WENDERS’ 1987 FILM WINGS OF DESIRE IN WHICH TWO ANGELS ROAM BERLIN, UNSEEN AND UNHEARD, LISTENING TO THE THOUGHTS OF THE CITY’S PEOPLE. TIRED OF AN EXISTENCE OF ONLY EVER OBSERVING RATHER THAN EXPERIENCING, ONE OF THE ANGELS, DAMIEL, DECIDES TO GIVE UP HIS IMMORTALITY AND BECOME HUMAN IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO SENSE, PHYSICALLY INTERACT AND LOVE. ALAS IS THE MOST RECENT CREATION BY SPAIN’S COMPANIA NACIONAL DE DANZA AND MARKS THE FIRST-TIME COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE COMPANY’S ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, NACHO DUATO, AND THE SLOVENIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR TOMAZ PANDUR.

Duato is widely regarded as one of the most important ballet choreographers of the last 20 years. His ensemble, whom he has lead since 1990, has an excellent international reputation and frequently tours outside of Spain. Not surprisingly then, the dancing in Alas is exquisite. On a stage dominated by a cross-tiered, tower-like structure that is evocatively lit from within, 16 extraordinary dancers glide, slide and float. Their technique is immaculate, their precision awe-inspiring and yet their personalities always shimmer through. They are powerful and athletic, excelling at dashing across the stage at breakneck speed. They are equally impressive in the lyrical sections, performing intricate gravity-defying duets. Duato himself dances the role of Damiel. Recently turned 51, his maturity and commanding stage presence are compelling.

Alas is an exceedingly beautiful production with lavish costumes, masterful lighting and many moments of choreographic magic. And still, as a work it is not entirely convincing, somewhat disappointing even. This is due, ironically, to Alas being based on Wenders’ famous film.

Translating a work of art from one medium to another always risks pitfalls. It would be unfair to criticise an adapted work along the lines of the-book-was-better cliché. It is valid though, in this case, to point out that the ongoing success of Wenders’ film is partly due to its striking originality both in terms of content and form as well as its conceptual audacity. It was a masterstroke by Wenders and his co-author, Austrian writer Peter Handke, to parallel the dilemma of human existence with the fate of an angel whose desire it is to be freed of his immortality so he can immerse himself in a world that causes so much anxiety and pain to those who inhabit it. This delicious variation on “the grass is always greener on the other side” is as fantastical as it is poignant.

In Alas, however, the quiet poetry of the film is replaced with pathos and grand gesturing. The beauty it so successfully conjures is not undercut by the bleakness and the laconic theme of hope in the face of adversity so evident in the film. Alas, in fact, comes across as a blatant, almost hedonistic celebration of beauty alone and ultimately has a hollow ring to it. It still makes for a spectacular dance experience but without the brilliance and vision of the film to which it aspires.

Compania Nacional de Danza, Alas, choreographer Nacho Duato, theatre director Tomaz Pandur, costumes Angelina Atlagic, lighting Brad Fields, texts Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, Lyric Theatre, Sydney, Jan 11-13

INTO, TWO SOLOS COMMISSIONED AND DANCED BY KATHRYN DUNN, OPENS WITH BELONGING, CHOREOGRAPHED BY FRANCES RINGS, BEST KNOWN FOR HER WORK WITH BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE. EXPLORING THE INNATE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE BODY AND NATURE, BELONGING IS A QUIETLY INSISTENT EVOCATION OF A WOMAN’S LIFE CYCLE.

Initially crouching in a foetal position, Dunn sets out on what appears to be a journey through imaginary landscapes. Her slender, long-limbed body appears to be driven by an invisible force that takes her across the stage on a winding pathway, often in curves of varying diameters, sometimes spinning on the spot. The flow of movement is constant. The great fluidity that marks large sections of the work is occasionally contrasted by explosions of sharp angularity. Set to a haunting score by David Page with singing by Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Dunn’s journey ends with the inevitable—complete stillness. She lies on the ground, again foetally, the cycle completed. The invisible force driving her has loosened its grip, the body has been laid to rest.

After Dunn’s focused almost trance-like performance in Belonging, she reveals another facet of her performative range in Figment. Choreographed by Narelle Benjamin, it has been created in response to the experience of Benjamin’s sister, a longtime sufferer from schizophrenia.

To capture the sensations of someone with a disjointed, fractured sense of reality, Benjamin punctures her trademark yoga-based movement language with bouts of staccato movement, interlaced with moments of stillness. Benjamin’s choreography with its many changes of direction, speed and levels, as well as Dunn’s considerable acting ability, creates a disturbing portrait of someone frantically, at times desperately, battling their demons.

Figment is a highly integrated creation with Benjamin’s trusted key collaborators at their multi-layering best. Huey Benjamin’s nuanced musical score incorporates sounds of footsteps, clunking crockery and white noise, like someone tuning into many radio stations in quick succession. These sonic cut-ups are complemented by Sam James’ striking video images featuring musical scores, TV static and water streaming from a shower head. The graphs of brainwave activity are especially poignant. Zig-zagging across the gauze scrim that divides the stage from the audience, they evoke oscillating barbed wire fences, behind which the woman portrayed by Dunn is held captive to her delusions and hallucinations. We are shut out, with no access to her world—damned to be mere witnesses to the figments of imagination that torture her.

Kathryn Dunn has danced with various Australian companies including Sydney Dance Company, Chunky Move and Bangarra Dance Theatre. In recent years, she has been based in London and New York. Into offered the perfect opportunity for this highly skilled and charismatic dancer to reintroduce herself to Australian dance auudiences.

IN CHUNKY MOVE’S GLOW A SOLO ORGANISM STARTS OUT CELL-LIKE AND INCHES AND THEN DANCES ITS WAY INTO EVOLUTION, DETERMINING THE WORLD AROUND IT AND THEN FACING DIFFERENCE AS ITS SHADOW SEPARATES OFF AND THREATENS IT, LEAVING THE CREATURE HOWLING AND GROWLING. MORTAL ENGINE LEAPS MUCH FURTHER INTO THE FUTURE, TECHNOLOGICALLY TOO WITH RESPONSIVE VIDEO THAT CAN ACCOMMODATE SIX DANCERS RATHER THAN ONE AND A MOVEMENT SENSITIVE SOUND SYSTEM. THE ENVIRONMENT GENERATED IN MORTAL ENGINE TRULY APPEARS TO HAVE, AS, OBARZANEK HOPED, A LIFE OF ITS OWN [RT81, P41].

The world of Mortal Engine is more palpably human and social and more complex. Unlike the relatively linear Glow, the images in Mortal Engine constellate, motifs resonate. There’s the dance of fingers, alone or barely touching; a couple variously asleep and awake (as if viewed from above) in waves of forgetfulness and tension; Glow-like struggles between individuals and the environment as small dark shapes slither, scurry, scatter and re-group around the body, evoking everything from slime mould to ant attacks to unconscious art-making. A body magically and frighteningly blackened by light dances with but cannot become one with the white of another body. Five or six dancers inhabit the stage in tight formal circles or tangling couples. This is a restless world, a dream world, a nightmare even where humans appear as just another slippery species writhing out of the shadows and assaulting each other or, when more recognisably ourselves, fragilely connecting.

While we watched Glow from above, Mortal Engine uses instead a steeply raked stage-cum-screen; the effect is still of looking down into a strange world given the amount of floor work and the further tilting forward of the front part of the stage for the sleep scenes. The effect is cinematically immersive but with a bracing three dimensionality that cinema is still perfecting. And that depth of field is realised in the bodies of the dancers by choreography that makes great play of shifts between horizontal and vertical planes, between moments of stillness and furious tanglings, abject scurryings and courtly turns.

This is also a world where sound and light perform on their own, where the dancers disappear and a different kind of attentiveness is rewardingly asked of the audience as Robin Fox’s oscilloscope art pulses intensely before us.

In the final passage a strikingly different world emerges as a laser beam tunnels out into the audience and, within and around it onstage, a new drama unfolds—something being completed? It’s a big, risky change in aesthetic and a more familiar one (from clubs to Hotel Pro Forma’s Orfeo) than the sheer enveloping otherness of the dominant mode of Glow and Mortal Engine.

I’m not sure what the potent images of Mortal Engine add up to and look forward to second and third viewings, but the swings between domestic interiority and a feral universe provide an engrossing if disturbing dynamic, and the integration of live performance and projected, responsive imagery is immaculately and convincingly executed.

Chunky Move, Mortal Engine, direction & choreography Gideon Obarzanek, performers Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, Amber Haines, Antony Hamilton, Lee Serle, Charmene Yap, interactive system design Frieder Weiss, laser and Sound Artist Robin Fox, composer Ben Frost, costume designer Paula Levis, lighting design Damien Coopoer, set design Richard Dinnen, Gideon Obarzanek; Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 17-20

AS A MUM, I LOVE THE WAY YOUNG BOYS ARE: THEIR VORACITY FOR LIFE, CAPACITY TO DREAM, TIRELESS PHYSICALITY, AND THEIR PLAYFUL CODIFIED HUMOUR. EVERY MEMBER OF STEPHEN PAGE’S KIN POSSESSES THIS INALIENABLE BOY SPIRIT.

Originally commissioned in 2005 for the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Page’s younger male kin (all nephews, except for son Hunter) take charge of The Studio with voice, live music, movement and seven endearing personalities. Page, in collaboration with his brother, composer David, has managed to mine the inner fragilities and strengths of the boys in relation to issues of discrimination, addiction, violence, and growing up as young Aboriginal men learning their traditions while firmly engaged in contemporary youth culture.

The boys roll onto to the stage garrulously and kick off with a quick ‘bash’—they are convivial in their rendition of an AC/DC guitar riff (more Uncle David’s era), and aptly, with a drum solo of Rage against the Machine’s Killing in the Name. The boys are having a good time, the audience loosens. A car, stage left, is dramatically revealed in its smoking materiality: a burnt-out Torana. Peter England’s design abstracts the urban landscape simply, but strongly, re-contextualises the boys in a shifting montage of scenes.

The car is theatrically pragmatic. Scrambling bodies crawl over and under, entering and exiting through paneless windows, popping up from the boot and the bonnet. Props are concealed and revealed on cue. The outer shell is used to sit and ponder issues such as the significance of the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal history told orally by older kin members, and their experiences of being labeled ‘coloured.’ The latter is charmingly mooted: are we not all “multi-coloured”, sometimes red from anger and sometimes green from sickness? The chameleon car in various lighting states (designer Glen Hughes), inscribes this—sometimes red, blue, green, white, ochre or black. Darker moments (such as the aural witnessing of a fight scene between adults) see the boys sit silently within the car. The stage turns cold, the boys interior.

Kin is performed in a mix of styles, ranging from traditional Indigenous dance to hip hop popping and break, to contemporary Aboriginal phrasing. Torsos shift softly on the lateral plane, weight centred and balanced. The boys’ angular frames deepen the clarity of this grounded movement with paradoxical lightness. During a hip hop battle the beat of clapping sticks is substituted by our handclaps. David Page’s score artfully blends traditional and contemporary, live and recorded.

In Kin, ‘hanging out’, the framework for a series of compressed theatrical happenings, is made impressively real by the boys’ effortless performances, each embodying movement true to their physicality and character. Seven faces steal through the fourth wall, an invitation for us to bear intimate witness.

Kin, devised & directed by Stephen Page, composer David Page, designer Peter England, lighting designer Glen Hughes, videography Douglas Watkin, performers Isileli Jarden, Ryan Jarden, Hunter Page-Lochard, Josiah Page, Samson Page, Sean Page, Curtis Walsh-Jarden;Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 23-26

More 2007 Sydney Festival: Anita Fontaine’s locative media work, Ghost Garden, in the Sydney Botanical Gardens for dLux/Media/Art, page 24, and virtuoso Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen in concert, page 47.

PERFORMA 07 SWARMED ALL OVER NEW YORK CITY—IT SHOWED WORK ON BROADWAY, AT SMART UPPER EAST SIDE HOMES, IN TRENDY CHELSEA GALLERIES AND EVEN ACROSS THE RIVER IN BROOKLYN AND LONG ISLAND. BUT ITS MOST MEMORABLE PIECES WEREN’T THOSE THAT FOUND AN ATMOSPHERIC CORNER OF THE CITY TO CALL THEIR OWN. IN A TOWN WHERE EVERYONE’S ON THE MOVE, THE MOST MEMORABLE PIECES IN PERFORMA 07 WERE THE ARTWORKS THAT TOOK TO THE STREETS AND TACKLED THE DYNAMISM OF NEW YORK ITSELF.

Christian Jankowski invited visitors up to the roof of his Lower East Side apartment block one chilly Saturday morning to witness the surrounding cityscape suddenly come alive—with hula hoopers. Thirty men, women and one child twisted and bobbed in unison. Following a sight line from Suat Ling Chua—Jankowski’s neighbour whom he spotted hula hooping as a fitness regime—these dancers linked together the Manhattan skyline. They connected derelict buildings to new apartment blocks, neon-fronted shops to shiny glass office buildings. The joyful simplicity of Rooftop Routine sutured social, financial and racial differences that are felt more keenly on New York’s streets.

While the sight soothed New York’s wounds, however, it also emphasised the awesome scale of the city. Like the tiny figures in a sublime landscape, the hula hoopers looked fragile and weak. To watch Rooftop Routine, then, was to thrill in the shared danger of city living. As the dancers continued, other New Yorkers stumbled onto their rooftops to watch, and the intimidating skyline was temporarily transformed into a rolling landscape of domestic vignettes.

While Jankowski relied on his audience to take part in a celebration of the city, Pablo Bronstein might have preferred it if people stayed away from Plaza Minuet. In an interview he said, “The presence of the viewer distorts the space.” Bronstein’s interest in the physical landscape of New York was not as a home for individuals but as a battle ground for ideologies. Orchestrating four performances that took place in and around Wall Street, Bronstein pitted the architecture of New York’s financial district against the bodily discipline of ballet.

In each of the Plaza Minuet performances, a troupe of turquoise-clad dancers bounded into what are known as ‘privately owned public spaces’ (areas designated for public use and owned by private companies), and moved in silent unison between ballet positions. These spaces are designed to be used in a particular way—the vast atrium of 60 Wall Street, for example, is lined with palm trees that make sure people walk in lanes and carry on moving. And they’re usually used by particular types of people who wear suits and sombre colours. But the bright costumes and refined, aesthetic movements of Bronstein’s dancers contravened these unspoken rules. Making alternative use of this space, the dancers brought its hidden rules to light.

More interestingly, the dancers in Plaza Minuet did not just contravene the modes of behaviour implied by Wall Street’s architecture, but actively competed with it. Controlled by Bronstein and a choreographer, Hilary Nanney (who barked orders as they performed), the dancers escaped the strictures of Wall Street only by conforming to the strictures of ballet, itself the product of Renaissance-era social control. Displayed against each other, both types of authority—the imperatives of Wall Street’s architecture and the contortions of ballet—were stripped of their aspirations to naturalisation. But the comparison also showed that authority in this sense is inescapable, whether in 21st century New York or in 15th century Florence. The question is—is it more bearable when we pretend it’s not there?

While Rooftop Routine offered a heart-warming break from everyday life, Plaza Minuet took a chilly, forensic look at the mechanisms that control daily living. And while Jankowski revelled in the common, human interest of New York, Bronstein focused on the meta-structures of the city as institution. By engaging with the real conditions of New York these artists created experiences unique to Performa 07. More importantly, they represented an essential dimension of Live Art: art that exists outside formal art venues destroys the notion that (good) art is ever separate from life.

Performa 07, Christian Jankowski, Rooftop Routine, Nov 3; Pablo Bronstein Plaza Minuet, New York, Nov 7 2007

ALLAN KAPROW’S 18 HAPPENINGS IN 6 PARTS, WHICH INTRODUCED THE WORD ‘HAPPENING’ INTO POPULAR CIRCULATION, WAS ORIGINALLY PRESENTED IN 1959 AT THE REUBEN GALLERY IN NEW YORK CITY. FOR THOSE OF US REMOVED BY TIME OR DISTANCE FROM THESE ORIGINAL EVENTS, THE ‘HAPPENING’ HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR, HAVING BECOME A CATCH-ALL TERM FOR UNCONVENTIONAL PERFORMANCE EVENTS WHICH EMPHASISE THE ABSURD, THE PROVOCATIVE, AND THE UNSTRUCTURED. ATTENDING ITS RE-CREATION FOR THE 2007 PERFORMA BIENNIAL IN NEW YORK REMINDED ME THAT THIS EVERYDAY USAGE IS A LONG WAY FROM KAPROW’S ORIGINAL INTENTION. ALTHOUGH 18 HAPPENINGS HAS PLENTY OF NON-NARRATIVE EVENTS, THEY OCCUR WITHIN A CAREFULLY STRUCTURED FORMAL COMPOSITION WHICH PLACES THE AUDIENCE, RATHER THAN THE ACTIONS OF THE PERFORMERS, AT THE HEART OF THE WORK.

This 2007 version was directed by André Lepecki, who holds an academic position at New York University and writes about the relationship between choreographic writing and representations of the body—how bodies and actions are re-created from written records. Lepecki emphasises that his version of 18 Happenings is neither re-enactment nor re-construction, instead favouring the term “re-doing.” He argues that the objective of this project is not “time travel” or the resurrection of the historical event. Instead, Lepecki’s version exists in the present, looking from here and now at what remains of the past event—its form, the writing about it, the significance it has accumulated. One of the ways in which the past is framed within present experience is reflected in the material construction of the event: rather than taking place within the entire floor of a loft gallery, as in the original, this version uses timber panels to construct a space with the dimensions of the former Reuben Gallery within the much larger Deitch Studios warehouse.

Stepping into this space is like a kind of inter-dimensional travel (though it might have felt like that in 1959 as well). Notwithstanding Lepecki’s desire to distance this project from historical re-enactment, I am struck by the ways in which the insights the experience gives are those which are only possible through inserting my own body into it, as opposed to reading texts about it or looking at photographs. This is exactly the value commonly given to re-enactment—as in police re-enactment, for example, which uncovers details that would otherwise have escaped notice. In the case of 18 Happenings, what is revealed is the pivotal role of the audience.

The ‘loft’ space is divided into three rooms. Simultaneous mini-performances occur in each, and the audience changes rooms every two performances. This much I knew from historical accounts, and I was prepared for a cacophonous experience in which I would be overwhelmed by multiple, disparate actions happening simultaneously. However, the actual experience felt less concerned with simultaneity than it was with distance and alterity. That is to say, while relatively mundane actions happened in my room—someone bouncing a ball, or squeezing oranges into juice—I never found myself struggling to pay attention. In fact, I hardly paid attention to them at all, instead finding myself peering curiously through the semi-transparent plastic dividers into other rooms. Even though I knew full well that what was happening there was of the same banal quality as what was happening in my room, it had a mystery and allure because of the fact of being in another room. Contrary to my expectation of chaos, there wasn’t too much information for me to take in. Instead, there seemed to be deliberately too little, with my desire to have full knowledge of the event frustrated and deferred by the arrangement of space.

Attending the re-doing produced a similar insight about the 15 minutes of “mingling” prescribed between each audience rotation. From a theoretical vantage, this might be dismissed as inconsequential filler, but actually ‘being there’ gave added significance to these in-between periods. One of the ways this happened was through its repetition as an activity, so that in the second period of mingling I had an opportunity to reflect on what I was doing and even revise how I mingle—do I want to head straight for a seat which looks like a promising vantage point? Do I want to explore the other rooms more fully? Do I want to meet a stranger? Additionally, these periods seem to last longer than the actual performance periods. The timing of Lepecki’s re-doing follows Kaprow’s instructions fastidiously, so this, too, is part of its intended effect.

I was made additionally aware of my own role in the performance by the program notes’ explicit reference to my involvement: “the visitors—who sit in various chairs” are listed in the cast of participants along with those “who speak” or “who move” or “who move objects.” A critical account of the original happening might miss this detail, but it’s hard to avoid while clutching a program the whole time. Of course, this interest in audiences is evident in Kaprow’s writings from the time, but he’s more often remembered for having expanded the range of what was permissible as performance. Lepecki’s re-doing rightly shifts the focus back on the audience, curious about what is happening in other rooms and curious, too, about each other. What’s ‘happening’ isn’t just a series of conceptual performances, which can be understood through their documentation. Instead this work is acutely aware of the ways in which an audience is produced and crafted—and the only way to really know what this experience is like is to be part of it.

Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing), director André Lepecki, presented by Performa, Dietch Studios, Performa 07, New York, Nov 11,2007

“MÉXICO IS DIFFERENT LIKE A TRAVEL FOLDER SAYS.” THUS QUOTH THE IMMORTAL BARD, RY COODER. THROUGH THE LENS OF THE RECENT TRANSITIO_MX02 FESTIVAL OF ELECTRONIC ARTS & VIDEO YOU CAN SEE WHY. OVER A PLATE OF CHILES RELLENOS, DIRECTOR OF THE TRANSITIO_MX02 FESTIVAL GRACE QUINTANILLA RECOUNTS A STORY HER YOUNG SON TOLD HER, IT GOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS:

God is feeling friendly so he invites all the devils and demons to a dinner party but he imposes one condition, they must eat and drink without bending their arms! Without a second thought, the devils and demons accept and arrive promptly for the feast. They eat voraciously, lifting the delicious food and drink vertically above their heads with arms outstretched, pouring the victuals into their mouths like an avalanche. It is a bunch of happy, but very messy, devils who return home that evening, God is well pleased.

Following this success, God decides to hold another dinner party and this time he invites all the angels, democratically imposing exactly the same conditions. The angels think about this awhile and then accept. They fly into the dining room to take their seats and say grace. God watches with a smile on his face as the angels begin to eat, taking food in their hands and offering it to their neighbours.

This metaphor of communal action was the foundation for the curatorial strategy behind Transitio_MX02 festival, this year entitled Nomadic Borders. Conceived as a frontier upon which we temporarily converge before transit, the festival experimented with a series of multi-skilled curatorial teams tasked to interrogate concepts of Communities-in-Process and Processes-in-Community addressing the problematic relationships between communities and technologies.

As an Australian participant it was inevitable I’d contrast and compare México and Australia as two ‘New World’ post-colonial cultures, that exhibit a curious blend of parallel and divergent cultural formations. Both are peopled by Indigenous cultures, both were savaged by aggressive European invasion and both are now ironically tied to the apron strings of the USA economy. The salient issue, why do the two cultures feel so different?

Stereotypes are never useful, and here in Los Estados Unitos Méxicanos (The United States of México) they are redundant. At Tenotihilan (México City) the Conquistadors encountered an extraordinary urban complex, geometrically organised at a massive scale. Following the conquest, the Spanish (literally) overlaid it with the colonial architecture of Imperial Spain, grandiose and expansive.

Revolutionary México re-organised colonial urbanism with the mark of Socialist triumph, leaving contemporary México City with vistas, monuments and public buildings that dwarf those of Hausmann’s or Mitterand’s Paris.

In contra distinction, the Indigenous people of Australia had evolved a subtle and mostly immaterial culture, stabilised sometime in the Palaeolithic era, that was in effect, invisible to the industrial era English colonisers. The English brought with them the crude utilitarian architecture of the penal colony; gaols, wharfs, warehouses and the odd bourgeoisie villa, formed the architectural palette, cemented by little or no urban planning until the Victorian Gold Rush finally established both urban planning and civic architecture of a comprehensive nature.

The divergence between Méxican and Australian patrimony begins from first contact. Both sets of colonisers were ruthless but the Spanish, unlike the English, mixed. México is 80% mestizo, producing a hybrid culture typical of so many colonised countries, richly complex, eclectic, and wide open to receive and adopt new forms. Such pluralism makes for a complex and at times contradictory society but one that is essentially free of fundamentalist or purist views. The Australian government sanctioned mantra of multiculturalism is less of an organic hybrid in its fragmentary mosaic form—neatly lampooned by the Chicano artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña as culti-multuralism.

To compound this divergence, Spain was at the zenith of an agrarian empire but England was rapidly developing as an industrial powerhouse set on establishing a global economy. Despite being exploited as a mine and farm site, Australia remained connected to the paradigms of invention, research and industry, whereas by and large México has a poor international reputation in these areas but is strongly identified with the arts and literature, in effect the Méxican national product.

New technology is thus a fully-imported consumer product, with which Méxicans in general and artists in particular have a flirtatious relationship, playing with the seductiveness of such technology but at the same time cultivating an awareness of the pitfalls that such seduction implies. Grace Quintanilla pointed out to me that an artist can be a very good photographer even if they have no part in constructing the camera; likewise México is producing serious and mature works of technological art focused on the development of a critical discourse rather than being obsessed by the technology employed.

To elaborate, here are six vignettes drawn from a large and polyglot event, which spread over three impressive venues and which included a four-day critical symposium. Whilst all of these works rely upon technology it was not the principal focus. The level of experiment and risk-taking designed into the curatorial process was clearly expressed in the exhibition venues.

jardin

Sheen, slick and cool are not adjectives that spring to mind when contemplating Jardin by Chicano artist Jamie Ruiz Otis (México). One could use technoserene to describe this formal zen garden setting totally constructed from grains of grey recycled computer plastic, the solemn grey rocks themselves VDU monitor cases. Being zen the work was otherwise mute and self-effacing but drew the visitor into a conflicted world of technological pollution, recycling, conspicuous consumption and the ersatz in general.

carreta nagua siglo xxi

Ricardo Miranda (Nicaragua/USA) worked pretty hard for his money performing his Carreta Nagua siglo XXI project. Each day he took visitors for a spin in La Alameda park in his homemade rickshaw, muscle power providing both the motive force and the electrical energy to power the interactive AV narrative dealing with the migrant experiences of his family in New York City. A collision of two forms of basic technology but employed as a pretext for direct social engagement, this work dissolved the barriers between artist and audience in an earnest manner—a sweating artist cannot be accused of being idle.

continuum, continuus

The Laboratorio Alameda was once a nunnery, replete with an outdoor barbeque area used to burn heretics during the inquisition (yes they got to the New World too). Continuum, Continuus, a video-sound work by the Croatian artist Toni Mestrovic swells to fill one of the huge arched interior spaces. Enveloped by a fat, rich and totally immersive surround-sound field, reminiscent of the bottom end of a Gregorian chant, is a simple looped image of a man endlessly handling rocks. The protagonist is rebuilding a Croatian dwelling; no moral play is attempted but the work is pregnant with potential.

sonic bench

Sonic Bench by British artist Kaffe Matthews presented both a stand-alone outdoor public sonic-object and a performance work. With origins in the collaborative Music for Bodies project [www.musicforbodies.net], Kaffe’s audio sculpture invited an embrace of the haptic and the kinaesthetic. Destined for reception in the viscera rather than the ear, a shifting palette of tones enveloped visitors via skin and muscle contact, in a sonic massage. Like many other works in Nomadic Borders, the Sonic Bench shouted out for a re-enchantment and re-embodiment of new media in a shift of attention away from technical delivery to affect.

black market

Walking under a massive stone arch, a small coin falls on my shoulder, an insignificant, almost valueless silvery disc. But the coins keep coming, a slow cascade launched into the void by an industrial conveyor belt, jutting over the balustrade above. Black Market, by Mario de Vega (México), employs these diminutive specks of value to represent the minimum wage of a day labourer in México City. It seems pitiful—it is pitiful in a city full of people struggling, in a country struggling, against the behemoth of the USA.

tierra y libertad

In a not dissimilar vein, Iván Puig, another Méxican artist, has established an electro-mechanical drilling and excavation mechanism in the galleries of CENART (Centro Nacional de las Artes, a 35 acre art, architecture and performing arts academy). Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) has ground through the floor and brings to the surface a meagre supply of brown México City dirt. Another canny mechanism processes the payload and heat-seals it into small plastic bags, free for the taking, the conjunction of land and economy, the constant depletion of resources and the avarice of the cultural market do not fail to surface.

Transitio_MX02 Internal Festival of Electronic Arts & Video, México City, Oct 12-20, 2007, http://transitiomx.net

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED THAT MOMENT AT THE MOVIES WHEN THE LIGHTS DIM, THAT SECOND OF PITCH BLACKNESS BEFORE THE TRAILERS BEGIN. YOU FEEL THE COLD IN YOUR BONES AS THE GLOW IS SUCKED OUT OF THE ROOM. I’M A MORNING PERSON BUT I LOVE THE FAUX NIGHT ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON AS THE FILM BEGINS.

This isn’t the first Lawrence Johnston film to explore the delicate balance between light and dark. In his previous feature documentary, Eternity, he sinks into the mysterious and moody world of a man who walks the streets and creates at night, beyond the halo of neon, writing one word over and over on the Sydney sidewalks in a perfect copperplate script: gold chalk on black asphalt. Poet Arthur Stace is a shadowy figure who, in Johnston’s melancholy film, emerges out of the darkness after he literally “sees the light.”

The only place to see Johnston’s latest feature doco Night is at the cinema. From an extraordinary opening that captures the violets and aquas of swirls of lightning caught in a violent score recorded in Poland with the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra by composer Cezary Skubiszewski (who also featured in films The Pianist and The Three Colours trilogy), we’re led into a dreamy, meandering evocation of what night might mean, tracing its themes through the ideas of coming home, contemplating the stars, going out to party and dance, the buzz and lows of shiftwork, bad dreams and blackouts, and ways of looking at the moon. Like the mood pieces Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi, Johnston’s film doesn’t have a strong narrative drive. It’s about capturing moments, fleeting feelings, transitions.

Australian voices drift over landscapes bringing new poetic definitions: a man sees sunset as light and dark vying and negotiating; another speaks of the beauty of the word ‘evening’ as a smoothing, a drawing, of the harshness out of light. Like a giant lava lamp, the beauty of the film releases and lets go. A windmill stutters. Majestic landscapes—Uluru, the Olgas—point to the stars. Children speak and make their usual simple but profound insights. As night clouds drift at an abandoned drive-in, a boy talks of how small the stars make him feel. A parent advises that when a child is about to die, to look closely at the “beloved’s eyes”, for in the nights to come they will be only stars. Home movies of the Page children dancing and dagging for the camera in their PJs captures that sense of excitement/loss that bedtime brings—what you’re missing out on when the lights go out—interweaving with David Page (writer and actor, and composer for Bangarra Dance Theatre) talking about his nocturnal adventures: how he was dared to climb out and, clinging to the gutters, work his way around the house, past his parents’ window. Adam Elliot (Oscar winner for Harvie Krumpet) gives his usual hilariously skewed perspective, saying that he loved blackouts as a child because it meant that he was allowed to hold his willy, because no-one else could see.

Johnston is especially interested in bodies, how they move through time and space. At the disco bowling alley the footage is beautifully choreographed, the run-up and let-go of sending a ball hurtling to the pins becomes a precise then free dance, capturing the joy in women as they make a strike, hug and cheer together. As the intimacy of night “forces you out of your eyes and into your other senses”, the film becomes full of sounds and textures. As a couple describe swimming at night, the sensuousness of their words and the water mix: the woman moves through the ocean “like velvet…almost a different element”; the man feels the water as “a woman”, taking on the sheen of skin.

Like all great docos, there are contradictory elements at play. A woman speaks of her love of coming home after work, opening that door to a sanctuary. But a man reminds us of the violent changes happening around us, communities displaced and disintegrating; the ability to ‘come home’ is diminishing. A man remembers the moon filling him with romantic yearning; a boy knows the moon protects the Earth from comets; a priest says that on full moon nights there’s no question, he has “more confused people to deal with.” A man says you can get away with more at night, you can lie, under the cover of darkness; but a cop knows that catching criminals at night is like “falling off a log”—if you pull random cars over at 3 or 4 in the morning, there’s a high chance that they’ll be “up to something nefarious.”

What’s unusual about Johnston’s doco is that it captures the faces of people in repose. As they experience the night—catching a train home, waiting at the station, sitting at their desk in a blindingly lit office—there’s a stillness to them that you don’t often see. People interacting with others are usually animated, passionate. This film visits them alone, unaware of the camera. An interviewee suggests that your rhythms, the lines of journey, become different at night. As you walk in and out of pools of light, you become “closer to yourself” without the long “vistas of vision.” This sweet captured intimacy often reminds me of the works of Bill Henson—an artist also enamoured with the dark and who features here too as one interviewed—especially his photos of groups of people gathered at traffic lights, unaware they are in the frame, waiting for the green man; or his series on children at the opera (Paris Opera Project 1990/91), their faces still and bright out of the liquid darkness. In Night an exquisitely beautiful fragment on churchgoers, set to Nina Simone’s Everything Will Change, focuses on children holding candles, their faces glowing as if lit from within as they pray.

There’s a healthy and popular argument emerging for the slow food movement, and I like the idea of a parallel one for slow film. Prepared carefully, using hand-picked and home-grown ingredients until the flavour’s just right, shared lovingly with friends and family, taking hours to consume, a day to digest. This film continues to raise ideas and imaginings and haunts me for weeks. I emerge into the dark-and-light of Market Street to catch a train, blending again into the cityscape, watching my fellow passengers heading home one foot in front of the other, deep into the night.

Night, writer, director, producer Lawrence Johnston, producer Lizzette Atkins, cinematographer Laurie McInnes, editor Bill Murphy, composer Cezary Skubiszewski, sound designer Livia Ruzic, distribution Dendy

THE MATERIALITY OF FILM IS CENTRAL TO THE CURATORIAL MISSION OF BRISBANE’S OTHERFILM FESTIVAL (OFF). HERE, THE IMMINENT DEFICIENCIES OF THE MEDIUM—ITS BULK, ITS FRAGILITY, ITS INCREASINGLY ANTIQUATED TECHNOLOGIES—ARE RECAST AS POSITIVE ADVANTAGES: WHIMSY, ORGANICISM, NUMINOUSNESS, HISTORICAL CONTEXT. WITHIN A CONTEMPORARY ECONOMICS OF DIGITAL SUPERFLUITY, THE VERY INCONVENIENCE OF FILM REQUIRES, OF NECESSITY, A DISCIPLINE OF ITS CREATORS. NO OTHER MEDIUM DEMANDS AS MUCH RESORT TO COMPLEX FORMULAE RELATED TO LIGHT, DISTANCE, TIME AND CHEMISTRY: DESPITE THE EVANESCENCE OF THE PROJECTED IMAGE, NO OTHER MEDIUM CAN ADVANCE THE CONCEIT THAT IT EMBODIES THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE UPON SO COMPLETE A SCALE.

Of course, film is simply a medium: the indispensable tools for any artist are intelligence and imagination. Previous editions of OFF did much more to reconcile analogue and digital technologies, and host accommodations of both narrative and expressly visual cinema. In retreating from this inclusive homogeneity, the OFF curators entertain the risk of indulging a form of romantic steam-train anachronism. While this may not be an unreasonable creative response to the experience of the modern world, it has some evident limitations. For me, the strongest works at OFF were often those that visibly responded to the personal experience of the creator, rather than the historical context of the medium.

The subject of OFF’s retrospective survey was veteran Melbourne experimentalist Dirk de Bruyn. His work is a striking convulsion of sound and image, and a dedicated engagement with the suburban dislocation of a ‘New Australian’ migrant. Central to his concerns are the limits of language per se; this is an existential enquiry. The hallmarks of these films are a naive sound poetry and the colourful use of optical printing to fracture the spatial contiguity of the screen. The work of this extravagant polyglot, devoted to identity confusion, estrangement from the physical environment and the conflict of native tongue and adopted vernacular, might profitably be compared to the film experiments of Ronaldo Azeredo and other Brazilian concrete poets. OFF’s expansive survey of de Bruyn’s cinema and performance has been elaborated by the publication of a valuable monograph, by the tireless Lienors and Dan Torre, themselves engaged in a revelatory investigation of Australia’s native counter-traditions of animation practice.

Among the several international guests, Bruce McClure (USA) was particularly noteworthy. His work exemplifies the field of ‘Flicker’ minimal cinema; three projectors in tandem showing alternating white and black frames, while the PA throbs to a brut ostinato. From this rudimentary technological premise, McClure is able to essay a compelling experiment in Gestalt psychology by making delicate adjustments to the projector aperture gates, with the delay effects governing the soundtracks. As an auditor, there’s an essential fascination to be derived from the brain’s attempt to transfigure coherent form of this simple stimuli: object relations in the form of grids and patterns, sound-image correlations. Volume is a crucial aspect of this work, and supports the immersive qualities of the enveloping darkness; the soundtrack is pleasingly akin to the most challenging industrial music experiments of Boyd Rice’s NON. Minimalism is rarely to my taste, but McClure is at the pinnacle of his field, and his work amply justifies OFF curator Joel Stern’s continuing interest in this neglected margin of experimental cinema.

In company of fellow curator Sally Golding, Stern also figures as part of the expanded cinema ensemble, Abject Leader. Their newest work makes a studied advance on the colour-separation experiments presented by the Cantrills at the previous year’s Festival. This is another variety of minimalism: an antique portrait filmed and projected through green, red and blue filters, the footage converging on a single portrait-format screen. Better than many theoretical expositions of the same idea, the work perfectly illustrates the uncanny essence of cinema: the ambiguity of a static, human form, but projected by a technology that assumes motion, creating the effect of a perceptible tremble in the frame and features of our protagonist.

Some expanded cinema pieces did employ digital projection technology, though not always to their advantage. The work of Dagi Igarashi and Midori Kawai promised an alchemical scrutiny of an earth-and-water response to primary sound vibrations across an intricately sculptural screen, but the live video feeds were scuppered by the grumbling sub-bass frequencies of their audio rig. A genuine shame: the evocative soundtrack enjoyed only thwarted suggestions of how the work was designed to look.

The following weekend, Rod Cooper and Anthony Magen premiered their new Helmethead duo. Cooper wears the eponymous headgear. The screen atop it presents his occasionally grotesque “mental furniture” (this is the organicism I referred to earlier), as rendered by Magen. Both provide live audio accompaniment from handheld dictaphones—the jarring orchestration of cartoon “boings” and Cooper’s more familiar droning textures. Great fun, if a little long; it’s playful, messy, but sufficiently dynamic to command audience attention. Like de Bruyn, Helmethead describes another kind of idiomatic estrangement; on the evening of the 2007 Federal Election we can barely discern subliminal flashes of Rudd and Howard as they compete for Cooper’s allegiance.

Utopian aspirations come with the territory when you advocate for visionary cinema. While the social behaviour of contemporary Western citizens is increasingly mediated by industrial and commercial concerns, the OtherFilm Festival directs its attentions to the congenial rehabilitation of otherwise unlikely venues. Environment is just another aspect of OFF’s ambitious gesamkunstwerk: this time, it was the baroque arcadia of Brisbane’s Old Museum Building, and the use of the Ahimsa House community centre. This year was also the festival’s first in Melbourne, with work by visiting US artists, Kerry Laitalia and Vladmaster, both given receptions as satellite events to ACMI’s Christian Marclay survey.

Laitalia’s work is an archivist’s reverie; some works, particularly Secure the Shadow…E’er the Substance Fade (1997) convey a genuine minatory thrill. The scores of that film and Out of the Ether (2003) both profit from the influence of George Kuchar on their soundtracking strategies; an atmospheric use of found audio sourced from old lounge LPs (I recognised the Peter Thomas soundtrack for Rampatrouille underneath the second). Vladmaster’s work is an absolute anomaly: the inspired adaptation of the familiar but obsolete Viewmaster toy. The Vladmaster employs a singular erudition in the creation of her crypto-cinematic narratives, handcrafting viewer reels from stereoscopic photographs of her own dioramas. In a hilarious perversion of consumer artefact to singular creative ends, soundtrack cues trigger the serried click of audience interaction.

It is perhaps instructive that the Vladmaster’s ACMI performance enjoyed a full house, while Laitalia’s work at the same venue had a more modest one. Certainly, a younger audience has become more predisposed to interactivity in screen media. But Brisbane’s OtherFilm Festival otherwise eschews what has become one of the dominant tendencies in Australian media art curatorship: an infantilising obsession with play, toys and games. It’s a disturbing trend, driven by commercial expedience and technological determinism, and one which assumes an indifference to distinctions between art, entertainment and utility. While this confusion of categories is arguably the most interesting area of both art and entertainment per se, the danger is that critical rigour might be compromised by the pursuit of innocent recreation.

The 3rd OtherFilm Festival, curators Sally Golding, Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela; Institute of Modern Art, Ahimsa House, Old Museum Building, Brisbane Nov 16-24; ACMI Cinemas, Tapespace, Melbourne Nov 29-30, 2007;www.otherfilm.org

FOR FILM CRITIC AND UBER-CINEPHILE MEGAN SPENCER THERE’S A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HER RECENTLY ESTABLISHED DESTINATION FILM FESTIVAL AND THE FESTIVALS TYPICALLY FRONTING THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL CIRCUITS. IT’S A DISTINCTION THAT CAN BE TRACED TO COMPETING PHILOSOPHIES AND CONTRARY AGENDAS, BUT IT IS DESTFEST’S DIVERGENT FOCUS THAT RENDERS THE DIVISION MOST VISIBLE.

Whereas what Spencer refers to as the “big brand film festival” tends—like the cineplex—to favour feature length, industry fashioned and government subsidised films, DestFest opens itself up to audio-visual material that falls outside this somewhat limited scope. The inaugural program turned the spotlight on fields of activity outside industry-dominated spheres of production and distribution, treating Sydney-based cineastes to three afternoons of innovative cinema and engaging panel discussions.

The first two screenings in the festival’s tripartite program were dedicated to the feature film’s less prominent counterpart, the short, with the focus divided between international and Australian works respectively. Given DestFest’s stated predilection for audio-visual material that pushes the envelope, it was fitting that for the International program Spencer showed a collection of shorts from the fourth volume of the pioneering Wholphin series: a quarterly DVD compilation of curios and cutting edge shorts produced by enterprising publishing house McSweeney’s [RT81, p30].

Two Cars, One Night by up and coming New Zealand director Taiki Waititi was entrusted with the dual responsibility of opening the program and charming the pants off festival patrons. Set in the car park of a small town pub, the film revolves around an exchange between three kids left to amuse themselves in their respective family cars while their parents knock a few back in the adjacent pub. What starts as a volley of inquisitive looks between the youngsters escalates fairly quickly into an amusing crossfire of insults between the cars in which they’re housed. Boredom eventually dissolves the de rigueur childhood displays of bravado and boy-girl antagonism though, giving rise to a curious rapport between the film’s central figures.

Two Cars is beautifully shot on monochromatic stock, but arguably what most distinguishes Waititi’s film is that it doesn’t lean on narrative structure, nor a hackneyed punchline format, in order to engage the viewer. What takes centrestage instead is the absorbing dynamic between the film’s three young characters, and it is this peculiarly fraught but nonetheless endearing screen relationship that gives Two Cars its strength.

Chris Waitt’s Heavy Metal Jr. similarly turns the camera on preadolescent subjects, tracking Hatred—a Scottish hard metal band composed of 10 to 15-year-old boys—over the four weeks leading up to their first public performance. Like Two Cars, the strength of Heavy Metal Jr. lies in its intriguing characters and their thoroughly engaging dynamic. What is so compelling about the film is the band’s utter, and highly humorous, incongruity: with their musical genre, their ideal image and their immediate surrounds.

For all their satanic salutes, demonic lyrics and hard core posturing, Hatred’s rosy-cheeked members can’t seem to shed their prepubescent awkwardness nor their innocuousness. It’s a graphic discord aptly captured in the film’s closing scenes when the group finally makes its highly anticipated debut, not to a crowd of rocking thousands as promised by their manager, but to a handful of perturbed pensioners, unimpressed mothers and idol struck pre-teen girls at what turns out to be the local family fun day.

Waitt’s and Waititi’s superb offerings were two of the many in the robust International program that also included works such as the tense High Falls starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, and Lynne Hershman Leeson’s decidedly more sombre Strange Culture, a documentary inquiry into the FBI’s questionable biochemical investigation of artist Steve Kurtz. Cumulatively these distinctive shorts offered a promising start for the newest kid on the festival block, and if post-screening discussions were any indication, the subsequent instalment only lifted the bar.

The second session shifted the festival’s focus to short works produced on Australian shores, and this screening allowed Spencer to flex her curatorial muscle a little more visibly. The result was an incredibly strong and diverse program that surveyed contemporary short film and video production as well as giving a number of older shorts a second life.

One of the more recent works and festival standouts was Nathan Lewis, Jeremy Hyland and Aaron Kiernan’s Hands Hyland, the shamelessly charismatic account of one lad’s attempt to win the affections of his long-time muse. When news of her imminent departure reaches the enamoured suitor—the eponymous Hyland——he sets out on a marathon cross-city quest to intercept his belle.

Hyland’s narrative of longing confers upon it something of a neo-romantic disposition, but it is the piece’s stylistic execution that perhaps most strongly lends the film its particularly heady brand of romanticism. Part of the film’s charm lies in its use of old school devices like trick photography and stop motion animation; techniques that contribute to Hyland’s playful tone and fanciful diegetic world. Together with the film’s low-fi aesthetic and self-reflexive nature, this stylistic playfulness lends Hyland an informality and intimacy that, like Hyland himself, take aim straight at the heart.

Alex Bryant offered a similarly charming and irreverent contribution to the program in Songs in the Key of Death, his epic musical rendering of one man’s existential crisis. Having been informed by his GP that his death is imminent the film’s protagonist is advised to resign himself to the discouraging prognosis; such resolution is necessary, his GP rather curiously opines, in order “to ensure a successful death.” What is prompted by this “final notice”—as Bryant’s ill-fated character describes it—is a reckoning process largely rendered in song in which the damned protagonist attempts to reconcile himself with his impending curtain call.

While it may broach a solemn subject, Songs in the Key of Death refuses to adopt an entirely sombre posture, opting instead to lace its morbid tone with a none-too-subtle dash of the ludicrous. Bryant’s character shimmies and shakes to his pre-mortem meditations on life and death against psychedelic animated backgrounds,as both he and the film express train through Kübler-Ross’s stages of grieving to a soundtrack of folk, avant-garde metal and acid rock.

This peculiar mix of earnestness and jocularity both contributes to the charisma of Bryant’s film and stands as symptomatic of the film’s more general play with, and fusion of, aesthetics, genres, media and moods. Like Hyland, Songs in the Key of Death takes liberties with its representational strategies, and the result is an intriguing and darkly humorous cinematic swan song.

Rather aptly, one of the recurring subjects in the well-represented forums accompanying both of these sessions was the experimental licence afforded by short format works. For many panellists one of the key attractions of the short was precisely the escape it provided from strictures generally associated with subsidised feature length industry productions.

In stark contrast to the advice offered by the founder of one of Sydney’s ‘biggest brand’ short film festivals, quoted as saying of his event “if you want to experiment…it’s better to do that at home”, DestFest’s first two sessions capitalised on the short’s capacity for greater abandon, bringing experimentation forefront and centre stage. Judging by the sizeable crowds in attendance at CarriageWorks it was a move that was both welcome and well-received, suggesting that with Spencer at the helm Destination Film Festival is indeed, if you’ll excuse the pun, going places.

Destination Film Festival, director Megan Spencer, CarriageWorks, Nov 4, Dec 1, 2007

Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone, video still, (2002-2006), Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith

THE FINAL EVENT FOR CARRIAGEWORKS’ DESTINATION FILM FESTIVAL (DESTFEST) WAS A SCREENING OF ARIN CRUMLEY AND SUSAN BUICE’S FOUR EYED MONSTERS (2005) FOLLOWED BY A PANEL DISCUSSION WITH PRACTITIONERS AND COMMENTATORS FROM BOTH THE “YOLK AND FRINGE OF AUSTRALIA’S FILM INDUSTRY”, AS THE DESTFEST WEBSITE PUT IT. THE PANEL—ORGANISED BY FILM CRITIC, JOURNALIST AND DIRECTOR MEGAN SPENCER, THE FESTIVAL’S ORGANISER—WAS AN INTERROGATION OF “CYBER-BORN FILM”:

The revolution will be downloaded…It’s an exciting time in filmmaking right now. Using Four-Eyed Monsters as a starting point—the superb YouTube feature—our panel will explore how online and digital culture has revolutionised and challenged traditional means of production, distribution and exhibition. Has the internet made these conventional methods all but redundant? How? And where are things moving to?

Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of the day, I’ll explore what a “cyber-born film” is. Drawing on the pregnancy metaphor, I’ll pivot this discussion around two approaches: cyber-conceived and cyber-birthed films. I’ll start with cyber-birth, because although it is at the end of this metaphoric chronology, it is in fact the most accessible and pervasive concern.

A cyber-birthed film is one that regards new technologies (cyber) as a way to release (birth) a film to audiences. The panelists encouraged filmmakers to think outside the box when it comes to distribution and offered examples of DIY techniques. Bondi Tsunami director Rachel Lucas suggests mobile drive-ins (where you take your movie with screening equipment on the road), grassroots cinemas (where other people arrange a screening for you) and screenings in clubs. Dominique and Dan Angeloro of Soda_Jerk explained that because remix artists don’t own the works they remix, they cannot go through the normal channels of distribution. Instead, they champion approaches developed within art environments, such as encouraging audiences to burn and distribute DVDs themselves.

Rosemary Blight, producer of Clubland, recommends holding onto your domestic rights and making strategic decisions about the order of platform release. Blight warns that the contemporary approaches championed by those on the panel and elsewhere are antithetical to the traditional film models of copyright and marketing. Copyright, for instance, is usually given away, rendering the filmmaker powerless to leverage any cross-platform distribution strategies. Via Skype, Arin Crumley suggested options such as universal licenses. He wants to see a better environment where audiences can discover things naturally, without having to be told.

Another theme of the panel, and of many film events, is “cyber-conceived” film: film that doesn’t regard digital technology as something to be added later but is integrated into its production and/or message. Pixel Pirate, by Soda_Jerk (with Sam Smith) features an Elvis Clone battling Copyright Cops and MGM’s action heroes. The narrative is created from a collection of over 300 pirated film and music samples. Remixes have been a part of fringe cultures for a long time, but in the last few years in particular more filmmakers have either actively encouraged people to remix their works or have started remixing their own. Filmmakers who have recently provided their films for remixing by audiences include Canadian Bruce McDonald with his The Tracey Fragments (2007), American Darren Aronosfky, The Fountain (2006), and Lance Weiler, Head Trauma (2006). In these films, the story involves some form of repetition or is structured in a modular manner. In other words, the works have a remixable and replicable nature right down to story and style.

So, a film can be transformed by other practitioners and by audiences. But what about production ‘outside’ this mutating creature? Blight lamented that the industry has been using the same marketing model for years: marketing every film the same way irrespective of content and target audiences. Websites, if created, are put up at the earliest a few months before a film is released. Crumley explained how Four Eyed Monsters took two years of promotion through numerous social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Marketers in Australia, Blight continued, don’t think about the audience. Indeed, in addition to community building, this concern ripples all the way through to the film content websites. If what happens before and after, indeed around a film, is so important, why not treat them all as part of it? Currently, many Australian film websites provide only scant details such as theatrical release dates and cast and crew lists without any thought as to how the website can augment (both before and after) the experience of the film. Other media need not be thought of as distribution channels only…they can be part of an expanded canvas over which a story or message is expressed.

Yes, the revolution will be downloaded…but also remixed and expanded. What is also significant, though, is that the revolution will not be won with spears or cannon balls lobbed between industry and independents. This is where Spencer’s all-too-rare inclusive approach to the film festival format is important and timely. Neither industry nor independents have all the answers, both are exploring new ways that can benefit each. To quote Spencer, it is with the “goodwill, collective passion, diverse points of view, anarchy, ingenuity, madness, blithe energy, creative spirit and industriousness that are part and parcel of making movies” that new possibilities will emerge. None of which is possible, it should be noted, without the participation of audiences during these tectonic shifts.

Cyber-born film, Destination Film Festival, CarriageWorks, Sydney, Dec 8, 2007
www.destfest.com

GILLIAN ARMSTRONG HAS ALWAYS MADE FILMS ABOUT STRONG AND INTERESTING GIRLS AND WOMEN. SHE HAS ALSO STRADDLED THE GENRE DIVIDE, SWITCHING EASILY BETWEEN FEATURES AND DOCUMENTARIES. FROM HER EARLY BEGINNINGS TRACKING AUSSIE TEENAGERS IN FOURTEEN’S GOOD, EIGHTEEN’S BETTER, SHE LAUNCHED JUDY DAVIS IN MY BRILLIANT CAREER AND THEN—AFTER STARSTRUCK, MRS SOFFEL, HIGH TIDE—SHE WAS GRABBED BY HOLLYWOOD, DABBLING IN LITTLE WOMEN, BEFORE RETURNING TO AUSTRALIAN SHORES WITH OSCAR AND LUCINDA AND, LAST YEAR, HER WONDERFULLY ENIGMATIC AND RICH DOCUMENTARY UNFOLDING FLORENCE: THE MANY LIVES OF FLORENCE BROADHURST.

Armstrong’s last feature, made six years ago, featured Cate Blanchett as the title heroine Charlotte Gray, a young Scot who joins the French Resistance during World War II. Her new film Death Defying Acts, a co-production with the UK, seems to take a diversion in that the focus is apparently the great escape artist Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) but, as always, Armstrong is really more interested in the womenfolk: a mother and daughter team, Mary and Benji (Catherine Zeta-Jones and the exceptional newcomer Saoirse Ronan, outstanding in Atonement) who, like Charlotte, are working undercover to dismantle the hero narrative.

There’s been a rush of releases in the past year about the lives and inner/outer workings of magicians, a sudden urge to reveal the apparatus: Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale in The Prestige, Edward Norton in The Illusionist and, best of all, the comic genius of Will Arnett as G.O.B, who manages to kill a lot of doves, in Arrested Development. Here, the film is as much about the fame as the magic. It begins with the camera beneath the surface, all calm, as Houdini attempts to release himself from chains underwater. His stillness and presence as he waits, pushing his physical limits, is counterpoint to the chaos and frenzy outside as people think he must have drowned. He finally emerges triumphant, with Pearce’s beautifully toned body, to become a God of the deep. It’s the first of many visually spectacular scenes, often filmed through glass or water—with a strong score by Cezary Skubiszewski (who was also composer for Lawrence Johnston’s Night, see page 19).

Throughout the film Armstrong directs Houdini like a rock star, crowd-surfing into Edinburgh on the throes of others’ desire. He invites strangers to punch him in the stomach—even when he coughs blood later in his hotel room. Houdini’s story appealed to Armstrong because “it was not just about his act but about how he sold his act. He was a great self-promoter…he was the world’s first superstar.” As the plot kicks in, we learn that Houdini has an unlikely, even kinky attachment to his mother. He states his ambition is to “be worthy of the woman who bore me” and offers $10,000 to any psychic who can find her in the afterlife and reveal her last words before she died. Mary and Benji step in to take up the challenge. Whether strolling the streets stealing men’s watches or performing a dubious music-hall act, “Princess Kali and her Dusky Disciple”—where Mary connects with the ‘other side’—this mother and daughter team are masters of deception.

With a voiceover by Benji we see the action from the child’s perspective, and this is when the film starts to trolley downhill. The narrative is cloying and reveals too much too soon. Writer Tony Grisoni says the script “started from the idea that at the centre of any magical act there’s always an audience that’s desperate for the magic to be real.” But Mary is all and only about artifice; she speaks of her ability to “pluck a character off a shelf and just about manage to convince herself.” However, in this role Zeta-Jones doesn’t work any magic on us and it’s hard to believe Houdini would have fallen for her charms—especially as in another Freudian, even soap opera twist, it’s revealed she bears a stunning resemblance to Houdini’s mother when she was young; and so he makes her wear his mother’s wedding dress, to channel her psychic energy.

Although Pearce gives a fierce and sensitive performance, there’s just no chemistry between him and Zeta-Jones and strangely, in the end, that’s the focus of the film—a battle of wits, a love story, without the desire. After a sloppy and sentimental ending where it feels like the script has run out of ideas and the committee has signed off on a mishmash, I wanted to change the focus back from the women to Houdini. Apparently he wasn’t even in the original drafts of the script but, with Pearce’s strength and charisma, he remains a fascinating character who stays locked in manacles, holding his breath underwater, never quite reaching the surface.

Death Defying Acts, director Gillian Armstrong, producers Chris Curling, Marian MacGowan, writers Tony Grisoni, Brian Ward, cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, editor Nicholas Beauman, composer Cezary Skubiszewski

BILL VIOLA HAS WRITTEN OF THE POROUS NATURE OF MEMORY, WHICH HE CHARACTERISES AS AN UNFOLDING PROCESS, CONTINUOUSLY BEING “UPDATED, MODIFIED AND INVENTED.” BRIGHTON’S DANCE FOR CAMERA FESTIVAL 2007 REFLECTED THE IMPORTANCE OF LINEAGE WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE HISTORICAL MEMORY OF THE GENRE, AS THE FORM FINDS WAYS TO REIMAGINE ITSELF BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PREVIOUSLY KNOWN.

Expanded from a single day’s event, and this year included under the umbrella of the Cinecity film festival, Dance for Camera’s three days of screenings were programmed by South East Dance’s Mairead Turner, Vicky Bloor and Charlotte Miles into several distinct strands, grouped around a central retrospective. Prefaced and contextualised by Martina Kudlácêk’s documentary In The Mirror of Maya Deren (2002), guest curators Christiana Galanopoulou of Athens-based Videodance, and Alla Kovgan of Kinodance in St. Petersburg, assembled a programme of Deren’s best known works, including Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-6). Live musical interpretation of the latter two pieces reflected and enhanced the filmic interweaving of dream states, water-based imagery and dislocating temporal distortions into a web of mesmeric liminality. An additional program examining Deren’s creative legacy included Kovgan and Jeff Silva’s highlighting of the medium’s material properties in Arcus (2002), by means of an assured use of inky negative and close cropped shifting frames.

Elsewhere, Horizon of Exile (2007), Isabel Rocamora’s meditatively-paced, desert-set, black-clad exploration of landscape and female identity, formed part of the Challenging Perspectives program, while the Dance 4 Film Preview showcased a range of work for televised broadcast in the UK and Australia. Here, Liz Aggis’ alternating usage of colour and monochrome in Diva (2007) underscored a simultaneous portrayal and subversion of both her performance persona and the process of filming itself, with Roman Kornienko and Maria Sharafutdinova’s 10 Exhalations (2006) of the title represented visually as a cloud of white vapour, utilised as a highly stylised shorthand device charting the narrative arc of a relationship from enraptured eye-gazing to abandoned cough.

The festival’s opening night program set out to explore non-traditional ‘dance’ content, including a range of work foregrounding elements such as camera journey and conceptualisation. Rajyashree Ramamurthi’s More Stories (2007) led the viewer through an immersive world of richly wordless narrativity, drawn from personal history and combining monochrome animation with lush colour coding, evoking the heightened sensual response of childhood recall. Becky Edmund’s Sand Little Sand (2006) presented an unvarnished and expansive Argentinean landscape comprising sand, road, rock, wind and sky, where the subtle and ambiguous movement of the sand itself, forming momentarily into puffs and clouds, was revealed at the work’s end as the by-product of a dancing figure, previously erased from shot [RT77, p36]. Olive Bieringa’s Small Dance (2007), situated the upright figure of contact improviser Steve Paxton against a grouping of flowering plants, fronting a two-storey wooden house. For the duration of the single-shot work, Paxton remains immobile, while the viewer’s eye is inexorably drawn to the gently swaying foliage and flashes of movement from an upstairs window, calling attention to the understated motion of the natural world and the everyday.

Viola has also noted the ephemerality of the electronic, stating that “images are born, they are created, they exist, and, in the flick of a switch, they die.” Two installations, housed for the festival’s duration in the foyer of Brighton’s Lighthouse building, dealt in strikingly divergent ways with the lifespan of the image, while bypassing traditionally-oriented notions of seated, single-screen viewing.

Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes’ Move-Me Booth, co-produced by Goat and Ricochet Dance Productions, utilised the familiarity and accessibility of photo booth culture to provide a meeting ground for choreographic input and public participation. Set against a plain white background and captured by a fixed, front-on camera, participants require nothing more than a willingness to interpret verbal instructions, enacted within the structural confines of the space, and selected from a varied menu of choreographic options, ranging from hip-hop to improvisation. Hosted on the installation’s web-site, the resulting images contain moments of poetry and abstraction, emerging from the configuration of an inadvertent grouping of bodies or the extreme close-up of facial features to camera. The series of solos, duets and trios also functions on the level of social document, testament to a mix of ages, backgrounds and expectations recorded along with each participant’s movement journey, and stored as data in an electronic afterlife.

Contrastingly, viewers for Billy Cowie’s In the Flesh (2007) lift a tent-like flap to enter a physically confined and darkened area akin to a magician’s cabinet, as a space set apart from the rules of everyday reality. Georges Méliès wrote of the potential for the moving image to contain “all of the illusions that can be produced by prestidigitation, optics, photographic tricks.” Using a projector, an angled mirror, and a pair of 3D spectacles, Cowie transforms a flattened, floor-based image into what he terms “a Spectrefilm” as a female figure manifests, simultaneously solid and insubstantial, as a William Gibsonesque life-size virtual presence, capable of reaching out towards the viewer and eerily connecting gaze. The pared down simplicity of this concept extended to a minimal soundtrack, consisting of piano and spoken word, and to a slowly-paced and carefully considered movement vocabulary, as a hand reaches to connect with an upwardly angled foot in an infant-like exploration of the limits of physical form. A shift from a foetal curl into an angled arrangement of elbows and knees ends with a careful placement of hand, feet and forehead to ground before the figure vanishes entirely into the darkness of a momentary blackout, subsequently rematerialising to start her brief life cycle over again.

Stan Brakhage describes the trees in the opening shot of Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) as attaining “a state of dance.” Dance for Camera demonstrated that there is both audience and appetite for work willing to explore such expanded notions of dance and how it can be defined and experienced within a contemporary screen context.

ANITA FONTAINE’S GHOSTGARDEN TAKES YOU ON A WALK THROUGH A GARDEN WHOSE GHOSTS APPEAR ON A GPS-ENABLED HAND-HELD PC. ATTACHED BY HEADPHONES, YOU TRACK A WHIMSICAL, GOTHIC ROMANCE IN A 19TH CENTURY SETTING IN 12 SCENES BETWEEN A CASTAWAY AND AN ARISTOCRAT.

Ghostgarden is the creation of Australian artist Anita Fontaine and her technical producer, Canadian Michael Pelletier. Both formerly worked in new media at Canada’s Banff Centre. Fontaine is now based in Boston working on her own projects and with an advertising agency.

Ghostgarden is not interactive in the way you might expect, say, of a Blast Theory creation [p26]. But you do have to work, using your device to find the WIFI hotspots in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens that will activate the PC in the same unit. And that’s an adventure in itself, involving not a little walking and the discovery of many incidental pleasures on the way. Once you’ve hit the spot, the PC calls up a fragment of the tale in the form of an animated image with matching voiceover and sound score. You then move on through the garden in search of more episodes in this elliptical tale of heartbreak.

Beyond the narrative’s 19th century setting being broadly correlated with the Botanic Gardens’ origins, there’s no precise connection between the site and screen images, although, as you near Sydney Harbour, there is a water scene. The male lover emerges from the deep with the treasure demanded by his beloved.

The tiny, full colour gothic images are collaged and vividly detailed (more would be revealed on a larger screen but that’s not what the project is about), the animation very simple, the narrative poetic and the score as sweetly romantic as the occasionally dark, sometimes erotic tale it tells. What Ghostgarden reveals is the creative potential of an accessible electronic medium and, like Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, although in a very different way, overlays a physical experience of place with a palimpsest of a very different order. Welcome to a parallel universe. RT

Ghostgarden, artist, creator Anita Fontaine, programmer Mike Pelletier, poetry Michael Boyce; d/Lux/MediaArts in association with Sydney Festival and Botanic Gardens Trust Sydney; Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Jan 5-27

PLUSH CURTAINS RISE TO REVEAL AN ENSEMBLE OF BEAUTIFUL BACKS WALKING AWAY: CHEWY AND MELLIFLUOUS. THIS WILL BE A NIGHT FOR BEAUTIFUL IMAGES CREATED BY BEAUTIFUL BODIES. A RICH AND DEEPLY TONED VOICE, THE KIND THAT NARRATES WILDLIFE DOCUMENTARIES, SPEAKS SEDUCTIVELY IN SPANISH. I LATER LEARN THAT IT IS COURTLY VERSE BY RENAISSANCE SOLDIER-POET GARCILASO DE LA VEGA AND I WISH THAT I HAD BEEN MADE PRIVY TO ITS MEANINGS.

This opening piece, the first of three works by the acclaimed choreographer Nacho Duato, is Por Vos Muero. The music is Renaissance Spanish. The costuming is courtly. The set is muted and elegant. The lighting is subtle but tightly choreographed. Semiotically, these elements signal subdued stateliness but…the ongoing rush of tightly woven choreography is sometimes frantic and I long for a breath or a pause. Ever-moving, rarely lingering, Duato’s choreography is intensely musical and these well rehearsed dancers move inside the music, embodying a symbiosis of sound and motion.

They are fluid, grounded but light, muscular but slender and glorious in extension. They are confident and perform the intricate movement score with gusto and occasional smiles of authentic pleasure. Their spines are both upright and rubbery. Their pelvic bowls are tethered by practice and open to the world. They display wonderful collectivity, even at the expense of individuality. They are all seductive in their obvious beauty and I have several ‘wow’ moments.

Gnawa, the second work, also begins with those beautiful backs, duly lit to highlight the developed musculature. The music seems at once Indian, Spanish and Turkish, but the program tells me that it is “sub-Saharan.” This dancing is far too polite for this music. Again, there is much partnering and lifting in a structured separation of male and female. Certainly, Duato plays with this separation by employing some man on man action, but his choreographic gendering renders these dancers not individual artists but prototypes of classicist perfection and virtuosity.

Let’s call a spade a spade. This is not contemporary dance. This is modern ballet. Duato uses the aesthetic freedoms of contemporary dance to wrench open the canonical dictates of classical ballet, but there are still plenty of pointed feet, plies, lifts and balletic extensions. There is the symmetry of the proscenium arch, the homogeneity of the dancers and a classical dynamic that vacillates between the slow and sinuous and the quick and light.

I am impressed rather than engaged. I feel seduced. I am struck by the sameness of the three pieces. But the wonderfully cool abstraction did lead my vision to elemental qualities of movement rather than narrative meaning. In fact, when Duato does attempt overt emotional resonance in White Darkness, a piece apparently about drug addiction, I find the posturing overblown, almost funny.

Three Works afforded enjoyment with a lingering emptiness and ultimately what I will remember is that I sat two seats away from Gough Whitlam and it was to him, the man who gave us free education and universal health care, I gave my silent accolade.

Compania Nacional De Danza, Three Works, choreography Nacho Duato, Lyric Theatre, Star City, Sydney, Jan 6-8

Does our cover celebrate Easter? Not intentionally. But if you’re that way inclined, Happy Easter! We celebrate, instead, the screen. The cover photograph is from a remarkable production Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut [p4] by Canada’s Theatre Replacement. We saw it in January at Vancouver’s PuSh Festival where we were running a review-writing workshop [www.realtimearts.net/features]. It’s about an actor who finds a discarded suitcase full of photographs and decides to perform the lives represented therein, working inventively with video and projections of images from the found albums. In this and other works the screen appears in more manifestations than ever in this edition of RealTime—the stage as screen in Electric Company’s Palace Grand [p5, 11], Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine [p15] and Terrapin’s Explosion Therapy [p38]; in cinemas [of course, but mutating, p22]; on pocket computers and GPS devices in Anita Fontaine’s Ghostgarden [p24] and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke [p26]; in video installations [Atom Egoyan’s Auroras, p28]; and, from the UK-German outfit Gob Squad, in 360 degrees as spontaneously filmed performance [p34]. But in this very same edition we record a great surge in physicality and materiality: the live action sculpture of Cirque Ici [p40], the artist machines of Joey Ruigrok van der Werven’s Volta [p40], Speak Percussion playing with glass [p48], the bicycle works seen by Jean Poole at the Istanbul Biennale [p28], Ricardo Miranda carting audiences in his rickshaw for Mexico City’s Transitio_MX02 Festival of Electronic Arts & Video [p18], site works entailing tumbleweed, coins and being rowed to an island in Finland’s ANTI Festival [p30], the audience journey in Second to None in an imaging of Port Adelaide’s Aboriginal past [p37], and then there’s Aalst [p13], The Black Watch [p12] and The Last Highway [p12] in the Sydney Festival, each in their own way reconstructing social bodies under investigation.

There’s no obvious tension between the virtual and the physical—they co-exist, part of a spectrum of possibilities, or they work in creative counterpoint in works like Rider Spoke where you do a lot of bike riding, guided by a laterally minded computer on your handlebars, or in works like Mortal Engine where bodies and responsive technology unite to generate new worlds. Everything is raw material for art: bicycles, rickshaws, machines, fashion [La Pocha Nostra, p31; Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics, p28], ape masks [p34] and rabbit suits.

BLAST THEORY’S LATEST WORK RIDER SPOKE CONSISTS OF A HIGHLY ORIGINAL AND EXCITING FORM OF AUGMENTED TRAVEL. THE PIECE’S STRUCTURE IS DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE. PARTICIPANTS ARRIVE AT A VENUE WHERE THEY CAN SWAP CREDIT CARD DETAILS FOR A HANDHELD COMPUTER (NOKIA N800), MICROPHONE AND HEADSET, BICYCLE AND HELMET, ALLOWING THEM TO CYCLE FREELY WITHIN ANY KIND OF URBAN SETTING, BEFORE AND AFTER LISTENING TO OTHER PARTICIPANTS’ STORIES AND RECORDING THEIR OWN FOR FUTURE LISTENERS. THE PIECE CAN LAST FOR UP TO ONE HOUR.

The computer, which is attached to the handlebar, functions as a positioning system. Yet instead of showing the cyclist’s location on a standard map, it utilises an interface combining images from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry. Aided by the interface, the cyclist navigates an expanded city, made of intimate, sometimes delicate, occasionally passionate and even hilarious author-generated content.

Rider Spoke was developed in 2007 by Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at Nottingham University, Fraunhofer Institute and Sony Net Services as part of IPerG, a four-year research project funded by the European Commission’s IST Programme, whose principal objective is an investigation of pervasive games which interweave digital media with participants’ everyday lives. Another outcome of this project is Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines (2006-current; RT80, p6), also developed with the Mixed Reality Laboratory, winner of an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2007.

I ‘performed’ Rider Spoke in London, at the Barbican Centre. The operators, wearing colourful checked shirts, took my details. Outside, a bicycle had been prepared by Matt Adams, one of Blast Theory’s founding members. I was told to be careful and to wait for the device to contact me, which it did, some 10 minutes later, as I cycled down a busy road. The first message appeared on the screen: “Find somewhere you like, then give yourself a name and describe yourself.” I was then invited to find a hiding place to record my answer. I remember that I turned right and right again, away from the traffic. At that point, I was neither lost nor worried but strangely euphoric, caught between the liberating act of cycling and the equally liberating possibility of confessing to strangers.

A swallow, a clear iconographic reference to the possibility of regeneration, representing the migrating soul in Egyptian art and the resurrection in Christian art, appeared on my screen. This, I had been told, indicated that I could stop. The contrast between the evocative image on the console and my surroundings couldn’t be starker. I remember seeing a run-down council estate on the left and an empty pavement on the right, near a couple of boarded up shops. Some children were playing football. “Describe yourself”—I wondered what that meant. Usually, in these kinds of performances we are encouraged to create a role, but here I felt that the role would be even more minimal than in Blast Theory’s previous works. Aware that one day there might be listeners, I started to record a description of ‘myself’, surrounded by strangers, looking at me looking at them.

Once I completed my message, I cycled on, noticing, perhaps more intently than otherwise, passersby, taxis, buses, queues of impatient, tired looking people going places. I, of course, wasn’t really going anywhere. Although I was travelling, and following the console’s directions, as well as paying attention to overall traffic, there seemed no purpose to my travel. Actual places, my own memories, distant voices of absent others became intertwined. I still remember the fragments that made my route: a bustling local pub, a Chinese woman carrying a mountain of washing, a young, elegant man on his mobile dropping a piece of paper, the sound of a familiar voice (Martin Flintham’s, from the Mixed Reality Laboratory) that made me smile, a police car coming too close, a broken window, a deserted bus stop where I recorded my message, a hole on the road, my bicycle tipping to the right. I also remember listening through the headset to the tempting but somewhat sad recorded voice of another Blast Theory founding member, Ju Row Farr, who, by alerting us to the work’s rules, was also taking us backward and forward in time. And there was the image of the swallow appearing on the interface when I least expected it, alluding to the possibility of worlds beyond.

Rider Spoke offers binary choices—either to pause or move; either to speak or listen. These frictions, breaking up the fluidity of everyday life, allow for contaminations between present and past, actual and digital, geographical and fictional. I listened to Martin’s story. The surrounding setting became a backdrop to something other that had neither happened there nor then. I cycled on. I recorded another story, about a wild teenage party, and then one more about someone who keeps me awake at night. I still recall listening to the private, introspective stories that somehow rendered other participants present to me. Interestingly, to listen to their confessions, we had to locate their hiding places by cycling until the screen told us we had ‘found’ one. I recall feeling the stark contrast between the cartoon-like prefabricated houses on the screen and the culturally loaded side streets I was in. I remember thinking, so Martin stood in this place and said these words, ‘here.’ The site, the semiotics of both actual and digital locations, then, for a flickering moment, became Martin.

Blast Theory claim that Rider Spoke continues their work on how “new communication technologies are creating new social spaces.” Here, the creation of a publicly authored space (in the sense that it is authored both by the public and in public) takes ‘place’ in realtime. The piece utilises WIFI hotspots able to locate participants in the city so that each ‘hiding space’ functions as a palimpsest, combining two properties: the physical and electronic location. The only evidence of the presence of others here is in space: identities come to coincide with spaces, and spaces with their WIFI fingerprints. As the work progresses, this publicly authored space becomes increasingly complex—not only a fixed geographical map but also a transitory work in progress which, recalling the motion of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, pushes participants into the future whilst invariably forcing them to look back at the cumulating debris of their past.

Rider Spoke is a delicate, almost intangible work. Like other Blast Theory performances, it combines elements of trust and risk, irony and politics, confession and exposure, orientation and disorientation, everyday life and digital worlds. But whereas Day of the Figurines lasted weeks, here we are able to navigate through the work for barely one hour. Unlike Can You See Me Now? or Uncle Roy All Around You, there is no mission, no background scenario, no overarching narrative. Rather, this piece exposes a tension between our presence in space and our being in time. Whereas temporally, by asking us to remember, Rider Spoke relocates us in the past, spatially, by encouraging us to cycle forwards, it asks us to project ourselves into the future. Our ‘here and now’ then, our present, is at stake both literally, in the busy London traffic, and ontologically. Catching its participants as they move between the real and the digital, past and present, role-play and self-consciousness, motion and stasis, this fascinating piece marks a new phase in Blast Theory’s work. Here, unlike previous performances, the city is no longer somewhere to chase or find others but rather a depository of voices and their ephemeral memories. As an archive, or palimpsest, the city becomes an aging skin—a place of imprints, tattoos, scars of presence realised by recording or replaying the memories of our past whilst rapidly moving into an uncertain future.

ON THE LAST DAY OF THE FOURTH AUSTRALASIAN CONFERENCE ON INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT AT RMIT IN MELBOURNE DARREN TOFTS CHAIRED A PANEL DISCUSSION THAT BROUGHT TOGETHER A SMALL GROUP OF PRACTITIONERS, CURATORS, EDUCATORS, ACADEMICS AND CRITICS—SHIRALEE SAUL, PHILIP BROPHY, MARCIA JANE AND MYSELF—TO DISCUSS “WHAT HAPPENED TO NEW MEDIA ART?”

Conference participants who for the last few days had debated artificial intelligence approaches to storytelling, architecture in online virtual worlds, playing in streets and with mobiles, design, philosophical and methodological issues to do with gaming of all stripes, trudged into the morning session expecting to be snapped out of their conference dinner hangovers with a feisty debate. Alas, they witnessed no blood splatter. Instead, what occurred was more a meditation on “playing the moon.”

In 1937 Chinese writer Lin Yutang wrote “The method of ‘playing’ the moon is to look up at it from a low place when it is clear and bright, and to look down at it from a height when it is hazy and unclear” (Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, Oxford University Press, Melbourne). One could say then that Tofts framed the discussion with the provocation that the moon (new media arts) is in its hazy and unclear phase:

So was it the mobile phone or changes at the Australia Council? Why has new media art apparently disappeared from the cultural landscape? Key cultural institutions such as ACMI have made the transition from pixels to Pixar. Games criticism is thriving at a time when discussions of media art histories recede into the background. Or do we need to revise our definitions of new media art? Does anyone really care about interactivity any more? In the age of machinima and Second Life, is there still a place for ‘new’ media art?

Tofts began the session with a revived call (after acknowledging the fine activities of Experimenta, ANAT, RealTime, Scan Journal) for “advocates [of experimental art] to keep it visible, to remind us that things are still cooking in the interactive dream kitchens of the human computer interface.” Offering alternative techniques to raise awareness and facilitate critical discussion of ignored or unseen arts practices, I spoke about a program that I developed with dLux Media Arts: an art tour experienced at home, with people all over the globe, inside the online virtual world via avatar representations that share the same pixel substance as the art. I also voiced concern at the exclusion of independent new media arts practices from industry, education, policy and funding decisions. For me, the issue is that these decisions are based on a false assumption about how cultural industries are fostered. Commercial viability is often held up as a measure of success, and that success is usually equated to the technology employed. Rather than understanding the core insights and principles behind a project, many merely copy the outcomes. They clone the crust, not the kernel. This emphasis on false signs of success is one of the reasons why the insights of independent media art and artists are not being recognised or supported, and ironically results in a non-commercially viable, banal echo across the creative spheres.

The panelist who was perhaps expected to be the session gladiator was uncharacteristically mellow on the day. Philip Brophy who, as Tofts noted, was teaching media arts before such terms existed, did make a few acidic and lucid observations as to how practitioners and organisations could better address issues. That is, how the hazy moon can become clear. The panelist who didn’t see the moon as being clear or hazy, but just a moon, was Melbourne-based self-described “video artist” and educator Marcia Jane who described two of her works Ribbons (2007) and Intercept (2007).

It was Shiralee Saul who listed reasons why many perceive the moon as being hazy and therefore look down on it when in fact it is clear and bright. Saul argued media arts practices exist and are flourishing but are unrecognised due to semantic haziness. With a slide projection revealing and juxtaposing term after defining term, she made the point that “media arts has atomised into a flock of micro-practices.” Robot art, generative music and Ascii art sit shoulder to shoulder with pervasive gaming, machinima and mixed realities. Indeed, “media arts has been so successful that it no longer needs or even references the art world institutions.” The problem is that some people are still “tacitly” applying old definitions of media arts (such as “film” or “video”) even though they have been “superseded.” The only people, Saul contends, who make art are “traditional artists who see an opportunity to cash in within the art world’s opportunities.” For her, media arts are no longer only in galleries; they no longer necessarily need galleries.

Many on the day felt freed by Saul’s observation: not just because it acknowledges the undeniable diversity and flourishing presence of that which was formerly known as new media arts; but also because it removed reliance on the role of traditional educational, funding, critical and curatorial structures. Indeed, Tofts noted in an email post-panel that “we are no longer dependent upon the usual curatorial and exhibition demands/protocols of the gallery/funding/advocacy system that fostered and engendered the initial phase of media arts in the late 1980s/90s.”

One of the consequences, however, of this dislocation or divergence is that ancestry is forgotten or never known. As Tofts explained post-panel: “we should also not forget [media art] history, the contexts that have developed and morphed into the culture of Web 2.0.” There is an “absence of historical knowledge that […] young artists and graduates etc should be mindful of.” This is not, Tofts continues, a generational whine, but “a fundamental issue of knowledge and of being-in-the-world’.” Indeed, the expansion of the synchronic scope Shiralee Saul offered would benefit from a complementary diachronic one. Only then will we remember we’ve had this discussion before, and understand why we’ll be having it again.

What Happened to New Media Art? chair Darren Tofts, Dec 3, part of The Fourth Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, Storey Hall, RMIT University, Melbourne, Dec 3-5, 2007

here is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (video still), Jennifer Allora (US) & Guillermo Calzadilla

IN THE WORLD’S ONLY CITY ON TWO CONTINENTS, RESTING FOR ONE MONTH IN THE ATATÜRK CULTURAL CENTRE, IS THE VERY TOP 1.86M OF MOUNT EVEREST, NEATLY CARVED OFF AND PRESENTED FOR ALL BY CHINESE ARTIST XU ZHEN. PROVIDING ANOTHER VANTAGE POINT WAS THE ISTANBUL MODERN, WITH A 20-YEAR BIENNALE RETROSPECTIVE. BUT ULTIMATELY THE BEST ART OF THE BIENNALE, CURATED BY CHINA’S HOU HANRU, WAS TO BE FOUND OUT IN THE NOOKS AND CRANNIES OF THIS SPRAWLING, COMPLEX CITY.

egoyan’s aurora

Appropriately, given Istanbul’s maritime history and trading port status and the Biennale’s proclaimed focus on globalisation, the largest gathering of artworks were located in a harbourside warehouse named Antrepo, the two-storey interior designed to “function like a real city…a kind of urban maze to reflect the labyrinth structure of Istanbul.” Like Istanbul, this meant a lot was crammed in, it was very noisy (lots of sound overlap), traffic flowed continuously in random directions, there was a lot of East meets West, and the complex politics and history of the region were often explicit and upfront.

Having only learnt of Turkey’s World War I era atrocities inflicted upon the Armenians since arriving in Istanbul a few months ago, I was immediately drawn to Auroras, a video work by the unflinching film director Atom Egoyan, who was born to Armenian parents in Egypt in 1960. He wrote and directed the film Ararat [2002] about the genocide. In Auroras, Egoyan focuses on Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian exiled from her homeland after her family was killed in the tragedy of 1915; she travelled to the United States hoping to find her surviving brother. In 1918, Hollywood made a film of her experiences with Aurora playing a large role, catapulting her into unexpected and unwanted stardom. She later deserted the promotional tour and threatened suicide. The studio responded by finding seven Aurora look-alikes to take her place.

Egoyan explores this true story by providing seven well groomed actresses of different ethnicities on a panoramic screen, each taking turns to speak text from accounts of Aurora’s experiences. Within the blackened room there is a smaller, discrete room waiting to be discovered in which is projected a small loop of footage of a dishevelled woman with a failing memory, old enough to be Aurora, talking to an interviewer about photographs he is showing her. She is not identified as Aurora, but in the catalogue Egoyan asks, “Are we dependent on the subjectivity of performance to absorb another person’s trauma? Does history need to entertain us?”

bicycle works

For a city where bicycles are so rarely seen (rickety roads, crazy traffic, endless hills), Antrepo held a surprising number of bicycle related artworks. There is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep by Jennifer Allora (US) & Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuba) is a gorgeously shot six minute video which follows a cyclist around Istanbul, pausing at busy intersections to inflate his deflating bicycle tyre using a tulum (a large bagpipe-like traditional instrument from the mountainous Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey, and derived from the carcass of a sheep). The cyclist is from that region and, inflating the tube, he makes long resonating notes which are juxtaposed with and then ultimately blend into the city hustle. Working in many ways, this was a beautiful and haunting piece.

Rainer Ganahl (Austria), on the other hand, bicycle-tackled Istanbul to draw attention to 21 sites where journalists have been killed, riding between locations to generate a video-taped topography of sorts with photos and chalk outlines drawn at each site. His artist statement emphasised that the International Association of Journalists lists Turkey as the eighth most difficult country in the world in which to practice journalism. Beneath a series of photographs, the story of each victim is told. Most murders were a response to the journalist writing about a minority group in Turkey.

just awake

Fell asleep under the stairs nearby, on beanbags provided for watching ceiling projected moonscapes and cityscapes (Taro Shinada, Japan). Felt asleep walking through the well-hyped virtual RMB City built by Cao Fei (China). Not that cyber glamour and extravagance felt incongruous with Istanbul, just that Second Life graphics never seem capable of pointing to anything but 1992. Knife sculptures (Abel Abdessemed, Algeria), simulated time bombs (David Ter-Oganyan, Russia) and life-size, weapon-loaded Kama-Sutra sculptures (Hamra Abbas, Kuwait) tend to have a little more jolt. As does the upbeat if elevator jazz sounds of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (South Korea), perennial festival favourites, slinking through another wise-cracking text animation, this time a story about the importance of ignoring all curators and critics—everyone has their own valid aesthetic abilities and tastes and all established canons of art are a hoax.

video layering

I wouldn’t have been visiting the Biennale if it wasn’t for an invitation to the Istanbul video laboratory of artificialeyes.tv, a video collective steadily carving an international reputation as live video performers. Acknowledging that the art of VJing is often hidden behind technical veils, this exhibition’s attempt to reveal some of its processes proved worthwhile and popular with Biennale visitors. Hardware modifications and specialty equipment jostled for attention alongside deliberately championed software code (across 30 metres of wall space), abundant photographs of event performances, and a compilation of videos including a recent one from Cappadocia I helped film. In the end it’s all about the video, the exhibition’s lingering resonance being the video projections layered on top of everything, gliding (through the use of Video Mirror Units) across floor, wall and ceiling space in slow, choreographed manoeuvres.

the world factory

Textile manufacturing has long been a Turkish strength, and yet the changes and challenges brought by the forces of globalisation are more than evident at the ghostly Textile Trader’s Market, a multi-storey textile shopping complex with plenty of vacant shops to fit temporary Biennale exhibitions and video screening rooms. Most directly related to the setting were a range of clothes designed by Tadej Pogacar (Slovenia) together with prostitutes, as part of a prostitute fashion label. But much of the art here explored the plight of the worker—architectural diagrams for providing modular shelters and homes for factory workers in Tijuana, ambient videos documenting the otherworldiness of factory workers within industrial locations, and Ömer Ali Kazma’s (Turkey) juxtaposed videos: Brain Surgeon, Clock Master, Slaughterhouse Worker and Studio Ceramicist.

parallel trails

Alongside every festival of scale inevitably exists a bounty of unofficial treasures, side projects, renegade events and alternate mini-festivals awaiting discovery. One of the most exuberant accompaniments to the biennale was the Triangle Project, a collaboration between Copenhagen, New York and Istanbul which will culminate in 2010 (when Istanbul is celebrated as European City of Culture) with the opening of a Danish Cultural Institute in Istanbul. On this leg it seemed to mostly involve transplanting the cream of Copenhagen’s electronic artists into an Istanbul venue known as The Hall for four evenings.

And so, in an Armenian church converted into a nightclub and cultural centre: transvestite ramadan cartoons adorn the walls; a blonde ponytailed 23 year old girl (Band Ane) jogs onstage singing her way through a rave anthem; half-shaven men parade in wolverine dresses; a trio on stage (kargology.com) earnestly debate public and private space while simultaneously appearing in three-way naked and sweaty motion on the video screen behind them; a masked duo (Albertslund Terror Korps) unleash their version of Danish Bhangra gabba techno with crude animations of aliens abducting aeroplane crash victims (hello VJ Cancer); and girls choreograph the theatrical cutting apart of each other’s paper costumes with scissors.

In a similar art-fashion-actor-model-DJ kind of vein there were Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics, promoted as “a public clothes swap and hack”, and the Istanbul chapter of Swap-O-Rama-Rama. Attendees brought a bag of old clothes and were able to get assistance from professional designers with industrial sewing machines, silk screening and iron-on stations, which naturally ended in a fashion parade of the remixes, a sprawl of colour, frayed edges and reinvention.

Istanbul Biennale 2007, Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary, Optimism In The Age Of Global War, Sep 8-Nov 4, 2007, www.iksv.org/bienal; Istanbul Modern www.istanbulmodern.org; Video Mirror Units www.vms-at.com; Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics www.istanbulstreetstyle.com/swap

AVOCA IS A SMALL PLACE. ONE MAIN STREET, 20 SHOPS, 40 PACES, BLINK, AND IT’S GONE. THE TOWN IS AMONG THE 25 POOREST IN THE STATE OF VICTORIA AND THE TRUCKS THAT ROLL IN TEND TO ROLL OUT AGAIN WITHOUT STOPPING. THERE HAVE BEEN SOME CHANGES IN RECENT YEARS AND, WITH AN INFLUX OF VINEYARDS AND WINE BARS, THE POPULATION IS CHANGING. BUT WHEN I ASKED THE MAN AT THE LOCAL GARAGE IF HE WAS BORN AND BRED IN THE REGION HE JUST LAUGHED. “ONLY BEEN HERE 20 YEARS, MATE. NOT LONG ENOUGH TO BE A LOCAL IN AVOCA.” TWENTY YEARS, AND STILL AN IMMIGRANT.

Unlikely as it may seem, Avoca is the site of senior Australian artist Lyndal Jones’ latest major work. Centred around an ‘immigrant house’, a beautiful, paint-peeling weatherboard hotel brought out from Germany in the 1850s, Jones has undertaken a 10-year project with the Avoca community, international artists, sustainability experts and writers to develop the house as “a poetic image of resilience.” It’s a long-term investigation into art, place and climate change in relationship to Australia’s immigrant communities, with Jones and her resident artists, the first of whom is the UK’s Jane Prophet, slowly charting the house’s integration into a small country town.

When you set out to create any major artwork there’s a lot of practical groundwork to be done. For the Avoca Project this has been literal: replacing the house’s ancient, rotted foundations. This ostensibly practical task is for Jones an integral part of the artwork, speaking of the harshness of our environment and the resilience of the immigrant in the face of radical change. The main body of work to date has thus been a series of long-term processes of “mending the house” incorporating video documentation, simple performances, landscaping and superhuman acts of renovation.

There’s also been groundwork to do in convincing people that a house can in fact be a work of art. Art in Avoca previously came in the form of painter and gallery owner Laurie McMurray, whose grey-bearded countenance fits with ideas of what an artist is and does. For Lyndal Jones, working in Avoca has meant spending time simply getting to know locals and building a context in which to work. She has been meticulous in her courtesies, dropping meals off to a sick neighbour, telling people about the work as it progresses, paying her respects despite the fact that the local tradesmen weren’t initially receptive to working for an outsider. Even to some in the city of Melbourne, the project reportedly looks like a budding arts centre or residency program, or worse still, a holiday house. “It’s not an arts centre,” insists Jones. “The house itself, and the processes which surround it over a 10-year period are the work.” It’s an ambitious concept in our real-estate-obsessed times, which equates houses with investments. Jones is instead turning our attention to the life of a house, its history and stories.

It took three years to get this dwelling to a habitable state and, once that was done, the doors opened in November 2007 for Avoca’s newest immigrant, London’s Jane Prophet. In Australia as the inaugural RMIT Creative Media Artist in Residence, Prophet’s a bright-eyed, razor-sharp woman who doesn’t wear her experience on her sleeve. But behind the hilarious anecdotes is a wealth of experience running projects like Technosphere, a multi-user online ecosystem which won her and her collaborators second prize in the Prix Ars Electronica in 1997. Her more recent work in the UK continues a long-held fascination with landscape and artifice, making her an ideal inaugural resident.

For Counterbalance, Prophet created a 12m by 8m stepped grid of electroluminescent light cable. The three levels of the grid are positioned to represent the water levels of three huge floods in the last century. To provide structure for the installation, Prophet used star pickets, a common farming material. By day it looked like the bizarre fencing project of an obsessive-compulsive. At dusk however, when the cable began to glow a fierce bluish white, the installation appeared as an abstract plane of light hovering above the grounds of the house. Designed to be seen by night from the road (and specifically from passing utes) it was a kind of 3D wireframe graph rendered in real life, conjuring the enormous bodies of water that have previously drowned the house.

Floods are part of both Avoca’s and the house’s mythology and in the two months I spent there as writer in residence, numerous people related flood stories. The waters came up to the back steps of the Avoca Hotel. Two foot high over the ticket box at the local sports ground. “Half-way up the kitchen walls and all this work I’m doing’ll be fucked when it happens again,” said a builder working on the house, an evil glint in his eye. Prophet latched onto these stories as the basis for her installation, constructing the grid as both visual reference and conversational anchor point.

In creating Counterbalance, Prophet faced plenty of physical challenges. But being an immigrant, perhaps her biggest challenge was gauging her audience. Avoca is a fiercely utilitarian place and isn’t big on over-opinionated art-savvy types. As a result there was a tangible sense of uncertainty towards the piece. Prophet was caught between the need for her audiences to have an intimate knowledge of local history, the house and the floods, but also familiarity with the visual language of installation. Plenty commented on the beauty of the form itself and there was constant foot traffic past the house, but many others would not be drawn to express an opinion.

On its own, Counterbalance might have been open to the charge from die-hard community cultural development types that it didn’t speak a sufficiently accessible visual language. But it would be disingenuous to read the work in this light. Counterbalance stood on its own as a beautiful, meticulously crafted work of light installation, and its basis in the rich mythology of the floods provided a clear point of entry. What’s more, those gaps between immigrant and local are at the heart of the Avoca project. Counterbalance forms one element of Lyndal Jones’ much larger, long-term project, and is the first step in laying out this relationship for scrutiny and critique.

Introducing Tumbleweed to the Finnish Landscape, Claire Blundell Jones, Anti Festival

ANTI FESTIVAL, “THE WORLD’S ONLY INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FESTIVAL PRESENTING SOLELY SITE-BASED WORKS” TOOK PLACE IN KUOPIO, FINLAND LATE LAST YEAR. NOW IN ITS SIXTH YEAR, THE FESTIVAL ONCE AGAIN PRESENTED A SERIES OF BROADLY DYNAMIC WORKS THAT ENGAGED INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES WITHIN THE CITY. THIS WAS ALSO THE FIRST YEAR IN WHICH JOHANNA TUUKKANNEN WAS JOINED BY ARTIST/RESEARCHER [AND ONE HALF OF THE UK’S LONE TWIN] GREGG WHEELAN AS CO-ARTISTIC-DIRECTOR OF THE FESTIVAL.

Site-specificity as a form is redefined and refocused by the attention the ANTI Festival gives to its surrounding discourses. Each of the works in the festival not only sets up a dialogue with the site itself, but also allows the audience to playfully and conceptually reconsider the potential for human and environmental encounter within these spaces. A diverse range of places is engaged each year, from small islands in the town’s harbour to a city bank building in the main square to the local grill.

At 10 am on the Friday of the festival, outside the Osuuspankki Bank, “UK artist activist collective of one”, the vacuum cleaner, gave away to the citizens of Kuopio 1000 Euros, including his festival artist’s fee. The money was distributed in a large pile of one hundred thousand one-cent pieces. When we arrive, a large crowd has already formed around the bank. There are cameramen from local TV stations, reporters with microphones and lots of people with buckets and bags. Our host, dressed in a security guard’s uniform, is encouraging people to take as much as they need.

As we inch our way to the front, there’s an awkward feeling as we realise that what we are straining to see is other people scrabbling for money. One man is on the ground, lying over the last few coins while someone else tries to push him off his pile. A man in a wheelchair has pulled himself onto the ground and is seizing the last few coins and shoving them into his backpack. The money disappears in less than half an hour. We heard later that someone had brought a wheelbarrow.

The performance is a proposition. If you join in, you enter into a game that is played everyday, a fight over limited resources, scrabbling to stay on top of your heap. Whether watching the game or playing it you are implicated. The coins had to be shipped into Kuopio from Brussels as one euro cent is too small a currency to be found in great quantities in a wealthy country such as Finland. In order for the money grabbers to spend their loot, they will have to take their wheelbarrows and buckets into other banks around the town and exchange their cents for larger denominations. After the performance, we imagine the hundreds of freshly minted coins continuing their journeys as people do their weekly shopping.

In Introducing Tumbleweed to the Finnish Landscape, Claire Blundell Jones, armed with a leaf blower, escorted a ball of tumbleweed through the streets of Kuopio. Bizarre chance encounters could happen anywhere over the three days of the festival. Down streets, through town squares and along the harbour foreshore, the site for this work was the entire city. As we see Blundell Jones wandering the streets, carefully directing her tumbleweed along the pavements and through parks, a narrative begins to unfold. She becomes a lone ranger, a woman out of place. A relationship is formed between the artist and her accomplice. As she introduces Kuopio and its people to her shy but strong tumbleweed, we begin to see this as an act of love. Over the duration of the performance, through various friendly interventions with people, cars, bicycles and enthusiastic dogs along the way, the mythical American weed slowly reduces to the size of a tennis ball.

The Longest Lecture Marathon takes place in the Community College over three sessions totalling 27 hours (one 3-hour and two 12-hour sessions) and is billed in the program as the world’s longest Power Point presentation. Performed by Australian artist Rebekah Rousi (now living in Finland), the performance is an odd mix of improvised text, lecture and extended physical score. The piece centres on a series of randomly selected slides, which appear to be a disconnected collection of policy statements from EU policies on Climate Change to VET guidelines for English Language teachers. Rousi elucidates each slide, word by word, to the audience/class in what feels like a strange English language lesson. She explains each word simply, jumping on tables to demonstrate the meaning of “on”, finding increasingly bizarre ways to describe words, sometimes surprising and amusing herself with her own discoveries.

We go back a few times over the three days; Rousi is always energetic, welcoming newcomers to the class and returning immediately to her slide. When we go back to the schoolroom, an hour before she is due to finish, a number of people have gathered to witness the end of this great feat. The artist is carrying on with the same enthusiasm we had witnessed earlier. She never seems to flag even if she is looking a little dishevelled, her mascara running down her face (she’s either been laughing or crying earlier that day). We all hang on her every word. This performance is like a seed that takes root in you. For the last two days we have wandered the town always aware that in that room Rebekah Rousi is still going, her rhythm, tone and language firmly lodged in our minds.

On the Saturday, on the other side of town, Simon Whitehead [UK] rowed between the harbour and Vasikkasaari Island, inviting people to join him from dawn until sunset in the ritual building of a large bonfire. The fire was made from found bits of wood from the island and the offerings people brought, which ranged from sticks and leaves to household furniture and an apple. Our crossing was the last for the day and we had to move quickly as the sun was setting and Whitehead had last minute preparations to attend to before the final ritual burning. Despite cold and fatigue the artist spoke with warmth and generosity, inviting us onto the boat. We were asked not to speak during the journey, setting the tone for the next thirty minutes where every act was slowly pared back to basic necessity as we turned our focus inward towards the island.

We walk in silence into a clearing. To the left is a large table surrounded by white birch trees and toadstools. To the right is a large bonfire built to perfection in tepee symmetry by Whitehead and the strangers who had come before us. We stand there, taking in the calm beauty of it all, not really sure what to do. The artist points to the table and whispers more instructions. He asks us to record our gifts and our reason for bringing them in a book, a ritual inventory of the fire, and then to join him at the beacon to place our gift. He gestures for us to sit with him on the large rock next to a wooden mound. We look out onto the shore, back to Kuopio where the offering will shortly be directed. He lies down, we follow, and together we stare at the sky.

When we return to shore, we’re invited to stay to see the beacon of light burn at sunset. The experience, a slow, peaceful and yet fleeting encounter with the island, feels rooted in the island’s elusive temporal reality. The performance concludes beautifully in the final act of burning.

The ANTI Festival, Sept 27-30 2007. www.antifestival.com. Other Australian artists in the program included Rosie Dennis and the writers Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari (Panther), a performance collaboration currently based in Melbourne. www.pantherpanther.com

DURING LA POCHA NOSTRA’S THE NEW BARBARIANS FALL COLLECTION 2007, IN AN UNQUANTIFIABLE WAY, RAJNI SHAH HAD BEEN PARADING SPIDER-LIKE UP AND DOWN THE FASHION SHOW RUNWAY FOR SOME TIME, NAKED BUT FOR A BLACK CHOKER, WITH AN ANIMAL SNARL AND DARK ARTERIAL BLOOD SMEARED ACROSS HER FACE.

Slowly, quietly, Australian artist Sarah Jane Norman—similarly unclothed except for various thin black trusses dissecting her body and a rubber mask of what looked like Condoleezza Rice over her head—made her presence known at the opposite end of the catwalk. I can’t even remember what was playing on the soundtrack at the time because by then the entire experience had battered me into helpless submission. Ninety minutes of noise, fury and fashion, culminating in La Pocha Nostra and their associate artists making me vibrate with the heartbeat regularity of a quartz crystal.

Days later, details of New Barbarians are still repeating upon me like snatches of a half remembered dream, sneaking up, unexpected and often unwelcome, triggered by some innocuous element of my daily life. BAM! There’s Alex Bradley, hauling himself the length of the catwalk by means of the connecting spars of two lighting clamps, the metal props attached to his wrists, instruments of torture, clunking painfully into the wood of the runway. BAM! Roza Ilgen [RT81. p34], her form entirely covered in human hair, short-arsed, sporting breasts and a beard like some long lost evolutionary by-road: Captain Caveman, Morlock, Bigfoot, arms splayed out, a perverse Christ, the audience cheering her enthusiastically. WHOOSH! The sound of a mad Mexican woman jabbering away down a telephone line, unintelligible, distorted, insane. BOOM! BANG! Guillermo Goméz-Peña suddenly breaking into a native American chant, all the while pouting ridiculously like Derek Zoolander. GO!

Presented in the mode of a fashion show, New Barbarians keeps all the rituals, bluster and bombast of such events intact. The audience have been told to “dress for the catwalk” and most have obliged. There’s a foyer preview, free drinks, a rat pack of photographers (all uniformly name-badged PAPARAZZI SCUM) and once we are led inside the auditorium there’s VIP seating at the runway’s edge, a hammering soundtrack, plus some disjointed and deliberately mashed-up films projected onto a screen above the throng—cutting rapidly and queasily between ethno-geographic documentaries, rehearsal footage, adverts, military recruitment films and Middle East news stories. There’s the obligatory show manager hustling models to and from the stage with a constant air of unflappable yet pissed-off efficiency.

Goméz-Peña, founder member of La Pocha Nostra, holds court on a platform opposite the runway, freezing the noisy proceedings regularly in order to deliver verbose treatises in a patchwork of languages, physically inhabiting a space somewhere between a Hopi tribal chief and Karl Lagerfeld. His consort is a snappy-suited female announcer who gives voice to the catwalk at random, speaking over the soundtrack in measured sing-song tones, offering performers for sale, encouraging the audience towards acts of rebellion or cultural vandalism. It is relentless, and total. It also has that single most important clash of textures prevalent in the world of fashion: the constant, repeated intertwining of the profound and the utterly meaningless, holding the event together like warp and weft. There’s the all-pervading sense that what we’re witnessing is the creators throwing a huge amount of stuff at the wall, and seeing what sticks. It’s exuberant, funny, unapologetic…and occasionally feels as if it’s in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

La Pocha Nostra have spent much of the last 15 years conjuring up and making flesh this world of border and hybrid cultures, building a creative lab where cultural phenomena undergo a type of rapid, barely controlled fission. The forms (it doesn’t feel right to call them ‘outfits,’ somehow) on the runway tonight are the gene-spliced bastard children of the communications satellite and the nightclub, bearing the family traits of hip-hop, sado-masochism, YouTube and airport terminals, cheap handguns, DVD boxsets, protest marches and internet porn, speaking cross-Phillipino-Icelandic with a Brazillian/lowland Scots accent, listening to klezmer-grindcore on their iPods and spending their holidays on the fucking moon.

As they tour the world, Goméz-Peña and a crew of three or four permanent cohorts ‘collect’ associates, throwing further spices into their melting pot. The diverse bodies are all artists, all complicit, all having made themselves beautiful in their own eyes, no doubt via some mediation on the part of their hosts. As a result of this diversity it’s unsurprising that many fascinating socio-political concerns are manifest in each model parading back and forth before us: power play appears to be a fundamental building block of their interactions; gender is not so much bent as blended, a thick chromosomal soup; and the models borrow ‘clothes’ from every religion and religious impetus that crawls beneath the sun. BAM! Harminder Singh Judge, gas-masked with the multiple arms of a Hindu deity strapped to a crucifix. CRACK, THWACK. Jade Maravala, a stiletto-heeled terrorist with a Nike swoosh adorning her hijab. BANG! Jiva Parthipan performing an exuberant, grinning Kathakali dance with a handgun stuffed into his crotch.

The crossbreed cyber-sexual rebellion of New Barbarians might sound disconcerting, but it’s not what gave me the shakes. It wasn’t even the implication that somewhere beneath the fashion show there was a bubbling bloodbath of righteous violence. What I was watching, after all, was a distillation of a million things, people and places that already exist, active, actual, accessible either physically or technologically, far from alien or inhuman in any conceivable way. The danger wasn’t in the shapes, nodes and ideas.

I certainly wasn’t shaking with indignation, as I loved the damn thing: feeling oddly, happily at home. I’ve heard since the show that some people actually found New Barbarians offensive, but it’s completely inconceivable to me why. I can’t understand how anyone could be offended by such a vivid celebration of the possibilities of human synthesis. Sure, there was plenty of perverted religious imagery; much nudity (some of it in the areas euphemistically and uselessly described as ‘graphic’); and little, if any, explanation of what you were seeing and why it was there—only a sly announcement before the catwalk burst to life that the audience shouldn’t take all they saw “entirely seriously.”

But still, what’s offensive about that? La Pocha Nostra’s magpie tendencies are wonderfully indiscriminate, irreverent in equal measure towards male, female, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, left, right, rich, poor. Basically, if you’re human, you’re fair game. To me, being offended by New Barbarians is about as logical as being offended by Rio De Janeiro, Singapore or Los Angeles—all of them by no means short of culture clashes, bastardised religions, ridiculously beautiful people and plenty of senseless violence.

And maybe that explains why I was shaking. It was like an overdose. Perhaps if you can picture the entirety of Singapore, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, London, New York, Paris, Milan…imagine every last inch crammed into a hypodermic and injected forcibly straight into the base of your spinal column—an instant download of more dirt, glitz and mixed messages than you could possibly handle.

La Pocha Nostra, The New Barbarians, Fall Collection 2007, Arnolfini, Bristol, Nov 10, 2007

Read about La Pocha Nostra’s Muesum of Fetishised Identities at Performance Space Sydney RT44, p32; RT56, p32; and RT58, p11

FOR ALL THE AUSTRALIAN TOURING THAT TOOK PLACE IN 2007, SUPPORTED BY PLAYING THE WORLD AND INCLUDED IN SEASONS LIKE OZMOSIS AT THE BARBICAN IN LONDON OR THE FESTIVAL OF AUSTRALIAN THEATRE IN CHINA, THERE ARE NUMEROUS NEAR-MISSES OR UNTIMELY REVERSALS WHICH GO LARGELY UNREPORTED.

Restless Dance Company withdrew from a project with Shanghai’s Special Olympics this year due to a lack of focus in the artistic program at the Chinese end. Marrugeku lost the second venue on their 2007 tour at the last minute, salvaging their ZurichTheaterspektakel presentations only by turning them into a showcase. Other companies such as Lucy Guerin Inc report invitations from across the globe which they have been obliged to turn down because they cannot be connected into a viable tour. Performer Moira Finucane sums it up thus, “International touring is an enormous amount of logistical and creative work, across currencies, travel arrangements, freight, borders, customs, different venues, languages, cultures and varying expectations.”

marrugeku

Complications aside, Australian artists report a genuine enthusiasm for their international experiences, whether they are fresh to the fray or old hands. Companies like Stalker and Marrugeku have been working on the international circuit for over a decade. In 2007 the company was commissioned to create Sugar for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture celebrations. This major production involving artists from Burkina Faso, Liverpool, Marseilles and Australia and supported by a variety of European funds, was a huge project to pull off. Artistic director Rachael Swain says, “We have been touring for over 15 years. It’s how we survive. We make work to sell internationally but we still rely upon grant support. We were recently invited into the Australia Council’s Export Development Initiative which had the pre-requisite that companies would become self-sustaining within three years of investment into international touring. We had to give up half way through and return the funding. We did make great progress in terms of advocacy and profile by using this investment to travel and network, but it costs us $60-$70K just to take a show overseas. It’s unrealistic to think we can make a profit like that.” Swain speaks from the privileged standpoint of working with one of the most highly regarded European agencies, Frans Brood. Despite her admiration for the work of its director Guy Baguet, with whom she has collaborated for 12 years, she is concerned that there is currently, “less scope out there, even with the bigger festivals.”

strut & fret

If scale is perhaps the double-edged sword upon which Stalker and Marrugeku’s international profiles rests, smaller companies, newer to the business are more gung-ho about their international opportunities. Scott Maidment at the Brisbane-based Strut & Fret Production House has had an unprecedented year with three massive hits at Edinburgh’s Fringe festival. Men of Steel, Tom Tom Club and Meow Meow all received rave reviews and added extra shows to sold out seasons. Maidment has been overwhelmed with interest from producers and is currently negotiating a Broadway run for Tom Tom Club and overseeing a seven month international tour for Men of Steel. Maidment took a team of 17 people to Edinburgh—“a huge investment” for his small operation. Yet he says, “We got more work done there than in three months of emailing.” Maidment’s leap of faith was informed by research into other production houses overseas and investment in travel to European festivals such as Avignon and Chalon dans la Rue. Whilst he says there are “no role models in Australia for what we want to do“, Maidment is already seeing the returns on largely unsubsidised trips and building a sustainable business strategy out of hard work and risky decisions.

circa

Yaron Lifschitz, artistic director of the Brisbane-based physical theatre company Circa, shares Maidment’s entrepreneurial approach, citing “focus, strategy and luck” as the motor driving Circa’s recent prolific touring. From a single showcase in Korea in 2005, Circa have toured to North and South America, the UK and Europe and are contemplating a raft of invitations for 2009. Lifschitz says that Circa has been driven overseas by the “huge competitive disadvantages we struggled against in Australia”; “the income and recognition we have gained internationally has increased the cultural value of Circa in Australia…We had to get famous to survive.” Lifschitz repeats Swain’s comments about commitment, but is more aligned with Maidment when it comes to priorities. “We have three criteria for whether we tour”, he says, “strategic, financial and logistical. If two out of the three make sense we will do the tour.” He pauses before adding a fourth criterion, “Fun. If it is likely to be fun, we are always going to consider it.”

rosie dennis

This trend of quietly investing in travel and research is borne out by individuals such as Sydney-based Rosie Dennis, who has been overseas three times in 2007 [RT81, p15]. Dennis’ solo performance tours have been funded by the Australia Council and Playing the World, but she has also self-funded some of her travel and added side-trips to each gig, to network and develop her relationships with one or two other markets where she finds a response to her work.

back to back

Geelong-based Back To Back Theatre have been equally successful in Europe in 2007. Executive Producer Alice Nash says, “We feel privileged that there has been such strong support for the work. In 2007 Back to Back toured Small Metal Objects, to six international cities and in 2008 we have six presenters in North America confirmed. The hardest parts have been working out how, as a small company, to structure ourselves to deal with it, and giving ourselves permission not to do every little thing ourselves. And we’ve had to determinedly allow space for the development of new work for the future. Of course, we will hope for international commissions in the long-term, but it’s important not to get ahead of ourselves too. We are an idiosyncratic company and we are learning how our practice sits in different contexts. We hope to engage in dialogue that makes artistic sense for us and for those who present the company.”

australian art orchestra

Nash’s account of juggling is repeated by Australian Art Orchestra’s General Manager, Ann Moir. She says, “It takes a lot of time, patience and belief in the program. Things outside of our control have to fall into place. Logistically it is a case of putting in the hours and getting all the plans worked out before starting out.” AAO’s four city tour of India in 2007, in collaboration with Indian artists, is the result of an investment in India which began in 1996 with Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade support. With 25 artists on the road, AAO is not an easy company to tour and Moir has few expectations of global domination, preferring to select partnerships for the long-term which will reap rewards for the company.

urban theatre projects

These long-term objectives are shared by Urban Theatre Projects whose first serious dialogue with an international presenter began at APAM [Australian Performing Arts Market] in 2006. Harbourfront Theatres invited the company to create a Canadian version of their Back Home production in Canada in 2007 and are now discussing a major new work to be made there in 2009. General Manager Simon Wellington recognises that this relationship has changed and will continue to change the nature of the UTP which, “up to 2003 was still in the cycle of making large community participatory work.”

branch nebula

Meetings at Arts Markets crop up frequently and reinforce the importance of networking and discussion between artists. Whilst some see immediate returns, such as Branch Nebula, supported by Performing Lines, who pitched Paradise City at APAM 2006 and subsequently toured to Brazil in 2007, others start lengthy dialogues which may or may not lead to touring and commissions.

chunky move

Chunky Move have been exploring international markets for several years, but it took the hugely successful solo, Glow, to really ignite sustained interest in Gideon Obarzanek’s work. Glow’s small scale and large impact has opened the UK, US and Asian markets for Chunky Move in 2007 and North America in 2008.

adt

The power of a production ideally suited to touring is something which Australian Dance Theatre can attest to, as their recent UK tours of Held and Birdbrain demonstrate. Serving to break into a market and establish a profile, signature productions can forge the way for more complex presentations, as ADT have proven with Devolution touring to Paris’ Theatre de la Ville. ADT are not resting on their laurels and have secured an international commission from the Joyce Theatre in New York and the Southbank Centre in London for Garry Stewart’s forthcoming production G, a response to the ballet classic Giselle, and Stewart was recently commissioned to make a new work for London’s prestigious Ballet Rambert.

right product, company & attitude

The right product with the right company attitude and the consistent investment in international relationships clearly bears fruit. Witness William Yang’s repeated international touring, Taikoz’s return trips to Japan and Finucane and Smith all over Europe in 2007. Whilst there is no magic formula and luck crops up in almost every conversation, it is clear that Australian companies large and small are reaping rewards internationally which pay dividends at home and that this looks set to continue.

For reviews of Circa and Back to Back
performing at PuSh, Vancouver see p8 and p10

IN 1971, THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT OF CARDIFF, WALES, AGREED TO A BOLD EXPERIMENT. AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CONSTRUCTING NEW BUILDINGS TO HOUSE THE ARTS, THEY ACCEPTED THE PROPOSAL FROM LOCAL ARTISTS TO ALLOW THEM TO OCCUPY AN OLD HIGH SCHOOL ON THE WESTERN, MORE INDUSTRIAL SIDE OF TOWN. THIRTY-SIX YEARS LATER, CHAPTER ARTS HAS EVOLVED FROM ITS COMMUNAL, ARTIST-RUN ROOTS INTO A MORE PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE COMPOUND OF THEATRES, CINEMAS, STUDIOS FOR HIRE, AND AN ART GALLERY, BUT IT RETAINS A CLOSE CONNECTION TO THE CITY AND A PARTICULARLY WELSH FLAVOUR OF ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION.

This commitment is demonstrated by Chapter’s annual Experimentica festival, now in its seventh year, where the emphasis on promoting a wide range of artistic practices is one of its real strengths. At this year’s festival, the week-long program brought together sonic arts, film, performance, movement and installation. The work seemed to take over the whole building, with the former classrooms becoming sites for examination and testing of received forms of performance such as puppetry, cabaret, and installation.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but the work at Experimentica which is most markedly cross-disciplinary also tends to be addressing ideas of Welshness. Sonic arts collective Gwrando create a shrine to lost Welsh music, mixing the cracked and distant sound of dozens of discarded Welsh language records with live singing and film. The effect is a rich evocation of the way in which our relationship with the past is fragile and fragmented—as is our experience of presence. In Cerdded Adre (The Long Walk Home), Rowan O’Neill combines historical lecture and autobiography with fragments of performance, using playful self-reflection to both celebrate and critique the layers of fakery involved in performing national identity. In On Running, Gareth Llyr and Louise Ritchie also work with the tension between description and event, combining improvised dance with handheld video to explore how an experience of the landscape around them can be brought into the contained space of the theatre.

With their crowd-pleasing work Cabba Hey, performance duo Mr and Mrs Clark discover a neat trick with regard to expectation and experimentation. By framing their performance within the cabaret format they invite an audience to react to their work as comedy, and this allows the Clarks to be as experimental as they want without ever worrying about being labelled pretentious. They start out with bags over their heads, and in a series of musical skits strip them off only to reveal or assume more and more masks. Disavowing seriousness, they can actually be increasingly serious: upon closer study, their piss-take choreography is more choreography than piss-take (including a faithful reproduction of the Martha Graham technique). When they perform a ventriloquist act with Mrs Clark as live dummy, it is both absurdly hilarious and heartbreakingly earnest, a balance that has everything to do with painstaking attention to the details of their performance.

Experimentation involves looking back to the past as much as looking forward to the unknown, and the Clark’s Cabba Hey could be seen as a knowing reflection on early 20th century Dadaism. But if Dadaist cabaret was insurrectionary theatre, then this is insurrectionary cabaret, in that what makes it pleasurable is its more and more clever deferral of pleasure. And so, one of the Clark’s closing numbers does literally what the Dadaists attempted metaphorically, giving the finger to its audience—and the audience loves it.

Puppetry doesn’t often find a place in experimental theatre festivals, but Jeong Geum-Hyung’s duet with a vacuum cleaner is a reminder of how fantastical, magical and disturbing a form it can be. The long hose of the vacuum cleaner has a man’s head at its end, the gaping suction hole his mouth. Throughout, this face appears to be the only animated thing in the room, with the rest of Jeong’s body completely lifeless and inert. In a reversal of roles, the face-object appears to manipulate Jeong’s body to serve its masculine desires: lifting her to her feet, rolling her across the floor, and ultimately using her as an object of its own bizarre and disturbing sexuality. The effect should be comical, and at times is, but it is not the comedy of the absurd but that of the absolutely truthful and perfectly executed. Jeong’s work addresses issues of control and manipulation and of animation and death—exactly the realm of puppetry, but Jeong’s brilliant performance is a reminder of how exciting it can be.

Joost Nieuwenburg’s Common Sense combines the welcoming experience of installation with the arduousness of durational performance. A one metre high by three metre square box, contains Nieuwenburg, a stove, a sink and several kilos of onions. Only able to crawl, he peels and chops the onions for four hours, adding them to a pot which is always cooking. A swimming pool ladder at one end of the box invites us to climb on top, from where we can see the artist through a small vented porthole placed directly above the simmering pot. Another small window on one of the side panels offers a different vantage point. The smell and the heat escaping these windows are overpowering, as is the image of Nieuwenburg sweating and crying inside. As the day wore on, the darkening room became illuminated only by the glow from within the box, and there was an exquisite contrast between the warm peacefulness of the room, the aesthetic pleasure of the shining, meticulously crafted object, and the infernal labour going on inside.

The final performance of the festival, Helena Hunter’s Tracing Shadows, feels like it would be at home within the live art genre, with its use of intense imagery to address the material presence of the body—but it’s an experience entirely mediated by the mechanisms of the theatre. Hunter employs a veritable arsenal of theatrical tricks: projections and pulleys, carefully calibrated lights and sound effects, and darkness as cover for theatrical sleight-of-hand with which to surprise the blinded audience. But its central concern is Hunter’s barely visible body, her naked back twisting and straining in the faintest of light. In brief glimpses through the blackness we see blue ribbon pouring onto her body, a child’s dress appearing in the darkness, and Hunter’s body writhing and breaking in an attempt to fit into the impossibly small dress. These elements create a fairytale world that combines the seductive and the destructive, the childlike and the adult, desire and the artificiality of desire. Like fairy tales themselves, Tracing Shadows relies entirely upon the contrivances of its formal conventions, and at the same time, it is eerie and compelling.

The range of work presented at Experimentica allowed for intriguing explorations of cross-disciplinarity, Welshness and the dynamic tension between artifice and authenticity. Above all the festival was most commendable for its genuine commitment to experimentation. This was an environment where untested work could be tried and where artists could talk openly with each other and their audiences about the challenges they were addressing. It’s rare to find a place that values process as much as product, but it’s clear that experimentation has a welcome home in Cardiff.

Experimentica 07, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales, Oct 16-21, 2007, www.chapter.org

WE ARRIVE IN BERLIN TO MEET GOB SQUAD FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE SECOND PHASE OF REHEARSALS ON A NEW WORK THEY ARE CALLING SAVING THE WORLD. HAVING SEEN THE LAST FEW DAYS OF REHEARSALS OF THEIR 2005 PRODUCTION KING KONG CLUB, WE ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE SYSTEM. THERE IS NO DIRECTOR OR LEADER. THERE ARE SIX CORE ARTISTS, BRITISH AND GERMAN, WHO ARE JOINED ON EACH PROJECT BY TWO TO FOUR GUEST ARTISTS, A TEAM OF VIDEO AND SOUND AND TECHNICAL CREW, AND PRODUCTION PEOPLE. THIS COLLECTIVE SYSTEM LENDS ITSELF TO A CERTAIN SORT OF ANARCHY WHERE DECISIONS SEEM TO BE MADE BY THE LOUDEST OR MOST PERSISTENT VOICE IN THE ROOM OR WHOEVER HAS THE LAST SAY.

In 2005 we soon found ourselves standing nervously backstage for a trial run of King Kong Club dressed as hairy apes alongside 28 other ape-suited audience members. For the next thirty minutes we gleefully followed the firm but charming directions of five Gob Squad performers (dressed as film directors) through the filming of various nightclub scenarios: an orgy, a boot-scooting dance, a rock band performance, a cocaine snorting toilet scene and some pole dancing. Each scenario lasted only a few minutes before we were whisked away by another director into another phantasmagoria; heroic, awkward and ridiculously good fun.

The end of the filming is not the end of the show, there is brief intermission (to allow time for some clever edits) before we sit in the theatre and watch the movie we have just created. It seems that to see a Gob Squad performance is to literally be part it. It’s the immediacy of Gob Squad’s performances, this seamlessness between performance, video, and audience that excites us and leads us straight back their studios when we visit Berlin again.

We are back in 2007 to sit in on two weeks of development of the company’s latest production, Saving the World. The concept seems simple enough, Gob Squad arrive in a city and find a town square. “The best way to think about the kind of place we are looking for is that it’s the kind of place where you would set up an Imbiss (a German food van)”, says Sean Patton. They then film, via a complex system of cameras, a full, seven-camera panoramic view of the square. This material is then played back to an audience in a large theatre filled with the 360 degree seven-screen film. “Saving” therefore also means capturing, recording and preserving, and even understanding. The project seems to be simultaneously trying to deal with the end of things as well as the possibilities for utopian beginnings.

Gob Squad create performance events that combine audience interaction, live video and performance in real time; editing, if any, happens during the event itself. The company have been developing this performance genre over a number of years and how they use it is central to the conceptual development of each work. In each piece a relationship is formed between the audience and the performers in the creation of filmed live action. Saving the World will have its world premiere in June at Kampnagel, Hamburg.

During the development period we witnessed a number of wild discussions over cake and coffee about video time versus real time in the new work. How would the work capture a full 24-hour period in the square and show it back in a two hour theatre piece? What time periods is it important to capture or save? How then does the captured time of the panoramic video recordings relate to the live time in the theatre? Is it important to maintain a link between the recorded world and the world inside? Should the filming be done in the 24 hours before each show; or does the link in time not matter; can it be filmed next week and shown in May; what does this do to the relationship between film and audience? Alongside all of this, technical experts in the company are testing the possibilities for the successful execution of any of the many possibilities that are raised in these discussions. Our minds reel at the possibilities that are opened up in the fertile grounds that are Gob Squad’s cake and coffee afternoons.

After a week of being in Gob Squad’s world, we are invited to see a rehearsal and then performance of their most recently completed work. In Kitchen—You’ve never had it so good, Gob Squad create their own Warhol Factory playing themselves in three Andy Warhol films, Kitchen, Sleep and a series of screen tests. The premise is very simple, or at least it should be. It’s a kitchen with people doing things in it. It’s a person sleeping. It’s a couch with a person staring into camera. The lights go down and three films start rolling simultaneously.

“Hello, thanks for coming, and welcome to Gob Squad’s factory. My name is Biret and tonight I will be paying the part of Biret in a film called Kitchen by Andy Warhol. It is New York 1965 and the times are a changing…and here in Kitchen we are at the cusp of everything because this film that we are in is the essence of its time.”

These films are projected simultaneously onto a single screen in a theatre. Behind it Gob Squad are performing live to camera in three adjoining film sets. They move in and out of the films, swapping the roles of various clichéd personas from the Warhol era. The films are each constantly undermined by disruptions happening in the others.

Seeing this re-enactment is like watching a group of people trying to work out how to make a period film. They can’t quite get it right and, of course, this is the point. Too much time has passed, too much has changed between 1965 and now. The essence of Warhol’s time is not the essence of Gob Squad’s time. In their frustration, the performers stop the film, they walk out from behind the screen and one by one replace themselves with an audience member. The performance ends with Gob Squab in the audience. With us standing in their place, they can be a blank canvas; they can be whoever they want to be. Gob Squad are making a new film before our very eyes and it’s free of histories. They are capturing the essence of here, right now; live in front of a camera and with an audience.

When we return to the studio the following week to work on Saving the World, we start again puzzling out the performance, trying things out, coming up with simple structures, short sequences that might be what we’re looking for. We go out into the street with cameras and try it all out—homemade time lapse, talking to passersby about the future, trying to explain the world. As we go through this process we realise again that the openness, robust experimentation and curiosity witnessed in Gob Squad’s performances is carried over into the way they make work. The process of making the work is much like the final product: people are invited in, the world opens up to Gob Squad and Gob Squad opens up to the world.

As we are leaving Sarah Thom smiles her winning smile at us and says, “Bye Panthers. Feel free to steal anything from us that you like!” Perhaps they are saving the world in more ways than one.

IT’S COMMON FOR THOSE SEEKING NEW AND VITAL MODES OF PERFORMANCE TO DECRY THE SLAVISH VENERATION AFFORDED THE ‘CLASSICS’—TO MOAN ABOUT THE WAYS IN WHICH NEW VOICES ARE DROWNED OUT BY THE INCESSANT BABBLE OF SAME-OLD SAME-OLD SHAKESPEARES AND IBSENS AND VARIOUS GREEK FELLOWS. I’M ONE OF THESE CRITICS, I’LL CONFESS—AN UNKNOWN QUANTITY WILL LIKELY PIQUE MY INTEREST MORE THAN ANOTHER ROUND WITH BRECHT, GENET, EVEN LOVELY MR PINTER. BUT I’VE ALSO REALISED THE CURIOUS PARADOX OF THIS POSITION: CANONICAL TEXTS ARE MORE FREQUENTLY TREATED WITH DISRESPECT THAN NEWER WORKS.

For better or worse, many directors seem far more comfortable messing about with tired old plays than they are with fresh and unknown ones, and this isn’t just at the level of independent theatre. Benedict Andrews’ Sydney Theatre Company production of Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla is exemplary. Andrews worked both with and against White’s grand and imposing text to produce a very layered, ironic response. It’s less often that one encounters the same kind of treatment—of questioning, of interrogating or deconstructing—when we see a director handling a hot new work from an emerging writer.

The Eleventh Hour’s mission is to revitalise classics, and they do this as well as—if not better than—any other company in Australia. They don’t simply dress up old plays, or use them as vehicles for an alternative agenda. For company directors Anne Thompson and William Henderson, the works of Shakespeare, Beckett or Wilde endure for a reason, but this doesn’t mean that their job is simply to present the most faithful production of each possible. Instead, they tease apart their source material to reveal the intricate complexities holding each text together.

Their most ambitious endeavour so far has been their recent production, Not What I Am—Othello Retold. Here, Thompson’s direction saw the bard’s iconic play unravelled to its barest threads and rewoven into a performance work both redolent of the original and utterly other. The greatest testament to the work’s success was in the way Othello Retold regularly blurred presentation and interpretation—one often had to ask “was that in the original play and I’ve always missed it, or is it something new?”

This occurs most obviously in a kind of hyper-sexualisation of the play. When characters aren’t actually fucking each other they’re groping, fondling or kissing, often while conversing with others. It’s an uncanny approach to the erotics of Othello—laying bare the sexual jealousy at the work’s core and therefore making its audience search harder for other subtexts. Then again, by emphasising a heightened carnality in the work, one can’t be sure how much is simply drawing from Shakespeare’s play and how much has been added to it.

Rodney Afif’s Othello is a Middle-Eastern military man driven to murder by the racist machinations of Venetian society. His tragedy unfolds in a nightmarish city of unstable boundaries—Julie Renton’s magnificent design of floating walls transforms itself in an instant— and a shadowy, cloaked chorus represents the invisible society looking to bring about the Moor’s destruction.

Afif’s Othello, though set upon, is not merely the noble hero driven to madness by a cruel world, however. He is far more human—angry and confused, unable to properly articulate his fear and finally revealing a savagery that can’t wholly be the result of his torments. He is a deeply ambiguous character, both victim and perpetrator of violence, and this sophisticated portrayal denies any easy conclusions.

As Iago, David Trendinnick provides an excellent foil—a lascivious and ultimately pitiable wreck of a being, a monster worthy of contempt, not fear. Shelly Lauman’s Desdemona is of a less subtle hue but still evokes the sympathy necessary to instil a growing sense of horror as events take their inevitable turn.

There may be a little too much going on in this production. It’s so fertile as to at times overwhelm with significance, and the result is a dreamlike, kaleidoscopic experience of a story seemingly done to death. Just how a classic should be.

Red Stitch Actors Theatre occupy the opposite end of the spectrum—you won’t find many classics in its half-decade history. The company is more concerned with producing the works you haven’t seen, and presenting to Melbourne the best international (and, increasingly, local) plays available. Red Stitch is primarily an actors’ company, and as a consequence, the imperative is often to do a play justice, rather than to problematise it. For better, again, or worse. When the company gets it right, the results are, on occasion, stunning. Motortown fits this category. The play was completed by UK writer Simon Stephens in only four days—hardly encouraging—but is possessed of an unexpected depth and rigour superbly realised in Red Stitch’s final production of 2007.

Like Othello, Motortown’s central character is a military man coming home and coming undone. Danny returns to England after a tour of duty in Iraq. His attempts to reconnect with a woman he had once briefly dated reveal his nostalgic delusions about the past; her rebukes see him purchasing a handgun and seeking out some kind of revenge against the world he has returned to.

The play is composed of a series of vignettes, mostly duologues, in which Danny encounters another example of hell on his home turf. He is a barely contained bottle of rage, but this is slowly revealed through conversations with his disabled brother, his put-upon ex-lover, a local shopkeeper and a London low-life. Danny’s world, like Othello’s, gives him no space to speak his hatred and fear, and he ends up exploding violence upon an innocent woman. Or doesn’t: where Shakespeare uses violence to conclude tragedy, the bloody climax of Stephens’ work occurs at its centre, and its affective aftershock is the work’s triumph.

Motortown doesn’t simply end with Very Bad Things as the inevitable outcome of a society’s misdeeds. There’s no cathartic conclusion before we go home to bed—Danny’s miserable existence continues as rich swingers abuse him, home life doesn’t improve and his self-loathing only grows.

Director Laurence Strangio is no stranger to experimentation; his longstanding collaborations with Caroline Lee have proven his abilities to reconstruct literary classics with a keen and unwavering hand. Here, though, he has demonstrated the worth of staying true to a work’s essence, of finding the ideal register that causes a play to resonate long beyond its final note. Find the right play, and you’ve created a new classic.

The Eleventh Hour, Not What I Am: Othello Retold, from William Shakespeare’s Othello, director Anne Thompson, performers Rodney Afif, Shelly Lauman, David Trendinnick, Jane Nolan, Stuart Orr, Greg Ulfan; designer Julie Renton, lighting designer Kick Pajanti, composer Wally Gunn; The Eleventh Hour Theatre, Melbourne, Dec 1-15, 2007; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Motortown, writer Simon Stephens, director Laurence Strangio, performers Richard Bligh, Brett Cousins, Cleopatra Coleman, Verity Charlton, Dion Mills, Sarah Sutherland and David Whitely, designer Peter Mumford, lighting designer Richard Vabre; Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda. Nov 21-Dec 22, 2007

THERE’S A WELL-ESTABLISHED BODY OF NEW MEDIA PERFORMANCE THAT DRAWS HEAVILY UPON COMPUTER GAME CULTURE, FROM THE UK GROUP BLAST THEORY’S SEMINAL DESERT RAIN AND CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? [SEE P26], TO THE MORE RECENT WAYFARER [RT81, P35] AT PERFORMANCE SPACE. IN EACH OF THESE WORKS, COMPUTER GAMES DICTATE THE DRAMATURGY AND PROVIDE THE NARRATIVE FRAMEWORK (A QUEST, A PURSUIT, A RACE). THE TRICK THAT MAKES BLAST THEORY’S WORK SO SUCCESSFUL IS THAT THE PERFORMANCES OPERATE IN BOTH DOMAINS, FUNCTIONING SATISFACTORILY AS GAMES BUT ALSO AS LIVE PERFORMANCE, INTERROGATING AND INTERVENING INTO BOTH THE CONDITION OF GAMING AND OF LIVENESS.

It’s clear from the outset that Powerhouse Youth Theatre’s City Quest has some big shoes to fill. City Quest is an ambitious undertaking, a feature of artistic director Claudia Chidiac’s work with Powerhouse since her appointment in 2005. That work includes the intelligently provocative This Territory (2007, in collaboration with Australian Theatre for Young People) and the cross-cultural wedding spectacular I do… but (2006).

For a weekend, PYT occupied several city blocks at the centre of Fairfield, inserting performers, video installations and other interventions amidst the shops and public spaces of this suburban centre. The safety briefing at the outset declares, “all the people are real”, further noting that if audience members “see something you like please feel free to purchase.” So while the gaming rhetoric poses a crisis that must be averted, the frame of the performance places a surprising emphasis on tourism.

It’s an unusual positioning of the audience. On the one hand, the ‘missions’ to address the civic crisis that the game proposes (the ‘Emerald Torch’ that somehow maintains social stability has been lost and must urgently be recovered) frame the audience as the potential saviours of Fairfield. On the other hand, the nature of these missions are to look closely at the inhabitants of this urban landscape, performer and resident alike, and to examine the nooks and crannies of this section of western Sydney suburbia, cameras in hand. And of course, along the way, we’re encouraged to engage in commerce. “You are in Fairfield, try something you can’t pronounce.” The audience as tourist cum civic saviour? Over lunch in a Turkish restaurant, two young locals inform me that the show “has really put Fairfield on the map” by bringing all these inner city types out of their geographic comfort zone. City Quest thus produces a fascinating convergence of art, gaming and social life.

We’re ushered in to meet the computer-generated gamemaster, The Watcher, who sets the scene: play out your missions, look for clues and ultimately uncover the location of the Torch. Assigned a mission, I dutifully carry my digital camera onto the streets and take pictures of details as instructed—flags, something emerald, someone in mid-air, and something I can’t pronounce. Along the way, I interact with a variety of young performers, some in installations on the streets. Some encounters are more peripatetic. Each of the performers has a story to tell, as well as clues to offer, provided that I perform whatever task or undergo whatever small ritual humiliation they request—submitting to a fashion makeover, shooting goals in an alleyway, recovering an ‘alien’ artefact. I accumulate multicoloured tokens for my labours, a tally of which at the end will constitute my final ‘score.’ Despite The Watcher’s urgency, on the streets everything is pretty relaxed, with plenty of surplus time to window shop and chat with other audience members, sharing clues gathered so far.

We’re led to a carpark rooftop where a piratical Vagabond announces that The Watcher cannot entirely be trusted, that his control of our questing should be contested. A choreographed battle ensues, with rival characters vying for control of a ‘key’ by leaping thrillingly from one level of the carpark to another. This results in more clues that lead to a code concealed in a laneway, a phone number whose message in turn sends us back to mission control.

As a game, City Quest isn’t entirely coherent or compelling, but as a social and cultural experience, it’s engaging, entertaining and generally a fantastic day out. Without really having to do anything besides turning up and playing along, order and hope is returned to the city of Fairfield. And the Emerald Torch? Well, that was back at the beginning, and I touch it as I exit, granted hopeful glimpses of the future both for the city and the characters who’ve populated it.

Powerhouse Youth Theatre, City Quest, director Claudia Chidiac, deviser-performers Jhon Al Asadi, Ricardo Ciccone, Geneveive Clay, Khoa Doun, Will Erimya, Collin Gosper, Nour Issawi, Ali Kadhim, Andy Ko, Anna Nguyen, Htoora Thahiya, Evin Tobia, game design, composition Keith Lim, sound, multimedia Khaled Sabsabi, design Kate Shanahan, Le Parkour choreography Ali Kadhim, premium fighter Craig Anderson, animation Michael Zhu, multimedia & software consultant, production manager Simon Wise,video maker Fatima Mawas, Ryan Peters; Fairfield, Sydney, Dec 8-9, 2007

WE ARE POLITELY USHERED INTO WHAT APPEARS TO BE A FUNKY BASEMENT BAR – COLOURED LAMPSHADES SUSPENDED FROM THE CEILING, CUSHIONS AND COMFY CHAIRS SCATTERED ABOUT, AND A BABY GRAND PIANO COMPLETE WITH LOUNGING SINGER, READY TO CROON. THE MOOD IS DREAMY, AND AUGMENTING THE INTOXICATION, SMILING WAITERS DISTRIBUTE SHOT GLASSES OF WHAT THEY ADVERTISE AS “LOTUS JUICE.” A GAUDILY DRESSED YOUNG MAN TAKES THE MIKE. “YOU HAVE TWO CHOICES”, HE DRAWLS. “I CAN TELL YOU A STORY, OR YOU CAN FUCK ME.” THERE’S A SMALL PAUSE, AFTER WHICH HE SMILES AND BEGINS TO TELL THE STORY OF ODYSSEUS, LOST FOR 20 YEARS ON HIS JOURNEY HOME TO ITHACA. LOST, AND LONGING FOR HOME.

On the other side of the theatre space, hitherto covered by gauzy drapes, another performance begins in response to the story offered in the lounge bar, with excerpts from Odysseus’ story presented through tableau and declamatory monologues. Performers struggle across a stage covered in a thin layer of dirt, with a grid of naked light bulbs overhead, creating islands of light amongst the darkness that appear and disappear as they are switched by passing performers. It’s a simple but highly effective technique. The stage morphs strangely as the performers navigate their course endlessly through these islands, but as the map continues to shapeshift, the course ahead becomes no clearer.

The dirt crackles under our feet as we are invited to leave the comfort zone around the bar and inhabit the space of the lost travellers. Around us, a vast number of young performers strut and fret their minutes upon the stage, recalling on the dimly lit field of dirt encounters and incidents from Odysseus’ unwilling journey—the sirens, the Cyclops, and Circe’s island where the crew are transformed into pigs. From the lounge area performers read letters to real and imagined distant homes. As Odysseus struggles with both terrible monsters and impossible longings for a home denied him by the gods, the performers describe a more pedestrian melancholy. Finally, Penelope appears, at home in Ithaca waiting faithfully, fending off the predatory advances of an army of suitors. Rather than a happy homecoming, our hero returns and promptly slays all of his would-be rivals, filling his longed-for home with blood. Journeys, it is abundantly clear, change people, and sometimes these changes can be terrifying to behold.

For all its evocative ambience, there is a curiously disconnected quality to Lotophagi. There’s a fine line between exploring states and stories of losing oneself and being lost, but Lotophagi, for all its moments of beauty, feels most often like the latter. As a sprawling epic, it shows the audience some potentially wondrous sights. But these remain postcard moments, happy snaps from which we must immediately move on. Little in the work seems to build or linger and, unusually for an ensemble emerging from PACT’s traditionally strong training program, the cast don’t ever feel as if they’re operating in the same performance work. For me, Lotophagi, while colourful and frequently interesting, remains mostly a collection of disparate elements—a work whose aimlessness, unlike Odysseus’, cannot be solely blamed upon the curse of the gods.

PACT Youth Theatre, Lotophagi: The Lotus Eaters, co-director Regina Heilmann, co-director/design concept Jeff Stein, directorial input Chris Murphy, Chris Ryan, sound design James Brown, lighting Frank Mainoo, designer Claire Sanford; PACT Theatre, Nov 22-Dec 9

Second To None, Kurruru Indigenous Youth Performing Arts & Vitalstatistix Theatre Company

“THE WHITES ALMOST MISSED OUT.” WITH AN IMAGE OF A WHITE MAN AND WOMAN, THIS LINE APPEARED ON THE FRONT OF THE OFFICIAL NEWSLETTER OF THE MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR NEWPORT QUAYS PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT PROJECT IN PORT ADELAIDE. THE ADVERTISEMENT RECOUNTS HOW ‘MR AND MRS WHITE’ NEARLY MISSED OUT ON THEIR DREAM PROPERTY AS PART OF THE CURRENT GENTRIFICATION OF THE PORT. THIS SERVES AS A HIGHLY IRONIC BACKDROP FOR SECOND TO NONE, AN EPIC SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE EXPLORING THE INDIGENOUS AND MARITIME HISTORIES OF PORT ADELAIDE AGAINST ITS FUTURE.

Second to None is a co-production between two unique Australian theatre companies based in Port Adelaide with strong ties to its history and communities—Kurruru (Australia’s only Indigenous youth performing arts company) and Vitalstatistix (Australia’s national women’s theatre company).

In the tradition of much site-specific performance, the sites serve as both subject and locale. Their meanings and histories are ‘excavated’ and transformed into performance that writes back over the site, a palimpsest of its present reality with reanimations of its past.

The audience encounters three slippery property developers (Sam McMahon, David Pidd, Stephen Noonan) who offer to take us on an exciting tour of Port Adelaide’s future. We are divided into three buses and are taken to the centrepiece site for the development (formerly the historic Hart’s Mill) overlooking the Port River. It is here that the tour is ‘hijacked’ (or reappropriated) when three young Indigenous women (Lisa Flanagan, Nazaree Dickerson, Jada Alberts) board the buses and offer to take the audience on another kind of journey altogether.

The travelling mode of performance, using the metaphor of the guided bus tour, transforms all we see out of the window into the backdrop for this performance. I listen to our new guide (Flanagan) as she tells us about the Indigenous history of the surrounding area as we drive away from Hart’s Mill further into the Port. She tells us about the day to day life here before white colonisation juxtaposing it with the Port’s urban landscape we are observing. Suddenly there’s an image of the past the guide is describing—three generations of Indigenous women on a roundabout, collecting firewood. We drive away, returning to the urban present.

We disembark the bus at Glanville Hall, a grand lodge built in 1856, which later served as a home for young Aboriginal boys in the 1940s. This site is about “being made white” offering an experience of the hall through the eyes of the young Aboriginal children who once lived there. I look into a room to see an eerie image of a young Aboriginal boy in white garb whitewashing trees. In a central room there is another simple but powerful image—a line of perhaps 20 Aboriginal children, again in white, lined up according to height, under the watchful eye of an Anglican minister. We look at this line-up for some time. For the largely white audience the image’s resonance with the plight of the Stolen Generations is palpable.

The buses travel to a second site-specific event at an outdoor location near the beach at Largs North called Kauwangga, an important site for hunting and gathering for the Kaurna people prior to white colonisation. It’s dark as we enter the sandy site. On the curved surface of a large tree, a video projection of an Aboriginal man’s face appears and speaks. We travel further to a camp fire to witness a performance of traditional cultural practices, entirely in Kaurna language. At one point a giant projection of a kangaroo is sculpted onto a tree in the distance. The young men go off to hunt it and later return. The performance beautifully achieves its aim to revive the traditional cultural practices of the Kaurna people while engaging with the most contemporary of aesthetics in its use of video and sound. As we depart, a soundscape and projections chillingly evoke a massacre.

The Waterside Workers Hall is our final destination, once a centre of political and cultural activities for wharfies and now the home of Vitalstatistix. Here fascinating aspects of maritime history unfold. The wharves were one of the few places where Indigenous people could work in the first half of the 20th century. Now Second to None departs from its immersive site-specific approach in favour of the aesthetic of a community event. Given the preceding journey, I found it hard to empathise with the narrative of white workers. We had seen colonial and commercial appropriations of land by shifty propery developers and oppressive missionaries while witnessing the vibrancy of Indigenous life and the evocation of a horrible massacre.

Finally the audience is invited to join in the dancing of a military two-step. The celebratory atmosphere engendered by this community and its sense of history leaves me wondering what the Whites with their new property will bring in the years to come.

Kurruru Indigenous Youth Performing Arts & Vitalstatistix Theatre Company, Second To None, directors Sasha Zahra, Maude Davey, Karl Telfer, Diat Alferink; original concept/research, Janine Peacock, composer, sound designer Lou Bennett, design Kathryn Sproul, assistant designer Chantal Tremaine Henley, contemporary choreography, Gina Rings, traditional choreography Karl Telfer, lighting design, Kerry Ireland; Port Adelaide, Nov 22-25, 2007

AS A KID, DID YOU EVER WANT TO CRACK THE CASE OF THAT UBIQUITOUS SCREEN IN THE CORNER OF YOUR LOUNGE ROOM AND CLIMB IN BEHIND THE GLASS? SOME OF MY FAVOURITE SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS WITH INFINITE MULTICOLOURED WORLDS WERE VERY APPEALING, BUT THE BOX REFUSED TO YIELD AND THE DREAM STAYED IN MY HEAD. THESE DAYS, COMPUTER GAMES WITH SOPHISTICATED AVATARS GIVE KIDS (AND ADULTS) A FEELING THAT THEY HAVE ENTERED INTO AN ALTERNATE WORLD COMPLETE WITH FRIENDS AND FOES, CHALLENGERS AND PREDATORS, BUT IT’S STILL NOT QUITE LIKE DIVING IN AND SUBMITTING YOUR OWN BODY TO UNKNOWN EXPERIENCES. TAKING THIS IDEA OF DIGITAL EMERSION AND RUNNING WITH IT, EXPLOSION THERAPY BY TERRAPIN PUPPET THEATRE EXPLORES THE SCREEN AS A SPACE AND AS A FELLOW CHARACTER.

Staged in the Peacock Theatre, the set up for this action-packed show is uncomplicated—three players, one large screen and a few simple props. The characters are unique, shying a little to the left of archetypal. A hapless gent in braces and baggy pants, silk tie stitched to his shirt in a permanent state of dishevelment, just wants to read his newspaper in peace, his speech a barely recognisable grumble emerging from his moustache. Foiled in his attempt at solitude, he is interrupted by a cheeky and somewhat devious lady decked out in 1940s style, her heavily made-up face framed by a blunt black bob, polka dot necktie and furry purple hat. Bouncing between these two is a madcap girl, dressed head to toe in pink and red polka dots, whose hair shoots out the top of her head in a stiff ponytail. There is always a lollypop in her pocket. Unlike our gent, the female characters have little recognisable dialogue, instead communicating in squeals and squeaks, oohs and aahs, giggles and roars.

Like a litter of puppies, the characters play with each other, tripping and teasing and fighting and bowling around the stage until they discover a large switch box with flashing red light. Gathering the courage to press the big red button, they bring life to the large screen behind them. What they soon discover is that they can enter this screen, and be transformed into pixels.The moment in the show when our hapless gent pulls up his sleeves and stretches his arm into the screen space where it becomes a slightly jumpier, digital version of itself is quite remarkable. He wriggles it around in amazement and draws it back out, all of his fingers still intact. A four year old in the audience notes, “That’s tricky.” Indeed.

So here begins a period of exploration for the curious three. Initially each braves this new space tentatively, slowly stretching themselves in, their flickery, video selves eventually standing with amazement in the middle of the screen. Then the madness begins, with any one of the group running in and out of this new arena, a little like play on a digital slippery slide, with each reinventing ways to experience the space.

Maybe there is dodgy wiring in the connections, but it seems as though the longer this world operates the more dangerous it gets. At first it’s harmless enough. Doors appear and disappear on the screen and the characters run between them, finding that there are chaotic rules of engagement. Hapless gent and madcap girl find themselves surrounded by bubbles of colour that float by, sometimes flopping out of the screen space onto the stage. Then hapless gent manages to shoot coloured circles out of his rear and the madcap girl explodes. I won’t go on, lest I give away all of the madness, but needless to say, the game ends in tears, with devious lady somewhat physically altered by the experience. It’s as if the screen reveals fault lines in personalities and relationships.

This is a cleverly choreographed show that explores a different take on puppetry, where the transformation of human players into video, via the device of the screen, casts them in the role of puppet, with the screen as manipulator. This is so successful as an idea, that the addition of traditional cloth puppets in the show seems almost superfluous and perhaps incongruent with the digital language. I longed for a little more complexity to the story. The conflict for this tale is generated by the technology, which affects the characters in strange and sometimes frightening ways, but the resolution is light-weight, leaving our hapless three in the dark, and the show somewhat incomplete. The world created by the screen is compelling, but it seems to have become the core around which the show is built, rather than a device that is crucial to a story. Nevertheless, I loved the Alice in Wonderland set up—where you never know what might happen if you jump down a rabbit hole (or into a screen in this case).

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Explosion Therapy, director Frank Newman, performers Sara Cooper, Leeroy Hart, Laura Purcell, designer Roz Wren, animator, illustrator Mark Cornelius, Clockwork Beehive, lighting designer Daniel Zika, sound & music Charles Du Cane; Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Jan 9-18

Explosion Therapy can be seen at the 20th UNIMA Congress and World Puppetry Festival (April 2-12), Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, Fremantle, April 7-9

AS FOR SO MANY PEOPLE, I IMAGINE, NEWS OF THE DEATH OF JEAN-PIERRE VOOS WAS SO IMPROBABLE I HAD TO HEAR IT FROM SEVERAL QUARTERS BEFORE I COULD MAKE IT REAL. THE MASTER OF THE SURVIVAL STRATEGY AND CREATOR OF EVER-NEW BEGINNINGS COULD LEAD YOU TO BELIEVE HE WOULD ALWAYS FIND A NEW OPENING, THAT HE WOULD DREAM UP ANOTHER ANGLE IN EVERY CRISIS. HIS PROPENSITY FOR TRAVEL, ADVENTURE AND NEW STARTS MAY HAVE BEEN TRIGGERED WHEN, HAVING BEEN BORN IN FRANCE, HE TRAVELLED WITH HIS MOTHER ON A PRECARIOUS JOURNEY TO ENGLAND IN THE MIDST OF WWII. HE GREW UP THERE UNDERTAKING HIS OWN FIRST TRAINING IN THEATRE. HE DIED ON JANUARY 17 AT 76 YEARS OF AGE, OF COMPLICATIONS FROM A LUNG INFECTION IN TOWNSVILLE, WHERE HE HAD SPENT THE LAST 25 YEARS, SETTING UP, FIRST, TROPIC LINE AND THEN TROPIC SUN THEATRE, IN ASSOCIATION WITH JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY.

I first met Jean-Pierre in a workshop with his company, KISS Theatre Group, renamed Kangaroos In Silk Stockings to avoid some never-quite-explained bureaucratic hassle in Holland, when he took 13 or so rookie Australians back there in 1983, the previous company having dispersed in Australia. But the name soon reverted to KISS. My first image of him is of his sharp profile as he swept into the church hall in Paddington, his piercing eyes focused intently forward as he went past. That intent focus never seemed to flag.

Jean-Pierre was driven by the work of some of the most rigorous practitioners of the 20th century—Artaud, Grotowski, the Living Theatre and the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch. Taking on board the full implications of the aesthetic, physical and personal rigours at the heart of these ideas was never going to be easy: the relentless need to find spaces, to hone the bodies of his company and maintain a touring/performing program was a constant reality. It shouldn’t have been surprising that at times the often blistering tongue challenged some of our most cherished beliefs and comfortable assumptions. Nor would anyone who experienced this not also have felt themselves stronger and the more self-reliant for it. Pretty soon the glittering mind, straightforward charm and grace would reappear and a new idea of the possible would emerge.

Always intensely committed to the experience of the audience, Jean-Pierre might be said to have been postmodern before his time: the de-centred narratives; the rigorous deconstruction of the classics, of which his knowledge was profound; the location of meaning in the body (while retaining an intense joy in the function and beauty of the word and a fascinating sense of the relation of logocentric and physical images); the training of the voice for sound rather than diction or expression, without losing sight of either in his productions; and the use of theatrical devices to create sense and experience, such as the performers’ 20-minute Sufi spin as brilliant halogen lights blasted the audience into a space that might be celestial in Spheres, his version of Dante’s Paradiso.

As Sue Rider says in her tribute on the Tropic Sun Theatre website [www.tropicsun.com.au/history/jp-tribute.html], Jean-Pierre was a great survivor. Other tributes reflect the impact his work has had both in Australia, where KISS, had performed several times before I joined it in 1983, and in Europe, where the company had led a peripatetic life in France, Switzerland and Scandinavia. He settled KISS in Holland for the last few years of its 15-year existence, and I worked with him there from 1983 to 1985, the last two years of the company’s life. Tributes emphasise his “ceaseless passion”, his readiness for adventure, his single-minded focus on the actor’s body and imagination as the source of new images and new performance modes. Theatre was the central preoccupation of his phenomenal life.

Jean-Pierre’s influence has penetrated the lives of a great number of people—supporters of the theatre as much as makers and performers, of whom many are still prominent members of the Australian theatre community. His grace, intelligence and charm always drew a wide circle of informed and active ‘patrons’ around his company’s work, as he sustained the ongoing need to accommodate and consolidate a shifting band of performers, finding homes and work spaces wherever possible and building performance skills that have seeped into the practices of many Australian artists. He made theatre that, like the companies and artists that most deeply inspired Jean-Pierre himself, challenged assumptions about the role of art in the community and the way its makers have to live to create that work.

Apart from his vision, his love of classics, his soup and wine-making and his innate sense of theatre, it was his ability to constantly renew his life, and his work and yet, paradoxically, not to change; that makes news of the death of Jean-Pierre Voos so inconceivable.

WHILE CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE HAS JUXTAPOSED THE TALENTS OF PERFORMERS WITH THOSE OF ARTISTS IN SOUND, SCULPTURE, INSTALLATION, VIDEO AND NEW MEDIA FOR DECADES, THE SELF-CONTAINED WORLD OF THEATRE HAS BEEN MORE CAUTIOUS.

There are Australian theatre artists like Benedict Andrews, Michael Kantor, Barrie Kosky, Jenny Kemp, Matthew Lutton, Chris Kohn and Anna Tregloan whose work has cultural immediacy—each has a distinctive stage language but in dialogue with a wide range of practices from the world beyond.

Sound design has become integral to theatre over the last decade, providing more than interludes and, at best, something more than cinematic ambience. But more adventurous collaborations are rare. So it’s exciting to discover that a wonderful Adelaide artist, the Iranian born Hossein Valamanesh, acclaimed for his installations drawn directly from nature (Australian and Iranian), is working with Brink Productions and the State Theatre Company of South Australia on Andrew Bovell’s new play, When The Rain Stops Falling.

Given that the play, says Brink artistic director Chris Drummond, is about “where we’re all going as human beings at a personal level, at a political level, at a historical, environmental, ecological level”, Valamanesh’s idiosyncratic spatial sensibility and his acute responsiveness to the natural world from which he draws the materials for his unconventional creations, would seem ideal for such an enquiry.

Rather than being asked to interpret the finished play by providing a scenic framework, Valamanesh was invited instead to work with Brink and Bovell in 2004 on conceptualising the work before the playwright commenced writing.

Bovell, the writer of the feature film Lantana (based on his earlier stage works) and co-writer with director Anna Kokinos of Head On, has created a four-generation epic stretching from 1959 to 2039, tracing family conflicts and the search for a lost father from London to South Australia to the desert against a changing climate. An Australian play that locates itself in the great environmental drama we are living through is a rarity. And to ask a visual artist of Valamanesh’s stature and insight to be party to such a grand venture, even rarer. RT

Brink Productions with the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the Adelaide Festival of Arts, When the Rain Stops Falling, writer Andrew Bovell, director Chris Drummond, visual artist Hossein Valamanesh, performers Paul Blackwell, Michaela Cantwell, Carmel Johnson, Kris McQuade, Anna Lise Phillips, Neil Pigot, Yalin Ozucelik, composer, sound artists Quentin Grant, lighting designer Niklas Pajanti; Scott Theatre, Adelaide, Feb 28-March 15

LUCY GUERIN’S STRUCTURE AND SADNESS, JOEY RUIGROK VAN DER WERWEN’S VOLTA, CIRQUE ICI’S SECRET AND THE LATE TANJA LIEDTKE’S CONSTRUCT ARE JUST SOME OF A GROWING NUMBER OF WORKS IN A DIGITAL AGE THAT SHARE A PALPABLE AND POETIC ENGAGEMENT WITH THE MATERIAL WORLD: REAL PERFORMERS WORKING MAGIC ON REAL THINGS.

Of course, van der Werven (originally with Doegtroep in the Netherlands and then with Stalker, Marrugeku, Urban Theatre Projects and others in Australia) and France’s Cirque Ici have been at their distinctive alchemical labours for many years. Others have come to it later, including the artists who trained with van der Werven in UTP’s Mechanix in 2003 and in the first stage of Volta at Performance Space in September 2007.

Cirque Ici’s charismatic ringmaster and solo performer is Johann Le Guillerm, a lean, growling, caped figure wearing ridiculously long clattering foot armour. He works a long, thin metal rod into a near circle, creating a dynamic sprung hoop that he can roll away, casually predicting its imminent self-propelled return. The creations, whether this rod or a carpet that unfolds itself slowly, or a bird-like paper areoplane, or a roll of leather that mutates into a little pyramid, or the variously sized tin tubs that Le Guillerm spins into a galloping circle, are material objects made circus animals. He not only tames, trains and directs his charges, he places his body inside the arc of the metal hoop, rolling with it, puts his head into the pyramid (and is sucked into its tiny space, as if devoured), himself becoming part of a magically activated material world. He too is animal like, never speaks, repeatedly bares his fangs and exhales exaggeratedly like a wary beast or the creature from Alien.

In fact there is something quite alien about this persona, not least evident in the footwear suggestive of a hybrid creature especially when Le Guillerm astonishes us by standing en pointe—how can he do so when his boots run to such a fine point and are articulated in metal sections all the way to the heel? This man is another beast in his own show, with his own unique characteristics, not least a sense of time that cannot be hurried (to the consternation of those in the audience who prefer their circus fast and conventionally entertaining).

Some of Cirque Ici’s pre-constructed creations are sculptural, like the surreal ‘horse’ that comprises a saddle aloft myriad thin wire legs and which Le Guillerm rides elegantly about the ring, rocking to its easy, vibrating gait. In another act, he harnesses stage smoke into an eerie in-house tornado.

In the final act of Secret, Le Guillerm tames long, timber planks by roping them into a massive construction which he straddles as he works, constantly testing its strength and balance addition by addition until complete. He then swings cheekily ape-like from this creaking, trussed architectural monster which fills the stage, and makes his final exit. Secret is a marvellous circus-and-sculpture hybrid, yielding not only richly suggestive imagery but also beautifully crafted stand-alone creations inspired by natural forms from Le Guillerm and his collaborators.

At the end of Tanjia Liedtke’s Construct (RT81, p12), Kristina Chan is locked in a similar structure which has been steadily built about her in a show that commences wittily with the simplest of shape-forming, using hands and bodies, pieces of timber, a ladder, and moves towards a dark vision of relationship constraints. In Lucy Guerin’s Structure & Sadness (RT77, p39) the dancers also build, again starting small (and reflecting the processes of testing and balancing in duets) eventually creating a monstrous but fragile structure which falls, and a world has to be rebuilt. In both works the dancers are required to do much more than work their bodies—they build, they sculpt dexterously, juggling and manipulating strips of timber and moving on to shapes bigger than themselves.

Joey Ruigrok van der Werven’s skill is in creating performative machines from materials at hand and of nurturing this talent in others. Volta, in the vast foyer of CarriageWorks, comprised devices made by the artists who drove them. Clare Britton unpacks and inflates a huge transparent plastic bubble, enters it, cuts her way out of its top and releases a toy chicken. Nick Wishart manipulates the semi-transparent torso of a shop dummy to yield shifting colours and sounds. Heidrun Löhr’s installation features suspended kettles over gas flames on a bed of coals; as the kettles whistle she raises and lowers them via pullies creating a score as if from a sibilant organ. There’s fire and light coming from above as Carlos Gomes, looking like someone from a folk Ring Cycle, fans a furious furnace, branding lateral directions onto timber signposts. Marley Dawson drops the head of a log high crane arm onto large metal balls, appearing to flatten them, and then rides the arm to the ground. Ouch! Van der Werven adds water to the fire and light, emerging naked in a wave of water from a hole in the floor and leaping into a go-cart about to be released from the huge taut band holding it back. Away he goes. Rod Nash’s low, rumbling, tooting vehicle enters, driverless, clearing a path for itself. Overhead, a single fluorescent light flies the length of the space like a rocket. Richard Manner’s sculpted clusters of small lights dance about in the dark like fireflies. Clare Britton re-enters the space carrying a small nest of light bulbs and magically lilluminates them with a mother bulb; one flies aloft and triggers a vast ceiling of tiny stars.

On the first of the two nights of Volta, the Federal Election became part of the show, thanks to Sean Bacon’s live media manipulations, and, on the second, the Australian Idol final. Volta blended performance with exhibition and a sense of occasion, allowing its audience to wander about, taking in the details of various creations and meeting the makers, while being treated to a steady stream of events. While a less seamless version might allow for more reflection, Volta has proved itself as a meeting ground for artists of all kinds and their audiences to share in an expanded sense of performance. More, please.

I should add to this short list of recent performances-as-construction Artspace’s Aftermath with its focus on performative installations over several months, where you could watch the artist at work, see the finished creation as performance and then observe subsequent transformations of the residue [RT81, p53]. Just as it’s been a pleasure to see the screen integrated so dynamically and inventively over the last decade into dance and contemporary performance, if still rarely in theatre, the engagement now with the materiality of things and across artforms is exhilarating. Of course, someone’s bound to object that it’s all been done before, and of course it has a history, but this is something more than re-inventing the wheel—these days there’s so much more you can do with a wheel [see Jean Poole on bicycles in the Istanbul Biennale, p28, and Gabriella Giannachi on Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, p26].

Cirque Ici, Secret, creation, direction, interpretation Johann LeGuillerm, music Matthieu Werchowski, Guy Ajaguin, lighting Herve Gary; Sydney Festival 2007, Hyde Park, Sydney, Jan 14-26; Tanja Liedtke, Construct, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Jan 10-13; Volta, concept & direction Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, dramaturgy Clare Grant, artists Sean Bacon, Clare Britton, Marley Dawson, Carlos Gomes, Heidrun Löhr, Richard Manner, Rod Nash, Koen van Oosterhout, Simone O’Brien and Nick Wishart, Performance Space at CarriageWorks, 24, 25

IN CATE BLANCHETT’S IN-THE-ROUND PRODUCTION OF SCOTS PLAYWRIGHT DAVID HARROWER’S BLACKBIRD, MAX LYANDVERT SHAPES OUR EXPERIENCE WITH A WRAP-AROUND CONSTRUCTED ACOUSTIC RESONATING WITH THE SOUND OF DISTANT CONVERSATIONS, SLAMMED DOORS, RATTLING PIPES, PASSING FOOTSTEPS AND OBJECTS BEING MOVED ABOUT. THE SOUND DESIGN FRAMES THE SPACE, FOR THE STAGE DESIGN SIMPLY COMPRISES SEVERAL FLUORO-LIT DOORS INTO IMAGINARY CORRIDORS AND IS DRESSED ONLY WITH A CHEAP TABLE AND CHAIRS, GREY CARPET AND LITTER. THE ROOM LOOKS AND FEELS LIKE ONE OF THOSE INDETERMINATE SPACES IN A LARGE BUILDING WHERE STAFF HIDE OUT FOR A SMOKO OR OTHER ILLICIT BEHAVIOUR.

The hollow acoustic heightens the sense of emptiness and regret in the lives of the play’s antagonists and delivers moments of suspense as a passerby seems about to enter, stalling the confrontation, and shock when someone does. The struggle is between a caretaker, Ray, in his 50s and Una, the young woman he seduced when she was 12. She’s done some detective work to find him and initially he doesn’t recognise her. The play is built around the push and pull of hatred and the residue of attraction, the desire for revenge and a plea for forgiveness, all heading towards the pivotal telling, in consecutive monologues, of what happened on the night when he abandoned her as a child in the hotel to which they’d absconded.

Harrower’s tautly spare, but curiously literary writing is at its best in his portrayal of Ray, who for all his apparent sincerity actually gives little away, withholding information rather than lying and thus providing the momentum for the final revelation. A restrained Peter Kowitz plays Ray with quiet, nervous reserve. His assertions that the relationship was a one-off, that he was never a paedophile, that he burned the photographs he’d taken, that he really loved the 12-year-old Una, rekindles a moment of perverse passion in the pair, although it is beyond Ray (guilt? impotency?) to follow through. Ultimately, what is cruelly clear is that the woman remains forever a damaged child. As she said earlier to Ray, “You made me.” Perhaps Ray has been destroyed too by guilt and prison, though we can never be sure.

Paula Arundell imbues Una with steely determination, explosive anger and a strong sense of justice (at Ray’s trial the judge accused her of “suspiciously adult yearnings”), but also with moments of vulnerability and uncertainty, evidence that she is still locked in an emotional loop with her seducer—as the play’s final image confirms.

Blanchett, as we might expect, draws intense, studied performances from her actors, but the conventional blocking, the overly fast pacing of the production, even the inwardness of working in-the-round, gravitate against the emotional impact of each successive stage of Harrower’s play. Perhaps the playing became more measured later in the season, but on opening night Ray stayed too easily in the thrall of his accuser, the recovery from the pair’s bout of violence was too quick, and the mutual kicking about of rubbish embarassingly perfunctory, hardly evidence of the desperate release sought at this stage of tortuous mutual entrapment.

The STC Blackbird warranted seeing for the convincing performances of Kowitz and Arundell, and for Max Lyandvert’s sonic encapsulation of actors and audience—though not the melodramatic underscoring of the play’s final moment.

Blackbird is a short work on the page but the scale of its moral complexities and emotional compulsiveness demands an opening out on stage, spatially and temporally. Daniel Schlusser’s account of the productions by Peter Stein in Edinburgh and Benedict Andrews in Berlin, as reported by Melbourne theatre director Daniel Schlusser for RealTime [RT71, p10], suggests very different approaches, not least a greater ritualisation of this co-dependent relationship and more radical attitudes to time and space.

Sydney Theatre Company, Blackbird, writer David Harrower, director Cate Blanchett, performers Peter Kowitz, Paula Arundell, Danielle Catanzariti, designer Ralph Myers, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, composer sound designer Max Lyandvert; Wharf 1, Sydney, Dec 15,2007-Feb 16,2008

THERE IS CHANGE AFOOT AT DANCEHOUSE IN MELBOURNE, AS THE SMART NEW MICRO-SITE WHICH ACCOMPANIES THE 2008 WEBSITE SUGGESTS. NOT ONLY IS THE LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY CLEARER, SHARPER AND ALTOGETHER MORE DYNAMIC, BUT THE CLUSTERING OF INITIATIVES FOR OPEN APPLICATION IN 2008 SUGGESTS AN ENERGY WHICH ARTISTIC DIRECTOR DAVID TYNDALL IS KEEN TO COMMUNICATE.

Tyndall updated the website himself, admitting that, “As soon as I was in the door, I wanted to address the way Dancehouse is seen by the community and how we see ourselves.” Tyndall is satisfied that his 2008 programme portrays the kind of forward-thinking he has promoted in his first year in the position.

“There has been a lot to do”, he says. “Dianne (Reid, the previous artistic director) left in August 2006 and I did not start till January ‘07, so although her excellent initiatives continued with the help of David Corbet, we had been kind of rudderless for a while. The Board had been working hard to address issues of management and artistic direction, so that by the time I arrived, as the first ever full-time artistic director, they were ready for me to take the reins.”

Tyndall is a VCA graduate and former dancer with recent producer experience with Chunky Move, Dance Works and Expressions dance companies. He has taken to the role of artistic director with relish, delivering a busy program in 2007 and collaborating with his board to instigate organisational change. Tyndall has just advertised for two additional part-time positions, Programme Producer and Venue and Production Co-ordinator, and is excited about how this will free him for further strategic planning.

Dancehouse is triennially funded by both the Australia Council and Arts Victoria, yet its cash turnover of $320-$350K seems small in relation to the volume of activity crammed into the busy program at its North Carlton home. “A huge amount of what happens here is generated by the community”, says Tyndall, “Our members bring their own projects and momentum to the program. There is a challenge to balancing the content we generate and that created by the community. We have to ensure that we are still accessible to the dance community. We do that by remaining affordable and available to hire. In the past couple of years, Dancehouse has been stretched to breaking point with a mass of activity and constant communication. There was a danger that people felt overwhelmed by all this undifferentiated activity and switched off. The board encouraged me to streamline the activity. I have done this by identifying three core areas: research, training and performance. Of course there is a great deal of crossover between those areas and we encourage that. This just helps us to create balance and leave gaps for the community to input.”

Tyndall is enjoying the positive response to his 2008 program. The residency and chance to curate are the most popular additions. “The strongest point of difference from previous years is the focus given to the individual artist through the residency initiative. There has been a tendency to distribute Dancehouse funds across as many artists as possible. This project dedicates $10,500 and 14 weeks of time to a single artist per residency. We needed to connect the many strands of Dancehouse’s activities and in particular to create more meaning around the performance program. So, two artists per year will be supported to make and show work at Dancehouse, to interface with the teaching and research aspects of the program and benefit from the totality of the Dancehouse offer.”

Due to the pressures on his time in 2007, Tyndall was obliged to launch the residency project with a pre-selected artist in order to buy time to perfect the transparency of the selection process. Phoebe Robinson is the first “Housemate” resident for 2008. Tyndall approached a handful of artists involved in the 2007 program and from there selected Robinson. “Phoebe created one of the most popular short works in the Short Shorts performance season in 2007. She’s an artist who would stand to benefit greatly from the residency due to the stage of career she’s at.”

Whilst the residency project is the best resourced of Tyndall’s initiatives, he admits it has a way to go. “The residency is open nationally but we are limited to the $10,500. I would eventually like to be able to support all travel and accommodation costs for interstate artists and for the residency to eventually become international.” With the shift of focus of Canberra’s Choreographic Centre to youth dance, Dancehouse has the potential to fill a national gap in the provision of research opportunities for independent artists and Tyndall is developing his dialogue with sister organisations Critical Path in Sydney and Strut in Perth.

In 2008, his Get Out of The House project continues another year of partnership with Strut and Dancebox in Osaka. Two artists will be awarded $5,000 to present their work at these venues. With Critical Path and Strut Tyndall is also sharing the hosting of the Irish choreographers of the Daghdha Dance Company.

Creating the 2008 program, Tyndall considered initiatives to involve the breadth of the independent dance community in Melbourne, from recent graduates to mature artists. The diverse workshop and class program remains, as does the popular mentoring scheme, Learning Curve. There is a Rotary Youth dance project. There are Space Grants and presentation opportunities for work-in-progress or in a fully produced theatrical setting. Your Collection is a new initiative which invites an artist to be employed by Dancehouse as curator of their own season of up to eight works of 10 minute duration, opening out another aspect of the program to community input.

David Tyndall’s definition of the Dancehouse mission sums up the positive energy taking one of Melbourne’s performing arts institutions into an inspiring new year. “Dancehouse is a dynamic and thriving centre for cultural and creative diversity, critical thinking, networking and exchange. Dancehouse seeks to reflect the cultural, economic and political diversity of our community and is an accessible resource for anyone wishing to explore dance as an artist or observer.”

BALLET LAB’S WORKS ARE NOTHING IF NOT IMAGINATIVE. CHOREOGRAPHER PHILLIP ADAMS HAS, OVER THE YEARS, CREATED MANY SCENARIOS DRAWING ON MYRIAD SOURCES, LITERARY, MUSICAL, FILMIC AND MYTHICAL. BRINDABELLA IS NO EXCEPTION. PART AUSTRALIAN FOLKLORE, PART SOFT-PORN, THE WORK CANVASSES SEVERAL IMAGINARY MOTIFS. THERE IS A SUGGESTIVE GRANDEUR ABOUT THE OPENING. RUCHED, CRIMSON CURTAINS BEDECK THE MALTHOUSE’S MERLIN THEATRE, CREATING A PROSCENIUM FRAME. THE RICHNESS OF THE FOLDS OF RED MATERIAL BROACHES A SENSUOUS DIMENSION REDOLENT OF THE 19TH CENTURY OPERA HOUSE. BELOW DECKS, A SUBMERGED MUSICAL GROUP AMPLIFIES OPENING NIGHT ANTICIPATION.

The music begins, distorted shadows of the musicians evoking a dark palette. A courtly quintet emerges through the curtains. A woman, Brooke Stamp, in a sumptuous Louis Quinze gown, preens herself in a small mirror. Her courtiers circle, fawning fauns. Their furry outfits suggest a less than historical take since these Rococo mannerisms are promptly discarded as the curtain reveals an archetypical forest setting, complete with obligatory wolf howls.

Forgive the detour, but we could be at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, watching an adaptation of Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers. As in that 1960s satire, mittel European fairytale joins folksy ballet to create an ironic twist on horror. Predictably, the woman is at the core of the tale, a symbol of sexual difference encircled by male activity, their fur suggesting beastly intentions. Although Brindabella purportedly draws on Australian folklore, the male dancers reappear strapped to pine trees, not eucalypts. As the heavy foliage lists across the stage, the men stumble to keep up. I worry for their health and safety. Happily the trees are discarded and somehow the costumes melt away.

The five performers are now running in unison, tracing a large circle over the entire floor. They each discard their clothes as they run, over and undertaking to keep up with the group. This was a very special moment in the development of the work, an eye in the storm of parody and pastiche. The simplicity of the running, the lack of costume and the unison of ordinary movement forged an aesthetic break which could have been taken in any number of directions. I’m not entirely sure where things went at this point. Movements blur in sweaty encounters and departures. Two men grapple in a roughly honed male-to-male duet.

Eventually the group reforms and takes to the front of the stage wielding chrome and leather—the disassembled wheels could be used for circus, unicycles, a bit of juggling perhaps? But no, slowly a motorcycle in bicycle form is pieced together. The performers suggestively straddle the leather seats, leading us into the cum-soaked world of Pumped, Rimmed and Loaded. Vintage Adams duets, triplets and groupings occur, performing perfunctory folds, bends and twists to create a series of tableaux. Ultimately couples team up to consummate all manner of intercourse. Where sexual innuendo may have permeated the rough and tumble of Adams’ previous works, here suggestion well and truly comes out of the closet, reflecting the iconography of Brindabella’s publicity shots. Heads loll in synch as bodies are straddled, while jeans are whipped off to castigate the reticent. Someone’s bum protrudes as his jeans are pulled down. The whole scene could have been enacted in suds, mud or lubricant. Although the borders of porn were not transgressed by this theatrical play, the audience’s ‘premature’ clapping at the end of this section suggests a certain discomfort—or was it appreciation? In any case, the story doesn’t finish here. Cast and audience are transported to a darkened stage sundered in the distance by a blinding central light. Naked and holding ostrich feathers, the performers approach the pearly gates of Burlesque afterlife.

This was another moment in the flow of Brindabella where a certain conceptual space was opened up. I wonder whether this and the earlier running sequence was the work of Adams’ choreographic collaborator, New York’s Miguel Gutierrez? Both sections summoned an existential vortex. This was in part the consequence of marked contrasts—while the sexual play was quite stylistically rendered, the running and the final section were stripped back, lacking artifice. Similarly, the mannerisms of the opening courtly scene were markedly absent in the “boy stripped bare” section at the work’s end. This difference resembles that between western art’s classical nude and Lucien Freud’s naked bodies. Narrative drops away here in favour of something else. Personally, I would have liked to see more power on the part of this something else, to have seen it ‘queer’ (displace the centrality of) the rest of the material, its parody, irony, and recognisable iconography.

It’s not for me to say where this work might go, but 20th century artists such as Bataille and Klossowski played with the boundaries of art, pornography and philosophy. In another (after)life, Brindabella might likewise challenge its own boundaries, setting up a relation between its multiple differences of genre in such a way as to inform its divergent movement aesthetics. It is a story of desire, of desire unbound, with the potential to flow beyond the boundaries of convention. This relates to the sexual, sensual but also kinaesthetic conventions which pertain to the queer sexuality underlying the work. To challenge such boundaries is to challenge the morality inherent in heterosexuality, something Brindabella was, I think, attempting to achieve.

Balletlab, Brindabella, choreography Phillip Adams, Miguel Gutierrez, performers Derrick Amanatidis, Tim Harvey, Luke George, Brooke Stamp, composer: David Chisholm, set & lighting Bluebottle, musicians Lachlan Dent, Peter Dumpsday, Timothy Phillips, Nic Cynot; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, Dec 5-8

IN THE PAST 18 MONTHS, INDEPENDENT ARTIST CLARE DYSON HAS PRESENTED THREE MAJOR WORKS OF DANCE THEATRE, EACH OF THEM DEALING WITH SITUATIONS IN EXTREMIS, OR AT LEAST IN THE LATEST CASE, FRAUGHT. THEY ARE CHURCHILL’S BLACK DOG, ABSENCE(S) AND, NOW, BEING THERE. THE FIRST OF THESE UTILISED CONVENTIONS OF CHARACTER (ALBEIT IN A CONTEXT WHERE THE CONCEPT OF CHARACTER WAS UNDER STRAIN); THE SECOND IMMERSED THE AUDIENCE IN AN INSTALLATION WITH OVERLAPPING MEANINGS DEPENDENT ON THE POINT OF VIEW. BEING THERE WEAVES PURE DANCE AND A RECORDED SPOKEN NARRATIVE INTO A SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MOSAIC. IT WAS DEVELOPED AT TANZFABRIK IN BERLIN WHERE IT HAD AN INITIAL SHOWING.

These three works add up in diverse ways to a consistent, heuristic theatre of ideas based on Dyson’s investigation of audience agency and heightened by an unashamed proclivity for the potent poetics of Romanticism. Her rigorously conceived work is always sensitive to the surprising complexity, the mystery, the flawed beauty and fragility of life.

Dyson is canny in her choice of like-minded collaborators, including Mark Dyson (lighting) and Bruce McKniven (design). The circumscribed performance space of this new work is an ellipse delineated by muted lighting and a surround of chairs, a minimalist configuration that nevertheless gradually assumes a meaningfulness compounded by the failure of different geometrical planes to meet and the syntactical sense of ellipsis whereby words are left out and implied. There are gaps in the seating arrangements as transit points enabling the dancers to move here or there. As if in the complete intimacy of a dance studio, the dancers are within reach, and the audience is face to face.

Being There is about a woman who has an affair in a foreign country (over there), betraying her husband at home here in Queensland. Her predicament is that she is at a moral and artistic impasse. “When she was younger, she imagined the purpose of art was to move. Audiences, I believed, want to be discomforted. Move where? She wonders now.”

Being There constitutes a kind of dream fugue, a non-linear series of glimpses from past events. It plays on the dancer/text relationship, and portrays a struggle for mastery. Writer Siall Waterbright’s dispassionate vignettes amount to a cool appraisal that the unnamed woman cannot be there, wherever she is. Ironically the unseen woman’s infidelity is a poignant quest for visibility. By contrast, the dancers take a stand in the here and now, not standing in for the text. They choose to be present, authentically themselves, introducing themselves to the audience, even taking time for a water break. But sometimes the text gains ascendancy and the performers are over there. Lyrics to a song are in a foreign language. A woman removes her knickers, or strikes matches, illuminating, as Dyson says, “the domesticity of everything.” Sometimes the vocalized text takes centrestage, relegating the performers to the dark. Dyson conducts this antiphony seamlessly.

The two performers, Emily Amisano and Trish Wood, are personable, casually dressed, just two young women who dance beautifully, and beautifully together. They double relations in the text, traverse the same emotional territory, but as themselves, they unnerve us. We are proximate to them, breathing with them. They are falling women. They really cry, blow their noses, bruise themselves and slap the floor in an anguish which refracts rather than reflects the text. They are so committed that we are plunged to the depth of our own resources of memory and desire in order to meet them, and ultimately to realise that our own moral situation is fatally compromised or at the least exigent. As we leave, we can only match the “uncertain dignity” of Dyson’s protagonist. For a little while we cannot look each other in the eye.

Dyson has a dangerous flair for not allowing the audience to resile. Hers is an existential art. The title Being There alerts us to the dialectical relationship with Absence(s). In that earlier work Dyson eviscerated us by dramatically conveying the contingency of human existence, turning us into hollow men and women forever haunted by loss and death. In effect, denying our presence. Being There seemingly rejects the Sartrean take on being-for-others, or existing purely in terms defined by the Other which is so problematic for her fictional protagonist. Instead, an open invitation is issued to be fully present to a face to face encounter by directly challenging the stance of the audience as uninvolved observers. When Dyson’s art moves us, it moves us to ethically new positions. We are moved by the naked intensity of the live performers, and even sympathise with the one who is not present. We care for them all, and want to take responsibility for them. This is the possibility for an ethics defined by the philosopher Levinas.

Heidegger points us towards her method. Clare Dyson is at pains to provide a ‘clearing’ where “we can apprehend the being of a being, apprehend the being as it is, where it is.” To pull this off is wonderful and, I think, important. Art wasn’t meant to be easy. If you have the taste for this sort of thing, it sure as hell beats shopping.

Being There, creator Clare Dyson with dancers Emily Amisano, Trish Wood, writer Siall Waterbright, designer, Bruce McKniven, lighting designer Mark Dyson; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, Dec 12-15, 2007.

IT WAS WONDERFUL TO SEE THE WESTERN BROADWALK FOYER OF THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE DURING THE SYDNEY FESTIVAL AWASH WITH VIDEO MONITORS LARGE AND SMALL SURROUNDED BY EAGER PRE- AND POST-SHOW VIEWERS. WHAT THEY SAW WAS BOUNTY FROM A TREASURE CHEST OF AUSTRALIAN DANCE FILM CURATED BY REELDANCE’S ERIN BRANNIGAN.

Small monitors with associated touch screens offered a selection of works and two pairs of headphones for shared viewing, and the opportunity to cut out the buzz of the crowd and immerse yourself, glass of wine in hand, in up to 14 works ranging from Tanja Liedtke’s One Cell, Nalina Wait and Jane McKernan’s Dual and Samuel James and Rosie Dennis’ Simulated Rapture to films of ADT’s Devolution and Chunky Move’s Glow.

The large ‘3 Screen’ outside the Drama Theatre featured The Fondue Set (collaborating with Shane Carn) re-creacting in serio-comic detail The Lorrae Desmond Show, alternating with Force Majeure’s The Sense of It, and Margie Medlin and Rebecca Hilton’s Miss World.

The ‘Screen Wall’ also provided viewing on a larger scale but changed content daily, featuring award winning dance films such as Gina Czarnecki and ADT’s Nascent and Sean O’Brien and Yumi Umiumare’s Sunrise at Midnight, a documentary of Stephen Page’s Kin and works by Anton, Shaun Parker and Natalie Cursio among others. A ‘VJ’ program on more large screens put works by Bangarra, Chunky Move, Dance North, Lucy Guerin Inc, David Corbet, Sue Healey and others in the mix.

For successful viewing of works on the big screens, less crowded, quieter foyer moments were preferable, but the curious were not deterred, while the small monitors offered ideal intimacy. Dance Screen was a popular venture that warrants repeating. Certainly for the many hundreds who course through the Opera House daily on tours the program should have been running all day. Not only did Dance Screen reveal to the audiences packing out the festival’s Movers & Shakers dance program a wealth of dance film of all kinds, but it provided audiences with options—either to mingle or relax into another world of dance altogether.

Sydney Festival, Moves & Shakers, Dance Screen, curator Erin Brannigan, Theatre Foyers, Western Broadwalk, Sydney Opera House, Jan 5-16

IN A WELCOME AND RADICAL MOVE BY THE SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY, INCOMING ARTISTIC DIRECTORS CATE BLANCHETT AND ANDREW UPTON HAVE PROGRAMMED A TWO-WEEK WHARF2LOUD SEASON OF TESS DE QUINCEY’S EMBRACE: GUILT FRAME, AN INTENSE 40-MINUTE MOVEMENT WORK “ILLUMINATING THE SHAPE AND RHYTHMS OF OUR INNER LIVES.” EACH PERFORMANCE WILL BE FOLLOWED BY DRINKS AND DISCUSSION. THIS DUET BETWEEN SYDNEY-BASED DE QUINCEY AND MELBOURNE ARTIST PETER SNOW IS PART OF A LARGER DE QUINCEY PROJECT CONNECTING WITH INDIA, SIMPLY TITLED EMBRACE.

Embrace is an ongoing exchange between De Quincey Co and Indian artists in partnership with Monash University. Seeded in 2003 in Kolkata, the Embrace exchange explores a relationship with The Natyashastra, the seminal ancient text and cornerstone of Indian artistic practice, with Body Weather, the practice developed by Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku Performance Company in Japan. Tess de Quincey was a dancer with that company for six years (1985-91) before returning to Australia where she has continued to perform solo and with her company, as well as teaching Body Weather.

De Quincey defines the developing relationship between The Natyashastra and Body Weather as “a synthesis of Eastern and Western practice and thought, bringing together ancient Buddhist and Taoist thinking with elements of 20th Century Western philosophy. It’s a radical, open-ended exploration that melds contemporary dance and sports theory with martial arts, traditional Japanese/Asian theatre and Western avant-garde arts practices.”

Visiting old friends in India with a great library, de Quincey found herself one day sitting on the balcony reading The Natyashastra and feeling, she says, “a resonance and connection with my own work but at the same time a lot of differences.” Here, she thought, was a means with which to engage with Indian artists.

De Quincey wasn’t thinking of absorbing an Indian performance methodology but connecting with certain “energetic states” common to The Natyashastra and Body Weather. But it’s also, she says, about “the placement of the ego—the position of non-self-expression and utilising the body as a transformative entity.” De Quincey had turned to Body Weather in response to “a crisis of faith in relation to Western dance, because I knew I wasn’t getting what I needed.” Workshops in Bali with Yoshi Oida in 1984 in Topeng mask work, Noh Theatre and meditation with a Shinto priest provided the first steps for a new direction that lead her to Body Weather.

For de Quincey, leaving Western dance was to escape conventional notions of form and expressiveness: “Working in Japan for six years I became really aware that the placement of the individual is really different there, because you see the individual as servicing the communal space…You’re not concerned with the “I”, you’re actually concerned with the space in between.”

I ask if taking on Body Weather is to learn a discipline or evolve a particular state of being. “I think in one way it was almost like trying to shed. The first couple of years were about coming down to bedrock. Really everything I’d learned in terms of physical work had to be dropped. The Body Weather training on a mind-body, muscle and bone level is more like gymnast’s work. It’s quite purist in that respect. Most dancers are working to put aesthetic relationships into their body from the word go. In effect, this approach tries to drop them. All those things take a long time to shed.”

I wonder what de Quincey is doing if not actually dancing in the Western sense? She replies, “Developing strength and relationship to ground—the grounding that is embodied in that. For example, the mind-body workout is purely about understanding the depth of relation to the ground but also about working space together. The communal body is also a very big part of the mind-body. So you see the body from outside working into the greater body. And that in effect is another way of working, a preparation for performance.”

De Quincey senses profound cultural differences in performance and audience reception. “A Western dancer will perceive the internal line of the body cutting through space. So you see the line of the arm working through space. It’s like the geometry of the body is the indicative factor. For Mai-Juku, the body is being danced by the space. So the softness of the arm is totally different. Even if you were to make an arc through space, the reason for doing it would be so different that the expression of it is ultimately different. Often from an audience point of view you’re certainly aware watching this work that there’s a very different sense of time and space, especially of time. I think part of the thinking of Body Weather is to open up a different doorway. And of course, as soon as you shift into a new speed outside your natural speed, you shift out of normal mode.”

Not surprisingly then, framing is a term de Quincey uses frequently. In Kolkata in 2003 she worked on embrace: Limitless with 40 children from the slums, staged in the streets, and embrace: A Silent Thread, with 14 dancers and many locals in a spectacular site-specific work moving from a park to an old home, now a classical music venue. “The sense of framing has partly come about through doing site-specific works. A Silent Thread established a frame for audiences in a stately old home, shifted it around and took them through different frames. I was very affected by the portraits of the old Raj you see somewhere like the Bengal Club. If you’re directing the audience’s attention what they are seeing is, in one sense, a filmic frame. As you move through a site you’re drawing in on different focuses, using performers to delineate frames…and of course, there were plenty of frames within that building—windows and doors.”

But in embrace: guilt frame, there’ll only be one frame, “a gilt frame”, declares de Quincey, a metre wide that she and Snow will perform in, going though a number of “energetic states.” She fills me in when I wonder where the term comes from: “I’ve been working a lot on Gestalt with Philip Oldfield, a very interesting therapist and psychologist based in Sydney. Working with him, I felt an immediate parallel world to Body Weather, but it was a psychological understanding of the same elements. He reads the body completely. His whole relationship to understanding psychology is from the micro-signalling I understand to be the communicating factor in any performance. He speaks about energetics, so maybe my reference comes from that.”

De Quincey details the structure of the performance: “We’ve gone along with The Natyashastra states—love, laughter, sorrow, anger, the heroic, fear, disgust, astonishment. We run through a cycle of them and then, for eight minutes at the end, we’re improvising. The first state is love. You take the eight states and put them inside love. Within love, you have also astonishment, anger, fear and so on; but the base state is love. It’s almost like a holographic world that you can keep breaking down. The first time we did it as a total improvisation. I’d basically conceived it as the frame, the eight emotional states and physical lock-in points within, that delineates the agreement between the performers as to which state we’re in. And we’re going from one state to the next, as simple as that.”

There’s no sense of a one-off about embrace: Guilt Frame for de Quincey: “I find it very interesting, the idea of process and product. The only reason we can make this performance is because of all the other Embrace performances before it.”

Music is also an important component of the performance for de Quincey: “I’ve been waiting for a long time for a way to use Ligeti’s Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes (1962), which I discovered years ago and just fell in love with. But we couldn’t get permission from the estate to use it. So I asked Michael Toisuta to make a piece as a homage to Ligeti. It’s very different from the Ligeti, but it uses metronomes. We tried using computer-generated sounds but it was a disaster so we bought metronomes. In the Ligeti I’ve always liked the extraordinary patterns that only last for brief moments emerging from absolute chaos.

“But the interesting issue is how we understand patterns and perceive them. And the music seemed to me the means by which to open the space of the framing of chaotic relationships in our lives. The metronomes create a bedding, an endless felting of layers, but at the same time they cut through them. We’ve had to create that feeling afresh. And that’s been an interesting parallel experiment. Michael’s composition is much more musical than Ligeti’s, even though he didn’t set out to do that. And there are moments where it’s completely like a Balinese orchestra. And we hadn’t looked at that either.”

But the music is not there to be performed to, says de Quincey: “It’s a timepiece. It’s there all the time. To me, part of what I understand this piece to be about is time, because you can’t work with emotions without having time—all those long threads and where they go back into our histories and forward into our future imaginings. Those perspectives seem to be absolutely embedded in the issue of time and space, even thought it’s a tiny gilt frame space…As soon as you bring the world down to a matchbox, space becomes endless as well. It’s the paradox of scale.”

Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf2Loud, embrace: Guilt Frame, created and performed by Tess de Quincey and Peter Snow, original Concept Tess de Quincey, set Designers Russell Emerson, Steve Howarth, lighting designer Travis Hodgson, sound designer Michael Toisuta; Richard Wherrett Studio, Sydney Theatre, Feb 27-March 9

Jon Rose, “Neue Musik ist niemals von allem Angfang an Schön” (New music is never very nice at the beginning)

THE FOLLOWING IS AN EDITED VERSION OF THE 2007 PEGGY GLANVILLE-HICKS ADDRESS BY VIOLINIST, COMPOSER, FREE IMPROVISER AND INSTALLATION ARTIST JON ROSE FROM THE ANNUAL FORUM PRESENTED BY THE NEW MUSIC NETWORK. THE COMPLETE PAPER CAN BE READ ON THE NETWORK’S WEBSITE AND WILL BE THE BASIS FOR A CURRENCY HOUSE PLATFORM PAPER IN 2009.

The full title of the address is Listening to History: some proposals for reclaiming the practice of music. Rose frames his witty and passionate argument for a wider and deeper embrace of music in everday life, education and cross-cultural relations in terms of Australian Aboriginal culture past and present, and within that reflects on the European incursion and its instruments—from the piano to the computer (sadly, Australian pioneering here was not capitalised on). Our edited version focuses on the mainframe of Rose’s argument about the relationship between black and white cultures. His short history of electronic music in Australia can be read in the full version of this address online. We’ll look at this history in a later edition of RealTime.

Last year at a Sydney University, a musicologist observed, “Everybody knows that music in Australia didn’t really get going until the mid-1960s.” Significantly, this gem was spoken at a seminar that featured a film about the Ntaria Aboriginal Ladies’ Choir from Hermannsburg, Central Australia. The denial of a vibrant and significant musical history in white as well as Indigenous culture has done this country a great disservice.

It may well be the prime reason why none of the 20th century’s great musical forms ever originated in Australia. Bebop, western swing, cajun, tango and samba (to name but a few) originated in lands also saddled with a colonial history. A tiny country like Jamaica has given birth to no less than calypso, ska and reggae.

To many, living in our current cut-and-paste paradise, this probably seems irrelevant and an irritation—why bother with the detailed sonic interconnectivity of the past when you can avoid both past and present by logging into, say, Second Life on the internet? I didn’t add “future” to the list of avoidance because you can guarantee that the future will be mostly a rehash of the past. It’s what we already have in Australia—everything from faithful copies of powdered wig Baroque to yet more hip-hop, to concerts where almost any plink or plonk from the 20th century is attributed to John Cage.

Unless we investigate and value our own extraordinary musical culture, the dreaded cultural cringe will continue to define what constitutes the practice of music on this continent.

interactions

So, first to History. It didn’t start off so badly. As Inga Clendinnen recalls in her book Dancing with Strangers, the firsthand account of Lieutenant William Bradley states that “the people mixed with ours and all hands danced together.” Musical gestures of friendship also took place. “The British started to sing.” The Aboriginal women in their bark canoes “either sung one of their songs, or imitated the sailors, in which they succeeded beyond expectation.” Some tunes whistled or sung by the British became favourite items with the expanding Indigenous repertoire of borrowed songs. Right there at the start we have a cultural give-and-take from both sides.

There is a unique recording made in 1899 of Tasmanian Aboriginal Fanny Cochrane singing into an Edison phonograph machine. The photo is stunning too, but that is all there is until anthropologust AP Elkin’s first recording in 1949 (as far as I can ascertain). Audio recordings thereafter document almost exclusively the music practice in Arnhem Land.

The recording of Fanny Cochrane is arguably one of the most important 19th century musical artefacts from anywhere in the world—certainly more important than the recording of Brahms playing his piano in the same year. With Johannes we still have the notation; without Fanny’s voice there would be nothing. And maybe that’s what we have wanted: ‘nothing’ to connect us to the horrors of Tasmanian history.

Translations of Central Australian Aboriginal songs were undertaken by Ted Strehlow in the 1930s, but he had his own Lutheran agenda and concentrated on ceremonial songs not personal everyday songs. He also wasn’t interested in how the songs actually sounded, the sonic structures, the grain of the music.

music for conquest & survival

“An impossible past superimposed on an unlikely present suggesting an improbable future.” Here Wayne Grady, in his book The Bone Museum, is describing the nature of the palaeontologic record, but he could be describing the culture of the modern Australian state. I find it a useful key. Let’s unlock some other musical history that has been documented.

We know that the first piano arrived onboard the Sirius with the first fleet. It was owned by the surgeon George Wogan. What happened to it is not known, but we do know that the import of pianos by the beginning of the 20th century had grown from a nervous trickle to a surging flood. The famous statement by Oscar Commetent that Australians had already imported 700,000 pianos by 1888 may be unsubstantiated, but the notion of one piano for every three or four Australians by the beginning of the 20th century could well be close to the mark.

A read through John Whiteoak’s groundbreaking book Playing Ad Lib presents a strong tradition of orality; and through observations of colonial Vaudeville, the music hall, the silent cinema, circus and theatrical events, he exposes a lexicon of unorthodox music-making more akin to the 1960s avant-garde and beyond than repressed Victorian society. If you like: the colonial 19th century was a period of fecund instrumental technique—music-making without the instruction manual.

Unfortunately, from the Gold Rush onwards, the common purpose of the colonisers became clear. Even the most enlightened were engaged in the wholesale destruction of Aboriginal culture, a political-economic agenda formulated by the powerful and still entering the law books via the mining industry to this day.

Even where Christianity worked a more moralistic trail of destruction compared to the pastoralists, the practice of music was both the medium of conquest and the medium of survival. Whatever your view of history, when the Hermannsburg Aboriginal Women’s Choir sing the Chorales of JS Bach in their own Arrernte language, with their own articulation, gliding portamento and timbre, it is an extraordinary and unique music that is being made. Started by Lutheran Pastors Kemp and Schwartz in 1887, the choir’s music is full of colonial cultural contradiction, but that music has also nurtured the Indigenous population through times of persecution and extreme physical hardship. The choir has gone from a 40-plus membership in its heyday of the 1930s to the current situation where it is difficult to muster eight singers—on our way to record the choir two years ago, two of the choir’s ladies had died in that week. This music could vanish in five years.

Mixed up with government policy to liquidate Aboriginal culture by placing mixed-blood children in institutions, in 1935 Aboriginal children with leprosy were “rounded up” (to quote the local newspaper) and placed in the Derby Leprosarium in Western Australia. An unexpected outcome of this brutal herding was the founding of The Bungarun Orchestra. To keep their fingers exercised, up to 50 patients performed Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner by ear—copying one of the sisters at the piano. And, according to their own testimony, the music helped the inmates escape the loss of their families and traditional cultural life, and also the painful injections of chaulmoogra oil [an ancient Asian cure from the seeds of the tree of the same name] into their bodies. Documentation of the orchestra shows dozens of violinists, the odd guitar, a didjeridu and some four banjo players. I’m not a fan of Wagner, but I would pay big bickies to hear a recording of Wagner with banjos. Unfortunately, the only audio documentation seems to be the singing of an Anglo hymn; nothing from the classical canon.

It’s a shocking frontier story, but my point is that the practice of music fulfilled a vital if contradictory role—it was part patronising western hegemony, and part genuine release, expression and consolation for those suffering.

lost tradition

Gumleaf playing may well go back thousands of years; again, the record is hazy. According to musicologist Robyn Ryan, it was documented first by pastoralists in 1877 in the channel country of Western Queensland. The gumleaf was used by Aborigines in Christian church services by the beginning of the 20th century, and reached popularity in the 1930s when the desperately unemployed formed 20-piece Aboriginal gumleaf bands at Wallaga Lake, Burnt Bridge and Lake Tyers, and armed with a big kangaroo skin bass drum, marched up and down the eastern seaboard—demonstrating defiance in the face of the whitefella and his economic methodology. The spirit of this music was not to appear again before the 1970s Aboriginal cultural revival. Alas, the band music itself has disappeared.

What has happened to this tradition? The Wallanga Lake Band played for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. Why isn’t there a 20-piece gumleaf band marching down George street on Australia Day? This is the New Orleans trad jazz of Australia. Who is looking after this, who is nurturing this?

My point is that you can and should research and write your own history—if it has content, it will ring true. It might also provide the materials with which to challenge the future.

an unmusical culture

There are good models of environmental performance in our recent past, but these are fairly isolated events when you consider that all music was an outdoor affair up until 1788. These aren’t quite up there with the Aboriginal notion of ‘If I don’t sing the land into existence, it doesn’t exist’, but some have tried to come close. I’m thinking of examples like The Gwotamala happenings organised by George Gittoes in the Royal National Park in the late 1970s; The Maritime Rites of Alvin Curran performed in Sydney Harbour in 1992; the Totally Huge Festival on a West Australian sheep station in 2001; the 2008 NOWnow festival in the Blue Mountains will go outdoors; the spectacularly successful Garma Festival in North-eastern Arnhem Land.

Here’s what Galarrwuy Yunupingu says about the Garma festival: “it’s about learning from each other the unique Indigenous culture as well as the contemporary knowledge that we learn from the white man’s world. This is about uniting people together and the weighing and balancing of their knowledge.”

How can we weigh and balance knowledge of music when only 23% of Australians get any kind of specialist music instruction in our public schools? It’s not just that the standard of what there is teeters from the bad to the abysmal; it’s the fact that music is just not rated as a necessary life skill, not rated in the same way that the notion of music as a profession has become laughable. Vast sums of money can be spent on the bricks and mortar of opera houses and conservatoriums, but noone wants to pay the musicians. The punters might pay for celebrities, but they resent paying for the real cost of live musicians, and by that, we know what the value of music really is in our society. Rock bottom.

Here’s some statistics taken in 2004 from the Music in Australia Knowledge Base [http://mcakb.wordpress.com]. Out of a population of over 20.1 million people, only 230,800 persons said they were involved as live performers of music. That’s a lot less than the number of pianos in Australia in 1888 when the population was well under 3 million.

So how unmusical have we become? That figure 230,000 includes unpaid and paid hobbyists as well as professionals. That’s 1.47% of the population. Out of that 1.47%, only 15.2% worked 10 hours or more per week. This means that less than 3,500 musicians were employed anything like full time in this country during the Howard boom year of 2004.

What was their worth? There are no figures, but of that initial boast of 230,800 people who said they had been involved in music somehow, only 11,500 said they received more than $5,000 dollars in that year. And that number would be seriously warped by the millions handed out to opera and the five orchestras. I disagree with the pronouncement from an ABC presenter who thinks that classical music needs defending —classical music does not need defending. Classical music has a hotline direct to the power elite of this country and has nearly the whole of the available subsidized cake and eats it too.

reciprocity & the future

For a musical praxis in the future to have any hope it must involve a high level of reciprocity—the ability to socially combine on a local and global level. It would have to be a catalyst that makes us more human. This has dangers—at its worst music helps us wage war more effectively; at best it brings us into communion with other selves—other species—the natural world from whence we came.

As Aboriginal models can teach us, music should be part of a continuum of creative practice involving sound, stories, and image—something integrated and interchangeable with geographical location; something that draws on all media, and we are now aware of that concept through the Internet.

We might be able to move from a position of musical impotence to one of strength if we choose to listen to the past. We whitefellas are in a unique position to learn from the Indigenous peoples of Australia. That doesn’t mean Nimbin hippy-style delusions of back to the bush; I’m proposing a society where there is, if not universal musical suffrage as was the norm in traditional societies, at least a situation where if you want to share knowledge, as when a Warlpiri woman tells a sand story, the most natural thing is to paint and sing this knowledge into existence. Technology can be used well to promote such notions, but it cannot replace original content, social connection, environmental context, and the wonder of firsthand experience, any more than we can replace the earth on which homo sapiens has become an uncontrollable parasite.

A few years ago Germaine Greer, in her essay White Fella Jump Up, proposed that Australia’s salvation might lie in becoming an Aboriginal Republic—an idea for which buckets of manure were poured over her head by the usual commentators. Well, I’d back almost anything that got rid of the British hereditary ruling class and that ridiculous Australian flag. However, the rub of the issue is this: our current models of music have not and are not serving us well. Instead of importing the latest theoretical cultural package from the USA or the UK, perhaps there are many elements in our Indigenous and colonial history that contain empirical guidance for the future of music as practiced in this country.

Mutawintji Aboriginal guide Gerald Quale once told me, “You whitefellas got the three Rs; well, blackfellas got the three Ls—look, listen and learn.” This strikes me as a good approach to our history and a methodology for the future if we want there to be music making of any value, but we are going to have to believe first that it is worth trying.

New Music Network, 2007 Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address: Listening to history presented by Jon Rose, The Mint, Sydney, Dec 3, 2007

AS FINNISH BUTTON-ACCORDIONIST KIMMO POHJONEN STRIDES ONTO THE ANGEL PLACE STAGE IN PSEUDO-SAMURAI WRAPAROUND TROUSERS AND SLEEVELESS VEST, HIS HEAD SHAVED SAVE FOR THE WISPY HINT OF A MOHAWK, I WONDER IF WE ARE ABOUT TO EXPERIENCE THE AWKWARD HYBRID OF ‘CLASSICAL MUSICIAN GONE PUNK.’ (I’M REMINDED OF HIPSTER VIOLIN VIRTUOSO NIGEL KENNEDY WHO HAS ALSO JUST TOURED AUSTRALIA.) PERHAPS THE POHJONEN PERSONA MAKES ME SLIGHTLY LESS SQUEAMISH BECAUSE, DESPITE THE PRESENTATION IN A MAJOR CONCERT HALL, THE ACCORDION ITSELF HAS ITS OWN PROTO-PUNK ASSOCIATIONS—YOU CAN’T GET ANY MORE DIY THAN FOLK MUSIC. AND THE SOUND OF ACCORDION, FOR MANY, INSTANTLY CONJURES ROMANTIC PROJECTIONS OF SOCIETY’S OUTCASTS—GYPSIES, CIRCUS FOLK AND CARNIE FREAKS.

Pohjonen starts with some lyrical material illustrating his technique but very rapidly spikes and jagged edges appear, cascades of dissonance erupting as though his hands are misbehaving. From the moment he commences he is completely physically animated, his nuggetty arms pumping the bellows, feet stomping on effects pedals as he rocks back and forth, getting more and more maniacal as he builds his crescendos and walls of sound.

Working with sound designer Jukka Kaven, the essentially unidirectional output is amplified and spatialised. He has an impressive rig of pedals for delays, looping, pitch shifting and other magics. Many of Pohjonen’s compositions are based on presenting a simple phrase which he captures and loops in realtime, successively layering loop upon loop until he has built an epic orchestral squall. While this is impressive technically, and sonically—we witness the piece in the making—the results become structurally predictable (a problem for many musicians using additive looping techniques).

Pohjonen is most invigorating in his integration of extended instrumental techniques. In one piece he starts with the sound of the bellows of the accordion, a deep soughing and sighing, which he then overlays with a patina of rhythms and patterns drummed on the body of the instrument. To this he adds vocalisations—earlier in the concert he has begun to sing along with himself, but more in the way you might do when you practice, a sub-vocal search through the material—now he is exploring his voice as an instrument with mouth clicks, hisses, slurps and yelps. As his voice turns edgier, he discards the accordion, supported only by the looping of his drone like chanting. Now he is standing, performing some kind of liturgical dance, slapping his forehead, beating his chest. As he moves around the stage, a story is being told, but of what—a battle hymn? Summoning of ancient spirits? The lighting is similarly dramatic, with strong colours and patterned gobos speckling the blond wood interior of Angel Place. Pohjonen obviously takes his music very seriously, but is it my cynicism that makes me suspect some kind of parodic intention behind this showiness or is he earnestly trying to conjure a contemporary hybrid shaman?

Sometimes when watching musicians utilising extended techniques, I begin to question the idea of instrument—perhaps this is a mindset that can be applied to any material—someone playing the bass may just as easily be exploring the sonorities of a chair with the same intensity and generating interesting results. Kimmo Pohjonen is undoubtedly virtuosic on his chosen instrument and his explorations of the accordion through its materiality and its electronic augmentation make his work challenging and genuinely entertaining. After extended listening though, I can’t help thinking about what he could do with a chair.

Kimmo Pohjonen, sound design Jukka Kaven, lighting Ari Valo Vitanen; City Recital Hall Angel Place, Jan 18; Sydney Festival 2008

MELBOURNE MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER SIMON CHARLES HAS BEEN AWARDED
THE APHIDS-REALTIME RESIDENCY.

Simon plays saxophone, has a Bachelor of Music degree from Melbourne University and is currently undertaking a Master of Music degree in performance and composition at the Victorian College of the Arts. His compositions include Marionette for narrator, electro-acoustic playback and video, created in collaboration with poet Jessica Wilkinson for the 2007 This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle. Other 2007 compositions include Evocation for Bosgraaf and Elias (Netherlands) for bass recorder, guitar and electro-acoustic CD and Encapsulate for ensemble Onomatopoeia, for soprano, alto, cello and two percussionists. Simon has also curated concerts and been an artist-in-residence at the Bundanon estate in New South Wales.

Aphids, the Melbourne based company specialising in international cross-artform collaborations, and RealTime, the magazine promoting innovative Australian art to the world in print and online, have come together to offer this residency for an emerging Victorian reviewer in music and sound art. Part of the Aphids Residencies and Mentoring Program for young and emerging artists, funded by the Myer Foundation, the residency takes the form of a mentorship with Victorian RealTime reviewer, Chris Reid, and two visits to Sydney to work with the editors of RealTime.

RealTime looks forward to working with Simon and seeing his writing on our pages. RT

THE GLASS PERCUSSION PROJECT EMBRACES MANY ARTS: GLASSMAKING, MUSICAL COMPOSITION, SOUND ART, INSTALLATION AND THEATRE. ONE OF A SERIES OF EVENTS COMPRISING THE PROJECT, INTERMEZZO IS SITE-SPECIFIC TO THE ATRIUM, A CAVERNOUS VAULT 15M HIGH AND 50M LONG, LINED WITH CAFES, SHOPS AND BARS, AND FORMING A HUB IN THE FEDERATION SQUARE CULTURAL PRECINCT. THE PERFORMANCE TAKES PLACE IN THE FRACTURE GALLERY, WHICH LIES WITHIN THE ATRIUM’S GLASS WALLS—A DOUBLE LAYER OF CLEAR GLASS ON THE WESTERN SIDE OF THE BUILDING CREATING A 2-3M CAVITY—AND INSIDE WHICH ARE SCAFFOLDING AND LINEN-COVERED TABLES THAT SUPPORT THE 1400 FABULOUS HANDMADE OBJECTS CREATED BY GLASS ARTIST ELAINE MILES.

On display throughout the season, these objects twinkle in the sunlight, especially at sunset. There are many types of glasswork: plates, bowls, decorated rods, wine glasses and abstract shapes. Some resemble familiar musical instruments, such as marimbas, gongs, tubular bells and wind-chimes, but, for this event, all the pieces double as musical instruments.

The percussionists, Eugene Ughetti and Matthias Schack-Arnott, wear protective goggles and white suits resembling Japanese martial arts outfits as they climb around inside the glass gallery to reach the various groups of instruments. The instruments are closely microphoned and the sound is broadcast into the atrium through a complex multi-channel loudspeaker system via a computer and mixing console. The sound the audience hears is at times heavily mediated through Myles Mumford’s live processing. The computer processor is an essential component of the instrumentation, and the performers are cued through click tracks to coordinate their playing with the processing. In effect, two people—the performer at the glasswork and the performer at the computer—are playing some of these instruments. For example, when Schack-Arnott plays the gong, a large windowpane hit with the hands instead of the usual mallets, Mumford bends the pitch to create a deeply resonant sound rich in melodic and harmonic character. Mumford uses processing to extend or abbreviate the duration of sounds, amplify harmonics and resonances, make audible certain pitches that are outside the normal range of hearing and filter out other pitches. The mixer, Michael Hewes, then channels the sound throughout the atrium, emphasising the space in which the performance occurs, and even extending the concept of the instrument to include architectural space itself.

Ughetti’s composition comprises many short elements totalling about an hour and, in constructing it, he responds to the objects themselves, seeking out their sonic and musical potential. He indicated that the glass pieces were carefully selected to ensure the correct sound, especially the tuning. Chromatic, pentatonic and microtonal tunings with quarter and eighth tones are evident. The composition and the performance seem to have evolved simultaneously with the design of the glass pieces as artworks, producing multifaceted objects with great potential. Even where familiar instrumental designs are parodied, such as with the marimbas and bells, the glass instruments produce a sound that establishes them as unique, characterised by the resonant properties of glass as distinct from metal, wood or animal hide. The glass gamelan sound is delightful and, as well, it extends our appreciation of the traditional gamelan form. Ughetti has notated all the elements of the composition, but allows some room for the performer to respond as the performance develops.

Intermezzo is a wonderful work, detailed and nuanced in its orchestration, with moments gentle, introspective, intense and virtuosic, drawing on the full range of percussion artistry. The appreciative audience shuffles about between the balcony and the floor of the atrium to see and hear what is unfolding, or absorbs it sitting with a drink. A CD recorded from a performance was replayed in the atrium at random intervals every day, forming part of the installation, so that passersby would be drawn into the project. Listening to the CD at home is an intimate experience very different from listening to the live performance in the atrium, lacking the ambient noise of human and street traffic that forms part of the live event.

Overall, Intermezzo approaches a gesamkunstwerk with its coherent blend of visual, dramatic, compositional and technical elements, and its production involves a carefully rehearsed and tightly managed team effort. The Glass Percussion Project raises the question of what a musical instrument might be and what a sound installation might be, and bridges the boundary between the visual and sonic arts. The project doesn’t answer any questions, but opens a world of possibilities upon which these and other artists will undoubtedly build.

The Glass Percussion Project, Intermezzo, co-director, composer, percussionist Eugene Ughetti, co-director, glass artist, installation artist Elaine Miles, percussionist Matthias Schack-Arnott, live electronics Myles Mumford, sound diffusion, sound engineer Michael Hewes, lighting designer Richard Vabre; Federation Square, Melbourne Jan 10-Feb 2

IN TUNE WITH THE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE AUSTRALIANS SIGNALLED BY THE FEDERAL PARLIAMENT’S APOLOGY TO THE STOLEN GENERATIONS, WOMADELAIDE 2008 FEATURES ONE OF THE HITS OF THE MELBOURNE AND SYDNEY FESTIVALS, MURUNDAK: BLACK ARM BAND.

Prime Minister Rudd’s comprehensive apology included lucid retorts to the denials, obfuscations and distortions of the warriors of the culture wars and their anti-’black arm band’ rhetoric. The name Black Arm Band for this impressive group of black and white musicians deftly mocks the labelling, at the same time acknowledging the reality of grief, and signalling that Indigenous culture is truly alive because that’s what Murundak means in the Woiwurrung language—alive.

Originally commissioned by the 2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival and produced by Arts House, Murundak brings black and white performers together in a 30-strong band, blending live performance with projections of iconic images from Indigenous culture and poltical encounters between black and white Australians.

Many of the songs too are iconic, including Shane Howard’s Solid Rock, Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s From Little Things Big Things Grow, Yothu Yindi’s Treaty, Neil Murray’s My Island Home, Archie Roach’s Took the Children Away, Tiddas’ Koorie Woman and Ruby Hunter’s Down City Streets. Doubtless there’ll be much singing along and memorable reinterpretations of classics.

The powerful Black Arm Band lineup includes Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, Bart Willoughby, Stephen Pigram, Peter Rotumah, Kutcha Edwards, didjeridu virtuoso Mark Atkins, Lou Bennett, Joe Geia, Shellie Morris, Emma Donovan, Dan Sultan, well-known actors Ursula Yovich and Rachael Maza-Long, and musical directors David Arden and Shane Howard, as well as guest John Butler.

Coming so soon after ‘sorry day’, Murundak’s appearance at WOMADelaide will be a double celebration, of a rich cultural history embodied in song traditional and modern, and as a confirmation of the bridging of cultures promised in the beginnings of reconciliation. RT

NEWLY ARRIVED AS A TEENAGE ART STUDENT IN LATE-1970S USA, CHRISTIAN MARCLAY CONDUCTED HIS EARLIEST EXPERIMENTS IN VINYL RECONSTRUCTION AS A CREATIVE RESPONSE TO AN IMMERSIVE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT. THE UBIQUITY OF VINYL LPS FOUND ITS COROLLARY IN A TRASHCAN CORNUCOPIA OF DISCARDED RECORDS: THE EBONY ELLINGPHANT’S GRAVEYARD. THESE WERE THE RUINS UPON WHICH THE YOUNG MARCLAY PLAYED, COLLAGING VINYL FRAGMENTS INTO RECOMBINANT RECORDS WHICH, WHEN PAIRED TO A RECORD PLAYER, ALSO SUGGESTED THE POSSIBILITY OF PERFORMANCE.

Rather than proceeding from legitimated precedents in primitive musique concrete, or the Broken Music of Flux-artist, Milan Knizak, Marclay had intuitively arrived at a pataphysical response to the problem of music which both paralleled contemporary experiments in hip hop and dramatised cultural and economic theories about the consumer as producer. Turntablism would not become the defining term for music made from the mixing and manipulation of records until 1994. Marclay was the field’s unwitting, if recalcitrantly unfunky, pioneer.

From the outset, Marclay’s musical activities have been informed by the conceptual smarts of his fine art schooling; his early duo with fellow student, Kurt Henry, homaged Duchamp with its name, The Bachelors, Even. Marclay’s recombinant records function as sophisticated sculptures (they look like pizzas composed of different flavoured slices) and, despite a career which has seen him work alongside such celebrated composer/improvisers as Sonic Youth, John Zorn and Otomo Yoshihide, it is as a visual artist that Christian Marclay has enjoyed his greatest success.

Marclay’s work explores a special variety of synaesthesia in which notional correspondences between sound and image are embodied in material artefacts. The sounds of these objects are often latent, suggested rather than heard, like his framed photograph of the Simon & Garfunkel 45, The Sounds of Silence. His installations and sculptures pursue this research into a materiality of sound, subjecting musical instruments to absurd exaggerations (a supine accordion with a seven metre bellows), or perverting domestic media into ironic comments on the familiar comforts they provide (a pillow crocheted from tape recordings of that boresome foursome, The Beatles).

Within Australia, Marclay’s work has figured in both the 1990 Sydney Biennale and the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2001 exhibition, Art>Music: Rock, Pop, Techno with his Broken Music. Internationally, he’s shown at the Tate Modern and the Pompidou, the Walker Art Centre, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the Venice Biennale (twice), and the list goes on…So a survey of his videowork should, perhaps, aptly be the subject of the ACMI screen gallery’s first solo artist focus.

ACMI’s Replay exhibition largely neglects this conceptual thread of Marclay’s career, and is less convincing for doing so. Instead, the audience is proposed a much more elementary discourse: sound-image relationships. Many of the works on display are essentially performance documentation, which an actual performance by Marclay—who was present for the exhibition opening—might have made redundant. Others apply a form of montage to footage from Hollywood features; but their elementary cataloguing of ‘universal’ forms and situations merely echoes the monocultural conceit of classic US studio filmmaking. What I personally find disturbing is that by privileging the logic of musical structure over the possibilities of dramatic narrative, Marclay seems also to have borrowed classic Hollywood’s claim to a blithe ideological neutrality (records are synthesised from which particular natural resource?).

The strongest works are those created from original footage. Deaf actor, Jonathan Hall Kovacs, translates music criticism into sign language with a dancer’s grace in Mixed Reviews (Sign Language). The dramatic sweep of his arms suggests an overwrought conductor, and his resort to wild-eyed mugging for dramatic emphasis lends the work a slapstick charm. Despite some gestural Sturm und Drang, its a moment of rare, silent, elegance within the Marclay oeuvre, and a witty quaternary retort to the tertiary function of the reviews (after the secondary, performance, and the primary, the score). I’m not clear what the original reviews were of, though I suppose the fact that Marclay collects music criticism is consistent with the general sense of surfeit that obtains in his work.

Another anomaly is Guitar Drag which features verité footage of the eponymous performance as a Fender Stratocaster is drawn by a rope through a variety of rural landscapes. Still plugged into an amp on the back of the speeding pick-up truck, the guitar’s demise provides a diegetic soundtrack. In counterpoint to this wry echo of the Fluxus movement’s destructive phase, the textural complexity of the music and the autumnal landscapes invite meditative contemplation in the auditor. This video’s power is only heightened by the knowledge that it explicitly refers to the 1998 automotive lynching of James Byrd Junior: for all its complex referentiality, this is a hauntingly eloquent work.

Three further works serve to illustrate the wealth of sound-producing techniques that the vinyl LP has afforded Marclay. Ghost (I Don’t Live Here Today) demonstrates his phonoguitar (essentially, a shoulder-strung turntable) and his performative gestures mimic the histrionics of rock guitar virtuosity. Record Players finds an ensemble scuffing their fingernails over LP grooves, before shattering the albums with cheerful abandon. Gestures is for four adjacent screens (a form Marclay will employ again) and brings the artist’s technical inventions into cacophonous, simultaneous, proximity. Each of the screens offers a close shot of a turntable, and Marclay tests the sonic and physical limits of the vinyl long-player; styli loop in locked grooves, and the off-centre spindle lends itself to loping pitch shifts. A little scratch never hurt anyone…

Marclay’s found footage works describe the imperial culture of US studio cinema in all its naked banality. In itself, that might be a rather artful reduction, although I doubt it was intentional: the problem is simply that Marclay has much less facility with the technology of moving image media than he does with a turntable. With the exception of Up and Out, the soundtrack is always diegetic—what you see is what you hear. In Telephone, Marclay compiles screen telephone conversations, but the effect is simply of a crossed-line conference call: what is most striking are the lost opportunities to reinvest these clips with new meaning through their canny adjacency. Bruce Conner did so much more with found footage half a century ago, and US television offers an accomplished guide in the form of Jay Ward’s Fractured Flickers series (1963).

Crossfire is an immersive environment which places the viewer at the centre of a cubic fusillade, with shots fired from action cinema clips rear-projected at each opposing wall. Sonically, as an exploration of genre clichés, and as an engagement with cinema’s materiality, it pales in comparison with Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), which has a very different, explicitly metaphysical, intention. Crossfire is also diminished by the absence of the work that accompanied its original viewing at London’s White Cube gallery: a collection of verbal sound effects rudely torn from the pages of comic books, lurid onomatopoeia becoming the mute stand-in for an extravagant concrete poetry.

This question of context is an important one. In hosting this initial survey of Marclay’s videowork, originally curated by Emma Lavigne for Paris’ Cite de la Musique, ACMI lost an opportunity to acknowledge a rich tradition of Australian artists working in detourned media. In spite of its allusivity and conceptual sophistication, Marclay’s work begins from benign assumptions about media saturation. Australian artists engaged with the materiality of found media have produced a rich and intelligent body of work which forcefully contests that assumption. I’m thinking expressly of Lynsey Martin’s experimental films—some of the most extraordinary cinema ever made in this country, and still largely unknown—but also of the turntablist interventions of Marco Fusinato, and Phil Samartzis’ 1980s duo with Andrew Curtis, GUM. With its resort to so many imported exhibitions and film programs, rather than promoting Australian work internationally, ACMI’s curatorial policy is in danger of being characterised as another kind of Terra Nullius.

Christian Marclay: Replay, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Nov 15-Feb 3

NOW IN ITS THIRD INSTALMENT, FOTOFREO IS BRINGING METAPHORICALLY AND LITERALLY DARK PHOTOGRAPHY TO SUN-BLASTED FREMANTLE. THE BIENNIAL FESTIVAL IS CATHOLIC IN ITS PROGRAMMING, REPRESENTING ART PHOTOGRAPHY, FASHION, PHOTOJOURNALISM, LANDSCAPE AND EVEN UNDERSEA PHOTOGRAPHY. NEVERTHELESS, ISSUES OF PLACE AND RACE SNAKE THROUGH THE EXHIBITIONS, WITH QUESTIONS ARISING OF OWNERSHIP (INDIGENOUS RIGHTS, THE PLACE OF WORKING CLASS WHITES IN THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA) AND LANDSCAPE (NOTABLY THE INDUSTRIAL DETRITUS CAPTURED BY EDWARD BURTYNSKY).

A keynote speaker at the Fotofreo Conference, the Canadian Burtynsky is renowned for his industrial landscapes. The large-format foreshore images in his Shipbreaking [2000] series of jagged and curving, rusted steel forms inspired Anna Tregloan’s set design for the Black Swan-Malthouse co-production of The Odyssey for the 2005 Perth International Arts Festival. Solidifying this connection with Australia, Fotofreo has commissioned a work from Burtynsky reponding to Western Australian tailing dumps and minescapes. The artist’s profoundly ambiguous images, tense with an arrested melancholy, will contrast with more familiar WA landscape photography such as Richard Woldendorp’s touristic aerial images of a land of ‘sweeping plains’ and beaches without horizons.

Contemporary indigenous photography is also included with the aggressive historical commentary of Brook Andrew. He is best known for the image Sexy and Dangerous (1996)—a key acquisition when the National Gallery of Victoria’s new Ian Potter Gallery of Australian art opened at Federation Square, and which emblazoned a smooth skinned Aboriginal torso with Japanese text. Andrew has more recently reworked greyed and patinaed anthropological photos of Australian Aboriginals from the early 20th century (Gun Metal Grey, 2007). His current work also includes an explicit challenge to relate the history of Australia and its art to that of the dawn of the European colonial project, late Renaissance and Mannerist painting. In Portraits and Costumes, Andrew has figures dressed in a pastiche of 17th century courtly dress and animal costumes, executing ironic acts of dance and gesture which literally inscribe a space in front of works of ‘the Great Masters’ hanging on walls behind them. This is a challenge both to their greatness, as well as to where one should place Australia and its first peoples within these histories.

An equally formalist approach to these issues is presented by Marion Drew. Drew has represented the Australian landscape both directly, in her dense blobs of Queensland’s jungle suspended in blocks of darkness (2006), and indirectly as in her 2004 commission for Brisbane Magistrates Court, Tankstream (a series of “watergrams” which reference the stream running beneath the site prior to settlement). Drew’s most famous project is her 2005 Australiana series, which recreates Dutch still life in Australia using native animals (roadkill, as it happens) and local settings. As Drew has observed, 17th century still life was rich in allegorical symbolism, but once decoupled from that context, these symbolic references become strangely haunting and ambiguous. Are they cries against settlement, against modernity, or aestheticised portraits of romanticised mortality? Drew likens her photographs to drawings because she produces them using long exposures in a dark environment, “sketching” her subjects using a torch. This generates soft, hyperreal images.

A particular treat for Francophiles is the work of “ar-ctivist, photograffeur” (artist-activist and photographic graffitist) JR, who made his name representing friends from Paris’ economically depressed outer suburbs—the banlieue—inhabited by African and Algerian immigrants from France’s former colonies. Months before les banlieue erupted in riot in 2005, JR posted gargantuan photocopies of his distorted close-ups throughout the city. As he observed, inhabitants of the richer central suburbs “saw the young people from the banlieue as though they were extraterrestrials. I decided to show them like that in my photos!” These massive grimacing visages literally got in the faces of Parisians living close to the centres of power, and similar images were later pasted on Paris City’s prestigious Town Hall, as well as on the barrier separating Israel from Palestine and the West Bank. Now institutionally recognized, JR maintains his anonymity, his commitment to illegal street postings and continues to re-photograph his urban galleries and bewildered, sometimes angry spectators in front of them.

Amidst this rich diversity of Fotofreo exhibitions, a highlight is the work of Roger Ballen who established himself in the 1990s, photographing poor whites from the “dorps” lying on the fringes of Johannesburg. Initially cloaked in the aura of documentary photography, Ballen’s work scandalised audiences with its suggestion of a new, post-Apartheid underclass, as well attracting accusations of exploitation (like Diane Arbus) given his focus on bodily grotesquery and illness. While far from free of such references, Ballen’s material has increasingly emerged as profoundly Surrealist, with key tropes such as human-animal hybrids, graffitied scrawls and potently ambiguous surfaces, scenes and detritus (shades of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades). Ballen’s Puppy Between Feet (1999) reworks Jacques-André Boiffard’s photograph Big Toe, published in 1929 with an essay by dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille. Bataille claimed, “The big toe is the most human part of the body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated” from that of semi-arboreal apes, the toe’s grotesque corns and grimy protrusions signifying man’s essential connection to dirt, filth and what Bataille called the “baseness” of humanity’s “excremental” desires. Ballen’s intensely graded black-and-white images bring this theatre of baseness to Western Australia, while outside the sun blisters gallery walls.

Fotofreo, The City of Fremantle Photography Festival, various venues, April 5-May 4; Fotofreo Conference, April 5-6, WA Maritime Museum; www.fotofreo.com

Occasional RealTime correspondent and leading Australian media artist Tim Burns has a photographic retrospective of his works at Urban Dingo Gallery as part of FotoFreo Perth Exhibitions. Ed.

THE DAILY LIVES OF JAMES MCARDLE AND DANIEL ARMSTRONG HAVE A PRESENCE IN BENDIGO’S REGIONAL LANDSCAPE. MCARDLE TEACHES LOCALLY AND LIVES WITH HIS FAMILY IN CASTLEMAINE AND ARMSTRONG, WHILE WORKING IN MELBOURNE, SPENDS MOST WEEKENDS WITH HIS SCHOOL-AGE SONS AT HIS PROPERTY IN VAUGHAN. AZIMUTH, THEIR JOINT EXHIBITION OF NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK AT THE PHYLLIS PALMER GALLERY IN BENDIGO FOREGROUNDS ISSUES OF REPRESENTATION WITHIN NEW MEDIA AESTHETICS.

The works in this exhibition and the evolving practice of these two established photographers speak to and of the journey from traditional photography to what Vilem Flusser has identified in his introduction to his 1983 book Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion, London, 2000) as the technical image. As Flusser predicted:

The universe of technical images, as it is about to establish itself around us, poses itself as the plenitude of our times, in which all actions and passions turn in eternal repetition. It is from this apocalyptic perspective that the problem of photography will acquire the shape proper to it.

The works in this exhibition, in their overt and covert digital manipulation, witness and enact this flow from the traditional photographic to the technical image and can be read as aesthetic speculations on this shift.

Armstrong’s series of digital photographs are heavily manipulated grids of astronomical images sampled from the night sky with time exposures of a number of seconds using both analog and digital recording equipment. These grids are reconfigurations of those stars that impose such presence on one’s visual nocturnal experience of regional Victoria. It is a presence that is often lost on those living with the washed out night skies common to a metropolis like Melbourne or Sydney.

Each dot in these grids retains a soft blurrable contour filled with a smudge of colour often lost on the naked eye. Though such a description highlights those painterly aspects that the digital has been perceived as championing, these clusters of light have arrived as images through decades of technical analog astronomical interrogation of the sky. They have been considered as ‘real’ technical extensions of the naked eye. They also have a presence beyond the grid as Armstrong has stretched and morphed them into three-dimensional shape.

The surface of Armstrong’s work hovers playfully in this gap between the analog and the digital. Each dot performs like a de-facto pixel that forms into a spatial relationship with others. These compositions are more technical than the ‘organic’ organization of the night sky. Whilst symbols, characters and numeric codes were historically projected onto such tapestries of light, Armstrong’s clusters have arrived from somewhere else, from within the technology itself into what would previously have been considered a fiction.

If as Flusser points out, “Ontologically traditional images mean phenomena, while technical images mean concept”, then Armstrong’s work performs a metamorphosis on the history of astronomical photography, itself a premonition of the technical image, into an abstracted perceptual field that is reminiscent of pop art and conceptual art. It is the collated data set of stars as images that is being presented for consumption here.

In deciphering such a data-basic puzzle, we are confronted with the same dilemma that Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) faces in Blade Runner in his unfolding relationship with the replicant Rachael (Sean Young), which precariously swings on whether she is human or android (or whether he is). As in that representational hall of mirrors, even if there is no difference (and there is), something has shifted in our relationship to the image. This unease, a destabilising mix of visceral intuition and critical thought, visits you in front of one of Armstrong’s concoctions, to disarmingly cancel each other out. Like a roo caught in the headlights of a moving car, we are immobilised by reflection and physicality working on each other. What is required to address the impasse is a re-jigging of the senses and critical thoughts. It requires a new way of seeing to overcome the trauma that technology throws our way.

This infatuation with what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not,’ which is present in Armstrong’s earlier re-enactments of bogus flying-saucer imagery, reaches a new register here and contains within the ovoid and circular constellations a mischievous trace of this earlier obsession.

If you stand in front of these images long enough then the figure-ground gestalt flips to turn the lights into clusters of holes rather than imaginary objects or symbols. It is an ominous glare that seeps through these holes and can bring to mind the prowling light outside, trying to enter the darkened house, situations that often occur in horror films and those about alien visitations. It is a reversal that also brings to mind Flusser’s contention (Finger, The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, Champaign University of Illinois Press, 2003) that the once private home has become a nomadic tent buffeted by the technological winds that sweep through the multifarious wires that pierce its perimeters. Is this Merleau-Ponty’s embodied being-in-the-world, pierced and under siege, dumbfounded by the technical image?

McArdle’s blurs and smudges come from a different dimension, not out of distance and time, but movement and time. These landscapes harness the vortex, a phenomenon I first encountered in Arthur and Corinne Cantrill’s moving image work Near Coober Pedy (15 min, 1977) and further articulated in Canadian Jack Chamber’s found footage film Hart of London (16mm 80 min, 1970)

Near Coober Pedy consists of a series of shots captured from a moving car during an interminably long car journey to Australia’s centre. The camera locks in on and tracks in short pans individual features in the flat, ‘barren’ landscape, to create a swirl of movement, a vortex, around these still points.

Hart of London, assembled out of historical newsreel film footage from the Ontario town of London, has moments of movement and editing that break free from the narrative documentation even more emphatically than the lyrical body of the film. These moments are referred to as vortices by Chambers and could also be described as windows or wormholes into more synecdochic modes of representation.

These films both perform ‘unsettling’ operations on the representation of three-dimensional Cartesian space and linear/causal time. McArdle can be read as combining such strategies within the photographic and transforming its stillness into a trace of movement. His use of the vortex and the blur as indicators of a landscape being moved through find a precedent in the metamorphosis of the senses that the train traveller was required to implement at the turn of the 19th century.

Reading the moving landscape overwhelmed the early train traveller. “The inability to acquire a mode of perception adequate to technological travel crossed all political, ideological and aesthetic lines” (Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, Berg, New York, 1986). New perceptual strategies had to be developed that contextualised the blur and the streak. “To adapt to the conditions of rail travel, a process of decentralisation, or dispersal of attention, took place in reading as well as the traveller’s perception of the landscape outside.”

McArdle extends these ways of looking. His images of the landscape are collected in transit on car journeys through vicinities around Bendigo. A fleeting glance may fasten on some detail. This place is then re-visited on foot to gather images on the move and swivel of the body and the camera. The gestures of McArdle’s body and the camera’s movements are registered as the streak and blur and the painterly swirl, the vortex. The large scale of these images, as with Armstrong’s, also enables a bodily as well as visual response from the gallery viewer-participant.

The digital has allowed McArdle to evolve his technique in documenting such a gestural landscape into a seamless triptych where a foreground close-up, medium shot and wide angled horizon are combined into a painterly yet still photographic collage. This technique allows McArdle to increase the intensity and directions of the gestures he imparts on the landscape in his work.

I am arguing that these are not random operations but document a bodily relationship to these spaces. They add an emotional register of meaning. One of the most effective images places the vortex within the dark hole of a group of mine shafts that pepper the local landscape. It is as if the fluid landscape is being sucked into these holes. Is this an indication of a spent and unsettled landscape, a space in crisis, or are these the traces of emotion imparted from the body of the photographer himself? In such a way the personal and the local can be read in dialogue in McArdle’s work.

The ‘technical’ in these works operate differently from those of Armstrong’s. They remain hidden under the surface. This may be one of the reasons why it was the mineshafts that caught this writer’s critical eye, as they can suggest a subterranean yet historical world outside the purview of the image. For Flusser the technical image is about a preoccupation with surface. McArdle’s images tease at this concern but remain more than surface.

Armstrong’s and McArdle’s images articulate how we are now embedded in Flusser’s premonition, the age of the technical image; where the written sentence is redundant, where images speak for themselves and all at once. This may be considered magic but it is not. The pea is under every pod (or none). It is also the age in which Schrödinger’s Cat is made manifest (or not).

Finally, the fact that these techniques are being expressed through the local energises and focuses this work. That is why it was so important that this exhibition was experienced in Bendigo. Driving up from Melbourne during the day, my eye caught many moments in the landscape into which James McArdle’s technical and bodily strategies could have inserted themselves. On the way back, driving across the Westgate Bridge at night into Melbourne, there were Daniel Armstrong’s grids sprinkled across the city in front of me, framed by the car window.

James McArdle, Daniel Armstrong, Azimuth, Phyllis Palmer Gallery, RMIT, Bendigo, July 27-Aug 8, 2007

LIGHT, THE OVERARCHING THEME OF THIS YEAR’S ADELAIDE FESTIVAL OF ARTS, HAS A SPECIAL RESONANCE IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA AS COLONEL WILLIAM LIGHT IS CREDITED WITH DESIGNING THE CITY. HIS BRONZE STATUE POINTING A FINGER AT ADELAIDE FROM MONTEFIORE HILL AND HIS GOLD-PLATED THEODOLITE THAT SITS LIKE A LOUISE BOURGEOIS SPIDER ON A PLINTH IN LIGHT SQUARE MARK THE CITY’S GRATITUDE.

Someone has suggested that a laser tracking light should be attached to his finger so that we can find out exactly where he is pointing. Sounds like disco and a job for Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), a New York-based art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with open source technologies for urban communication. They will be giving a masterclass and doing public art interventions all over Adelaide March 5-16. GRL often use LED Throwies to make statements. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. You spell out your graffiti in light on metal (ie magnetic) surfaces thus saving both paint and muscle power.

Enlightenment is the twin theme of the festival and The Speed of Light, the set of five exhibitions and a keynote address involve a certain amount of what might be called an enlightened return to the 70s. This could be the wheel of fashion or, as in the worldwide tendency to re-enactment of past performance art, a reflection of the voracious need for copy in a web-based world.

Doug Aitken, LA-based artist and maker of music videos and ads as his day-job, recently showed very large image projections on the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He will not be making a work in Adelaide but is the keynote speaker for Artists’ Week and will set the stage for thinking about different kinds of light and ways of working with it. Outdoor large scale projections will be present in the work of the Australian-based mob The Electric Canvas who will be projecting an Australian World Premier Free Spectacle from dusk til 2am every festival night on buildings up and down the cultural boulevard of North Terrace.

As part of The Speed of Light at Greenaway Art Gallery, New York-based Chilean artist Iván Navarro will show videos as well as light sculptures made with neon tubes that look like remakes of Dan Flavin’s art and build on some of the unresolved aspects of minimalism. Argentinean artist Felix Larreta’s Spherescent, a geodesic dome that you can walk inside and is covered with op art patterns responding to music and sound patterns, will be located on the 70s timewarp zone of the Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza by Greenaway Art Gallery’s offshoot, GAG Projects, Berlin. At Flinders University City Gallery Italian artist Elisa Sighicelli will show lightboxes and videos. She selectively paints the backs of her photos before illuminating them thus combining the softness of oil-painted surfaces with the sharpness of photography. Düsseldorf-based Mischa Kuball has been working with light for 20 years. He makes political and social statements with projections, and twists our capacity to make sense from fragments of language projected onto sculptural elements designed from his digitized brain waves. Finally at the Jam Factory The Speed of Light comes to rest with The AES (+F) Group from Russia which consists of graphic designer Evgeny Svyatsky and conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich who work together regularly with fashion photographer Vladimir Fridke; on those occasions his F is added to the other initials. Their work, a three-screen video installation and a five metre photographic panorama, depicts a tableau vivant of international youth in battle [RT81, p2]. Of all The Speed of Light program this work has the most political dimension as it makes palpable the youth of the world who sit in front of illuminated screens and play computer games, thus battling each other (and older people) day after day, night after night, on the internet.

Curated by Julianne Pierce, Artists’ Week 2008 is a program of back to back artists’ talks and forums. Play It Loud asks whether combining music and art is dumb or just plain fun. Speakers include Chicks on Speed and the Ziggy Stardust-coiffed Philip Brophy as well as art band The Histrionics’ Danius Kesminas. The Art and The City forum investigates whether more art is being made using the city as a canvas. Shaun Gladwell will speak along with Evan Roth from Graffiti Research Lab. Playing It Safe asks if are we in a period of conservative art. Speakers include Arlene Texta Queen, Deborah Kelly of Beware of the God fame and Adam Geczy. In Intimate Dialogue the question is: how do curators work with artists and contribute to their creative practice? Speakers include Rachel Kent, Victoria Lynn and Jason Smith. Continental Drift wonders if it’s possible for Australia-based artists to have international careers. Speakers are Jenny Watson, Daniel von Sturmer and Festival gizmo-designer Michael Kutschbach.

The Gloves Come Off session wonders if people in the visual art community are too polite to one another. Speakers are writer Ashley Crawford, ABC content creator Courtney Gibson and Marcus Westbury, writer and presenter of the ABC TV’s series Not Quite Art. The NAVA (National Association for the Visual Art) session will focus on regulation of the visual art industry. Forums on Light will have an art/science twist. Speakers range from serial portraitist Robert Hannaford to actual scientists(!), and more artists—Chris Henschke who has done a recent residency at the Australian Synchroton and the famous holographer Paula Dawson.

Also prominent in the festival’s visual arts program are the 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Arts, titled Handle with Care and focused on “aspects of contemporary life that generate disquiet and debate”, and the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Modern Art’s Penumbra, Contemporary Art from Taiwan, featuring new media and installation works.

Chicks on Speed, the headline act for the Artists’ Week party, are an electropop and Fluxus-inspired group of grrrls who started running a bar with a techno surge in Munich when they were at art school in the early 90s. They make art, music, fashion, graphic design and mayhem, yet are amateurish in all these fields and proud of it. Like the Guerilla Girls who were at the 1992 Adelaide Festival, they make some tough comments about the ‘art world’ machine and male dominance of it.

The Australian member of the Chicks, Alex Murray-Leslie, recently said: “I really believe that art is over in a sense, the whole thing is mostly just a commercial system now. So we try to reinvent it from our perspective, a feminist perspective…” There are distinct echoes of 90s art stars VNS Matrix’s practice in Chicks on Speed’s ambience. Who doesn’t remember at least a few words from VNS’s cyberfeminist manifesto of art for the 21st century: “we are the virus of the world disorder…the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.”

UNIMA 2008 AND ASSISTEJ 2008 ARE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE EVENTS BEING HELD IN AUSTRALIA IN COMING MONTHS. THE 20TH UNIMA CONGRESS & WORLD PUPPETRY FESTIVAL WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERTH AND ASSITEJ (INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF THEATRE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE) IN ADELAIDE.

While UNIMA caters to audiences young and old, ASSITEJ is focused on theatre for young people. For the RealTime readers of tomorrow with a taste for the new in performance both are events that look set to satisfy a deep-seated need for magic, adventure and innovation.

unima

UNIMA’s program of some 30 works includes South African William Kentridge’s remarkable blend of puppetry and charcoal drawn animation in Handspring Puppet Company’s Woyzeck on the Highveld; and Angel, from the Netherlands’ Duda Paiva, an innovative merging of dance and puppetry in a duet between an angel and a drunk. On the food front, Australia’s Men of Steel make wonderfully messy magic with cooking utensils; France’s Compagnie Akselere transforms a restaurant setting into the tale of Sleeping Beauty with, among other things, puppeteered forks; and Belgium’s La Compagnie des Chemins de Terre presents [Richard], in which “Romeo & Juliet is played by the puppeteer’s clothes, Hamlet takes the form of ripped paper and Richard the Third is re-enacted with a slab of meat.” Polyglot Puppet Theatre has collaborated with Ilbijerri Aboriginal Theatre Co-op on Headhunter, a wild, funny ‘road movie’ of a show. For shoe fetishists, Spareparts and the WA Museum have created The Mary Surefoot Shoe Collection which involves investing shoes with interesting new lives of their own. And for other proclivities there’s the sexy, strictly adults only Cabaret Decadanse by Canada’s Soma International.

There are works from Australia’s Black Hole, Lemony S, Spare Parts, Richard Bradshaw, Barking Gecko, Terrapin, The Indirect Object (emerging artists from the VCA’s puppetry course), and shows from the Czech Republic, Denmark and Japan, as well as exhibitions and conferences. UNIMA 2008 looks a perfect introduction to and confirmation of the great power of puppetry in its many surprising new manifestations.

assitej

ASSITEJ ranges across theatrical forms, embracing spoken word, multmedia, dance, music, large-scale and miniature puppetry and physical theatre. From Australia there’s Snuff Puppets’ scary but funny Dream Time show, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic, created with Indigenous artists; and Christine Johnson’s Fluff, a wonderfully eccentric tale, musically and theatrically, about finding homes for lost toys. Adelaide’s Windmill Performing Arts is offering two works, Cat and The Green Sheep, the latter inspired by Judy Horacek illustrations. Perth’s Buzz Dance Theatre’s Cinderella Dressed In Yella cross-costumes boys as the fairytale heroine in a work based on playground games. Also on the program are works by Patch Theatre, Arena Theatre, Urban Myth Theatre of Youth, Polyglot, Ilbijerri, Men of Steel, Uncle Semolina (& friends), Kage, Real TV and Krinkl Theatre. There are companies from Sweden, Israel (The Arab-Hebrew Theater Of Jaffa), Japan, Denmark, Korea, USA, New Zealand, Germany, Thailand. Australia’s provocative Zeal Theatre has collaborated with South Africa’s Bheki on a play about boys triggering a political storm at an international sporting event. Surprise, dance theatre from Austria’s Dschungel Wein, looks one of the most intriguing shows on the program. It’s for audiences two years and up and asks: How do surprises actually sound? Do several surprises make a melody? We’ll have more on ASSITEJ in RealTime 84. RT

20th UNIMA Congress & World Puppetry Festival, an initiative of Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, Perth, April 2-12, www.unima2008.com; 16th ASSITEJ 2008, World Congress and Performing Arts Festival, Adelaide, May 9-18
www.assitej.com.au

Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s Explosion Therapy is part of the 2008 UNIMA program. See the review on page 38.

WE ARRIVED IN VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA KEEN TO ADJUST TO THE CLIMATE AND CULTURE, AND LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE FROM WESTERN CANADA IN THE PUSH PROGRAM. WE WERE REWARDED WITH CRISP, ICY TEMPERATURES, A LITTLE SNOW AND PLENTY OF SUNSHINE, AMPLE CANADIAN GOODWILL AND, SOME VERY FINE WORKS FROM VANCOUVER ITSELF BY ELECTRIC COMPANY, THEATRE REPLACEMENT AND BOCA DEL LUPO.

PuSh sees itself as a festival committed to presenting groundbreaking work. Executive director Norman Armour’s 2008 program included Romeo Castellucci’s Hey Girl!, Nigel Charnock’s Fever, neworldtheatre/Teesri Dunya Theatre’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (a Vancouver-Montreal collaboration) and three Australian works, The Space Between by Circa, Small Metal Objects by Back to Back Theatre and Chunky Move’s Glow.

These works and Electric Company’s Palace Grand [p5, 11], Theatre Replacement’s Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut [p4] and Boca Del Lupo’s My Dad, My Dog [p6] gave the festival its edge, along with Toronto-based Mammalian Reflex’s hugely popular Haircuts by Children (which also played at this year’s Sydney Festival).

November Theatre’s The Black Rider and Catalyst Theatre’s Frankenstein, both from Edmonton, capital of neighboring Alberta, were given fine ensemble performances, but appeared to belong to an earlier generation of experimental theatre, while a local adaptation of Balzac’s Old Goriot and the Montreal-based Théatre la Seizième, in Août, un repas a la campagne (August, an afternoon in the country), evoked an altogether older theatre tradition. Not everything then was groundbreaking, but in the end we couldn’t complain.

Hey Girl! [p8] divided audiences, even generating anger, not because of the work’s sublimely alien theatricality but because it was regarded as didactic (which for a Castellucci work it was), sexist (the male director portrays captive woman, liberates her and apparently disempowers her in the process) and racist (the black woman freed by the white woman remains a distant, dancing figure without agency). Others felt the work more complex with its mutating images and shifting symbolism.

The Australian works were well received; Circa in The Space Between [p8] for moving beyond the usual frame of the physical theatre routine and for the dancerly quality of their work; Chunky Move [p5] for Glow’s innovation and passion (save for some who saw it as mere technological demonstration); and Back to Back’s Small Metal Objects [p10] for the unique experience it offered, subtly challenging notions of morality and normality in an altogether different theatrical space.

Boca Del Lupo’s My Dad, My Dog ably and sometimes quite magically integrated live performance with projected animation, with the animator onstage adding further dimensions to the action in a work that very laterally addressed cultural and personal differences. Some fine, witty, elliptical writing sat side by side with some too familiar postmodern framing, but it’s not difficult to envisage a superior version with a little tweaking.

The Electric Company’s Palace Grand was revelatory, a theatrical delirium of multiplying doppelgangers (all played by the same actor, Jonathan Young) and a remarkable staging of screens within screens, and rooms within rooms, disappearing our normal notion of the stage. Palace Grand gave us a glimpse of Canada’s psychological relationship with its ‘interior’, the North. I immediately wanted to see the company’s previous works about Nikola Tesla and Eadweard Muybridge.

Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut was another PuSh highlight, and like Palace Grand and the best writing in My Dad, My Dog, put paid to the commonplace we’d been hearing that “Vancouver has some great visual theatre but it’s let down by the writing.” There are a couple of episodes that Clark and I…could live without to make a more potent work but it is already a powerhouse of wit and hard-learned wisdom as performed by an actor in a rabbit suit [James Long], supported by an onstage video artist managing the projected images drawn from a suitcase of abandoned photographs that inspired this very funny but tough work.

Australians have seen little contemporary Canadian performance, Robert Le Page, Marie Brassard and Daniel McIvor aside. Palace Grand, challenging though it is, and Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, wonderfully accessible but defiantly tough as it is, should be welcomed by Australia’s international arts festivals.

There are other Vancouver companies like Radix and Theatre Conspiracy, a performance art scene (with a bi-annual festival), and sound and music events at Western Front (a venue eerily like Sydney’s old Performance Space) we look forward to reviewing.

Norman Armour not only programmed Australian works but he also invited RealTime to run a review-writing workshop for his 2008 festival. Let’s hope that Armour’s interest in Australian work (he’s here for the 2008 Australian Performing Arts Market) and in establishing a dialogue between our countries grows and is, above all, reciprocated by Australian festivals taking on Canadian works.

We enjoyed a wonderfully informative, creative and collaborative workshop with our writers—Vancouver-based Anna Russell, Meg Walker, Alex Ferguson and Andrew Templeton, and Brussels-based Eleanor Hadley Kershaw. We thank the Vancouverites and Norman Armour for their hospitality and look forward to a developing relationship between RealTime and Vancouver and Canada beyond. Thanks too to the Canada Council and the Australia Council for support towards our workshop. KG

RealTime-PuSh Review-writing Workshop, PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Vancouver, Canada, Jan 20-30

IN LATE 2007, TWO CONFERENCES, THE IMZ DANCESCREEN IN THE HAGUE, HOLLAND, AND OPENSOURCE: (VIDEODANCE) IN FINDHORN, SCOTLAND PRESENTED A COMPLEX AND AT TIMES UNSETTLING PICTURE OF AN ARTFORM IN TRANSITION.

Several attendees commented to me that IMZ dancescreen, long held to be one of the premiere screendance events in world, was this year a rather smaller and hastily pulled together affair. And it is true that by comparison with some of its earlier iterations, the event overall appeared to have lost some of its lustre, forward-looking energy and intellectual coherence. Despite some inspiring and cogent words about creating work for an audience in the keynote address by Henk van der Meulen, President of IMZ, the festival seemed content to settle into a self-congratulatory snake eating its tail pattern of ‘this work is good because we say it’s good therefore it’s good.’ But by and large, it wasn’t. It is alarming when you feel that you could take any element out of a work—its aesthetic, its choreography, its design, its shooting and editing styles, its music and sound design—and replace it with that element from another work without really noticing any significant change.

Some exceptions were the films at IMZ that looked for deeper inspiration in the nature and history of the media in which they are participating. Particularly worthy of mention is Swedish choreographer Pontus Lindberg’s potent and visually splendid Rain; a lovely adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain entitled Höhenluft (Mountain Air) from Netherlands/UK director Annick Vroom and choreographers Andrea Boll, Andreas Denk and Klaus Jürgens; and UK-based Isabel Rocamora’s poignant, award-winning Horizon of Exile. Also worth following up were Netherland’s choreographer Jirí Kylián and director Boris Paval Conen’s quirky black and white adaptation of Carmen titled Car Men; British choreographer/director Jo Parkes’ highly unusual mixing of farming and dancing in From the Soil; and the offbeat dance screen award winner Les Ballets C de la B, directed by Belgium’s Alan Platel.

But overall the festival had a sense of creative stagnation and aesthetic clumsiness, perhaps partly explained by the fact that IMZ is sustained by (largely European) commissioning editors who, to their obvious frustration, are less and less able to contribute to the development of the artform (because they have less and less cash). With the shift of dancefilm distribution from television to the internet, the question of who is going to pay for dance films to be made in the future remains unresolved. The closest to a solution was offered by Rob Overman, who is developing an online portal for classical music called Monteverdi.com, soon to be able to be ‘re-skinned’ to serve as a node for the rich bodies of work in other genres, such as dance film and jazz.

The issue of screendance distribution for student use, research and audiences was also discussed in arguably the liveliest session at dancescreen, Teaching/Education of dance filmmaking, ably chaired by John Crawford of University of California at Irvine. The speakers presented an inspiring vision for the educational possibilities of the artform. Interestingly, taken together, some of the more cogent comments underscored an idea which came out of the Screendance: The State of the Art Conference at the American Dance Festival in July 2006 (RT74, p20): the need for a critical framework for screendance, seeing it as an artform at the fluid nexus of three overlapping disciplines—dance, cinema and visual art. In particular, Katrina McPherson of Dundee University, Scotland traced the history and usefulness of dance film as a teaching tool in her book Making Video Dance (Routledge, 2006). Shona McCullagh, a dance filmmaker and educator from New Zealand, warned that the cheapness and easiness of digital video was leading to less honing of the creative process, less focus and less clear artistic choices, with the result that much current work in the medium was, in her words, “flumsy”, meaning wobbly and without rigour. And Alex Reuben, supported by one of his former students at The Place in London, Sergio Cruz, cogently argued for the necessity for widening of a screendance practitioner’s range and reference to include practices from video art as well as cinematic traditions.

All caveats aside, IMZ dance screen’s most creative contribution was to bring to attention the potential that digital media and the internet are offering as opportunities for new forms of creativity and interactivity. Some of these were witnessed in McCullagh’s session on her recent explorations of new and hybrid technologies in the work mondo nuovo; Simon Fildes’ introduction to online dance creativity; Ronald Hartwig’s presentation on imaginative online marketing; and Billy Cowie’s installation work, In the Flesh, a 3D hologram of a woman in a closet [see p24]. It was hard to tell whether Cowie meant this work to be eerie, awkward, confronting, or spiritual—but remarkably it appeared to be all of these things.

Where IMZ was more about business, Opensource: (Videodance) Symposium was more about ideas. The Opensource: (Videodance) Symposium in June 2006 was one of the first international gatherings to bring a theoretical perspective to the burgeoning art of screendance and people were bursting to be heard on the subject. That symposium, followed closely by the Screendance: The State of the Art Conference changed the landscape for international practitioners and thinkers, and has lead to the soon to be released Screendance Journal. At the second Symposium in November 2007, there was definitely a feeling that things had moved on. And perhaps, if there is a criticism to be made of the event, it was that it relied a little unquestioningly on the structures previously set up rather than remembering, in advance, that you can never step in the same river twice. Nor was everybody willing or able to, as Douglas Rosenberg, US dancefilm-maker and academic, put it, “name your frame”, or present clear information about the perspective from which theories were being put: an important skill when ideas that are being discussed have a big impact on our perception of past and future creativity.

Interestingly, the most vital discussions at Opensource, in congruence with IMZ, were in response to the fluid, unanswered questions posed by the internet. In particular, the idea of a “screendance map.” This would build on some of the work already begun by Fildes and McPherson at videodance.org as well as filling out the details of the earlier critical framework proposed at the Screendance Conference. In doing so it could supply the metadata needed for an online dance film portal, allowing creators to use ‘tagging’ technology (suggested by British choreographer Litza Bixler) to identify, describe and situate their work. In this way, dance films could find their place in an evolving, interactive definition of the form.

Following on from this was a debate about whether in the online world screendance would continue to require the kinds of curators or gatekeepers characteristic of television and film festivals, or whether users would prefer to follow the ontology of the search engine—tags, similar work, most viewed work—and the social network: what their friends were watching. This question will be no doubt asked at the forthcoming Screendance: State of the Art 2, Curating the Practice/Curating as Practice, at the American Dance Festival in July 2008.

“Screendance is dead, long live Screendance”, proclaimed Katrina Macpherson as a rallying call for reinvigoration of a form which, after an exciting period of discovery and experimentation, appears to many to be in danger of stultification. Critical thinking and speaking about screendance, like the digital revolution and the internet, has the potential to be part of the problem or part of the solution. It will probably be both, but let’s hope more of the latter.

IMZ dancescreen, 11th International Competitive Festival for Dance Films and Videos, The Hague, Netherlands, Nov 15-18, 2007
www.imz.at

Richard James Allen is co-artistic director with Karen Pearlman of The Physical TV Company. At Opensource: (Videodance) he gave a presentation on the company and its multi-award-winning work Thursday’s Fictions.

It’s hard to describe the sense of freedom you get watching this show. To start with, there’s the freedom of being outside the usual theatre box. Small Metal Objects (performed by Australia’s Back to Back Theatre) takes place in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, a crescent shaped concourse with a glass ceiling many stories above. On one side of the concourse is the library itself, also fronted with glass, all the way up, it’s insides open to view. On the other side are the cafes, flower shops and pizza parlors. We’re sitting on a narrow bank of seats somewhere in the middle. Crowds flow in and out of the main library entrance. People sip lattes, read newspapers or eat snacks at the shop tables. Each person in the audience stall is wearing a set of headphones. To the passersby, we may look a little odd. To us, they just look like normal people doing normal things. ‘Normal’ is a concept that will be unpacked in a most ingenious and surreptitious manner over the next 50 minutes. When it’s done, we may never feel normal again. But we may feel a lot freer.

We’re sitting on a narrow bank of seats somewhere in the middle. Crowds flow in and out of the main library entrance. People sip lattes, read newspapers or eat snacks at the shop tables. Each person in the audience stall is wearing a set of headphones. To the passersby, we may look a little odd. To us, they just look like normal people doing normal things. ‘Normal’ is a concept that will be unpacked in a most ingenious and surreptitious manner over the next 50 minutes. When it’s done, we may never feel normal again. But we may feel a lot freer.

A conversation begins in the headphones. Voice One (male): “Cooked a roast last night. Think it was chicken.” Voice Two (male): “I love chicken.” Space. A couple of spare piano chords. Voice One: “Celebrated my 15th wedding anniversary.” Space. Piano. Voice 1 again: “If a guy with a gun came at my wife and my kids I’d take the bullet for them.” The conversation continues like this for some time. It’s affectionate, honest, witty. It may be pre-recorded, we don’t know yet. Voice Two talks about how much he wants “to give,” to help, that he’s worried he’s gay because he doesn’t have a girlfriend, that if he were famous he would give every needy person in the world 825 grams of food a day. Voice One has great ideas too: he wants to get into the self-storage business because these days people don’t throw things away. In the same breath he mentions childcare as another good bet, presumably because people don’t throw children away either. The general movement of the crowd continues. Suddenly I see the source of the voices: at the far end of the atrium two men are slowly moving in our direction. They both have headsets on. One of them is a skinny, medium height brunette; the other is short and heavy-set with a blonde buzz cut. It turns out Voice Two belongs to the brunette, who’s name is Steve (Simon Laherty), while Voice One belongs to the blond, Gary (Sonia Teuben).

As they get closer, we can see by Steve’s movement, and by the performers’ physical appearance that the actors are mentally/physically ‘challenged’—a concept that is already beginning to be stripped of the logic of prejudice. After all, they were having a conversation that might be attributed to any two ‘normal’ guys, one who’s been married for 15 years, the other who is lonely and confused about his sexual orientation. The gentle pace of the performance, supported by a hypnotic sound score, is at odds with the usual rhythm of the concourse. Gary and Steve seem to inhabit a parallel world; the people who sit at neighbouring tables haven’t taken notice of them. The actors are almost like spirits. They take their time with every exchange. The crowd speeds past. We are witnessing a genuine clash of cultures: one is slow and considered, one is madly goal-oriented. We know which one we usually live in.

By the time the next character appears we’ve been well massaged into the culture of Steve and Gary, and judging by the grinning faces around me the audience is grateful for the experience. Allan (Jim Russell) is a speedy big time realtor. He’s putting on a major function and needs to furnish his clients with drugs. And here’s another challenge to our expectations: Gary and Steve are dealers. Allan doesn’t have much time. Gary is happy to furnish him with the goods, but things have to proceed at a pace that doesn’t suit Allan’s pressing agenda. To complicate matters, Steve has become immobile. He’s “deep in thought” and refuses to go to the lockers to get the stash. As much as Gary would like to accommodate Allan, he won’t abandon Steve, so the deal’s off. Allan phones for support from his psychologist, Caroline (Caroline Lee). Lee, who is a motivational consultant for large corporate clients, arrives, and the two ‘normals’ get to work, soothing and cajoling Steve—Caroline offers everything from free consultations to (when she gets most desperate) a blowjob. Most significantly, she appeals to Steve’s desire to improve himself, to become a happier, productive, more efficient person. This is the dialectic that has been playing throughout: Steve and Gary’s culture is based on personal bonds, on trust and human compassion; Caroline’s and Allan’s is utilitarian. As Steve and Gary say, “Everything has a value.” Caroline and Allan would agree with this statement, but in their world value is equated with productivity.

Small Metal Objects doesn’t present a utopia. It simply defines the ethos of two contrasting cultures. In the current paradigm, we demand that Gary and Steve play by our rules. We reward them inasmuch as they are able to conform to our standards of successful behavior. Small Metal Objects reverses the paradigm. Allan can’t adjust to the values that supercede getting what you want when you want it. He and Caroline simply cannot speak the language of the minority culture they are confronting. The performance raises a whole host of concerns about ‘otherness’ and difference that can be applied to so many aspects of our fractured world, whether we’re looking at issues like racism, poverty and other forms of exclusion on a community level, or whether we’re facing macro issues like global military conflicts. That sounds heavy-handed, something this show is resolutely not. The superb ensemble playing of the cast, the deft direction of Bruce Gladwin, and the mesmerising sound design of Hugh Covill reconfigure the atrium, removing density from the space between passersby, unlocking new ways of seeing—no, of being—for those of us consciously taking it in.

It’s appropriate that this happens at a library, because we are getting a first class education here. This is what great art can do. It can re-organise your bones, re-wire your brain, and perform open-heart surgery all at the same time. Far from the confines of a theatre box and from the spatial concerns that accompany conventional scripts and conventional acting, we get to re-imagine how the conflicting cultures of our world might fit together a little easier, what little adjustments it might take for us to approach each other and make contact with difference. It’s a very moving exercise in the art of the possible, and it left me with a surprisingly untainted sense of hope.

Back to Back Theatre, Small Metal Objects, devisers Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sonia Teuben, Genevieve Morris, Jim Russell, director Bruce Gladwin, performers Simon Laherty, Sonia Teuben, Caroline Lee, Jim Russell, sound design & composition Hugh Covill; Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch Promenade, Jan 30-Feb 2

The letterbox orientation of a typical movie screen is turned on end, vertically stretching from floor to ceiling. Like the rest of My Dad, My Dog this is just a gentle adjustment of accepted convention, not an aggressive challenge. A small picture frame appears on the screen, about the size of your bedroom window. Inside it, an animated dog skips through an animated fall landscape. The dog roams across the bottom of the large screen taking the frame with it. It’s as if we’re looking through a rectangular telescope. Then the dog arrives at the trunk of a tree and chases off a pigeon. Leaving the dog behind, the frame travels up the trunk into the boughs. As it reaches the crest we hear a crash, the tree shakes and sheds it’s leaves, the picture disappears.

This whimsical passage comes early in Boca del Lupo’s My Dad, My Dog, a delightful show that plays live action against a vast canvas of animations that are a wonder to behold. The dog scene offers us one possible way of exploring what’s to come. While taking in the whole, we might use a selective eye to pick out details that suit our sense of narrative. A similar technique is used a little further along. James Fagan Tait (there are no character names in the program) is an ornithologist searching for the rare white-necked red-crowned crane, which is found only in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. He stands before the screen, now filled from top to bottom with animator Jay White’s depiction (a fluttering watercolour) of the DMZ. Looking not-too-hopeful about ever finding the rare bird, Tait exits. A live-camera feed from a mini-stage set up at the left side of the stage allows White to project his own hand holding a magnifying lens onto the large screen. It finds the crane in the foliated background. So this story is also about not seeing things — like seeing the tree shake but missing the crash. Framing certain things implies excluding others.

And there’s another story-telling technique at play here. Telling a story is always an act of translation. There’s a possible source event, someone puts that event through a subjective filter and transmits it to someone else. The storyteller may use the biological machinery of his or her body (lungs, larynx, mouth etc), or technological aids — a pen, a camera, a computer. I think we usually picture story telling proceeding in that order: original event, internal translation, re-telling. But in My Dad, My Dog the order is reversed. Sherry J. Yoon imagines her way back to a North Korea she has never visited and to a woman who doesn’t exist but is a plausible type for a relative she might have there. It’s like creating a photo album of a vacation you never had.

Well that’s just what fiction is, you say. And you’d be right. But Yoon takes pains to frame this fiction as a search for a missing part of her family story. She offers biographical details of her ‘real’ life (“I am Korean”) as the starting point for an investigation into her relationship with her father. She imagines her father reincarnated as a North Korean dog. When Yoon is not performing herself she plays the part of her North Korean alter ego, who works for the government monitoring and limiting the movement of visitors to her country. She visits the dog chained up in an alley and talks to it, believing it will understand her (in one hilarious scene the dog complains to a fellow canine that he can’t understand the woman because she’s speaking English). Yoon, as herself, returns to the stage periodically to tell us which parts of the story are true (and exactly what she means by ‘true’) and which are inventions. The difference is as important as we want to make it.

Often the characterizations are made deliberately flat, while animations like the dad-dog almost jump off the screen and display a psychological complexity the humans lack. The blurring of fact and fiction is kept in play. We realize that, to some extent, we all assemble our ‘selves’ from a patchwork of memories, dreams and desires. We put a frame around that which we accept as ‘I’, as ‘me’, and leave out the rest.

The autumn colours on screen and the delicate figures of Alicia Hansen’s piano compositions give the show a very west-side-of-Vancouver feel. There’s a lot of light-hearted dialogue about the character of the city: “Vancouver seems liberal but it’s conservative. But not as conservative as Toronto.” These comments aren’t serious digs. For the most part, My Dad, My Dog doesn’t try to be the last word on any issue. But after a while it starts circling itself. The content and episodic structure gets repetitive —I don’t think this is a deliberate narrative strategy. The animated sequences, mesmerizing as they are, become devices not always integral to the theme. The attempted resolution — “sometimes there are no answers” — felt pat to me. It felt too much like an answer, it created closure to that which might have remained open.

But then again, maybe I was looking in the wrong direction. It would be like me to put a frame around the thing everyone else thought was irrelevant. You know, looking at the tree and missing the crash. Oh, but maybe that was the point. Or lack of a point. Um, throw up another cool animation, the critic is leaving the stage.

You’ve got to enjoy this one. Before the movie starts, the outrageously accomplished Eye of Newt ensemble warms up the crowd with a jazz improvisation that foreshadows some of the tactics it will use to underscore Buster Keaton’s classic film The General. Stephen Smulovitz (violin and saw) and percussionist Pepe Danza start off with a weirdly haunting violin–mouth-harp duet that pulls at the heart while relaxing the body. Paul Plimley then layers in a piano ‘score’ that echoes the movie’s original soundtrack while maintaining a contemporary feel. Plimley, Danza and Paul Blaney (double bass) will drive us through the emotional peaks and valleys of Keaton’s epic slapstick journey, with Brad Muirhead’s trombone and Smulovitz’s saw adding comic inflection. The trombone, and the violin and saw (which sounds a lot like a theremin, actually) will also create dissonance, colouring the film’s original moods with a palette of exquisitely darker tones.

The pre-show improvisation has the effect of activating our imaginations and surreptitiously encouraging our vocal participation with the movie. This was a surprise to me — I hadn’t expected people to cheer and clap at Keaton’s antics. I’m used to movie patrons who are well behaved. But if the film has suffered any lack of impact since its 1927 debut, Eye of Newt and the enthusiasm of an all-ages crowd restored its immediacy. Keaton’s inventive choreography and physical daring prompted cascades of laughter, squeals of delight and more than a few gasps.

In the film’s American Civil War setting, Johnnie Gray (Keaton) is a Confederate train engineer who has but two loves: his engine “The General,” and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). Annabelle is a patriot, so when Johnnie is rejected by the army he falls out of favour with her. She tells Johnnie not to show his face again until he’s in uniform. Johnnie redeems himself by diverting a Yankee attack almost single handedly, and by rescuing Annabelle (who was inadvertently kidnapped by a guerrilla unit).

There are plenty of heart-stopping train stunts and enough tumbling feats of daring to keep our eyes popping and our necks craning. Eye of Newt matches Keaton stunt for stunt. The musicians catch every pratfall and every double take. They have an arsenal of well-timed responses to the shifting moods of this surprisingly layered film. The General is given an infusion of new blood by Eye of Newt, just as Johnnie is redeemed when his commanding officer gives him a new uniform. Keaton was at the top of his game when he made The General, almost in a class by himself. It’s fitting that for this engagement he has been paired with five players whose powers inhabit the stratosphere of musical invention and ability.

Nigel Charnok comes on stage with energy so fierce it’s hard to decide what’s going on. With his long legs and arms whipping out in all directions, he might be a great black stork gone crazy, or an enormous bird of prey in crisis. Soon he runs through agitated, fast-paced gestures of grabbing his crotch, slapping his neck (with cologne?) and raising his wrist to his eye as if to check the time. Perhaps an addict, desperate for sex and preparing for a date that’s bound to be disastrous? The theory is temporarily strengthened when he crams the waiting microphone into his mouth and it amplifies his gasps. By the time he swings the microphone stand crazily around his head, I’ve figured out what he reminds me of: the last, drunken guest at a brilliant party, who will simply not go home.

Charnok’s collaboration with jazz musician Michael Riessler and the Virus Quartet is a theatre work with three elements: Charnok’s words and movement, Riessler’s music and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Of the three, we get to know Shakespeare least – the sonnets are almost incidental to this one-person riot. Every so often Charnok recites one of them; usually he distracts us at the same time. Only once he admits to the power of the music on stage and removes himself: “this is really beautiful. I shouldn’t be talking. Listen to this.” He sits down in the audience half-way back. The sonnet he recites next is quiet and meaningful, in a way the others haven’t been, because we can’t see him, and he isn’t drawing our attention away.

The disciplined, rich sound of the quintet sometimes provides a middle path between Charnok’s mania and the sonnets’ formality, but it’s not always enough to stave off disorientation. Even Charnok has to remind himself to make the transition sometimes. “Oh, Shakespeare, right”, he says, after a rambling rant on Starbucks and Afghanistan. And then we’re wrenched into “O cunning love, with tears thou leaves me blind” as he hides behind the upstage blacks.

At one level, Fever is a classic introductory text to postmodernism. The work is endlessly self-aware and repeatedly deconstructed. It’s also very funny. Charnock never stops moving as he reminds us that we are an audience, although apparently we’re better than last night’s. Unlike that lot, we’re clearly “a collection of very fine, receptive, elegant human beings.” He lets us in on the music ensemble’s emotional state: “They’re all jet-lagged and I’m in a bad mood,” but assures us “it makes for great art.” Stripping down to near-nudity as the night proceeds, he runs bare-legged, sweaty and disheveled around the stage. More and more deconstructed himself, he exits and comes back on, looking at a polaroid of his own butt, to tell us it isn’t the end of the show but “we’re very near.” Then he refreshes himself from a water bottle, and spits it over the audience.

Much of the deconstructionism is applied refreshingly to modern dance. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he says, striking a pose with knees braced together, one arm flung to the side. “Do you have any idea what this means?” After the show, he tells us some of modern dance is “a big con.” Certainly for much of the work he dances the way a child or a drunk might, exuberantly, with a “look what I’m doing now!” spirit to it. We might have been conned, because he makes us watch it, and he calls it art. But we’re happy for a chance not to take modern dance seriously.

The work is modular, with a mix of composed and improvised sections organized according to set cues. Charnok claimed afterward that he and the musicians “ignore each other most of the time,” but the superb clarinettist (Michael Riessler leading the quartet) watched Charnok’s every gesture closely during their duets. Charnok maintains a studied indifference to the work. “It doesn’t really matter. That’s what gives me the total freedom. It’s happening for no one and I’m not there…. I’m really not there.” His attitude can sound disrespectful – to the audience and to the work. But Shakespeare can take it. So can Riessler and so can we. Let’s hope modern dance can too. It if can’t, it’s in trouble.

Drunken party guests aren’t known for their concern for others, but they still work hard for attention. Charnok craves our gaze. He may say what he’s doing doesn’t matter, but maybe he cares more than anyone. Unlike the last, late guest who’s despoiling the furniture and taking polaroids of his body parts, I didn’t want him to leave.

It seems we’re about to take a stylistic journey into theatre history. Before us is a detailed replica of the front porch of an old Quebec country house. There’s a swing, a few lawn-chairs folded up at one side, a front door screen, windows that look into the rooms, little details like an overturned bucket under the porch. There’s an orange extension cord running out from the house and a power drill sitting on the swing. As the patrons take their seats, an actor walks out and uses the drill to put a new plank in the front steps. Soon we will meet the family that lives in the house, four generations of women and a few of their spouses. They will present nicely layered naturalistic character portraits rich in physical and psychological detail. Cars will honk off-stage, crows will caw.

Actors will wipe away imaginary sweat and present languid bodies oppressed by summer heat. They will speak dialogue that, through a century or more of theatrical convention, we have come to accept as ‘everyday’. The playwright will carefully note the psychological cause-and-effect that motivates each character. And like the 19th century progenitors of this type of play, he will insert a symbolic element (here, a seven foot garter snake) that adds mystery and is the key to unlocking the deeper meaning of the work. It will all be handled rather deftly by actors who have raised their craft to a fine pitch. And I will wonder if we still need naturalism in theatre, and whether I should be at the movies instead.

There’s a distinctly Chekhovian quality to Aout – un repas à la campagne (August: an afternoon in the country) produced by Montreal’s Le Théâtre de La Manufacture, and written by Jean Marc Dalpé. It’s the story of a family whose fortunes, for generations, have been tied to a maple tree plantation which is now failing due to devastation by acid rain. Jeanne (Sophie Clément) the matriarch, is dutifully running the household while trying to keep her daughter Louise (Annick Bergeron) and granddaughter Josée (Catherine De Léan) in line. She also has to keep tabs on her husband Simon (played by the playwright), who has ambitions to make the plantation turn a profit again, but who suffers a heart condition that lays him out when he gets over-excited. Josée, 19, wants to cut and run to start a screenwriting career in the big city. She’s also bulimic, and for that reason Jeanne tries to keep her under a watchful eye. Daughter Louise, married to Gabriel (Henri Chassé), is a realtor having an affair she hopes will be her ticket to California and out of here. Gabriel is a hard working, beer drinking, salt-of-the-earth type, who tries to pull Louise back into their twenty-one year marriage. Grandma Paulette, played by the 86 year old Janine Sutto, an acting legend in French Canada, masterfully provides comic counterpoint to the action with dry jabs and a stubborn refusal to surrender an inch of her hard won peculiarities for anyone else’s satisfaction.

Echoing Chekhov’s rural comedies, the two younger women are dying to get out of this backwater, while Jeanne is doing what she can to keep the family together and to uphold tradition. As we will discover, she will do this even if it means crushing Louise’s spirit and allowing her to be subjected to physical violation. Thankfully, like Chekhov, the playwright gives us plenty of opportunity to laugh at the contortions the characters put themselves through to maintain their sanity in this stifling situation. The predicament becomes positively farcical at times. Louise carries on a playfully seductive phone conversation with her lover right in front of the family and guests. After she leaves, André (Jacques L’Heureux), one of the guests, ineptly tries to comfort Gaby by touching on all the horrible legal and emotional complications he will face after divorce — but hey, at least there won’t be a custody battle, Josée is 19.

André again exemplifies the absurdity of human behaviour when he describes how he overcame the grief of his first wife’s death by playing a few rounds of golf just hours after burying her. While the humour opens things up, and while we’re temporarily seduced by the hopes and dreams of these people, as with Chekhov’s country characters, this family is stuck in an evolutionary dead end. This may be where the symbolism of the snake comes in. After an excited Gabriel shows it off, it escapes, perhaps representing his last chance to save the marriage and/or the family’s last chance to save itself.

I was eventually drawn into the story, mainly on the strength of the acting ensemble, which handled the material effortlessly, tightening and slackening the tension with acrobatic precision. A colleague described Quebec actors as having that rare ability to shift from heightened emotional pitch to casual patter seamlessly. Jean-Denis Leduc, Artistic Director of the company, thinks it’s the result of a Latin culture (French speaking) transplanted to North America. Seems like a fair assessment.

In the tradition of his naturalist forefathers (with nods to plays like The Seagull and Miss Julie), playwright Dalpé serves up a melodramatic ending (something the naturalists were rarely able to resist despite themselves) that returns the family to a disturbing status quo. Despite the strengths of the acting ensemble and the subtle rhythms of the script, Aout borders on museum piece, a homage to a period when naturalism was a subversive theatre movement.

Boca del Lupo’s new show My Dad, My Dog is an unusual convergence of animation and live theatre, and animator Jay White has talent to burn. The dog of the title is animated with spooky care. Its movement and timing speak of every dog I’ve ever known, although it looks like none I’ve ever seen. As it creeps into view from the bottom right of a huge screen placed upstage, it’s hard to believe it’s not real. A Korean woman (Sherry J Yoon) believes it may be the reincarnation of her father – this in a country where people eat dogmeat soup in the summer. Understandably, she’s feeling a little confused.

So am I. Although the dad-dog storyline continues to an inconsequential ending, other stories emerge and ramble about without apparent purpose. It doesn’t matter that the relationship between the woman and a slightly seedy pigeon smuggler (played with excellent timing and a submerged creepiness by John Fagan Tait) is never resolved. But there’s also a young Canadian filmmaker (Billy Marchenski) who may or may not be imprisoned in his North Korean hotel room by order of the autocratic Kim Jong Il. The filmmaker’s storyline peters out, as does the pigeon smuggler’s intention to study the rare cranes that have flourished in Korea’s demilitarized zone over the past 50 years. After narration and animation had spent several wonderful minutes building up to these magical cranes, I so wanted to hear more about them, and I missed them all the way to the end.

Animator Jay White stands stage left with the tools of his trade, and is a visible part of the action throughout. With his interventions, new scenes are often established by combining animation and live-action film. In front of a drawn backdrop projected onto the screen, White’s giant hand comes into view, setting out miniature pieces of furniture, where they appear full scale as set elements, but doll-house sized in relation to the hand of the artist.

At its best, the animation adds wonderful layers to the world of the play, literally. “I’m here for the birds,” the pigeon smuggler says as he sits outdoors with the woman. “So far I’ve only seen pigeons, but I’m optimistic.” And here comes a projection of the out-sized artist’s hand, holding a real magnifying glass. The glass reveals a miniature crane hidden in the painted foliage behind the couple.

In moments like these, the animation dominates the production, and it’s so good-natured and virtuosic that it temporarily blinds us to the fact that the overall aesthetic is fragmented. Scratchy black and white line drawings are mixed with full-colour, painterly scenes. Single animated elements trade places with panoramic views. The screen itself is often used to support the live action, but at other times it’s the actors who are helping to animate the screen. When the screen displays scenery, it maintains the focus on the foreground action. When the actors interact with animated images, their attention is directed upstage, emptying the playing area. At other times animation and actors are merged on one flat plane, as with silhouettes. And some moments are purely filmic, providing a sense of immensity in a small, black box theatre.

For some reason the narrator (Sherry J Yoon playing herself) feels compelled to interrupt this unusual world to tell us the dog’s a symbol, to teach us facts about North Korea, or to tell us what parts of the play were based on personal experience. The show’s creators are too aware of the information vacuum in our media on the subject of North Korea, and their concern for our education stilts the script. Without the narrator’s irritating presence, the play would have been almost twice as good.

Animation is laborious work, and the co-creators noted in a post-show talk that the “rhythms of animation and theatre are very different.” New plays in development are often being revised late in the production process; working with an animator would make that approach impossible. An 80-minute play represents a powerful amount of work for a single animator, and it may be that the needs of dramaturgy were overridden by the needs of animation. I still appreciate Boca del Lupo’s desire to try the partnership.

I absolutely loved this play for the first 20 minutes, and I’d see it again. But My Dad, My Dog has at least three unfinished stories, a constantly changing aesthetic, and an extraneous narrator. These post-modern embellishments weaken what would otherwise have been an absolutely captivating night at the theatre. The images are wonderful, but something’s gone awry when the strongest parts of a play are its scene changes. The variety of visual approaches could still triumph if the script were stronger, but with this script, the animation almost felt gimmicky at times. White’s obvious talent saves it from that. I left the theatre feeling oddly sad. This play had so much going for it, and a near miss can be devastating.

Directly framed by Sherry J Yoon’s straightforward announcements as herself to the audience, My Dad, My Dog presents a fragmented story about a Canadian woman of Korean descent (Yoon) imagining how one of her North Korean cousins might live. Yoon once had a dog who, she was convinced, was her reincarnated father. She wonders what her unknown North Korean cousin would do if she experienced the same thing.

Yoon appears as herself several times, emphasizing a (possibly false) truth-fiction distinction – “It’s not a real story, but every detail in it is true.” As the Korean cousin (all characters are unnamed), she presents a slide show about North Korean culture. A Canadian filmmaker (Billy Marchenski) worries that he’s been kidnapped; his monologues are rapid. Another Canadian, a professor (James Fagan Tait) who seems to have minimal knowledge of the birds he’s supposed to be studying, develops a flirtatious but awkward relationship with the Korean cousin by talking about his obssession with pigeons. Cuts from the original Godzilla backdrop the filmmaker’s thoughts about monster movies. Sound is mostly live: performers stand stage right by a microphone to provide voiceovers for hand-drawn animated scenes; Alicia Hansen plays gentle rills on an upright piano, stage right, silent movie style.

The play is a comedy, ranging from dreamy scenes of feeding (animated) pigeons to insightful comments on Kim Jong Il’s obssession with cinema to hilarious moments of non-communication sparked by differences in Canadian and Korean expectations. But it doesn’t find its focus in the story. The filmmaker overcomes the fear that he may be kidnapped and learns that he may be too presumptuous, but what does it mean to learn something so general about oneself? The pigeon-man remains a flat character whose role is to urge the Korean cousin to talk about herself. She becomes somewhat personal with him, but gives no specifics about who her father was, or why it would matter for her dad to appear as a dog. If that conversational distance is meant to reflect on opaque North Korean privacy habits, then the significance of the dad-dog needs to appear in another way. And the dad-dog, one of Jay White’s gentle, hand-drawn animations, doesn’t get enough stage time to become anything more than entertaining (there’s a great scene where the dad-dog confesses to another animated dog that he thinks the Korean woman has bad plans for him, but he can’t really tell because she keeps speaking English).

Because the storytelling style skips all over the place – the flow between scenes is almost, but not quite tight – the set and the layers of technical innovation take over and become the heart of the performance. In a high-tech culture increasingly devoted to all things digital, it is a pleasure to enter the well-crafted world of low-tech projections that White uses to create the whimsical set for My Dad, My Dog. White’s hand-drawn animations fill a movie-size screen, so images are large enough for the performers to walk around in or, suprisingly, for White to animate around the performers. In one scene, for example, White pans down an image of a tall elevator while a performer stands still. Elsewhere, the projection is set up so he can draw a backdrop live: as he sketches on a glass panel, the lines gradually form a restaurant and fellow patrons around the two performers sitting centre stage at a three-dimensional dining table.

The simple animation techniques are deft and playful, innovative in how they surround the performers. My Dad, My Dog is fun but ultimately remains sketchy, leaving the audience charmed by literal drawings instead of metaphorical ones.

What I write here doesn’t express my response to My Dad, My Dog. I’m just using it to explore my possible response, had I been watching a different show in another country, with other people. While it isn’t a true account of My Dad, My Dog, it is made up of details that are true…

It is with a similar postmodern bent that Sherry J Yoon introduces us to Boca del Lupo’s production of My Dad, My Dog, the story of her imagined North Korean doppelganger’s discovery of a dog she believes to be the reincarnation of her father. Through inventive interaction between animation, film and live performance, we witness her unfolding relationship with a man who likes pigeons (James Fagan Tait) and a filmmaker obsessed with monsters (Billy Marchenski). In an idiosyncratic exploration of how Yoon’s life might have been had she been born on the other side of her family tree in Korea rather than in Canada, we experience a sometimes witty, sometimes whimsical investigation into perspective and point of view.

Framed by the animator (Jay White) and his tools on one side of the bare stage, and the musician (Alicia Hansen) with her piano on the other, Yoon guides the naïve film-maker around the streets of her city, neatly stamping in a straight line as he trails in zigzags behind her. She is responsible for him during his stay in North Korea, and instructs what he may and may not photograph. He pans his camera towards the audience, looking for an image he wants to capture. On the large screen behind the actors, we see the rectangular frame of his viewfinder scan the landscape. The screen is white apart from the small frame, which reveals to us a continuous, beautifully painted watercolour image of the city. The filmmaker finds a view he is pleased with, and shoots; we are momentarily blinded by his flash. In this instant, the onscreen watercolour transforms to an actual photograph: several men, police or soldiers, are lined up carrying guns. Panicked, the guide snatches the camera and deletes this image, explaining that her charge must check that it is appropriate before he takes a shot. This is the least composed we’ve seen her: a momentary lack of restraint reveals the severity of the consequences if prohibited behaviour occurs under her watch. The filmmaker wavers over another couple of images and Yoon quickly points him towards more appropriate compositions. He finds a poster with a man’s face blown up to enormous proportions, presumably the President. Flash, and we see the photo. That’s right, says Yoon, you seem to be getting the hang of this.

Luckily for us, Boca del Lupo’s ability to portray differing perspectives on a narrative is not restricted. The cultural misunderstandings between Yoon and her newfound friend, the bird enthusiast, are touchingly comical. As they sit to eat, the animator draws efficiently simple lines onto glass, creating a restaurant around them. Yoon misreads the ornithologist’s emphatic concern about “the soup” and can’t understand why he struggles to bring himself to eat it. When it dawns on her that he believes that this is dog soup, an infamous Korean delicacy, to his embarrassment she laughs uncontrollably. When they first meet in the park, what she believes to be a polite smile in reaction to his invasive questions and attempts to test her personality, he reads as an Asian contempt for westerners.

By far the most entertaining perspectives on display are the conversations between animals, played out in animations which appear on the big screen while the actors provide voiceovers into a microphone downstage left. Two pigeons crossly discuss the fact that the crane, which gets so much attention, wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for the DMZ (Demilitarised Zone, a strip of heavily guarded, and therefore environmentally protected, land between North and South Korea). The dog that Yoon believes to be her father discusses his bewilderment at her behaviour with another stray: just one of the guys discussing his woman troubles with his buddy. Earlier we witnessed Yoon speaking to the dog, reaching out her hand towards his form on the screen as she thinks out loud about her father. The dog doesn’t know whether she wants to hurt him or love him. There’s one of a number of postmodern quips as his friend asks, “what did she say?” “Well that’s the thing, I have no idea – it was all in English!”.

Later on, the ornithologist’s huge face – actual not animated – looms over us, occupying the whole of the screen. He purses his lips, squeaks and clicks, and it becomes apparent that we are the pigeon that he has decided to smuggle back into Korea in his trousers, at the moment just before the sedative is administered. Later on, the filmmaker sets Yoon’s dog free and he scampers out of sight. We hear screeching brakes and a crash. The dog has been run over by a car. The camera is brought centre-stage and we see the three humans looking at it, while onscreen their sad faces look down on us.

With this clever layering we are shown that situations can be experienced differently depending on which perspective you approach them from, or which perspective you are permitted. Following the dog’s death, Yoon breaks out of character, relaxing her stiff body language and losing the almost robotic Korean inflections in her English. The dog’s death is the only detail of this story that isn’t true. It’s invented to create “a sense of convergence and closure.”

The three characters decide to write down their secrets and give them to the pigeon to carry away, in an act of remembrance. The ornithologist cups his hands, facing the screen, and as he opens them out the bird appears on the brown and green park landscape onscreen, flying away from us into the distance. The animation follows and eventually catches up with the bird, so we are given a literal bird’s eye view of the sea as it flies towards Canada. It passes a semi-submerged Godzilla, then approaches Vancouver, and finally a large white house. Just as we think we are safely home, another dog bounds into view, leaps past us and we hear a squeak and a crunch. A single feather drops to the floor. Through another viewfinder, the dog, mouth full, looks guiltily back at us, then jumps away towards a tree in the garden. The camera idly drifts up to the top of the tree. Then a screech of tires, a yelp, and a crash. The camera drops to the floor. Blackout.

Although the relentless postmodern frame of this show sometimes seems a little tired, it is often charmingly self-aware: this quirky twist is a beautifully crafted ending to the personal and cozy journey of My Dad, My Dog. And as for this article? The only detail of the review that doesn’t express my true response is the beginning…

A tall, blank screen dominates Boca del Lupo’s My Dad, My Dog. The screen fills with a variety of images, some animated, some magnified sets and props manipulated live by Jay White, who stands on one side of the stage, wearing an apron like a modern day Geppetto. The images are sharp and effective, forming clever backdrops to the action, with White’s monstrously magnified hand appearing occasionally to open doors and move furniture. It looks great. And anyone who grew up in Canada with the Friendly Giant will no doubt smile. Although the projections were high-tech there was something old fashioned about the whole artifice. The machinery White operates reminded me of a doll-sized opera house. This sense of 19th century stage-craft was nicely complemented by the live piano playing of Alicia Hansen who resides on the opposite side of the stage from White.

Before seeing the My Dad, My Dog, a number of people told me they found it charming or delightful. While the imagery created by White gives the show a lyrical and at times child-like softness, this work is steely at its core. Even the central narrative conceit embodies this tension. Sherry J Yoon, one of the creators and performers, appears at the top of the show as herself to explain what inspired the piece: she became convinced that her dog was her father reincarnated. While this might appear an absurdist notion—at least to Western ears—it evokes a painful story of death and, as Yoon alludes, the fate of the soul of a violent man. Precisely what the steel core of My Dad, My Dog is remains a mystery to me, a blank, and maybe this is appropriate.

The play is set in one of the last blank spots on the map: North Korea, a world we only glimpse through government controlled images. This is neatly played out when one of the characters attempts to take photos. We see what the foreigner sees through his viewfinder projected onto the screen: animated drawings of the rough and tumble of North Korean life. The translator moves the Westerner’s arm so that a sanitised, acceptable image is framed. The camera flashes and the drawing is replaced by a photo. The photos, which already have an inhuman bleakness to them, are made even more ominous. This filling in blank screens with controlled images set against what our imagination creates is a central motif of the work and one that is played with very effectively.

Yoon, who was born in Korea, tells us about the numerous cousins she has spread over both sides of the border separating North from South Korea. She plays an unnamed translator, an alternative version of herself had she grown up in North Korea. She portrays this character with a remarkable level of formality and control: another blank slate. Her interactions with two unnamed Canadians, a bird-fancier from Vancouver (James Fagan Tait) and a filmmaker from Canada’s east coast (Billy Marchenski) are filled with frustrating literalness. Everything is taken at face value. The translator in fact does no translating. Her job is to speak English to foreigners so that they understand what they can’t do. Her blankness is only really broken through her relationship with an animated dog. The other two characters also have their familiars, the Tait character has a pigeon, the filmmaker monsters, specifically King Kong who looks through his hotel room at one point. The Tait character, whose bird obsession makes him a self-imposed outsider, is a nice counterpoint to the state-sanctioned translator. The filmmaker’s relation to the other characters is not so clear and his reason for being in North Korea—to make a monster movie—stretches incredulity, even in a piece that stars an animated dog. I suspect the filmmaker character was created to underscore the theme of blank screens and the creation of images, but it doesn’t quite hang together for me.

The relationship between the performers and the projected images has something to do with the blank screen itself. This is most obviously illustrated in two scenes set in a restaurant. White draws the restaurant for us while the scenes unfold. We watch random lines form recognisable shapes of tables and diners. Towards the end of the scene the filmmaker notes that people in the restaurant are looking at them. Direct interaction between the actors and the images on the screen is limited and therefore becomes pointed: the translator engaging with her dog and the bird-fancier releasing a pigeon. In these moments, it is almost as if the actors are puncturing the blankness of the screen, using their familiars to achieve this transition to an unknown other side. This somehow relates to the motif of reincarnation and the cycle of creation and recreation. The almost too sweet lyricism of the last scene—a released bird making its way across impossible odds back to Vancouver—is cut short by a moment of cruel humour. The transition between worlds, of crossing over into blankness is not without its danger.

Boca del Lupo, My Dad, My Dog, created by Sherry J Yoon, Jay White, director Jay Dodge, performers Billy Marchenski, James Fagan Tait, Sherry J Yoon, animation and scenography Jay White, music Alicia Hansen, costumes Reva Quem, lighting Jeff Harrison, Jay Dodge; Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, Vancouver, Jan 25-26, Jane 29-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

The slight young woman’s intelligent eyes lock onto mine as she perches on her upholstered white office chair, knees drawn up to her chest. I feel as though she and I are alone in the room as she tells me how, when she was younger, her mother told her that she thought she might be a better mom if she took her children to church. “This may have been a scare tactic.” The audience’s laughter snaps my connection with Wong and she swivels on her chair to address the person next to me.

Wong, who has introduced herself to each audience member personally as we entered the tiny blackbox space, is speaking the monologue edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner from the diaries, emails and letters of Rachel Corrie following her death in Rafah, Gaza in 2003. The audience are probably aware of the circumstances of Corrie’s death: while protesting about the demolition of Palestinian homes, she was crushed by an armoured bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces. But this performance allows us to get to know the woman behind the newsprint, extracts of which are projected in thin strips on each wall of the Havana Theatre as we enter.

The intimate, in-the-round setting of Wong’s performance painfully draws attention to her physicality in the space just a metre or two away from us. Four single lines of, at most, fifteen chairs form a square around the performance area; I can see the expression of every person present. Through Wong’s energetic portrayal of the powerfully evocative words of Corrie as a girl, we are invited right into her messy teenager’s bedroom and inner thoughts, witnessing her childish self-absorption, but ever-present sense of justice and engagement with the world. Through the strength of her writing, helped along with images projected above each line of seats, the space transforms from the world of her childhood and education in Olympia, Washington, to an aeroplane journey to Gaza, to check points outside of Rafah, and the base there for Corrie’s work with the International Solidarity Movement.
Wong jumps from chair to floor, she pushes her desk around the space, her boundless energy brims out of her small frame, threatening to spill onto the audience. She paces round the perimeter of her square of light, making lists, ordering her quick-firing thoughts. “What I have: thighs, a throat and a belly. Sharp teeth and beady eyes.” This witty attention to her corporeality and the horrible irony of her perceptive words as a 12 year old are incredibly moving: “It’s all relative anyway; nine years is as long as 40 years depending on how long you’ve lived.” We learn the motivations behind her activism, her desire to see what is at the other end of the spending of American taxpayer’s money, and her sense of guilt that she can leave the Middle East whenever she wants, but that the local people who have “sweetly doted on [her]” have no escape from their afflictions. The monologue is given a sense of conversation as we hear extracts from her worried parents’ emails: “There is a lot in my heart but I am having trouble with the words. Be safe, be well. Do you think about coming home? Because of the war and all? I know probably not, but I hope you feel it would be okay if you did.”

But at moments the dense text heads towards information overload and Wong’s unwavering energy feels monotonous. I alter my focus onto the audience directly opposite me. Some seem entirely engaged, others shuffle and accidentally make eye contact with me. It’s difficult to digest this vibrant stream of thought without any downtime. At one point my mind wanders onto why this show has previously provoked so much controversy in North America, with performances cancelled in New York for fear of offending Jewish audiences. The performance doesn’t claim to be anything other than an individual’s subjective thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian situation; Corrie’s naivety is not disguised. We see that this is someone learning, changing, and scared as she starts to question herself and her “fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature”.

In an article for the Guardian, Katherine Viner states that she and Rickman “chose Rachel’s words rather than those of the thousands of Palestinian or Israeli victims because of the quality and accessibility of the writing.” To me it seems that in using an outsider’s perspective on the situation in Gaza, Viner and Rickman not only create a route into these complex issues with which Western audiences might better be able to identify and therefore begin to think actively about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but they also avoid a reductionist “taking of sides”.
Wong’s animated outpour finally pauses. “Rachel Corrie died on the 16th of March, 2003.” She puts on a bright fluorescent orange jacket. Standing still, she switches on two TV monitors in opposite corners of the room. We crane our necks to see a fellow activist’s hurried and emotional account of Corrie’s death. The reality of his fear and adrenalin rush hits me hard in the stomach. Wong then turns over a panel on her desk which reveals a miniature landscape, a tiny version of the place Corrie died. Another video is projected onto the walls above: Rachel Corrie as a child is making an impassioned speech about how we can “solve hunger by the year 2000” if we work together, how a bright future where everyone’s human rights are respected is possible. As the onscreen audience applaud the small blonde child, Adrienne Wong joins in. Stunned, we follow.

During the show I was overwhelmed by the mass of information being propelled at me. But I’m still thinking, still running her words through my mind. I read my notes and Guardian reports on the incident of her death, trying to gather as much information as I can about the context for My Name is Rachel Corrie. If its aim has been to make us think, to spark interest and encourage discussion about the issues it introduced, it has succeeded. Whether the show will provoke action and involvement on the global scale that Corrie envisaged as a child, or even on the individual scale that she worked on in Rafah, is another—disheartening—question.

neworldtheatre & Teesri Duniya Theatre, My Name is Rachel Corrie, taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, director Sarah Garton Stanley, performer Adrienne Wong, collaborating director Marcus Youssef, designer Ana Cappelluto, lighting Itai Erdal, sound Peter Cerone, video Candelario Andrade, sound/video systems Jesse Ash; Havana Theatre, Jan 24-Feb 2; PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 16 – Feb 3

If fever can bring on delirium, it can also loosen a person from the usual constraints of decorum and let unspoken truths tumble out. UK dancer/performer Nigel Charnock creates an atmosphere of excited passion from start to finish in Fever by interspersing mad, large-scale movements with pseudo gentle moments. He’ll rush about with sweeping arm movements and scissor-leg high-kicks, sprint up and down the theatre stairs, throw himself on the musicians’ speakers – and then sit in an empty audience seat to join us listening to “the beautiful music; isn’t it like Schubert?” Charnock speaks physical gesture so fluidly that he can improvise hilariously cutting monologues about fundamental human obssessions without dropping his focus on movement.

Fever is a structured improvisation for Charnock and for the musicians, the two-cello, two-violin Virus String Quartet led by Michael Riessler on bass and tenor saxophones and clarinet. Originally inspired by Shakespeare’s love sonnets which Charnock speaks in part or whole but, as the program points out, every night is a new possibility. “Nigel Charnock will present a personal selection of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, possibly: No. 18, 34, 16….” The musicians, for their part, satirize minimalist music, quote Purcell, send Charnock “shut it!” messages by increasing the volume when he teases by dancing erotically close to one cellist.

Nothing is safe from Charnock’s rant. This realization keeps the audience happily on edge, grinning in anticipation. It also creates a performance-long link of trust – we like this guy – so we’re willing to consider at least temporarily a comparison between a Catholic’s fear of passion (familiar satirical territory) and a burqua-clad woman’s view of the world “through a letterbox” (uncomfortable satirical territory). Charnock mocks everything, including his dance training and his (eventually) bare legs, so when he does get serious, we believe him. He ends the show with an orgasmic “death,” clenching the microphone stand in response to Riessler’s agitated clarinet solo played over his writhing body. The Vancouver crowd, for once, let silence sit for several seconds before applauding.

It’s remarkable that Charnock and Riessler have been performing Fever for a decade. The show stays fresh because the structure includes space for commentary on current events (the night I saw it, Charnock referenced current events like Canada’s presence in Afghanistan; another night he mourned Lady Di) and because Charnock and the musicians perform the piece wholeheartedly. The performers use their intimate knowledge of the material to bend phrases and treat everything with irreverent playfulness, knowing they will all meet up again at particular points and on cue. Charnock has a long, accomplished career behind him; successes include a commission to make Stupid Men for the Venice Biennale in 2007. Looking across from Fever to his later works, it’s clear that this rambunctious performer obssesses about death, religion and sex. But then, don’t we all, and he does it with irresistible hilarity and polish.

Romeo Castellucci’s new work Hey Girl! contains many effects that aren’t really allowed in the theatre. Normally you don’t burn perfume because you’d get stuck with a huge bill for dry-cleaning the blacks afterwards. Normally you’re not really encouraged to shatter circles of glass onstage. It’s definitely considered inappropriate to drip gloopy substances all over the floor. Castellucci strips the stage back to a bare working space to protect the theatre (from himself), and gives us a painting instead.

Visual elements drive the work from moment to moment. Precisely focussed lights pick out the next object that will shape the action – a sword, a drum, a man watching. Careful staging draws our eye to each new tableau as if to a specific point on the canvas. Spoken text is rare, and always whispered, so as not to impinge on this dreamy, fog-laden visual world. Even the main character, the iconic Girl of the title (Sylvia Costa), is an image resolving out of an abandoned, amorphous glob of thick paint left heaped on a table. The skin-tone paint she emerges from never stops dripping onto the floor during the whole mesmerizing length of the work.

This is a polyptych – a many-panelled work of art, imprecisely seen through the smoke of ages, like the dust that collects on an old painting. On this panel, over here, is the bird that can no longer fly, and the violent crowd. On this panel is the other side of the Girl, the dark half who is enslaved to a man. On another panel is a newborn woman, weeping. Castellucci places the Girl stage front, listening to the brutal light of the Divine – in this case a laser beam. He shows us the Girl comforting herself in the person of another woman who bears an enlarged copy of the Girl’s head. In creating these moments, he’s suggesting what an allegorical painting would look like, if it came to life before us in three dimensions.

The challenge with allegorical painting – more typically a product of the Renaissance – is that the modern audience is out of practice reading the symbols. Castellucci has updated the images, but some mystery remains. How literal is the reading intended to be, and how much reading should we do?

The girl kneels before a large, metal sword. Slowly, exquisitely slowly, she reaches across and picks up a lipstick case I didn’t notice until just before her hand touched it. She puts the lipstick on. Then she places it on the sword and smoke rises. Reaching over to a bottle of perfume, she draws the scent onto her skin with a throat-slitting gesture. Poured over the sword, the perfume steams and sizzles and the theatre fills with a hot fragrance. The Girl soothes the angry sword with a folded pink sheet and recites the names of dead queens. Marie Antoinette. Ann Boleyn. The Russian Tsarina. She lifts the burning blanket and unfolds it, a dark brown X revealed, newly branded. “These are the queens who lost their head on account of the people,” she whispers.

A bald description of the Girl’s gestures does not convey the ritual power contained in each tableau. The impulse is to search for meaning, although following that impulse feels like an inadequate approach to the work. Certainly, there are multiple ways the scene above could be read. Most obviously, the lipstick and perfume signify the queens of history, the women with power who were destroyed by men. Alternatively, these are symbols of femininity that at various times have been rejected as disempowering. There are other possibilities, but the actual interpretation may be less important than the attempt to interpret. The pace of the piece is ritualistically slow, giving plenty of time for conjecture.

Hey Girl! is an extremely unusual work by a director with that rarest of qualities – a unique vision. It’s exactly the kind of work I hope to see at Vancouver’s PuSh Festival, which aims to present the best of contemporary work, including more risky and challenging pieces. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before outside the visual arts, and Hey Girl! makes me realize how much room there is to develop the images of live theatre. Castellucci expands our ability to read those images in places we never expected to see them. But he also creates a world in which humans move through a landscape full of symbols without ever trying to interpret them at all. Maybe that’s what we’re doing every day, but the layer of paint he applies allows us to see it for the first time.

When the mob of twenty-odd men pounded the white girl and the floor around her with pillows, I was anxious. When the white girl held the chain of the person she had been forced to strip and purchase – the black girl in her prison irons – I was distressed. During the opening scene, I balanced between repulsion and fascination as a female form untangled herself slowly, jerkily, from a pile of oozing, pale pink slime that seemed abandoned on a laboratory table under a short-circuiting fluorescent light.

From the dripping slime to the silver, armour-like paint the white girl later slathers onto the black girl, Romeo Castellucci’s Hey Girl! is full of visual surprises and tensely sculpted stage space. Hey Girl! plunges us viscerally into women’s oppression, racial subjugation, betrayal and splintered willpower, using a few narrative fragments and a multitude of visuals, some illustrative, some opaque.

The best moments are both illustrative and opaque. For example, there are two oversized fake heads in the performance, both sculpted to look like the white girl. The heads appear close in time. After the white girl is beaten, she reappears from the line of now-still men wearing the artificial head and waving a huge black flag. She begs for the lights to go off. When the lights return, the head lies ‘decapitated,’ stage front: one of the many “queens who lost their head on account of the people” that the girl listed earlier on. For a moment, the head is simply illustrative.

Then there is female sobbing. The white girl walks gently through the crowd of men and brings forward the source of the cries: a black woman wearing an even larger version of the artificial head. So much for simplicity. When the white woman sees a version of her own face on another woman’s body, it’s a moment of total identification; it is also a moment where identification is cut. The white girl falsely comforts, apologizes, and beheads the white face from the black body. Then, although ashamed of herself, she joins in enslaving – or is she releasing – the black woman. There is similarity, there is difference; there is a shift of power from the white woman being a victim to the white woman victimizing; there is also a long list of words – all nouns – being projected above their heads. The interaction between the girls is so codified, and non-naturalistic, that any communication between them invites but resists interpretation.

Tension can be generated by presenting a highly codified scene and then asking the audience to decode with little assistance. This tactic flourishes in performance art, a genre that asks viewers to watch body-based action in a context made difficult either by long duration, physical discomfort or extreme content. Thinking about performance art helps me translate Hey Girl! because it specifically resonated with my experience of Marina Abramovic’s Lips of Thomas (1975, 2005). Naked, Abramovic alternates through a group of gestures aimed at exhausting her body so it can escape the heavy codes of Christianity and communism (Abramovic grew up in the former Yugoslavia and continues to use the name Yugoslavia for her homeland). She eats honey, whips herself on the back, lies on a cross of ice until numb, cuts a star into her belly, stands at attention in a pair of military boots and listens to a folk song, eats honey again. Because the actions and the timeframe are both extreme – the 2005 performance extended the original work from less than an hour to eight hours – the analytical mind can’t process what’s going on until later. If authority pushes the bodies it manipulates to total exhaustion, then authority collapses from the lack of having something to control.

Hey Girl! similarly works to shatter symbols by presenting bodies and structures on the edge of physical damage and exhaustion. Bodies on stage are in pain, at least if they’re female. The girls are buried, shackled, beaten, traded, but also capable of wielding a sword or joylessly dancing. Viewers’ bodies are affected: the viscous pink material is palpably revolting; we endure the acrid smells of lipstick, perfume and fabric burned against a flagrantly phallic hot metal sword. When at last the patriarchal, colonial gaze, represented quite literally by four suspended lenses that hang between the white girl and the shackled black girl, snaps, only then can a new code be written, though it initially involves dancing around the shattered glass left from the previous hierarchies.

Hey Girl! is theatre, though, not performance art. It’s theatre that asks us to move into an understanding with our gut more than with our mind. Canadian actor and writer Darren O’Donnell once said, “What theatre is really about – like any other form – is generating affect, and that’s it. Feelings. And, if things go well, quickly following feelings will be thoughts. Stories certainly can do this, but they’re not the only thing to do it, and they’re no longer always the best way to do it” (Social Acupuncture, 2006). Castellucci aims at our affect directly. As Hey Girl! evolves, visuals that seem iconic become messy and harsh moments are tempered by sudden kindnesses. This complexity means that, afterwards, images continue to shift and morph, playing with the mind and maybe never yielding a stable response. It’s an effective way to go into culturally familiar stories about women surviving violence because it provokes authentic feelings around gender and race.